New Ways of Thinking About Gender and Leadership Effectiveness with Aparna Joshi

The challenges that women face in entering and performing effectively in leadership roles have been widely documented: recent research indicates that the gender gap in pay and promotion is fourteen times greater than gaps in performance. The disconnect between rewards and performance is particularly large in high-prestige occupations. Aparna Joshi, Arnold Family Professor of Management at Penn State University, presented two studies on gender and leadership effectiveness, examining the issue from the perspective of both men and women in leadership roles.

Professor Joshi’s research focuses on gender as a social construction, rather than biological sex differences.  Much of the work that has been done about sex effects in senior management roles focuses on women, but men have gender too! Focusing on sex also may obscure variability among women and men. Through this lens, Professor Joshi investigates whether women are rewarded when they are able to navigate through masculinized environments and whether men are punished when they cannot.

Gender and Leadership in the U.S. Congress

Politics in the United States is a highly masculine context; while women have been making gains in representation, women legislators make up approximately 20% of the U.S. Congress. Professor Joshi’s first study focused on when female politicians have been successful in bringing about change: to what extent are women legislators able to get bills passed? What types of bills are they more or less successful at getting passed? Are women legislators more successful when they highlight their distinctiveness, or when they try to assimilate with the dominant group?

To test these questions, Professor Joshi utilized a sixteen-year longitudinal data set of all Congressional bills introduced from 1993 to 2008, controlling for the president in office and the majority party in Congress. In general, men were more effective than women in getting bills passed (850 to 133) and introduced a larger number of bills overall (approximately 12,000 of 70,000 were introduced by women). Professor Joshi and her colleagues examined the content of these bills and coded them on a range from more female-identified (education, healthcare) to more male-identified (defense, fiscal policy).

The results of this analysis reveal that women legislators are as good as men at getting neutral (neither male- nor female-identified) bills passed.  Men legislators were also about as effective as women at getting female-identified bills; though many men don’t think that they have the credibility to speak about “women’s issues,” they nevertheless demonstrated legislative success. The most significant finding from this sample was that women legislators were particularly successful in getting male-identified bills passed.  This finding indicates that for women in male-dominated environments, distancing themselves from their distinctive identity group may correlate with greater success.

There was also an interesting effect over the tenure of female legislators that seems to indicate both a novelty premium for new legislators and a credibility premium for more senior legislators in passing female-identified bills. This finding presents an exciting avenue for future research!

Gender and Leadership among Fortune 500 CEOs

Professor Joshi also presented a study to problematize the “think manager think male” paradigm that tends to treat men as a monolithic bloc rather than examining variability among men. This study focused on masculinity as a source of variability for men: do different levels of masculinity and femininity predict differential performance or pay among men?

To test this question, Professor Joshi and her colleagues coded interview videos of male Fortune 500 CEOs for masculine and feminine traits and compared these findings to their pay in the first year of being CEO.  Even within this highly select sample of male CEOs, there was a range of femininity and masculinity that further reinforces the idea that men are not all the same.

Among this sample, femininity did not have significant effects on pay or performance.  Controlling for the firm’s prior performance, CEOs that were androgynous were the highest performing in the sample. However, CEOs that were masculine or androgynous were the highest paid in the sample. These findings indicate that while greater masculinity doesn’t correlate with higher performance, it does relate to higher pay.

This study demonstrates, first, that there is gender variability among men, even at the CEO level. Secondly, variations in masculinity can have costs for men. Rather than affecting only women, the “think manager/think male” paradigm also has implications for men navigating masculinized working environments. Further research on gender and leadership effectiveness should be sure to take into account gendered effects on both men and women. 

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.

Discussing Diversity: How Emphasizing and Minimizing Intergroup Differences Affect Bias and Empowerment with Ashley Martin

Over the last several years, there has been an increased push to talk about diversity, under the assumption that being blind to difference is counterproductive and that to leverage the benefits of diversity, we have to emphasize it. But is it really a good idea to talk about difference? This week’s WAPPP seminar featured Ashley Martin, PhD Candidate at Columbia Business School, as she presented a series of studies about awareness of difference and effects on inclusion and empowerment.

