Paradoxes in Transformations in Higher Education: Comparative EU-US Perspectives with Kathrin Zippel

How can global university reform help us design institutional change to promote gender equality in academia? This week’s WAPPP seminar featured a comparative EU-US study by Kathrin Zippel, Associate Professor of Sociology at Northeastern University and former WAPPP Resident Fellow for AY2016.

The “leaky pipeline” problem is a familiar one—at every level of academia, fewer and fewer women ascend the ranks. However, there have been broad transformations in academia that may plug these leaks and promote greater gender equality. In particular, Professor Zippel points to the globalization of scientific knowledge and academic neo-liberalism, characterized by global competition of knowledge economies, constellations of state-market relations, and an increase in managerialism within universities. These transformations change the way academia operates as an industry and thereby changes the conditions for gender inequality. Gender inequality is now seen as not having the luxury of excluding half the population, but we should instead be thinking of gender equality as a mechanism to make academia better.

Professor Zippel outlines four main approaches to promote gender equality in academia:

1. Fixing women – past interventions such as FP5 in the EU and fellowships in the US
2. Fixing institutions – current interventions, including EU FP7 structural change projects and the US NSF ADVANCE program, which provides grants to involve more women in STEM and improve the hiring, retention, and promotion of women in academia 
3. Fixing knowledge – in the EU, FP Horizon 2020 now asks for gender dimensions in research; NIH grants in the US promote including more women in clinical trials
4. Fixing problems – as part of Horizon 2020, the EU includes gender equality as part of “responsible research and innovation.” In the US, researchers have to explain how their findings will impact broader society, including gender equality

Interventions like NSF ADVANCE grants contain positive ingredients for change, according to Professor Zippel. The grant program encourages institutional self-reflexivity, creates statistical consciousness-raising in requiring data on women in science, and creates communities for change by building gender and diversity competences.

Common Challenges in Promoting Gender Equality in Higher Education

Managerialism
The increase in academic bureaucracy may be a boon for female academics. If departments exhibit gender bias or operate as “old boys' clubs,” women may find new allies in deans and provosts.

Redefining Excellence
We put a great deal of faith in “objective” measure of quality, but processes that look meritocratic can still contain bias. Even transparent evaluations are created in a social and political context – someone has to decide which journals are most prestigious and what “good” academic work looks like. We’re seeing a continuing trend of devaluing “feminine qualities.” The work that women do is either invisible or valued less in ranking systems.  Universities need to consider the “soft” and “hard” aspects that are critical to running the institution and to establish a clear link between gender equality and excellence.

Mobilizing the “Majority”
Why do we need to mobilize the majority? Because they’re the ones in power! Family policies and fair evaluations also benefit men in academia. To promote gender equality, we must think about mobilizing allies, building common ground, and demonstrating how dangerous biased metrics can be for all of us.

Involving Leadership
Gender equality shouldn’t be imposed from the outside, but instead integrated into the way academics think and evaluate each other. Instead of bringing in consultants to instruct faculty, Professor Zippel says, have senior professors instruct each other. Using their status within the institution lends credence to the value of gender equality.

Multiple Inequalities
As tenure track positions have dissipated, more and more academics have been stuck in temporary adjunct roles. These are particularly a trap for women; in an adjunct role, it can be more difficult to get enough publications and grants to establish oneself. The project to promote gender equality in universities tends to ignore these structural issues, focusing instead on how to make women more competitive with their male colleagues. However, gender is not the only inequality that academia perpetuates, and we need to be very intentional about the intersectional aspects at play. Rather than complaining about the pool of diverse candidates being too small, institutions should enact structural reforms to help create that pool.

Globalization of Academia
The increasing globalization of academia has given rise to “glass fences,” the international equivalent of glass ceilings. Women are finding it increasingly difficult to move laterally between countries because global science is also a gendered organization. However, there is a positive development in this space, which Professor Zippel refers to the “.edu bonus.” Because US science is seen as the global “gold standard,” when academics receive training in the US, that privilege travels with them. This higher status opens doors, particularly for women and other marginalized groups, and helps to overcome the glass fences problem. This is particularly important because moving laterally can help with rising vertically, given how important international collaborations are in science. These discoveries raise important questions about how we can mainstream gender into internationalization strategies and integrate global aspects into academic careers.

