Stereotypes about how women relate to one another in the workplace point in opposite directions.30 The negative stereotype portrays women as rivalrous, even hostile toward one another. This pessimistic but widely held view was on display during a 2018 concert in Las Vegas, when Donatella’s friend Lady Gaga told her audience that she’d need fewer than the fingers of one hand to count the number of supportive women in the music industry.31 Many would agree. The stereotype of the cat fight is alive and well, as is the persistent image of the queen bee who can be lethal to junior women coming up the ranks.
The positive counterview is that women find colleagues in one another, and that their common experience paves the way for meaningful bonds of solidarity and mutual support. For an illustration, consider the “amplification” strategy women in the Obama Administration devised to help one another get heard during the president’s first term in office. After one woman offered an idea, if it wasn’t acknowledged, another woman would repeat it and give her colleague credit for suggesting it.32
Which view of women’s working relationship is true? When she builds her network of professional contacts, whom should a woman prioritize: Other women or men? We set out with colleagues Bill McEvily and Evelyn Zhang to answer these questions by collecting data on more than five thousand middle managers—40 percent of them women—in a large North American bank.33 Supervisors, subordinates, and peers rated the middle managers along several criteria, including how energizing, trustworthy, competent, reliable, and willing to share networks and resources a manager was. We had 23,648 evaluations to analyze, and clear patterns emerged.
On average, men rated other men more positively than they rated women on all criteria—including competence, trust, and how much a colleague enabled them to get their job done. How about women, you ask? Women rated other women more positively than they rated men on all criteria, too. The evidence for gender solidarity was so stark that we initially questioned it. Perhaps the relatively large number of women employed at this bank made it unusual in some way? Did conducting the study in 2017, when women’s rights issues were more in the news than they had been, skew people’s answers? To check, we resurrected data we collected in 2006 in a technology corporation headquartered in the United States. Even in this male-dominated environment, we found the same pattern of gender solidarity across the 9,452 work relationships we measured. On average, men are good to other men in the workplace, and women are good to other women.
When we share this finding with professionals and academics, surprise is the most common response. “Really?” they say. Women are generally just as surprised as men.
A notable exception? Donatella Versace. “I’m not surprised at all,” she told us. “I have found enormous strength in the solidarity of women.” Being the only woman on Versace’s Board at the time of Gianni’s death had made a difficult situation even more challenging and painful. “None of these men listened to me, had confidence in me; none gave me the support I needed. And I struggled mightily for years. I had such self-doubt that I put on a mask—literally, a mask of dark makeup, intimidating all-black outfits, a stern expression that never gave way to a smile—to hide my weaknesses from everyone around me.”
Over time, Donatella found ways to build the support she needed to be effective. “I met strong, determined women, the kind you don’t mess with.” Some were fashion insiders, while others were executives and leaders in other industries. Four of them became allies, sounding boards, and constructive critics who joined Donatella on Versace’s Board. “Finally, I had people who had full confidence in my ability and pushed my thinking to make me better, not to take me down. Deep inside, I always knew I was capable, but these women gave me the belief in myself that had eluded me for years after Gianni’s death.”
Donatella’s insight aligns with research on the networks that help newly minted MBAs land leadership positions. Unsurprisingly, both male and female graduates achieve higher-level job placements when they have many connections in their MBA student network. But to get executive positions with the highest levels of authority and compensation, women need one more thing: an inner circle of close ties with other women.34 Women who have both many connections and a female-dominated inner circle have an expected job placement level that is 2.5 times greater than women with few connections and a male-dominated inner circle. Because of their strong bond, these fellow women are highly motivated to share tacit knowledge and gender-specific information about employers and opportunities with each other, as well as new connections important for women’s job market success. Without a tight-knit group of women who go out of their way to support one another, women don’t score prestigious leadership positions at nearly the same rate, even when they have the same qualifications as their male counterparts.
The implications of these findings are both exciting and worrisome. For women struggling to make it in a man’s world, being able to count on the understanding and support of other women—as opposed to having to fend off their undermining, as is often assumed—is a relief and a source of strength. But does this also mean we ought to engage in gendered networking to build our power bases at work? Should we uncritically flock to people like ourselves in the quest for safety and self-esteem? And what about differences other than gender? What about Aakash? Should other social groups who face challenging political landscapes—racialized groups, the LGBTQ+ community, or people with disabilities, for example—network with one another before engaging with others in the workplace?
Connecting with people who are similar to us is appealing because we understand them better than people who are different from us, and we see ourselves reflected in them and validated by them. This is a fundamental law of human relationships: Birds of a feather do flock together.35 Yet, it calls for caution about relying on demographic similarity in your network building. For one, the power of solidarity can only be harnessed if your social group exercises a degree of control over valued resources through all the means we’ve uncovered so far. And when your social group is a small minority in your work environment, the likelihood of people like yourself occupying powerful positions in it is low.