There is a great deal of literature about awareness of difference with respect to race: talking about difference reduces bias and increases engagement. However, there is almost no research on this awareness strategy for gender. The single study that had been published showed that being aware of or emphasizing gender differences was related to benevolent sexism. As a field, researchers have not systematically explored the types of differences attention to diversity emphasizes, whether they are similar for race and gender, and how this strategy affects outcomes for each group.

Effects of awareness on attributions of difference

In the first study, the researchers asked 143 participants to list ten differences either between men and women or between black and white people. When asked to categorize these differences, it became clear that the listed racial differences were far more in the realm of opportunity and culture, and the gender differences were more related to personality and biology. The results of this initial study demonstrate that the types of differences that people generate when asked to consider race and gender are difference – for race, people focus on external differences related to opportunity, but for gender, people focus on internal differences.

The second study served to measure individuals’ beliefs about how one should approach difference. Study participants were rated on an awareness scale (how often they agreed with statements like “there are differences between groups that should be acknowledged” versus “there is no reason to categorize people based on their membership in a certain group”) and how often they attributed difference to external versus internal factors (opportunity/culture or personality/biology). Study participants who said that we should celebrate racial differences were more likely to attribute difference to opportunity; by contrast, those who said we should celebrate gender differences were more likely to attribute difference to biology. Recognizing external differences with respect to race is a positive development, as recognizing inequality is the first step in disrupting it. However, attributing gender differences to personality and biology has consequences for women.

In particular, the third study revealed that “personality differences” really boil down to stereotypes about gender and leadership; that men are agentic and assertive, whereas women are communal and warm. By telling people to recognize and embrace differences, we may be inadvertently telling them to embrace stereotypes that limit women’s opportunities. In this experiment, subjects were divided into three groups: the first read an article on why it is good to be aware of differences, the second an article on why it is good to be blind to differences, and the third were simply asked to think about diversity.

In the second stage of the study, participants were asked to rate whether differences between groups were due to opportunity or biology, to what extent a list of character traits regarding assertiveness versus communality were associated with each group, and a measure of “denial of inequality” – whether participants thought that discrimination was not a problem, and that on average all groups were treated equally.

On the race side, participants were more likely to attribute difference to opportunity rather than biology. However, those who reflected on the importance of acknowledging difference in the first stage were more likely to attribute differences to opportunity, while those who read the article deemphasizing difference made fewer opportunity attributions. On the gender side, participants endorsed biological reasons for difference in both the control and the “aware” condition. Only the group who read the article about being blind to difference attributed gender differences more to opportunity than to biology. Further analysis of these findings indicated that there was little connection between race and stereotyping. By contrast, all participants associated men with agency much more than women, though in the blind condition, this assessment decreased somewhat.
Overall, this study reveals that being blind to difference is the baseline for racial differences, and that awareness pushes people to consider the antecedents of difference more closely. For gender, awareness of difference doesn’t change results from the status quo, but being blind to difference can improve assessments of women.

Effects on bias

The next study was designed to test the effects of awareness ideology on bias. Two groups of male study participants were asked to read either the “aware of difference” article or the “blind to difference” article, and then were given a woman’s resume and asked to rate her leadership potential and assess whether they would hire her. In the awareness condition, participants rated the applicant lower on leadership potential than in the blindness condition, and were less likely to hire her. The decision to hire is mediated by the individual’s leadership evaluation, which is itself affected by stereotypes regarding agency and what makes a good leader that are emphasized through awareness of gender difference.

Effects on women’s confidence

How do these assessments affect women at work? In the next study, 163 women were asked to make lists of differences or similarities between genders, and were then asked to what extent these qualities undermined their ability to be seen as a leader. When women listed differences, they perceived these differences as having a major negative effect on their leadership potential and listed more words related to agency and assertiveness than when they listed similarities.
In the next phase of the study, 115 women read either the article about the benefits of being aware of difference, the benefits of being blind to difference, or a control article that was completely devoid of any gendered content. Next, the participants took a workplace confidence scale: in the control condition and in the awareness condition, women rated their workplace confidence above the midpoint. However, in the blindness condition, women rated themselves as significantly more competent.

