Tuesday, October 31, 2017

Gender and Security Seminar Series: Does Integration Change Gender Attitudes? The Effect of Randomly Assigning Women to Traditionally Male Teams with Dr. Andreas Kotsadam

The inaugural session of the Gender and Security Seminar series featured Dr. Andreas Kotsadam, Senior Researcher at the Frisch Centre in Oslo, Norway, as he presented the results of a recent study on gender attitudes and integration in the Norwegian military.

Though women make up almost half of the paid labor force in most developed countries, occupational segregation persists. With only observational data, it is difficult to understand the causal link. It may be that workers in male-dominated field are more susceptible to gender stereotypes; alternatively, those who choose to work in male-dominated professions may subscribe to those stereotypes to begin with. Dr. Kotsadam’s paper helps to explicate this mechanism.

Dr. Kotsadam and his colleagues joined forces with the Norwegian army, which remains very sex-segregated: women make up approximately 14% of the Norwegian military. While all men and women in Norway must register to be conscripted, only about 1/6 of a given cohort is selected for military service. New conscripts spend eight weeks in boot camp followed by ten months of service. Military officials have made it a priority to increase gender integration, including having mixed-gender squads living together and sharing rooms.

In this study, new conscripts completed a survey on their first day of training before leaving for boot camp. Each person was randomly assigned to a squad: some squads included female soldiers, while others were entirely male. Squads live together, work closely together, and cannot leave the base during boot camp, creating an intense, cooperative setting in which to study gender attitudes. After eight weeks of boot camp, each person completed the survey again.

The survey included three gender-related measures:

1. Participants registered their level of agreement with the idea that same-gender teams perform better than mixed-gender teams. At baseline, 61% of men and 90% of women though that mixed-gender teams performed as well or better than same-gender teams.

2. Participants registered their level of agreement with the idea that it is important that men and women share household work equally. At baseline, 67% of men and 87% of women agreed.

3. As part of the military’s evaluation, participants were asked how well the phrase “I am feminine” described them. The researchers considered anything other than a complete disavowal of the feminine to be a measure of more egalitarian gender attitudes. All of the women and 56% of men agreed at least somewhat with the phrase “I am feminine.”

In comparing the final survey to the baseline, soldiers who had at least one woman in their squad demonstrated a 14 percentage point increase in agreement that mixed-gender teams perform as well or better than single-gender teams. There was an 8 percentage point increase in the number of men who agreed that it is important to share household work. Finally, there was a statistically significant reduction in the number of men who completely disavowed being feminine.

These results demonstrate a clear, large effect on gender attitudes from working together with women in close settings. According to Dr. Kotsadam, the effect is quite general and seems to affect more or less everyone. These results also confirm the central hypothesis of contact theory, which states that if people are placed into close, cooperative settings with equal status and an enforcing authority, “good things happen.” However, the reverse effect also holds in this data: for men who were assigned to single-sex squads, their survey responses became less egalitarian over the course of boot camp.

What impact do these gender attitudes have on perceptions of leadership? When asked which sex makes the best leaders at various levels of command, all soldiers uniformly answered men, perhaps because of an exposure effect: all of the leaders that they had come into contact with were men. However, in an experimental setting involving a fictional candidate for squad leader, soldiers in mixed-gender squads did not discriminate at all between male and female candidates.

Many of the objections to military integration revolve around what happens to men when female soldiers are introduced: to they want to quit the military? Do they demonstrate lower morale, worse performance, or less satisfaction? Does unit cohesion or preparation suffer? In these results, the researchers did not find any differential attrition between same-gender and mixed-gender squads, and all soldiers were equally satisfied with their time in boot camp, whether or not they worked with female soldiers.

The results of this study indicate that gender attitudes are not fixed – it is possible to change them. Dr. Kotsadam cautioned that while this study has a great deal of internal validity, its external validity may be weaker, as the military is a very particular setting made up of very particular individuals. However, this study is a clear confirmation of contact theory and sets the stage for additional work in changing gender attitudes.

No comments:

Post a Comment