Promising Future Steps

How can we change university structures and cultures to allow men, women, and gender non-conforming individuals to enjoy and succeed in learning and discovery? External pressures on universities, from funding agencies, professional associations, and networks of university and research institution leaders, may help to promote gender equality. Global efforts like International Gender Summits bring together stakeholders to think about how to promote gender equality as a global movement. According to Professor Zippel, the most fruitful approach will be to combine examining gender inequalities in university structures and including a gender dimension in future research. We can embed gender in institutional logics – universities are already concerned with competition for rankings. Making gender equality a component of this competition can alter the norms of research communities and promote greater equality in academia.

Professor Zippel’s forthcoming book “Women in Global Science: Advancing Academic Careers through International Collaboration” will be available in February 2017.

International Women's Day: Focusing on What Works

A lot has changed since March 8, 1857. That was the day when female garment workers in New York City marched and picketed, demanding decent working conditions. Their ranks were broken up by police. A lot has also changed since March 8, 1908, fifty-one years later, when female workers in the needle trades in New York City marched again, demanding the vote and an end to sweatshops and child labor. The police stopped them then as well. Today, on March 8, 2016, women around the world, can celebrate the distance they have advanced in protecting their rights. And they might wonder whether their work is finished.

It is likely your answer might be no, and indeed, many agree that the work is not done. Consider what happened to major orchestras in the U.S. when they first introduced curtains for auditions in the 1970s. Evaluators were forced to listen to the music coming from behind the curtain, remaining blind to the musician’s gender and appearance. The result was that the percentage of female musicians rose from 5% to 35%, and orchestras were able to recruit the best talent! But have all organizations managed to introduce such blind evaluations? Have they fought off other sources of gender bias?

It has proven hard to achieve true equality because unconscious bias is everywhere. Our minds are just wired that way. We create shortcuts and generalizations that help us navigate the very complicated world that we live in. While sometimes helpful, these shortcuts can lead us down very negative paths. They are the reason we find it intuitively more difficult to trust a male preschool teacher or a female plumber. Our minds tend to equate competency with looking the part because talent is not easily visible to the naked eye. Gender can get in the way of us truly recognizing talent.

On International Women’s Day (IWD), we commemorate the work of those who came before and inspired us by continuing to work towards gender equality. Professor Iris Bohnet’s timely book comes out on this day, marking the 105th Anniversary of IWD, and offering a pathway of where to go from here. In What Works: Gender Equality by Design, she provides tools to keep advancing, in 2016 and moving forward, towards gender equality by working around our biases. These tools are inexpensive and easy to implement, and can be useful to people in all levels of organizations: “Right up to board level, companies should find in What Works not only food for thought, but a guide for effective practical action as well”, avows the Financial Times. Want to learn more? Watch this video and pick up a copy of the book starting today. Want to do more? Check out our step by step guide!

What Works: Gender Equality By Design (Part 2!)

Fresh from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Professor Iris Bohnet presented the second half of her forthcoming book “What Works: Gender Equality by Design” at the first HKS WAPPP Seminar of the spring semester.  Professor Bohnet had presented the first half of her book at the first WAPPP Seminar in the fall, and the group was eager to hear more about her focus on “de-biasing organizations” rather than “de-biasing mindsets.”

Professor Bohnet is the Director of the HKS Women and Public Policy Program and Co-chair of the Behavioral Insights Group at the Center for Public Leadership at HKS. Her research demonstrates a powerful truth: No matter how well-intentioned they are, people can still fall prey to bias. Instead of trying to break people of these often unintentional biases, we should be looking to organizational design to “make it easier for all of us to do the right thing.”

The limits of diversity training

Professor Bohnet began with a survey of existing interventions to overcome bias in the workplace, including diversity training, negotiation training, leadership training, mentorship and sponsorship, and networking. Despite being a billion-dollar industry, the evidence on diversity training is mixed. After hundreds of studies, it is hard to be optimistic about diversity training, if only because it is incredibly difficult to de-bias minds. Beyond stereotypical thinking, humans rely on a number of other cognitive shortcuts that are very difficult to unlearn.

The rest of these interventions are geared toward helping women navigate the workforce more effectively. One critique of this approach is that it places the onus of fixing gender discrimination on women. However, it is important to be pragmatic and to consider how these methods can be helpful. The evidence from mentorship and sponsorship networks is particularly encouraging. Female economists who participated in mentorship training workshops were more productive, more likely to publish in peer-reviewed journals, and more likely to get tenure. This is some of the best causal evidence to date about the impact of mentorship and sponsorship and demonstrates the positive impact of these interventions.