Awareness of difference not only affects confidence, but also action-taking. The next study featured 126 female managers, who read either the aware or blind to differences article, then completed a self-assessment of their agency, the workplace confidence scale, and then participated in several risky decision tasks. In the awareness condition, the participants identified less with agency, rated themselves lower on workplace confidence, and took less action than in the blindness condition.

Dyadic effects

In the final study, the researchers examined how men’s awareness beliefs affected male-female interactions. Study participants were divided into male-female pairs. In the first part of the study, the men read either the awareness or blindness article. Next, the pairs were asked to complete the bushfire survival task, requiring them to discuss and rank a list of survival items in order of importance. Independent raters were asked to evaluate the amount of time men versus women spent talking, the level of openness in the conversation, and the overall quality of the interaction. In the awareness condition, men spoke more than women and were less open. In the blindness condition, women spoke significantly more than men, men and women were equally open, and the interactions were overall higher in quality. Indeed, it seemed that men were “leaning out” so that women could lean in.

The results of these studies indicate that awareness of difference can be beneficial in attributing race to external differences, but that deemphasizing gender difference leads to better outcomes for women. This research demonstrates that diversity strategies shouldn’t be monolithic, as they may not work for all groups. Perhaps instead of discussing differences between men and women, discussing similarities may be an effective intervention to promote gender equality.

Linking Non-Cognitive Skills and Educational Achievement to Girls in Developing Societies: The Case of Ghana with Sally Nuamah

Sixty-two million girls are school-aged but not in school. We know that girls’ education has positive impacts, not just for girls themselves but for their communities: educating girls is associated with decreased mortality and incidence HIV/AIDS and with increased economic growth. Non-cognitive skills – attitudes, attributes, and personal skills apart from aptitude that individuals can draw on to achieve success – can have important impacts on improving educational outcomes. “Grit” is the paradigm example: perseverance towards one’s goals may be just as important to academic achievement as aptitude. While there is evidence that non-cognitive skills shape academic achievement, it is less clear how these skills are transmitted, and in particular what role schools play in transmitting these skills. Further, much of the research on non-cognitive skills has been done on elite male students in a U.S. context, which may not be entirely generalizable to other settings.

Our first WAPPP seminar of the spring semester featured Sally Nuamah, WAPPP Fellow and Joint Postdoctoral Fellow, University Center for Human Values and Center for Study of Democratic Politics, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University.  Dr. Nuamah presented the results of a study on non-cognitive skills and educational achievement focusing on 37 girls in Ghana striving to be the first in their families to go to college. Dr. Nuamah’s research focused on three key questions: What challenges do girls face? What does it take for them to achieve? And how do schools contribute to their achievement?

The girls in the study faced three levels of obstacles to educational achievement: their low socioeconomic status, under-resourced school, and particular gendered challenges, including risk of pregnancy that led many students to drop out of school. Schools have an important role to play in mediating the negative effects of this sociocultural environment. Dr. Nuamah found that the school in her study facilitated “achievement-oriented identities,” positive beliefs about students’ own abilities to succeed and to translate those beliefs into realizable actions. The school emphasized both self-efficacy – impressing upon students that they have the ability to overcome challenges – and strategy – helping students to create, implement, and monitor plans to overcome challenges. This achievement-oriented identity was particularly affirmed at the school leadership level, in after-school programs, and in the religion and morality curriculum.

School leadership: At the time of the study, the school had its first female headmistress. She initially perceived the female students to be timid and took policy steps to change that. Every year, the school held a speech competition at which only male students had delivered the keynote. This year, the headmistress required that a female student give the keynote. This small change had a big impact – the girl chosen to deliver the speech said that it increased her confidence, and “I feel like there’s nothing I can’t do.”

