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.

Podcasting WAPPP Seminars

Great news for podcast listeners: WAPPP seminars are now available through iTunes University. If you are unable to join us in person, now you can listen to the presentation and discussion on the go.

Here's the link:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/women-public-policy-program/id605400671?mt=10

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Race in Your Face

This will be uncomfortable, so try to relax. Examining our own race and gender stereotypes can be as pleasant as sitting in the dentist’s chair. But for Kerri L. Johnson, Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at UCLA, discovering awkward truths about people’s biases is an occupational hazard. Dr. Johnson investigates how people use physical cues to categorize other people.  Sometimes she even gets hate mail and coverage by Rush Limbaugh.

At the Social Communication Lab at UCLA, Dr. Johnson and her social psychologist colleagues do things like asking students to decide whether a point-light display figure is a man or woman and to categorize faces of different races as male, female, gay or straight. They even have a program that analyzes the relative femininity or masculinity of a person’s face.  Despite the ill-informed hate mail, the researchers persist, because understanding how biases are formed is the first step to combating unfair stereotypes and discrimination. 

In one study, Dr. Johnson demonstrated that race is gendered. For example, in the United States, there is overlap in stereotypes of Asians and women (soft-spoken, shy, family-oriented), while the stereotypes about Blacks overlap with stereotypes about men (dominant, athletic, competitive). The same pattern surfaced when the researchers measured whether respondents were more likely to misidentify the Asian men’s faces as female and Black women’s faces as male. The faces in question were digitally created so that only the race varied (see above). Sure enough, subjects more quickly and more correctly identified the Black men and Asian women than the other way around, and the respondents’ own race or gender did not seem to make a difference.   

The Social Communication Lab runs dozens of similar experiments, finding, for example, that even when information was limited to just photos of faces, subjects were better than chance at categorizing the person as “gay” or “straight.” And, as another angry-letter-provoking study demonstrated, categorizing someone, whether by race, gender or sexual orientation, has implications for how we will interact with that person given our own baggage and biases.

Yet it was a study of politicians and gender that achieved notoriety and misrepresentation by both Samantha Bee at the New York Times and Rush Limbaugh. The conclusions of the study were that Republican women in Congress had more stereotypical feminine facial features than did their Democratic counterparts; and that uninformed observers were more likely to identify the highly feminine women’s faces as Republican and the less feminine ones as Democratic.

You can take a moment to learn about the methods used in this unexpectedly controversial study, and even start another uncomfortable discussion in the comments section here. Please, just go easy on the hate mail.

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.

Photos from WAPPP, Fall 2012

What's been happening around WAPPP

WAPPP seminar speakers, meeting the 2013 Oval Office cohort, and new faces (full photo album)

Feminism, now stalled (Harvard Gazette)

Law Professor Nancy Gertner says Second Wave needs a second wind

Reposted from the Harvard Gazette

By Corydon Ireland

Harvard Staff Writer

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Nancy Gertner is a former federal judge, the author of a recent memoir (“In Defense of Women”), a professor of practice at Harvard Law School, and an authority on sentencing, jury system discrimination, forensic evidence, and other legal areas.

But go back to June 1971, the month she had a loud argument with her mother in their kitchen in Flushing, Queens, N.Y. Gertner was about to graduate from Yale Law School and assume a prestigious clerkship in Chicago. But her mother wanted her to take the test to be a Triborough Bridge toll taker — just in case.

For a young woman lawyer at the time, “just in case” wasn’t a bad idea. The law was a man’s world. But just a decade later, the culture seemed to swing toward what feminists worked for: parity. By the late 1980s, first-rate law firms were hiring men and women in equal numbers. “We thought the numbers would do everything,” Gertner said during a lunchtime talk on Feb. 23 that was sponsored by the Women and Public Policy Program at the Harvard Kennedy School. (Weekly talks there are part of the program’s mission to create gender equality.)

