The Wife Drought

by Annabel Crabb

  In a famous 1991 experiment, Monica Biernat – a researcher at the University of Kansas – showed college students photographs of men and women and asked them to estimate their height in feet and inches. Obviously, this is a fiendishly difficult thing to assess from a photograph, so to assist the students, the subjects were photographed next to door-frames or desks, which provided some context. Some of the photographs were of men and women of exactly the same height, photographed next to exactly the same items. Nevertheless, the students consistently overestimated the height of the men, and underestimated that of the women. They were affected – even on this most basic and objective assessment – by their knowledge that men are on average taller than women.14 Those ingrained assumptions were so strong, in fact, that they actually overrode the hard evidence reported by the optic nerve; the participants literally did not believe their eyes.

  So what happens when this lamentably fallible collection of electric impulses and cells we call the human brain is entrusted with a decision on something far more complicated and far more subjective, like deciding which person is likely to be better for a job?

  What happens is that selection panels – even those who are fully in agreement that any decision they make should be absolutely free of bias – tend to manipulate their assessments of a person’s likely competence based on assumptions they have already made about that person, often because of their gender.

  Two Yale researchers – Eric Uhlmann and Geoffrey Cohen – in 2005 asked seventy-three male and female undergraduates to review the files of two fictitious candidates for the position of ‘police chief’.15 One candidate was poorly educated and lacked administrative skills but was ‘streetwise’, in good shape physically, and popular with other officers. This candidate lived alone. The second applicant was well-educated, good at administrative stuff and a capable media performer, but lacked rapport with other officers, and didn’t have much street experience. This candidate was married with a child.

  The researchers mixed up the genders; sometimes the streetwise applicant was a man and the educated one a woman; sometimes the other way round. Participants were asked to rate the applicants for their suitability as a police chief, and to rate the importance of the individual job criteria. They were also asked to assess their own degree of gender bias.

  Uhlmann and Cohen discovered that when participants were asked to choose between a tough, streetwise woman and a bookish man, they tended to inflate the importance of education. When the tough one was male and the bookish one female, they elevated the importance of street smarts over book-learning. Even the vaguely ‘female’ trait of parenthood didn’t get the female candidate anywhere; participants rated ‘family values’ as more important when it was the male candidate who had the family, and less important when it was the female one. Either way, the male candidate consistently benefited. And the weirdest thing is this: the participants who were the most certain they were not biased tended to be the ones who showed the greatest degree of bias.

  Why is this stuff part of the case for men being awful? It shouldn’t be, really; in most of these and similar experiments, the participants included men and women, both of whom exhibited the same kind of unconscious bias. Awfulness may well be an equal-opportunity character flaw. But because men are already over-represented among the hirers and firers, they wear the opprobrium for the behaviour.

  Why else are men awful? Well, let’s go through the file. They’re awful because they overrate themselves. Research into the comparative intelligence of men and women hasn’t offered much by way of plausible difference, but what has been established is that if you ask people to estimate their own IQ, men are likely to overshoot the mark, and women to undershoot it. Halla Beloff, a social psychologist at the University of Edinburgh, asked her students to estimate their own IQ and found that the male students put themselves an average six points ahead of their female colleagues. Professor Adrian Furnham, of the University College London, performed a review of the literature fifteen years later and found that Beloff’s thesis held up globally.16

  Men are also less likely to see bias in their own organisations. In 2012, the Financial Services Institute of Australasia (FINSIA) surveyed its members about gender balance in their industry. Financial services has one of the biggest gender pay gaps around: men are paid 31.3 per cent more than women, and women are under-represented in senior management roles. This is not especially unusual, but still – it’s significant. When about 800 employees filled out the FINSIA survey, however, what emerged was two almost hilariously inconsistent impressions of the industry. ‘Are women well represented at senior levels in your organisation?’ the survey asked. ‘Yes!’ said 64 per cent of men. ‘No!’ said 62 per cent of women. ‘Is your organisation transparent about remuneration and parity of pay?’ ‘Yes,’ said 50 per cent of men. ‘No,’ insisted 72 per cent of women.

  When FINSIA asked whether action was necessary to address the lack of women at executive level, 73 per cent of women thought it was. But 68 per cent of men thought it wasn’t.17

  All this stuff wouldn’t be so bad, of course, were it not for the fact that ‘women are hopeless’. Women’s hopelessness, in all its forms, is the second popular analytical theme for explanations of why ladies get the rubber end of the plunger at work. There is a rich vein of material here; the most current is the theory popularised by Facebook’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, which is that women are hopeless because they don’t ‘lean in’ to their careers.18 Faced with average workplace situations, Sandberg argues, women are more likely to take a back seat rather than forcing themselves up the front to where the action is. They don’t take on big jobs if they think there’s a chance they’ll be having a baby soon. When a job or promotion is advertised for which they satisfy eight of the ten published criteria, they’ll dither in a fug of anxiety about the other two for a bit, then get flattened by a galumphing herd of male applicants boasting four out of the ten criteria and a bullet-proof degree of confidence that they can scam the rest.