Using behavioral insights to move the needle

Behavioral insights and organizational design present an opportunity to develop novel interventions to decrease bias and improve diversity. For organizations looking to attract the best candidates, Professor Bohnet suggests they look at the language in their job advertisements. She presented a job advertisement for a teacher reading in part, “Looking for a warm and caring teacher with exceptional pedagogical and interpersonal skills to work in a supportive, collaborative work environment.” Gendered language like this resonates with women rather than men and can inhibit great male teachers from applying. And with boys falling about a year behind girls in reading and writing by age 15, partially because of the lack of male role models among their teachers, it makes a difference.

There are numerous behavioral interventions that workplaces can develop to overcome bias. Two simple things organizations can start with: get rid of “potential” rankings in employee evaluation, and stop managers from seeing employees’ self-evaluations before giving their own rankings. There is an enormous amount of bias in potential rankings. In another iteration of “seeing is believing,” a lack of female senior partners at a firm may lead to biased thinking that women don’t have the potential or desire to ascend the career ladder. While it’s not clear how to get rid of this bias, it is simple enough to remove potential rankings altogether in evaluating employees. Similarly, there can be a significant difference in employee rankings. On average, women are inclined to give themselves lower self-evaluation scores than men. If managers can see employees’ self-evaluations before making their own judgments, they may be influenced by these scores and give women lower scores (and men higher) than they otherwise would.  Instead, the manager could have conversations with team members about their performance, but wait to see a numerical self-evaluation until after they have made their own evaluations. These two findings are low-hanging fruit for organizations looking to reduce workplace bias; research increasingly shows that mindsets change once behavior has changed, and these low-impact methods reduce the effect of bias in the workplace.

Gender diversity in teams

In recent years, the “business case for diversity”—evidence that more diverse organizations do better than those that are more homogeneous—has attracted a lot of attention. A meta-analysis of 120 studies finds a small diversity premium for diverse corporate boards. However, these studies are just observational: it could be that diversity really does pay, or that companies that are high-performing are also more inclusive. One study measuring collective intelligence found that gender diverse teams outperformed homogeneous teams on each of the tested tasks. Gender diverse teams demonstrated complementary skill sets and a greater tendency to listen to and build on others’ ideas. Gender diverse teams are much more likely to avoid groupthink, which increases their effectiveness.

However, Professor Bohnet emphasized, we should care about gender equality because it’s the right thing to do, not just because of the business case for diversity. In closing, she discussed several organizational improvements that could encourage equitable behavior, including a “comply or explain” system for corporate diversity. Goal setting, transparency, and accountability all play a crucial role in changing behavior and, by extension, changing mindsets. Professor Bohnet’s book is available on March 4—be on the lookout for more bias-reducing, diversity-maximizing insights!

Reserving Time for Daddy: The Long and Short-Term Consequences of Fathers' Quotas

People often think economists only worry about inflation, interest rates, or fiscal policy, but did you ever think that economics researchers would be working on figuring out ways for couples to share child care and housework more equitably? Well, they do! In the latest edition of the HKS WAPPP Seminar, economist Ankita Patnaik, from Mathematica Policy Research, presented her work on the long term and short term effects of paternity leave on families. She is part of a group of up and coming scholars that, according to Professor Hannah Riley-Bowles, are producing research that reminds us that the topic of gender encompasses more than women; equality concerns everyone.

Patnaik began by providing an overview of encouraging trends that have emerged in recent decades. In some contexts, women have been catching up to men in the formal labor market, though pay gaps remain, and have closed gaps in realms like education. In contrast, 'care work', which includes unpaid tasks such as housework or child care in the home, is strongly characterized by sex-specialization and takes up more of women's time. In the typical household according to studies, women are assigned inflexible tasks that need to be performed regularly and at fixed times, like cooking dinner, for example. In contrast, men usually take on tasks that can be performed at any time and are not routine, like fixing various items or mowing the lawn.

These differences can hurt women at work and reduce their bargaining power within the household. They can result in lower priority assigned to women's activities outside the home. For example, researchers observe that women are more likely to quit their job in response to husband's long work hours and more likely to relocate to accommodate a partner's professional path.

Before Patnaik's research, studies had found a relationship between parental leave schemes that included a paternity leave provision and the number of men taking leave to perform childcare duties. They could not pinpoint a causal relationship though and the effect of fathers' leave on housework sharing was not clear. Her contribution provides answers to these questions by looking at a very special policy episode that happened in Canada in 2006.

Dr. Ankita Patnaik, Mathematica Policy Research

The province of Quebec put into place a parental leave scheme called QPIP Reform, which made it easier to qualify, provided more compensation, and included a five-week 'daddy-only' provision for leave in addition the mother's. Families with babies born beginning on January 1st would be eligible. This allowed Patnaik to compare eligible families with those that just missed the date and would be governed by the old scheme, which only provided with maternity and shared leave. The results are very impressive.

