THE WEIGHT OF STEREOTYPES
To different degrees, we’ve all been on the receiving end of some sort of bias and, consciously or not, we all hold some biases too. In the 1990s, a team of psychologists devised the Implicit Association Test48 to gauge a person’s unconscious tendency to associate certain groups of people with stereotypes and to evaluate them positively or negatively on that basis. Millions of people have taken Implicit Association Tests on topics as varied as age, race, weight, and disability, shedding light on the pervasiveness of unconscious biases.49 The effects of these perceptions on people’s actions are subtle but can be consequential, and for some of us, they can constrain our ability to access valued resources.
Cheryl Dorsey knows firsthand the discrimination that comes with being a Black woman in the United States. She vividly remembers the day her mother interrupted her Saturday afternoon dance-in-front-of-her-mirror session for “real talk.” Seven or eight at the time, she had covered her hair with a T-shirt to mimic the long, straight hair of the famous pop singers of the day. Her mom yanked her still, removed the shirt from her head, and said, “You are a young Black girl in the United States, and you need to figure out how you are going to navigate through this reality.” A teacher by profession, her mom did everything in her power—including being direct about sexism and racism—to give Cheryl the best chance to develop her full potential.
Cheryl proved to be a gifted student, one of the best in her class at her Baltimore high school. Nevertheless, a guidance counselor’s advice for “a girl like her” was to focus on applying to state universities, not the Ivy League schools she had put on her list. “This is what happened to so many of my Black friends,” Cheryl told us. “They could not express their full potential. They were advised to aim lower.” But her parents pushed back. They encouraged their daughter to apply to her original list, and a few months later she was accepted into Harvard College, where she graduated in 1985 with a BA in history and science. That would not be her only Harvard degree; by 1992, she had graduated with an MD and a master’s in public policy as well.
Throughout her time at Harvard, though, Cheryl felt like she didn’t belong. “I got all the messages in the world that women weren’t as good as men and that people of color weren’t as good as White people. What in the world was I doing in these environments? For a long time, I felt like I was an accidental participant, that I got lucky.” Nor did racism and sexism disappear when she became a doctor. As one of four Black female pediatric residents in a class of twenty-five, she noticed that employees at the medical center constantly referred to each of them by the same first name. And if she wasn’t wearing her white doctor’s coat, even her colleagues would barely recognize her in the hallway and often confused her with an administrative assistant. “That was a reminder of, ‘Oh, I see how I fit into this larger system.’ ”
Cheryl, whose commitment to fight social and racial injustice grew even stronger with time, went on to serve in the late 1990s as a White House fellow and special assistant to the U.S. Labor Department. While bouts with prejudice continued, she realized that in addition to her academic pedigree, her six-foot stature and her relatively deep voice helped her assert her presence and competence in high-profile meetings—to a point. She also recognized that overused, these assets could become liabilities. Attuned to how stereotypes can hold people back, she was well aware of the double-bind women in the workplace face. Perceived as too warm, they break with the image of leaders as strong and masculine, and they run the risk of being perceived as incompetent. But viewed as too strong and competent, they break with the image of women as warm, maternal figures, and run the risk of being seen as cold and insensitive.50
As a Black woman, Cheryl felt that she had to be especially cautious not to appear too aggressive. “I am a self-described social justice warrior, but I am always careful not to be the angry Black woman in the room.” Professional women, in general, tend to be penalized when they display anger.51 But gender stereotypes do not affect all women and men in the same way. In the United States, as Cheryl rightly pointed out, the stereotype of the angry Black woman—dominant, strong, aggressive, ill-tempered, loud, and hostile—finds its roots in the harrowing experience of female slaves in Antebellum America, and is still prevalent today.52 Cheryl worried that sounding angry would backfire on her, as people might then view her as “too emotional and erratic.”
