Delusions of Gender

by Cordelia Fine

  This is unintended sex discrimination at work. Rather than unfairly stereotyping the candidates – assuming, for example, that Michael was tougher than Michelle – the raters instead ‘defined their notion of “what it takes” to do the job well in a manner tailored to the idiosyncratic credentials of the person they wanted to hire’.22 Recently, Laurie Rudman and her colleagues have shown that these ‘shifting criteria’ can be used to implement backlash against agentic women. Student participants watched a videotape of an interview for a computer lab manager position in which the applicant, either female or male, espoused either an agentic managerial style or a communal one. The agentic managers, for example, said things like, ‘There’s no question about it, I like to be the boss … I like being in charge – to be the person who makes the decisions’. As in other studies, the male agentic manager was rated as being both more socially skilled and more hireable than the female version. But this hiring discrimination was cleverly done. Participants weighted competence more heavily than social skills in their assessments – but with one exception. For female agentic managers alone, social skill score was more important than competence ratings. As the researchers point out, this strategy puts agentic women at a double disadvantage. Not only is their high competence discounted, but emphasised instead are the social skills that, you will recall, were rated unfairly low.23

  Many, although not all, studies of real employment contexts also find that men are preferred over women for traditionally masculine positions – but both positive and negative findings from such studies are hard to interpret. The beauty of well-controlled experimental lab work is that you can, with absolute certainty, pinpoint sex discrimination. When Karen, Katherine, Michelle, and Emily are identical to Brian, Kenneth, Michael, and Edward there is little wiggle room for justifying differential treatment. The limitation of this kind of experimental work, however, is that it generally involves university students evaluating paper people. Real employers interviewing real people for real jobs will certainly be more motivated (as well as better qualified) to get the right person, as well as, sometimes at least, being more accountable for their decisions. This should count in favour of better and fairer decision making. But at the same time, one does not receive a new, more objective, mind upon graduation. Today’s students are tomorrow’s employers, and in the messier environment of real-world decision making there is ample scope for hiring criteria to shift, especially further up the career ladder where qualifications and experience become more idiosyncratic and harder to compare across candidates. So it’s interesting – and entirely consistent with the research presented here – that University of California–Irvine maths professor Alice Silverberg has ‘seen a variety of excuses used to justify not choosing a woman, which [she’s] never seen used against a man’.24

  The prescriptions of the communal stereotype can of course continue to disadvantage women even once they are hired. Unlike men in the same position, women leaders have to continue to walk the fine line between appearing incompetent and nice and competent but cold. Experimental studies find that, unlike men, when they try to negotiate greater compensation they are disliked. When they try out intimidation tactics they are disliked. When they succeed in a male occupation they are disliked. When they fail to perform the altruistic acts that are optional for men, they are disliked. When they do go beyond the call of duty they are not, as men are, liked more for it. When they criticise, they are disparaged. Even when they merely offer an opinion, people look displeased.25 The perceptive reader will notice a certain pattern emerging. The same behaviour that enhances his status simply makes her less popular. It’s not hard to see that this makes the goal of getting ahead in the workplace distinctly more challenging for a woman. This perceived dislikeability often drives economic and promotional penalties. And while not all occupations are justly described as a popularity contest, it is simply human nature to prefer to work with, and be around, someone you like. As Heilman points out:

  Upper management is sometimes referred to colloquially as a ‘club.’ Members of such clubs are apt to blackball the entry of those who seem inappropriate or distasteful. Simply put, if a woman is perceived as equally competent to a male colleague but seen as less interpersonally appealing and suitable as a member of the upper management team, there are likely to be unfavorable consequences for her in terms of rewards and advancement.26

  All of which means that at a day-to-day level, women leaders may be in the tiresome double bind of directing, commanding and controlling their teams without appearing to do so. Deborah Cameron, discussing the work of Janet Holmes who recorded and analysed about 2,500 workplace interactions, describes how Clara, the team leader in a multinational company, uses a typically masculine style of leadership. It’s firm, abrupt and direct. So, to deal with being issued orders by her, the team has developed a running joke whereby she is referred to as Queen Clara. For instance, when Clara says ‘it’s a no’, one of her team members responds that it’s a ‘royal no’. As Cameron points out:

  [W]ould a man in Clara’s position who behaved in a similar way have to make the same concessions? Would he be dubbed ‘the King’ by his subordinates, and teased about his ‘royal’ manner? Arguably, the humorous ‘Queen Clara’ persona is needed to render Clara’s style of management acceptable precisely because she is not a man. A woman who displays authority as unabashedly as Clara still makes a lot of people feel uncomfortable or threatened.27