The likelihood that fathers would take paternity leave went up by 53 percentage points, and their leaves became three weeks longer. "Norms play a critical role", she explained. Because this policy is aimed specifically for fathers, social norms become more accepting of men leaving work to take care of a child than when the policy was shared leave. After the quota, "dads are more likely to take their leave if their brother or their boss took it", she remarked. She calls her findings "the flypaper effect", because the quotas stick to the dad's when they are directed specifically to them. Labels matter!

What is even more impressive is that she found that these five weeks of leave can have effects that are much more long lasting than could have been expected. After five years, moms in Quebec were spending an hour longer at work on average, making about $5,000 Canadian dollars more, and more likely to be working full-time. Dads were spending more time doing 'carework' and their work hours and earnings were unaffected.

Ankita Patnaik will continue to work on this issue, her findings are key to any policy maker working on closing gender gaps.

What Works: Gender Equality by Design

Imagine the following situation: You are a young professional musician. And you are really good. Music is what makes your blood flow. Ever since you were a little girl, piano and violin lessons excited you rather than bored you. Today is a very important day for you: You're auditioning for a position in the National Symphony Orchestra. How would you feel if you knew that the minute you walked on stage, before even playing your instrument, your chances of being hired would decrease significantly?

Before research showed that having musicians audition behind a curtain, so the jury would not be able to tell their gender, increased the chance that a woman would be hired or promoted, and that these "blind" auditions alone could account for a third of the increase in the proportion of women musicians hired into top-tier American symphonies, female musicians would face just that scenario. The implicit biases of possibly well-meaning members of the jury would too often reduce women's chances to succeed in the audition.

Although we would all like to think we do not suffer from the same biases as the members of those juries, the opposite is likely true. During the first HKS Women and Public Policy Program seminar of the academic year, Professor Iris Bohnet explained that we are all biased in one way or another, "because seeing is believing". We observe patterns in the world, such as most kindergarten teachers being female, or most software engineers being male, so we come to expect people to fill those roles. Don't believe it? Take the test yourself.

Professor Bohnet is the Director of the HKS Women and Public Policy Program (WAPPP) and Co-chair of the Behavioral Insights Group at the Center for Public Leadership at HKS. During the seminar, she presented a preview of her forthcoming book “What Works: Gender Equality by Design”, in which she argues that we can use insights we learn from Behavioral Economics to close gender gaps caused by implicit biases.

Professor Iris Bohnet, Director of the HKS Women and Public Policy Program

These insights allow us to create “nudges", which are small actions designed to obtain the most desirable reactions from people, building on knowledge of how the -often irrational- human mind actually works. In the book, she talks about "nudges we can use to make the world a better place", because they can reframe the environments in which we work. Best of all, they are mostly cheap and can be introduced quickly.

Professor Bohnet described previous approaches to increasing diversity in the workforce, such as diversity, leadership, and negotiation training, and underscored that there is not enough evidence to prove that these interventions work. On the other hand, interventions like long-term capacity-building or mentoring have been found to be very promising. In a study that followed the career trajectories of women economics professors who were randomly assigned into a long term mentorship program, the professors in the program fared better than those in the control group.

She mentioned many other nudges to redesign the work environment, like putting up more images of female leaders -"what you see matters in what you think is possible for yourself"-, avoiding panel interviews, assessing job candidates on a pre-determined set of questions immediately after the interview, highlighting the increased presence of gender mixed corporate boards rather than their low proportion, and many more. Professor Bohnet is handing in the manuscript for the book next week, so look forward to reading more when it comes out!

What Soil Can Tell Us About Sex Deficits

Soil can help explain child sex ratios in rural areas of India, argued Eliana Carranza, Technical Advisor at the World Bank’s Gender Innovation Lab, in this week’s WAPPP seminar, “Soil Endowments, Female Labor Force Participation and the Demographic Deficit of Women in India.”

Sex ratios – defined in the world of demography as the ratio of females to males in a population – are typically split with the number of females and males. Variations in ratio are often visible by age group, but the biggest variation in sex ratios is actually seen via geography. For example, a few countries in the Middle East and South Asia show a distinct and persistent deficit of women, including India.

The World Bank study that Carranza presented was recently published in the American Economic Journal and argues that child sex ratios in rural India can be explained by differences in soil texture. Carranza argued that these ratios are affected by women’s employment opportunities in agriculture, which vary across different kinds of soil.