But faith in the raw numbers turned out to be “dramatically wrong,” said Gertner. “Advancement has stalled.” Half of all new lawyers are women, she said, but only 16 percent of equity partners in law firms are female. And of lawyers who leave the profession, most are women — and most do it because of family and social concerns.

Gertner used the lens of the legal profession to speculate why, after earlier rapid advances, feminism’s cultural agenda seems to have stalled. (Universities, she said, are in an analogous position, with plenty of women graduating as Ph.D.s, but few getting to the top of the academic game.)

During her years on the bench from 1994 to 2011, Gertner got used to being trotted out at events as an example of progress. “You’re supposed to say: ‘Things are fabulous,’ ” she told her audience at the Taubman Building’s Cason Seminar Room. But they are not. The women’s movement was not just about having more choices, she said, but about “revolutionary” changes in the workplace and at home that have not happened yet.

In today’s “imperfectly transformed world,” said Gertner, it is social expectations and an “unfriendly workforce” that mean a woman — if anyone — usually will stay home with the children. (She called this reality “the maternal wall.”)

Gertner cited one study that showed 30 percent of women leaving the law, including 15 percent of equity partners, those with a financial stake in a firm. Another study, she said, showed that 34 percent of female law graduates have worked part time, compared with only 9 percent of their male counterparts.

So without a corresponding transformation of family responsibilities, feminism is likely to stay stalled, she said. “We’ve hit a wall.”

It’s not a situation that discrimination lawsuits can correct, said Gertner, because so many women are “leaning out” of their professions — that is, anticipating future pressures and so choosing career paths that enable them to leave the workplace more readily. (She gave as an example the woman who chooses a small family-practice firm over a larger one that presents more challenges and opportunities.) “If women are leaning out” of their own volition, said Gertner, “then their failure to advance can’t be the subject of a lawsuit.”

Besides, she added, overt gender discrimination in the workplace has gone the way of discos and bell-bottoms, “a world that no longer exists.” What is left, said Gertner, is “implicit bias,” which has the same stalling effect on feminism as the maternal wall.

There is also an issue with executing the law itself — a denial of the power of context. The gender discrimination lawsuits that do make it to court are weakened by a tendency to “slice and dice” the circumstances of alleged discrimination, said Gertner. “You don’t look at them as a course of conduct,” but as separate events. “Discrimination in the real world does not fit into the legal models we have.”

One way to counteract this tendency in the law is to have judges on the bench who are aware of the way the world works. “I had an appreciation of context,” said Gertner of her time as a judge. “I never saw the law as legal rules on the page.” (That appreciation, in part, was biographical. Her judicial tenure was influenced by her early childhood in a tenement on Manhattan’s lower East Side, by championing unpopular clients as a young lawyer, and by becoming a mother at age 39.)

In the absence of overt gender discrimination, it is hard to get legal redress, said Gertner. For young women in the workplace today, “it’s the opacity of discrimination” that makes advancement difficult, she said, instead of the stark realities of discrimination in the 1970s. Gertner said, “It was easier for me.”

With feminism stalled by social pressures at home and the workplace, she offered a radical idea. “The government needs to step up to the plate,” Gertner said, beginning by providing incentives for day care that would make it easier for women to combine career and work.

After all, there is a “business case” to be made for gender equality in law firms and workplaces, “beyond the obvious need to tap a rich vein of talent,” said Gertner. In a diverse world, workplace diversity adds to “the texture and the richness of the dialogue,” she said.

In the end, feminism’s mission of workplace parity has been stalled by the three factors of the maternal wall, implicit bias, and the opacity of discrimination, Gertner said.

She said advocates have a list of things to do: parse workplace discrimination by collecting the right data; engage in collective action; and challenge the government to underwrite day care and other engines of cultural change.

But all this is not enough. “The most important thing is: We have to be unsatisfied,” Gertner told her largely female, professional audience. “We have to not believe that this was the accomplishment of the women’s movement — that I’m here and that you’re here is somehow all we can achieve.”