  The computer giant Hewlett-Packard dug through its personnel files several years ago to investigate why it was that women weren’t getting to senior roles as frequently as men were. They established that female internal candidates for promotion didn’t put themselves forward until they believed they satisfied 100 per cent of the criteria given. Male candidates, on the other hand, tended to apply once they felt they had 60 per cent of the qualifications required.19

  Hillary Clinton, who has hired many young men and young women over her career, noted the difference at a 2014 appearance at New York University with her daughter, Chelsea, and philanthropist Melinda Gates. ‘Offering a promotion or expanded responsibilities to a young woman almost always provokes a response something like “Oh, I don’t know if I can do that”, or “Are you sure I could do that?” or “I’m not positive I could take that on,”’ Clinton said. ‘I have never heard that from a young man.’20

  Another thing that hopeless women don’t do is ask for a better deal when they are starting out in a job.

  Linda Babcock, an economics professor at Carnegie Mellon University, was curious about how the gender pay gap developed, and ran a little investigation into graduates from her own institution. After stalking a whole class of Masters graduates and working out which jobs each got on graduation and what they were paid, she established that the starting salaries for male graduates were 7.6 per cent higher than those of the women. Digging deeper, Babcock asked the graduates whether they had simply accepted the first salary offered, or if they had haggled for more. It turned out that only 7 per cent of the women had asked for more money, while 57 per cent of the men had. And the men who asked for more money tended to be successful – they were paid about 7 per cent more as a result.21

  Babcock was so struck by this that she went on to co-write a book on the phenomenon, called Women Don’t Ask. If this disinclination of women to ask for more money at the beginning of their careers is so pronounced, imagine how muc
h more they miss out on over the rest of their working lives. Every time a woman decides not to ask for a pay rise, or not to negotiate over salary, it’s not just a sacrifice she makes in the short term; it’s a sacrifice that compounds over the course of her career and can cost – in the long term – an awful lot of money.

  But women are rubbish at all sorts of other things too. The ‘women are hopeless’ genre has some compellingly gruesome extremes; New York Times bestsellers with invigorating titles along the lines of Play Like a Woman, Lead Like a Man, or Discovering Your Inner Bitch, which are all about the mistakes women make that mean they will never succeed.

  Dipping into this literature can be a confronting experience. I needed a bit of a lie down after reading Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office: 101 Unconscious Mistakes Women Make That Sabotage Their Careers, for example, by the imperiously named Lois P. Frankel, PhD.22 That PhD somehow renders the rest of the book’s title Gothically complete; I picture Dr Frankel with a pinched accent, a mercilessly cut suit, and horn-rimmed glasses perched high on her powerful nose. These idle conjectures derive a certain corroborative force from the book’s hardline stance on Mistake #80 (Dressing Inappropriately) and #84 (Wearing Your Reading Glasses Around Your Neck).

  Of the 101 mistakes she lists, I could personally recall making sixty-three. Some of them elicited a hot flush of shame and recognition. ‘Unless you’re Betty Crocker, there shouldn’t be home-baked cookies, M&M’s, jelly beans, or other food on your desk,’ barks Dr Frankel in her prologue to Mistake #27: Feeding Others. ‘Hillary Rodham Clinton may have been lambasted for her comment about not staying home and baking cookies, but her point was well taken. We don’t ascribe a sense of impact or import to people who feed others. It may seem like a small or inconsequential thing, but the fact is, you rarely see food on men’s desks.’

  It’s not the doctor’s last word on office décor, by the way; in Mistake #26: Decorating Your Office Like Your Living Room, she advises women to ditch the family photographs and throw rugs, noting acidly: ‘By emphasizing your femininity, you diminish your credibility.’

  This line of inquiry makes for compelling – if unnerving – reading, and over the course of the book I became increasingly convinced that I would now be running the ABC if I hadn’t spent the early part of my career Avoiding Office Politics (#9), Polling Before Making A Decision (#15), Letting People Waste My Time (#39), and Leaving Trailing Voice Mails (#71).

  By page 264 I was prepared to do anything that Dr Frankel told me (while simultaneously despising myself for my own suggestibility and my implied non-compliance with her express instructions on point #33: Obediently Following Instructions, and #25: Acquiescing To Bullies).

  Women are hopeless for all sorts of other reasons. They step off onto the ‘Mummy Track’. They think the workplace is a meritocracy. They develop something called Tiara Syndrome, where they work hard and don’t cause trouble and follow the rules and believe that if they keep doing everything right, someone will eventually make them into a princess.23 They put their own needs last, and will rather pack it in and leave a job than demand that it be changed to suit them.

  A good deal of time, worry and expense has gone into the construction of all these theories, and many of them are sufficiently authoritative to convince the dabbler that some men are truly awful, and some women indeed hopeless.

  Who hasn’t met one of those male bosses who is clearly so much more comfortable with other men that he gives them work and attention without thinking? Or men who only address other men? I couldn’t even count how many tales I’ve heard from amused female MPs or ministers about male lobbyists, colleagues or stakeholders who have shown up for a meeting only to address most of their remarks to her male chief of staff – or, even more hilariously, her male junior adviser. (Chaps: when you do this, ladies notice. And then they talk about it to each other. Quite often, they cackle about it. About you, I mean. Just so you know.)