This is because the soil texture in a certain region determines the depth of land preparation required to produce a crop there. Deep tillage, which reduces the need for labor in female-dominated tasks such as transplanting, fertilizing and weeding, is only possible in loamy soil textures. Therefore, districts with larger fractions of loamy soils exhibit lower rates of female participation in agriculture. The lower demand for female labor reduces the economic value of girls to a household, leading to lower ratios of female to male children.

The study sees a significant effect of soil texture on agricultural workers' opportunities, which disproportionately affects women. There is not the same effect on the overall male population, since men have other types of employment opportunities, while there are no real alternatives available for women in these regions.

The study found that an additional 10 percentage points in the share of female agricultural laborers in the rural work force is estimated to increase the relative number of rural 0-to-6 year olds by 44 girls per 1000 boys. This would bring the sex ration from an average ratio of 925 to 969, which is above the natural outcome for children of that age. The deficit of girls could be erased by a less extreme 5.8 percentage point increase in share of female laborers in rural workforce.

Carranza's policy prescription is relatively simple: provide more economic opportunities specifically for women. Previous studies show that increasing income is not enough to close the gender gap, and neither is creating more employment opportunities overall. In regions dominated by non-equalitarian perceptions regarding the role and value of women, women’s employment opportunities have even greater influence on labor force participation, which in turn affects child sex ratios.

Photo Source: The World Bank

Making the Law Work for Working Women

When Sarah Iqbal, currently the Program Manager for Women, Business and the Law at the World Bank, first started working on development issues there in 2008, she says she often found herself explaining why the obstacles women faced when trying to start businesses and get jobs mattered on a global scale. Now, she says, there aren’t enough data to meet the demand for such information.

In this week’s WAPPP Seminar, “Women, Business and the Law: Removing Restrictions to Enhance Gender Equality,” Iqbal discussed the findings of the Women, Business and Law 2014 Report. The report scrutinizes the laws and regulations across the globe that affect men and women differently so as to limit women’s opportunities and incentives to work.

In a survey of 143 economies, 90% were found to have at least one legal difference restricting women’s economic opportunities. The restrictions came in a variety of forms, from property rights restrictions to long lists of jobs that women were prohibited from doing. 15 of these countries had laws allowing husbands to object to – and therefore restrict – their wives’ employment.

The study looked at seven indicators of gender economic equality to make these determinations: (1) ability to access institutions, (2) property use, (3) whether there were restrictions on type of employment, (4) whether incentives to work are provided, (5) ability to build credit, (6) court accessibility, and (7) the degree to which women are protected from violence.

The report found that there were three main obstacles for women’s advancement in business. The first is women’s lack of autonomy to interact with government institutions or conduct official transactions. Iqbal illustrated this by discussing “head of household” rights and responsibilities, such as paying taxes or sending children to school, which are usually delegated to men.

Second, Iqdal explained that marriage is often the trigger for such loss of rights. While single women have as many rights as single men in almost every country studied, women give up some of their autonomy upon marriage in many countries around the world. Lastly, limited property rights are a major factor contributing to women’s restricted economic opportunities, since property can be used as collateral for loans to start small businesses, for example.

Fortunately, there is hope that progress is being made on this issue. Within five years of the ratification of CEDAW, rates of reform in the countries studied had doubled. The report also found that having women legislators increased the likelihood of reform in that country. Over the two year period examined, Women, Business and the Law recorded 59 legal changes in 44 economies. Of these changes, 48 increased gender parity, 11 were neutral to gender parity. None reduced gender parity.

In addition to collecting this data, Women, Business and the Law are working with countries to make their laws less restrictive for women's economic opportunities. Iqbal closed by arguing that “what gets measured gets done,” and that despite the clear challenges ahead, a good first step is measuring the problem in order to tackle it.

Photo source: The World Bank

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.

Download the seminar podcast (right click and save)

Did the plough doom us to millennia of gender inequality?

'Women are supposed to stay at home and raise children.' 'Men are supposed to work and bring home money to provide for the family.'

Throughout the world, we have many ideas of which gender should be responsible for what---perhaps the most fundamental and universal has been employment roles. Why is that?

One theory has to do with the nature of work: the economic structures of "traditional" society were largely manual labor based, almost necessarily ensuring the centrality and dominance of the physically more muscular male in economic production. People have argued that this started with the plough thousands of years go: before the plough, men and women were equal economically in that both could till soil and gather food by hand with equal skill. Accordingly, they were largely equal socially, intellectually, and in terms of power.

But when the plough was invented, it required a great deal of upper body strength to produce more agricultural output. So the gathering work that women did became less economically relevant, and the remaining work was left to the physically stronger sex---by nature's course, this was usually the male. Most consequential economic activity became dependent on the successful physical performance of the male. This was furthered by the thought that women’s interaction with domesticated farm animals would reduce fertility levels.