Stereotypes also constrain or favor men. When Black men in the U.S. display strength and assertiveness—qualities normally associated with leadership—they trigger the stereotype of the Black man as a threat rather than as a leader. And displaying anger has radically different consequences for White and Black men: Research has found that White male executives who express anger tend to be conferred higher status, and even a higher salary, than those who do not. For Black men, in contrast, displaying anger is likely to backfire, limiting their access to resources. But Black men with disarming, rounder, baby-like faces tend to lead more prestigious companies, make more money, and be perceived as warmer than White and Black leaders without such features.53
In accounting for how stereotypes affect our access to valued resources, we need to consider how our identities, like race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, age, abilities, and socioeconomic class, intersect and interact. As we just saw, racial and gender identities come together in ways that are distinct for women and men, Black and White people. The dynamics differ for other racial groups, too. For example, in North America, East Asian men and women are stereotyped as cold, competent, and nondominant. When they violate these stereotypes, by appearing more dominant for instance, they are subjected to more racial harassment at work than other employees.54
In addition to constraining people’s access to valued resources, stereotypes also affect their behaviors in ways that further limit this access. Being on the receiving end of negative stereotypes can lead to increased anxiety and worse performance, a phenomenon called “stereotype threat.”55 In one experiment, for example, women underperformed in a math test when told that the test had shown gender differences in the past.56 In another study, Black participants primed to think about their race before beginning what they were told would be a difficult exam performed worse than participants who weren’t primed to think about their race.57 Another series of experiments found similar evidence of the damage of stereotype threats on performance for Latinx college students, with a stronger effect for Latinx women who had to deal with both gender and race stereotypes.58
Cheryl, who went on to become the CEO of Echoing Green, one of the world’s most influential social entrepreneurship fellowships, has experienced the devastating effect of such stereotype threats in her own life. Over time, she learned that thinking about what motivated her was the best way to cope with such feelings: “Whenever I feel threatened, when I doubt whether I can succeed, I remind myself of why I do what I do: that it’s about fighting inequalities and creating a fairer society.” Psychologists observed the same dynamic in a group of female MBA students who were stereotyped as weaker performers. When they were asked to complete a short assignment on their personal values, their performance improved significantly, eliminating the gender gap in performance.59 The simple act of affirming your own values can help interrupt the process of stereotype threat, just as Cheryl experienced. Yet, as she also pointed out, “individual interventions are not the solution. They are only a way to cope with existing inequalities. What is at stake is changing the whole system.”
Effecting such a change seems daunting, now that we have a better understanding of the processes that conspire to make power hierarchies so sticky. The cultural beliefs conveyed by the stories that authority figures tell us, and that we tell ourselves, to justify who has power, combined with the psychological and behavioral effects of having power (or not), reinforce power differences across groups. The more these stories become embedded in a society’s collective psyche, the more they permeate the policies and practices that mediate who gets ac
cess to what resources, further fossilizing the existing hierarchies.60 As a result, they end up shaping not only the laws and norms we take for granted, but also our perceptions and misperceptions of others. This cyclical process is forceful, yet often invisible, which makes it difficult to resist. This is why, in our research, we see how terribly difficult it is to effect changes that challenge established power hierarchies and norms.61
CAN POWER HIERARCHIES BE DISRUPTED?
If this were the end of the story, the powerful would accrue ever more power forever, the status quo would perpetuate itself, and change would be impossible. Yet history tells a different tale. Power hierarchies may span centuries, but they can be challenged and disrupted. No empire lasts forever. Political regimes are toppled and replaced. New systems of social values replace old ones. Twentieth- and twenty-first-century social movements have chipped away at longstanding hierarchies that have subjugated women, people of color, LGBTQ+ people, religious groups, people with disabilities, and Indigenous communities.62 Sometimes hierarchies shift gradually over years, decades, or centuries; at other times, radical changes seem to happen in a matter of days. The question is, how?
Research reveals three conditions that facilitate change. The first is crisis: Natural disasters, wars, economic collapses, and technological innovation can all provide an opportunity to challenge the way power is distributed.63 Consider how World War II unlocked the world of work outside the home for women, as they became crucial to sustaining the economy. The second condition concerns the degree to which a power hierarchy is entrenched: The newer the hierarchy, the more malleable it is, because the reinforcing mechanisms we have described have not yet made power so sticky as to seem immutable.64 The regimes that emerged from the Arab Spring, for example, were fragile, and the result was political instability. Finally, to challenge established power hierarchies, would-be disruptors need an alternative view of how power should be distributed, not just trenchant criticism of the existing power structure.65 Popular accounts may stress the speed with which the French Revolution came to a climax in 1789, but the Enlightenment ideals that fueled it—equality, religious tolerance, and the consent of the governed—were developed over a century. These alternatives to the divine right of kings poked holes in the legitimacy of the stories and cultural beliefs that justified and upheld the status quo, making a new reality possible.
Yet these three conditions alone cannot disrupt power hierarchies. For that to happen, people must be motivated to take action against the status quo and have the opportunity to act on that motivation. When motivation and opportunity meet, people rise up.66
To see how the convergence of motivation and opportunity can disrupt a power hierarchy, let us take you back to the late 1800s and early 1900s, when steel was the lifeblood of much of the U.S. industrial Northeast and Midwest. Working conditions in the steel mills were horrendous: Men labored twelve hours a day, seven days a week, 363 days a year (Christmas and July Fourth being the exceptions). Every two weeks, the mills would switch the men from day to night shifts (and vice versa) by working them for twenty-four hours straight. Heavy, unrelenting work in hot, dangerous conditions made maiming and death commonplace. The very act of leaving home for work carried a substantial risk that you would not make it back at the end of the workday.67 At the same time, industrialists like Andrew Carnegie and Henry Frick amassed fortunes through their control of the means of production. Their enormous power ensconced them in the upper echelons of American society, with lavish residences in New York City and vacation homes in places like Newport, Rhode Island, that have today become magnets for tourists curious to discover the opulence of America’s first mega-rich. The new industrialists and their bankers accumulated so much wealth that they quickly became the most powerful people in America.
