Are Two a Crowd?

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has discussed how she was often confused with Sandra Day O’Connor when they sat on the Court together, despite not looking alike and holding significantly different ideological views. It’s important to note that this mistake was not made by passersby being interviewed on late night television but by the lawyers arguing before the Court itself.

This is one of many examples that Professor Denise Lewin Loyd employed at this week’s WAPPP seminar, "Are two heads always better than one? Stereotyping of minority duos in work groups," to explain the unique problems that individuals who are part of the minority on boards, task forces or committees often face. Loyd, an Associate Professor of Business Administration at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, argues that in many cases, being part of a minority duo on a larger team is even worse than being the only minority.

Past research indicates that single minorities within a group are often subject to “token pressure,” whether in the form of increased visibility, stereotyping or pressure to assimilate. Loyd conducted a study of 228 students on the issue, which concluded that this token pressure leads to discomfort, demonstrating that it’s a negative experience for the minority groups in question.

Though we might assume that token pressure would decrease when another minority member is added to the group, there is evidence to the contrary. Research featured in the Harvard Business Review even suggests that the presence of two women on a board may be seen as a subgroup and that those individuals have to give extra care to not look like they're conspiring.

Professor Loyd tested this hypothesis via an experiment she conducted with colleagues Mary Kern of Baruch College, CUNY and Judith White at Dartmouth. Using avatars, Loyd et al collected responses from 170 male participants to see how they viewed women in different settings in which they were the minority. Participants were asked to read a narrative involving a female employee who was part of a team where she was (1) the only woman, (2) one of two women or (3) one of three women on a team of seven, ten or 14. The decision-making and production tasks assigned were relatively agnostic so as to control for the fact that certain tasks may be perceived as more masculine or feminine.

Loyd et al found that women were viewed as significantly less potent and marginally warmer as part of a duo than while acting solo. While there are some limited situations where warmth is advantageous, being perceived as less potent is a clear negative. As part of a trio, women were not seen as less potent but were perceived as marginally warmer than as a duo. A second study involving female-minority groups performing a complex task revealed that men gave female duos worse performance evaluations, despite no significant difference in completion time and quality.

This research suggests that there is something uniquely negative about being part of a minority duo in a larger group. The phenomenon could be partly explained by the claim that minority duos make the category to which they belong more salient to the greater group. This could be a concern for women, who while still significantly underrepresented on corporate boards and in public office, are slowly gaining ground.

How ‘No’ Can Get Women to the Top

For the past decade and a half, scholars have examined why American women are in very few corporate managerial positions compared to their male counterparts, despite representing 30% of elite MBA programs. The disparity is usually explained in several ways: (1) women have different job preferences, (2) women and men have performance differences when it comes to managerial tasks (i.e. women aren’t as good at these jobs), and (3) women face discrimination in the workplace, which prevents them from getting to the top. Recently, however, some researchers have begun to explain the problem with a bit more nuance.

Lise Vesterlund, an Economics Professor at the University of Pittsburgh, discussed an alternative theory based on research she conducted with coauthors Linda Babcock and Laurie Weingart, both professors at Carnegie Mellon University. In this week’s seminar, Breaking the Glass Ceiling with “No”: Gender Differences in Declining Requests for Non-Promotable Tasks, Professor Vesterlund looked at the assignment of undesirable tasks to better understand the issue.

She based her research on the premise that employees who accept more non-promotable tasks are promoted less often. A survey she conducted among MBA students indicated that women were more likely than men to accept such tasks, largely due to fear of the professional consequences of saying "no." As an economics professor, Vesterlund wanted to look at both the potential demand and supply side causes of this gap. The demand side is whether women are asked to perform non-promotable tasks more often than men, while the supply side is women’s response to such requests.

In a study involving freshmen and sophomores at Carnegie Mellon, Vesterlund et al placed students in random, anonymous groups of three, where they were tasked with hitting a button to make an “investment” that benefitted every member of the group, but gave the least to the individual who actually hit the button. This action represented a non-promotable, undesirable task in a corporate setting that needed to be completed despite no one wanting to do it. In a second part of the study, students had to ask another member of their group to hit the button for them.

The results revealed that both the demand and supply sides of this issue were to blame. While the vast majority of students pressed the button in the last possible seconds of each round – revealing that they were likely motivated by desperate self-interest and not altruism – women pressed the button significantly more often than men. In the second part of the study, Vesterlund also found that both men and women were more likely to ask a woman in their group to hit the button. In response to this, female participants complied 75% of the times that they were asked, while male participants’ decisions were split 50/50.

Vesterlund argued that since beliefs about women’s propensity to accept non-promotable tasks are central to this problem, women saying “no” more often might actually make a significant difference. She also suggested that some simple institutional changes, such as random assignment to event planning, committees, and other undesirable tasks, could allow women to take on more promotable assignments.

The Work-Family Narrative and How It's Hurting Women

Gender inequality in the higher echelons of the corporate world has made the news a lot lately – from the UK to Nigeria to Ireland, but the discussion at this week’s WAPPP seminar, "The Work-Family Narrative as a Social Defense: Explaining the Persistence of Gender Inequality in Organizations," focused on the discrepancy in American professional service firms. Despite large gains at the associate level of such organizations, where female employees now comprise roughly half of the workforce, women are severely underrepresented in elite positions. According to the 2013 Catalyst Census, only 15% of C-Suite executives in Fortune 500 companies are women.

Robin Ely, a Professor of Business Administration and Senior Associate Dean at Harvard Business School, presented her research and hypothesis on why such inequality persists. She and her coauthors Irene Padavic and Erin Reid conducted interviews with 107 professionals in a mid-size global consulting firm, where 90% of partners were male. Most employees surveyed said they believed that the inequity was due to the fact that women are disproportionally affected by personal obligations, which can hold them back in a corporate environment where 70-hour weeks are common.

This idea isn’t new; it has been circulated in the news media for over a decade since it was first prominently discussed in a 2003 New York Times Magazine article titled, “Why Don’t More Women Get to the Top? They Choose Not To.”

Professor Ely has an alternative hypothesis, however: that this phenomenon is caused by overselling and over delivery (i.e. overpromising) on the part of partners, paired with associates’ compliance in order to stand out as strong employees.

This creates a 24/7 work culture within elite firms that makes it virtually impossible to balance one’s personal and professional lives, for both men and women. Instead of addressing this culture head on, Ely et al argue that employees use a social defense (a collective arrangement used by an organization to protect against threats and conflicts) to fend off the anxiety this conflict causes.

This social defense splits the professional and personal spheres and then projects the latter onto women. By psychologically assigning women to the private sphere (what Ely calls “privatizing women”), organizations perpetuate the idea that women will prioritize their personal life over their professional one, making them less able to take on management work.

Unfortunately, policy changes may not be enough to resolve this pervasive issue. For example, many elite firms have improved their family leave policies, but women still overwhelmingly use these policies compared to men. Ely argues that a shift in culture is needed, paired with dialogue that references the changes and what they mean for the narrative of the organization.

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