In his seminar last week on “The Origins of Gender Roles: Women and The Plough,” Alberto Alesina of Harvard University explored the effects of this ancient technological innovation on today’s perception of gender roles. The fact that work was bifurcated along gender lines so long ago, he argues, has meant that these norms and expectations persist even centuries after humans moved beyond agriculture as the primary economic activity.

Controlling for things like ethnicity, politics, and geographic features, Professor Alesina and his colleagues matched up traditional and ancient plough usage with today’s women’s labor market participation and perceptions of gender equality and norms. They found that there is, in fact, a strong correlation between ancient plough usage and gender inequality today. That technology affected not just the realities of work, but also the norms, markets, institutions, and policies that were shaped around them.

Since then, however, we’ve seen some profound changes in economics. Urbanization and industrialization, for example, brought women back into the workforce in a large way and galvanized the women’s and labor rights movements---to say nothing of the service sector. And though today’s inequality may have its roots in ancient technologies, it is still propagated by harmful norms and narratives that we certainly can control.



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How can mothers win? Ending the bias against caretakers.

As we’ve seen, both women and men face challenges reconciling work-life integrity. Usually, individuals are forced to adjust their own behavior: share household burdens, manipulate supervisors’ perceptions, or just opt out entirely.

What makes this whole balancing process harder is that caretakers suffer a particular bias at work. In her seminar last week on “Reducing the Caretaker Penalty: Norms, Laws, and Organizational Policy,” Stanford University’s Shelley Correll demonstrated how mothers, for example, are paid less than both fathers and childless women---nearly 5-7% less per child, in fact. But it’s difficult to overcome this because of two absurd and paradoxical societal perceptions:

• The assumption that mothers are less committed to their office work
• The normative view that mothers should be more committed to their children than their office work-and if they’re not, they’re bad people.

If mothers try to work their way out of the caretaker bias, they’re seen as selfish, arrogant, and dominant, and are penalized accordingly. Basically, mothers can’t win!

So can laws change societal norms? Professor Correll explains how, yes, they can not only provide punitive protections but also create more symbolic social consensus that implies what’s right and wrong.

The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) gives employees that have worked for over twelve months in an organization with more than 50 people the right to 12 weeks of unpaid leave per year. Just knowing about FMLA and other organizational leave policies positively affects how colleagues view mothers and other caretakers who take short leaves. Even a limited law that’s weakly enforced can promote gender equity.

If we enable workplace leave more reflexively, we can prep society for more openness, namely to the reality that all people---men, women, rich, poor---have and must honor responsibilities outside of the workplace. As Professor Correll put it, “work should be a verb, not a place,” and Best Buy’s management has pioneered Results Only Work Environments (ROWE), where employees are paid for results and output rather than the number of hours worked.

Convincing employers and supervisors of the merits of this kind of flexibility might be more difficult, because they may have legitimate concerns about their workforce. But these employers ought to keep two things in mind. One is that their own expectations of different groups---women caretakers, African Americans, etc---are often incorrectly biased, and these are biases that impede a fair and efficient workplace. Another is that more flexible work environments will mean longer-term retention of good workers.

Low- and hourly-wage workers and their employers face another challenge: their work is inherently based on time commitment, and already feels risky. Even if they can afford it financially, these workers don’t want to take FMLA because it will prejudice their employers upon return.

Accordingly, good laws are even more important in these cases, setting the norm for what is right.

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Why (and how) we shouldn't have it all

Debates over whether women should lean in, lean out, have it all or just some have been raging over the last few years, with few clear answers. Should women emulate men? Adjust what they’re doing to gain power? Opt out entirely?

At this week’s WAPPP Seminar on “Different Ways of Not Having It All: Work, Care, and Gender Change in the New Economy,” NYU Sociologist Kathleen Gerson suggests that the answers can’t, and shouldn’t be that simple.

While women have made tremendous strides in the workplace and at home, we’re entering a whole new economic era, where the boundaries between work and home, local and global job markets, and part and full-time work are all blurring---to say nothing of changing gender norms in most vocations.

Meanwhile, even household norms are changing, with more women working outside the home even through a child’s life, work tensions affecting marital relationships, and greater expectations of parental involvement throughout a child’s life.

As a result, both economics and home life are changing and becoming even less secure: careers aren't quite the linear, predictable paths they used to be, nor are household expectations of, and demands on both partners.