Even more important, when we fail to build connections with people different from us, we are the losers. The breadth of our networks—the diversity of backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences of the people we connect with, and their ability to connect us to different social groups—opens us up to all kinds of knowledge, opportunities, and innovative insights that can help us succeed.36 It also helps us draw more accurate power maps: by giving us a wider vantage point from which to observe the network, and by protecting us from the confirmation bias that comes from being exposed to people with the same point of view all the time. Confining ourselves to people like ourselves is terribly limiting and, in the long run, detrimental. That’s why Donatella Versace, even while realizing the unique strength she could derive from the solidarity of women, was careful to maintain a healthy mix of men and women with diverse backgrounds and experiences on Versace’s Board of Directors.
In fact, nearly the entire world is represented on her creative team. “I scout for designers far and wide. We have Chinese, Indian, English, Italian, American, and Filipino designers. And I love how they relate to each other. They all bring different worldviews, incredible stories, and the most fascinating conversations emerge and change our thinking,” Donatella told us. The purposeful breadth in her network gives Donatella access to her most valued resource: creativity.
FINDING SIMILARITY IN UNLIKELY PLACES
But, you might object, embracing diversity is easier for the decision makers at the top of the food chain like Donatella, who gets to choose who’s on her team. How can you build a strong, diverse network when you’re not at the top and the people who have power differ profoundly from you? Many people face this daunting challenge every day. The odds of success may seem dismal because you are asked to connect with others in meaningful ways despite gaping differences in culture and life experience. S
imilarity is a huge determinant of interpersonal rapport. We naturally connect with people like ourselves because they validate who we are (boosting our self-esteem)37 and they are more predictable (giving us safety). But similarity takes many forms.
We all organize our networks around what sociologists call social foci.38 These are shared activities, interests, and affiliations that give people opportunities to build relationships with like-minded others. For the big-shot business executives and investors Aakash needed to connect with to be effective at his new job, relevant foci might include the golf club or the alumni network of the private school they attended, circles from which Aakash was excluded. But many professionals have told us of other shared interests and affiliations that have given them meaningful ways to establish an authentic connection with people important to their success but otherwise quite distant from their social milieu.39 For example, many people in the business world engage deeply in humanitarian efforts and social causes. We have seen professionals like Aakash join such efforts and through them find a foundation of shared interest around which to bond with people quite different from themselves. This also applies to joining—or, better yet, launching—employee-led initiatives in their organizations, where an extracurricular activity gives participants a chance to forge networks across functional boundaries, up and down the chain of command. And sometimes the social foci are simply personal passions and idiosyncratic interests that two people unexpectedly find they share, bringing them closer.
To find similarities in unlikely places you must ask questions and listen carefully to someone else’s stories. Pay close attention and you will often find a common experience, a shared interest, or a passion that unites you. It’s not always easy, and some people face overwhelming obstacles; yet almost everyone can carve out a bit of common ground to create genuine connections with those who control access to valuable resources.
But suppose you want to do more than connect with the powers that be? What if you want to change who the powers that be are? This was Aakash’s deepest concern and greatest frustration: the sense of unfairness for being judged not as an exceptionally competent professional, but as a brown man with an accent. And imagine how people with even more disadvantages than Aakash feel. What if we changed the system at its root? What if we transformed the way we ascribe value to people and the resources they can contribute? Can we realistically challenge these power hierarchies? Yes—all of us acting in concert can—and in chapter 6 we’ll see how. But learning how to disrupt entrenched hierarchies of power requires that we first understand them: How do they come about? Why are they so hard to break? And when is it that people have both the motivation and the opportunity to change them? We turn to these questions next.
Chapter 5 Power Is Sticky, But It Can Be Disrupted
If a person cannot “own” power, and power isn’t reserved only for those at the top, why do we so often see it steadily accrue to some groups while continually eluding others? The stability of power hierarchies is mysterious but undeniable: Dynastic rule defined China for millennia and hereditary monarchies dominated Europe for centuries. The caste system, with origins in ancient times, remains a challenge to Indian democracy today. And, throughout history, men have held disproportionate power in societies around the world.
Slavery is perhaps the most egregious example of a power hierarchy. There is no power differential starker or more unjust than the “ownership” of other human beings. Yet in the United States, chattel slavery lasted for generations, ending only after the Civil War nearly tore the country in half. Even the resounding military defeat of the South did not dismantle the racial hierarchy that privileged White people over Black people. The Thirteenth Amendment may have banned slavery, but four hundred years after the first enslaved Africans set foot in Virginia, the myth of White supremacy still shapes American institutions, from the overrepresentation of Black people in the criminal justice system to their underrepresentation in corporate boardrooms. Black people in the United States are more likely to be politically disenfranchised, economically impoverished, and casually brutalized at the hands of the police. The murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd in the spring of 2020 were a stark reminder of the long history of violence, injustice, and trauma that Black people continue to suffer in the United States.