  At the end of the tightrope of impression management, should it be successfully navigated, is the glass cliff. Michelle Ryan and her colleagues noticed a curious pattern when they looked at the share-price performance of the top 100 companies in the UK, both before and after the appointment of male and female board members. In the months before a man was appointed to the board of directors, company performance was relatively stable. But women tended to be appointed after a period of consistently low performance. In other words, women were being appointed to positions ‘associated with a higher risk of failure, and [that] were therefore more precarious.’28 Ryan and colleagues’ follow-up studies back up these data from real companies. Who do people choose to become financial director of a company with declining share prices, to be the lead lawyer for a case that is doomed to fail, to be the youth representative for a failing music festival or to run for an unwinnable political seat? Students and senior business leaders choose women for these risky, or simply dead-end, positions.29

  Men aren’t always the winners; the lack-of-fit phenomenon can work against them, too. For example, when people were evaluating candidates for a position as women’s studies professor, the criteria (activist versus academic) were shifted to make the woman the better candidate.30 But often, when men choose to enter less-prestigious female professions they quickly find rolled out for them a red carpet leading to a better-paying position within the field. The sociologist Christine Williams coined the term ‘glass escalator’ to encapsulate her discovery that men in (what are currently) traditionally female occupations like nursing, librarianship and teaching ‘face invisible pressures to move up in their professions. As if on a moving escalator, they must work to stay in place.’31 (Recent research suggests that only white men can ride the glass escalator.)32 Many of the men she interviewed suggested that there was a hiring preference for men and reported being ‘kicked upstairs’ into more masculine specialties, like administration, that also happened to be better-paying, higher-status positions. Sometimes it was actually a struggle for men to stay in the more-feminine roles that they preferred, so powerful were the assumptions of those around them that they should be somewhere else. Perceived as, in a sense, too competent for feminine occupations, they were tracked into more supposedly legitimate, prestigious ones.

  The unwitting sex discrimination that devalues women’s achievements and sets difficult standards for interpersonal behaviour perhaps explains why, in survey after survey, women consistently and reliably rate their jobs as simply harder work than do men. Using large dat
a sets from both the United States and Britain, sociologists Elizabeth Gorman and Julie Kmec found that ‘[e]ven when women and men are matched on extensive measures of job characteristics, family and household responsibilities, and individual qualifications, women report that their jobs require more effort than men do.’33 (As a former female investment banker recently commented in The Observer, ‘We knew we had to work harder and be better than everyone else. The trading floor would empty out and after 7pm or 8pm only the women would be left. We would joke that we were doing our “vagina tax” work.’)34 Unconscious bias may also explain, in part, why women are paid less for the same work. As one comprehensive review of the literature concluded, ‘Women earn less than men, and no matter how extensively regressions control for market characteristics, working conditions, individual characteristics, children, housework time, and observed productivity, an unexplained gender pay gap remains for all but the most inexperienced of workers.’35 Interestingly, the implicit idea that a man’s work is worth more than a woman’s seems to be learned young. When eleven- to twelve-year-old children are shown pictures of men and women performing unfamiliar jobs, they rate as more difficult, better paid and more important those occupations that happen to be performed by men.36

  We can be prejudiced even when we don’t intend to be. Not many people would, I think, agree that women should be judged to a higher, harder, shifting standard; suggest that they be sanctioned for behaviour that is acceptable in men; or think it fair that they be paid less for the same work. But when we categorise someone as male or female, as we inevitably do, gender associations are automatically activated and we perceive them through the filter of cultural beliefs and norms. This is sexism gone underground – unconscious and unintended – and social psychologists and lawyers are becoming very interested in how this new, covert and unintended form of sexism disadvantages women (as well as non-whites) in the workplace. There’s little doubt that this new form of subtle discrimination is important and does hold women back, especially, perhaps, mothers. It’s also very hard to recognise (there are no control groups in the real workplace) and, therefore, contest. But as the next chapter shows, this newer, kinder form of discrimination hasn’t replaced the old, intentional variety. These days, they can work together.

  Let the … women carry on their crusade for a generation or two more; let men meet women as competitors for ‘economic independence’ and in the hard fight of wringing a living from the world; let men meet women in the fierce struggle of political life; let the screeching rowdyism of the militant suffragettes go on and grow worse; but, above all, let the feminist programme of greater sex liberty for women, with its demolition of wifehood and the home, be carried through; then will women indeed find that the knightliness and chivalry of gentlemen have vanished, and in their stead will arise a rough male power that will place women where it chooses.

  —William T. Sedgwick, professor of biology and public health at MIT (1914)1

  Unlike many of his contemporaries (who, as we will see, made pessimistic predictions such as voting-induced insanity or ovaries shrivelled from overeducation) Sedgwick was actually onto something. This threatening passage offers women a choice between the carrot and the stick, or what social psychologists Peter Glick and Susan Fiske refer to as benevolent and hostile sexism, respectively. So long as women stick to their traditional caring roles, they can bask in the stereotype of the ‘wonderful’ woman – caring, nurturing, supportive and the needful recipients of men’s knightly chivalry – without whom no man is complete. But the woman who seeks nontraditional high-status and high-power roles risks triggering the hostile sexism that ‘views women as adversaries in a power struggle’.2 Hostile discrimination against women in the workplace is intentionally and consciously done. It can involve ‘segregation, exclusion, demeaning comments, harassment, and attack.’3 It’s still with us.