There are three main ways that people are thinking about these changes:

• “Neotraditional” arrangements, in which both partners work and are committed to one another, but one partner “specializes” in care, while the other “specializes” in breadwinning
• “Self-Reliance,” where, even in committed relationships, both partners work to provide money and care in equal doses---without counting on the other.
• and “Gender flexibility,” in which there is an egalitarian sharing of earning and caretaking, but a vague meaning of equality: care and breadwinning are responsibilities assigned not by gender, just what needs to be done

Both men and women would prefer gender-flexibility as an ideal arrangement. But in practice, women tend to fall back to more self-reliant positions, while men reflexively tend toward neotraditional arrangements. This is partly because men are still under the subtle yet profound pressure of the male breadwinner ideal: a man who can’t support his family is unmarriageable and “isn’t a man.” Even equality is seen as chivalrous: “equality means the woman has a choice; but I don’t.”

In practice, a third of people are “neotraditionalists,” with fathers left managing time-demanding jobs. About a third of people are “on their own,” and are left to rear children by themselves or without a committed partner. One of six couples have reversed traditional roles, with women providing more financially, but this leading to resentment in the relationship. And another sixth are “equal, but exhausted.”

At the end of the day, these choices are not about gender, but universal hopes to have a balanced life with predictable work and secure relationships---all permutations of which will require trade-offs. The erosion of job and relationship security are permanent conditions with which we must all contend; to do so we may have to redefine the responsibilities of being a man and a woman in the modern world.




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If you can’t change the player, change the game

How many times have you heard people try to deny that they are prejudiced by saying that “some of my best friends are” black, gay, Republican, or women? I’ll bet it’s all too often.

Try as we might, most of us have some kind of latent bias that keeps us from being completely objective, even when we really want to be. Of course, too many of us are also pretty openly prejudiced. Both of these views get in the way of two things: equity and efficiency.

By equity, I mean that women in particular are underrepresented in most places of power---corporate boards, elected office, etc---in proportion to their population. By efficiency, I mean that there are tangible economic benefits to including different people, and women in particular, in decision-making.

According to Professor Iris Bohnet, Director of WAPPP and Academic dean at the Kennedy School, who presented her work on “Gender and Decision-Making” this week, women’s smaller appetites for risk-taking, more tempered competitiveness, and complementary perspectives may account for these contributions.

So how do we overcome these unintended biases and maximize these benefits?

One answer may lie in understanding and fixing “evaluation bias”. We often assess things based on factors completely unrelated to the thing itself. Our evaluations are often driven by the context around the subject, or our other assumptions or preconceived notions.

The Chubb Illusion: We think the center squares are different colors because of their surroundings
http://www.optical-illusion-pictures.com/famous.html 

For example, in many Indian villages people didn’t typically associate ‘leadership’ with women largely because they had rarely seen female leaders. But in 1993, women were required by a constitutional amendment to serve as the head of village councils, or Panchayat Raj, in one-third of all Indian villages---a change that familiarized the electorate with female leadership, and paved the way for further elections of women. (In 2011, 50% of all seats had to be filled by women).

This legislative change was a “nudge” in the right direction. By changing the context a little bit, people’s perceptions changed a little bit too. So if we adjust the process of hiring in different firms so that, for instance, candidates are referred to as “people” rather than as a “man” or “woman,” decision-makers might not be primed by their gender-based association, and instead choose based on merits alone. Similarly, if a school has to hire 5 professors in a year, it makes sense to hire them all at once, so any gender imbalances are immediately obvious when they’re seen in a single group---rather than letting gender slip past the radar in one-off hirings.

To tweak a phrase used by the rapper Ice T, if we can’t change the player, change the game. 

Is 'Opt'ing Out Even an Option?

Over the last year, Facebook Chief Operating Office Sheryl Sandberg, has made a splash with her “Lean In movement,” which seeks to elevate the role of women in the professional world. In her book and preceding TED talk, Sandberg---a former VP at Google, and former Chief of Staff at the US Department of Treasury---has been trying to “keep women in the workforce...because I really think that’s” why we have so few women leaders. “The problem…is that women are dropping out.”

At the New York Times, Lisa Belkin had written a piece called the “Opt-Out Generation, about educated mothers who have left a career to stay home, usually to take care of children. (Statistically, the revolution was limited to an economically fortunate few). More recently, follow-up articles have talked about how the promise of home life didn’t deliver: how “The Opt-Out Generation Wants Back In,” but is having trouble reintegrating into the workforce.