Slavery, dynastic rule, systemic racism, and gender inequality: All are supported by the same kind of scaffolding, power hierarchies that have proven resistant to change. These structures are so durable because power is sticky. It has inertia. Once power is distributed in a certain way, over time the resulting hierarchy acquires a patina of legitimacy. It becomes the natural order of things, and we forget that other human beings created it in the first place.1 Fortunately, what human beings have created, human beings can change.2 Sticky is not the same thing as stuck.
Before we can learn how to disrupt power hierarchies, though, we need to understand the forces that cement them.
WHAT IT TAKES TO CREATE A POWER HIERARCHY
Jane Elliott was an elementary school teacher like no other. On April 4, 1968, she turned on her television and learned that Martin Luther King Jr., had been assassinated. Overwhelmed with sadness and despair, Elliott then decided she had to do something. How, she wondered, could she give her classroom of White third-graders in a small town in Iowa even a glimpse of the injustice that Black people endured daily?
The next day, when her students arrived at school, she divided them by eye color. “The brown-eyed people are the better people in this room. They are cleaner and they are smarter,” she said, explaining that intelligence was determined by the level of melanin in a person’s body. The more melanin, the darker a person’s eyes were, and therefore the smarter the person was. She then gave her brown-eyed students preferential treatment throughout the day. They were allowed to drink from the water fountain, while the blue-eyed students had to use paper cups. When a girl asked, “Why?” and a brown-eyed boy chimed in, “Because we might catch something,” Elliott nodded in agreement. At recess, she gave the brown-eyed children five more minutes of playtime, and she praised them more often.3
The children’s behavior changed quickly, Elliott observed. The brown-eyed children, at the top of the power hierarchy she had randomly created, became more confident throughout the day. They soon became condescending, even insulting toward their blue-eyed classmates. By contrast, the children with blue eyes became more timid and despondent. They started making silly mistakes in exercises that they usually performed successfully. Brown-eyed children started ganging up on blue-eyed kids. At the end of the day, Elliott asked her students to write about what they had learned. Third-grader Debbie Hughes wrote: “The people in Mrs. Elliott’s room who had brown eyes got to discriminate against the people who had blue eyes. I have brown eyes. I felt like hitting them if I wanted to.”
The next school day, Elliott flipped the script and told her students that people with blue eyes were, in fact, better than people with brown eyes. The same dynamics unfolded, this time in reverse. About that second day, Debbie Hughes wrote, “I felt like quitting school… I felt mad. That’s what it feels like when you’re discriminated against.”
The exercise wasn’t meant to suggest that racial hierarchies are easily reversible—obviously, they are not—but rather to highlight that being born into a particular racial group, socioeconomic class, or sex influences one’s experience in uncontrollable ways. Some faulted Elliott for what they saw as unethical behavior in failing to obtain parents’ permission in advance and doing “great psychological damage” to the students.4 Yet many—including the children themselves—praised her, both at the time and later in life, for teaching them a critical lesson.
Elliott’s experiment emphasizes two levers that can be used to create and legitimize a power hierarchy: authority and narrative. She created the hierarchy by using the power that stemmed from her authority as a teacher, and then she justified and reinforced it with a “legitimizing story”: the supposed c
orrelation between melanin and intelligence, which tapped into the students’ respect for science. Elliott made up this pseudo-scientific relationship, of course; but the episode shows how easily authority figures can create power hierarchies. While we would like to think that as adults we’d be less susceptible than Elliott’s students were, her experiment gives us a taste of how deeply power hierarchies can affect us when we experience them for years, decades, or even centuries.
BEWARE OF OBEDIENCE TO AUTHORITY
One of the chief reasons power hierarchies persist is our tendency to obey authority. How far are we willing to go in doing so? Shockingly far, as a French TV show demonstrated in 2010.5 Two contestants would compete as a team, with one contestant posing questions to the other. The questions, twenty-seven in all, would relate to pairs of words which the respondent had to memorize at the beginning of the game (e.g. tame-animal, cloudy-sky). The game had all the usual quiz show ingredients: a well-known host, lights and cameras, and a chanting audience. Yet the setting was unusual: The contestant asking questions was seated in front of a set of electric levers, while the respondent was seated on an electric chair, inside a large, closed box, next to the levers.
Before the game started, the host announced the game’s only rule: Every time the respondent gave an incorrect answer, their teammate would have to administer an electric shock to him or her. With every wrong answer, the intensity of the shock would increase until it reached a level that could cause serious physical harm. To win, all the contestants had to do was get through the full set of twenty-seven questions. As long as the shocks were administered, it wouldn’t matter how many mistakes the respondent made. The additional caveat was that because the show was still in the pilot stage, the contestants would not receive any money beyond a small stipend for participating, but future pairs could together win up to one million euros.
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