  Professor Sedgwick, it should be said, probably did not anticipate that such hostilities would still be being directed at women a century later. Not because this would seem to be time enough for everyone to get used to the idea of women asking for a share of the jobs that men had allocated to themselves. Rather, because he predicted that men would soon call a halt to the whole feminist endeavour ‘and, putting the women back in their homes, say: “That is where you belong. Now stay there.”’4

  While we might think this kind of explicitly held attitude a relic of the past, legal scholar Michael Selmi argues that a ‘lingering bias’ towards precisely this point of view – that women are caregivers and men are breadwinners – can manifest itself in workplace discrimination. He suggests that ‘our perceptions of discrimination may have changed more than its reality, and there is certainly strong reason to believe that intentional and overt discrimination remains a substantial barrier to workplace equality for women.’5 He bases this conclusion on a review of class-action employment discrimination cases, especially in the securities and grocery industries, from the nineties to the early years of this century (the wheels of justice, as we all know, turn slowly). A common theme in these cases (all of which settled), Selmi argues, is the exclusion of women from higher-paying positions with greater promotional opportunities; and these discriminatory decisions were based on unexamined, stereotyped assumptions about female employees’ work preferences. Women prefer those kinds of dead-end jobs because they fit better with their family commitments, the companies typically claimed in their defence when their happily fulfilled female employees filed lawsuits against them.

  Yet as Selmi points out, the companies had no evidence that this was the case. Indeed, the aggressive, ambitious women working in the securities industry, in particular, ‘should have provided an important counterweight to the underlying stereotypes’.6 Those on the top rungs were not unconsciously seeing women as slightly less qualified for better roles. They were consciously deciding, without giving women a chance to decide for themselves, that these more generously remunerated (and, ironically, possibly more-flexible) jobs were for men. Several large retailers in other industries have been hit with similar allegations, Selmi notes.

  Beyond gender stereotypes, homophily (a psychological tendency captured by the old adage that ‘birds of a feather flock together’) can often create barriers for minority workers. A recent interview study of current and former Wall Street professionals revealed that they took it for granted that client organisations made up primarily of white men will prefer to deal with other white men. This meant that women and nonwhite professionals were excluded from the most lucrative jobs in the securities industry and were instead ‘concentrated in jobs without client contact and in client-contact jobs that generate less revenue.’7 Social exclusion may also hold back women who work in other traditionally male domains. The Athena Factor report mentioned earlier found that women in corporate SET jobs were being denied the sort of insider information that they needed to get ahead. One Silicon Valley participant, a major player in the technology industry, gave herself a male alias and discovered that the emails that ‘Finn’ received were completely different from those sent to ‘Josephine’. Finn got the scoops and Josephine got the ‘pap’. The report authors also describe ‘alpha male techies’ as combining poor social skills with an arrogant sense of male superiority. ‘One focus group participant described a recent uncomfortable experience. A male colleague walked up to a group where she was the only female. The man shook the hand of every man but avoided contact with her. “I could feel his anxiety in assessing how to handle greeting me,” she noted. “But he also didn’t think I was important. So in the end he just chose not to deal with me.”’8 This anecdote suggests a workplace environment that tolerates a deep disrespect for women. No intellectually functioning adult, however meanly endowed with social skills, can have failed to learn the social rule that it is rude to shake hands with every single person in a group except one. No less remarkably rude is the behaviour of a surgeon remembered by Kerin Fielding, one of Australia’s few female orthopaedic surgeons. She
recalls having had ‘many battles’ during her training, including one particular surgeon who refused to work with her. When Fielding met the same man years later he condescendingly enquired whether she had many patients, insultingly adding, ‘It’s just toes, fingers, I suppose.’9

  Unfortunately, the problem for women of being excluded does not end when they leave the office. Depressingly, it is still the case that in many industries it gets worse. At first glance, a round of golf and a trip to the local lap-dancing club may seem to have little in common. They are both leisure activities, it’s true, but one is conservative, traditional and may even entail the wearing of Argyle socks, while the other involves naked women rubbing their genitalia against the fly region of a man’s pants. What they share, however, is an environment that provides ample scope for excluding women from valuable client networking opportunities.

  In business-to-business sales, developing a good personal relationship with the client through out-of-office socialising is a vital part of the work. Unfortunately, two of the more popular venues for client entertaining – golf courses and strip clubs – both offer ample scope to keep women away from the networking action. Many golf courses are run around the principle that there would be something unnatural and absurd about women playing golf at the same time as men – or even at all. Even when women and men can play together, the different tee boxes used for the two sexes keep them somewhat separate. ‘Many women reported that men used the different tee boxes to leave them behind on the course or to require them to ride in a different golf cart.… In essence, they used the different tees as a way to exclude women even when playing with them’, report University of Michigan sociologists Laurie Morgan and Karin Martin, who studied the experiences of female sales professionals.10