In last week's WAPPP Seminar, Opting Out among Women with Elite Education: Evidence, Causes, and Societal Consequences, Professor Joni Hersch of Vanderbilt Law School looks at how valid these views really are. She looks at national averages across different types of college-educated women, and finds that most opting out is concentrated among married mothers who are graduates of elite institutions like Ivy League universities. To the extent possible, Professor Hersch even looked at how a woman’s parents’ educational background affects their current decisions; and indeed, the more educated her parents, the more likely she stayed in the workforce.

Women are more likely to stay in the workforce if they have science and engineering background; if they have graduate degrees; if they are employed in management, science, or health (rather than service or blue-collar industries); or if they are not married to very high-earning men.

Of course, as Anne-Marie Slaughter famously argued, the pressures on all women, in lower income and upper-echelon circles alike, to focus more attention on their own family remain strong---maybe even biological. The option to have a better work-life balance ought not be limited to those of elite educations, backgrounds, and industries, nor should this only pertain to women. Women that are not able to pay for nannies and other surrogate caregivers are particularly in need of “opting out” themselves.

Some steps toward that include lowering institutional barriers to that work-life flexibility: increasing public funding and other access to childcare and family leave, through legal protection.

That's definitely a vital start. But a sad paradox is that many industries that have welcomed women over the last decades---from increasing their numbers to improving work-life balance---have supposedly lost their economic and social “prestige” at the same time, making even that hard-won progress seem incomplete.

So, even as we start to change institutions and policies, we've got to influence how people think of their work and colleagues as well.

Beyond the Glass Ceiling

Today my friend sent me a link to Boys Clubs Tumblr – a visual collection of “the corners of the world where women have yet to tread.” It is mind-boggling how much progress we still have to make in closing gender gaps.

At WAPPP Seminars this year we discussed some of these “corners of the world.” There are the overwhelmingly male corporate boards, the merely 18 female CEO’s of Fortune 500 companies, and the female stock brokers earning less than their male peers. But we also heard about female leaders helping their countries address inter-group conflict, female professors inspiring young women to pursue STEM careers, and the women mobilizing their communities for land rights. 

In the final seminar of the academic year, Professor Matt Huffman, of the UC Irvine Sociology Department and the Paul Merage School of Business, brought research to bear on another question – do women managers change the workplace itself?

There is some evidence that female managers do close gender gaps among their employees. One study found that wage gaps were smaller inlocal U.S. industries with many high-status females. Two other studies explored gender segregation and found that female managers increased female hiring and gender integration in the California savings and loan industry and in California’s state agencies.

Huffman set out to study these phenomena on a much larger scale, using Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s data. EEO-1 reports, which are filed by all “medium and large” firms under the 1964 Civil Rights Act, amount to a set of longitudinal workplace data spanning decades. Each report breaks out the managerial and non-managerial occupations at a specific work site and reports on the number of women and racial minorities in each category. Because the work sites are identified by name and address, the individual files are confidential and only available to a handful of researchers. For Huffman, this presents a goldmine for empirical analysis, complete with information on industry types, organization sizes, and other potential control variables.

Since the data did not include wages, instead of focusing on wage gaps, Huffman decided to study organizational segregation – a measure of how evenly men and women were distributed across the non-managerial categories in the organization. Using regression analysis on 1975, 1986, 1995 and 2005 data, he demonstrated that organizations with a higher percentage of women in management positions were less gender-segregated in the non-managerial ranks.

Though the most recent work places were generally far less gender-segregated than the older cohorts, even without female managers, the pattern across all four points in time was similar – higher percentage of female managers meant more integrated subordinates. In other words, breaking up the boys' club at the top, helped break the barriers among departments and functional areas below. 

Huffman ran a series of other analyses to pinpoint aspects of the workplace context that amplified or diminished the gender-integrating effect of female managers on their organizations. He found that managerial formalization and company growth were both conducive to the gender integrating effect of female managers. Perhaps it is because formal structures can give women more access to power than a loose work environment might. It may also be because a female manager in a growing organization has more opportunities to hire people, altering the gender balance of her workforce.

Why does gender diversity and gender integration matter? First, women bring unique lived experiences to the workplace, and given that women are also half of the consumers, it is prudent to include their perspectives in developing and selling products and services. (Maybe if the Apple Inc. team added some women, someone would have thought that iPad could be a bit of an awkward name...). Second, companies with more female leaders make more money and women executives make venture-backed companies more successful, despite the fact that the venture capital world is still decidedly a boys club. 

Finally, gender equality is the just and the smart thing to do, which is why WAPPP's work closing gender gaps in economic opportunity, political participation, health and education is so important.

Anya Malkov is an MPP candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School, a WAPPP Cultural Bridge Fellow, and an alumna of From Harvard Square to the Oval Office.