Inhumane working conditions and stark inequalities between workers and the owners of capital were not unique to steel mills or to the United States. News of worker revolts in Europe began to cross the ocean, as did new ideas, including the writings of the German philosopher Karl Marx. Capital, his new narrative of class identity and class struggle, published in 1867, challenged the legitimacy of the status quo in industrialized nations around the world.68 Just as stories are critical to justifying and rationalizing the status quo, they can be equally potent in strengthening the resolve of the power-disadvantaged to rise up.
But, individually, the steelworkers were powerless. With millions of immigrants arriving in America, they were eminently replaceable. If one worker died or lost an arm, another was readily available to take his place. Their employers thus had absolute power over them, and they did not hesitate to abuse it. Under these circumstances, workers had only one way to push back: band together and strike—a classic consolidation strategy to shift the balance of power. By presenting a united front, the workers could increase the dependence of Carnegie and other industry captains on them.
The steel mill captains did their best to quash the workers’ capacity for collective action. They set pay rates at subsistence levels to deprive workers of savings and minimize their endurance during strikes. They used their political connections to summon police forces to disperse strikers. And they could still fire workers and hire replacements. During the Homestead Strike at Carnegie’s main steel plant in 1892, at least ten people died and more than one hundred were injured when a private security agency was called in to end the standoff.69 But over time, by joining forces, the Pennsylvania steel workers gained more power, and unions there and around the world were able to secure better working conditions and create a somewhat more equitable balance of power between business and labor.
The steelworkers had both motivation and opportunity to push back on the status quo. The motivation came from extreme power imbalance. Why? Because the more unequal the distribution of rewards becomes, the harder it is for the disempowered to justify the status quo as legitimate. As the rewards to the powerful surge, other psychological responses counterbalance the tendency of the power-disadvantaged to justify the current system: People also have a preference for fairness, and blatantly unfair treatment can lead them to perceive the powerful as using their power illegitimately.70 The exploitation and brutality the steelworkers endured angered them and motivated them to protest and resist. Certain emotions, such as sadness, sorrow, and shame, are associated with helplessness and can even be paralyzing. These are the emotions that underlie the powerless rationalizing the legitimacy of the status quo. But once the assumption of fairness and legitimacy cracks, anger sets in. And anger leads people to act against injustice.71 That’s why the leaders who instill and reinforce in the disadvantaged the idea that they are being treated unfairly and that those in power are illegitimate, can turn the power-disadvantaged into an angry force eager to challenge the status quo.
But until they acquired some measure of power—small though it might have been—over the mills’ owners, the workers had no opportunity to act on their discontent. By joining forces, they found a way to control access to a resource—their own labor—that was essential to keeping the mills in operation. While the balance of power still favored the owners and their surrogates, the workers had gained enough leverage to strike and to keep on striking until their demands were met. Motivation and opportunity had met, and the workers rose up.
As always, gaining power opens the door to power abuse, if not downright corruption, and worker unions are not immune.72 But every time you tell someone on a Friday afternoon, “Have a nice weekend” or, come Monday, ask, “How was your weekend?” you have unions to thank. Without their fighting back as one, individual workers would have remained utterly replaceable and completely powerless. When considering the effects of workers’ consolidation strategies on an economic system as a whole, unions remain one of the most effective tools for keeping power imbalances from widening wildly, and therefore help to prevent deleterious consequences for everyone’s prosperity in the long run.73
WHEN POWER IMBALANCE BACKFIRES
&n
bsp; Too great a power imbalance is dangerous, not only for the disadvantaged, but also for those at the top because it motivates action against the status quo, as we just saw. The disadvantaged don’t always have an opportunity to act on their motivation, of course. A small company that sells its products on Amazon might resent the terms Amazon imposes, but lacking alternative sales channels, and with millions of sellers reliant on Amazon’s platform, it has no way to push back.74
But when the disadvantaged gain a measure of power over those who impose unfair terms on them, pushback is likely, and it can be costly for both the powerless and the powerful. To illustrate, consider the war that Tim Sweeney, the founder and CEO of game maker Epic Games, has waged against Apple and Google to fight what he sees as their abuse of power over computer game developers. Sweeney’s pushback escalated as the popularity of Epic’s flagship game, Fortnite, grew, giving him leverage over the tech companies. In 2018, he launched Fortnite outside Apple’s App Store and the Google Play store to get around what he saw as their disproportionate app fees. In 2020, Apple and Google responded in kind by banning Fortnite from their stores. in retaliation for Epic Games’ avoiding their payment systems. A legal battle started, with costs for both parties.75
Our research on industry profits in the U.S. economy shows this dynamic across an entire economic system. As the power imbalance between two companies grows, the power-advantaged firm imposes more exploitative economic terms, which frustrates their disadvantaged business partners. The moment the latter get a measure of power over the advantaged party, they refuse to do business. The deal doesn’t close, and both parties in the failed transaction end up with lower profits than what they would have achieved in a more balanced relationship, where the powerful would have been less tempted to abuse its advantage.76
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