  When the efforts of awful men and hopeless women combine, the win–loss ratio between men and women at work becomes clear: women are more likely to lose, and men are more likely to win. Poor old women. Lucky old men.

  But I have a couple of problems with this whole scenario. First – it can’t be that simple. Some men are jerks, fine – but nowhere near all of them. And while I’m sure it is in many ways career-limiting for a woman to wear her glasses on a chain around her neck, or bring biscuits to work, or in other small but unmistakeable ways signal that she is a fluffhead who probably ought not to be made CEO, surely there must be more to this story.

  The tale of what happens to women at work cannot possibly be told, and much less understood, until we pan back and understand what’s going on with women outside the four walls of the workplace. Until you put work in context, and understand what other factors might influence women’s capacity to compete equally, all the awful men and hopeless women in the world will never quite explain why things continue to turn out the way they do.

  Cultural tendencies and discrimination are one thing. But brute structural differences are another. And how can we even begin to combat the minutiae of management oddities and human failing and so forth without dealing with the reality that men and women are unequal at work before they even show up?

  We are so used to not counting domestic work as part of our economy that we don’t accord it much relevance when running a diagnostic over the modern workplace. But the tentacles of home are everywhere at work, and not just in the illicit family photographs with which Dr Frankel recommends one should not clutter one’s desk.

  They are there when a person arrives at work. Has that person left home and proceeded to work in a stately and reflective fashion? Or has that person risen at the crack, fought and cursed their way through a mound of wet washing; wrestled several children into clothes, shoes, a semblance of oral hygiene and some sort of conveyance; transferred them to school or comically overpriced child-care facility, then sobbingly fallen through the door of their place of employ?

  During the work day, will that person work calmly and absorbedly on the business at hand, perhaps taking a sensible break at lunch in order to get some air and try that new noodle place down the road? Or will that person punch through the workload with the demonic fervour of the chronically short-of-time, utilising any temporal air-pocket not for quiet reflection, or mutually productive conversation with colleagues, but for urgent, obsessive mental scrolling through the checklist of things that could possibly go wrong. (What’s for dinner? Do we have milk? Who’s picking the kids up from school? Is it recorder day? Worse – is it Harmony Day?)

  And at the end of the work day, what will that person do then? Stick around until every last available scrap of work has been done, and walk out the door, turning out the lights with an approving supervisor who slaps them on the back and says, laughing: ‘You work too hard!’? Go for a beer with a few colleagues, and get into a funny argument that ends up in an actually half-decent idea about a new product line they could make together, or a conference they could go to, or a new way of doing something that they already do that would make it better?

  Or will that person belt out of there at half past five feeling like every eye in the place is on them, their horror at being thought a slacker in ironic counterpoint to the rival horror of arriving five minutes late to above-mentioned childcare facility and meeting a whole new set of critical eyes? And then get home to find themselves in the frame for a whole new set of crises, deadlines, and tactical debacles?

  Surely, all this makes a difference to who prospers in the end, and who doesn’t. And while people are people, and not statistics, surely the statistics give us fairly clear pointers about which of these scenarios are typically female and which are typically male, and consequently about which gender stands a greater chance of advancement – right?

  I feel a bit lame and obvious pointing this out. But I’m doing it because I don’t think it gets done enough.

  ‘Leaders in a Global Economy’, a
study resulting in a high-level collaboration between giant international firms, including Deloitte, Eli Lilly, Goldman Sachs, IBM and a bunch of others, asked more than a thousand very senior executives a series of searching questions that covered not only the usual heavily trodden terrain of such surveys – workplace experience, satisfaction, ambition and so on – but deeper, broader questions about how things went down in other areas of their lives.24 It came up with a shatteringly clear account of the differences between the lives of men at the top and those of their female competitors.

  Of the 1192 executives surveyed, half were men and half were women. Three-quarters of the men had a wife or spouse who did not work. But that experience was exactly the opposite of the female executives. Three-quarters of them had a husband who – like them – worked full-time. The men got wives, in other words. And the women didn’t.

  In some very senior jobs, the existence of a cooperative spouse is simply assumed. ‘Let’s say you are required to go to Melbourne, or to Singapore, straight away,’ offers Meredith Hellicar. ‘The assumption is firstly that you can just go. Often, the assumption is that there is someone who can bring your stuff in so you don’t have to waste time going home to pack.’

  When the global executives in the survey who had children were asked the fundamental question: ‘Who takes more responsibility for making childcare arrangements?’ the division was immediately and resoundingly apparent. Fifty-seven per cent of the female senior business leaders answered: ‘I do.’ Among the male executives, only 1 per cent gave that answer. One per cent.

  How can this disparity not be flagged loudly in every single glossy report published along the theme – and there are countless such reports – of female under-representation at senior leadership levels? How can the staggering asymmetry in domestic workload carried by men and women hoping to succeed continue to be something of a sleeper issue?