After-school: There is a great deal of research on the benefits of after-school groups: in particular, these groups create social support systems among peer groups. In Dr. Nuamah’s descriptive survey, girls reported an additional 2-5 more hours of housework per day than their male peers, with schedules that allowed for only 4-5 hours of sleep per night. Discipline and time management are critical for these girls, and these values are reinforced in their peer groups.

Curriculum: Dr. Nuamah emphasized the importance of religious and moral education in the Ghanaian context. Formal education in Ghana was historically closely tied to Christian missionaries, and schools’ practices reflect this history, including morning worship and daily prayer. In particular, rhetoric about achievement remains entwined with religion. Students are told to believe in themselves and their God-given gifts. This appeal to faith, even for students who aren’t particularly religious, engenders greater confidence in their ability to overcome challenges like the cost of education.

In conversations with students who had graduated, those seeking to go to college perfectly encapsulated the achievement-oriented identity—having faith and taking positive steps to achieve their goals. One student who had been accepted to university but couldn’t afford the fees voiced her anxiety, but said worrying wouldn’t solve her problem. She just had to pray to God… and she had applied for several scholarships.

Dr. Nuamah’s work highlights how school context can contribute to female students’ achievement, and particularly how schools can help girls grapple with gender-specific challenges, rather than assuming that the sole impediment to achievement is poverty. We look forward to learning more about this exciting area of research!

Gender, Conflict, Israel and Palestine: Gender in Peace Negotiations

President Clinton and Yasser Arafat, then-Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)

“If we’d had women at Camp David,” Bill Clinton later rued, “we’d have an agreement.”

There’s one thing that almost all negotiations between Israel and Palestine have had in common: a relative lack of women at the table.

It’s important not to neglect the important contributions several women have made to the much-maligned peace process. Dr. Hanan Ashrawi was a key player on the Palestinian team at the 1991 Madrid Conference as official spokesperson. Her prominence prompted the Israelis to summon their own female negotiator, Sarah Doron.

But by 1993, as talks towards the Oslo Accords progressed, it was clear that women would largely be limited to backseat roles.

One senior Palestinian negotiator at Oslo justified women’s exclusion by privately suggesting that the decisions taken were “too serious and monumental” for women to be involved as lead negotiators.

On the Israeli side, there was a clear divide: almost all the primary negotiators were men, while women were limited to the role of secretary, assistant or junior adviser.

Women’s lack of representation at the negotiating table has endured through the 20th and into the 21st century.

L to R: Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, US President Barack Obama, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas

That raises two questions: (1) Why? And (2), does it matter?

Perhaps “cultural” or social norms play a role.

In both societies and economies, patriarchal structures exist that discriminate against women. Women are less likely to work. Those women who do work are less likely to occupy senior roles and less likely to receive fair pay. Women are less likely to enjoy their fundamental human rights.

These social or cultural norms have ramifications for many walks of life in both Israel and Palestine. But discrimination against women in the military and political spheres in particular has resulted in fewer women being picked to lead or join negotiating teams.

There’s mandatory military conscription for women in Israel, but they’re much less likely than men to serve in combat positions. The perception endures that men are the “real” soldiers.

But cultural norms aren’t the only factor at play here. Politics is also to blame. (Side note: When isn’t it?)

In trying to understand women’s marginalization from peace negotiations between Israel and Palestine, Espanioli and Sachs found that the perpetuation of the conflict itself has pushed “gender” off the table.

The conflict and the occupation are all-consuming. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it defines political competition and discourse in Palestine and Israel alike. And while both parties remain at diplomatic and military loggerheads, these scholars argue that “gender” issues continue to be pushed aside.

Any discourse that detracts from the main objective for each party is seen as an unhelpful distraction, somehow of secondary importance: How can we talk about gender now when we should be focusing all our efforts on securing our borders?; How can we talk about gender now when we should be focusing all our efforts on ending the occupation?

I’m clear about the answer to the second question. Does it matter? Yes. But maybe not only for the obvious reasons.

 

Let’s start with a basic principle, inherently normative in nature: public sector institutions should reflect the populations they serve. As well as representing the population’s interests, values and priorities, civil servants should accurately represent the demographic diversity of those societies — ethnic diversity, religious diversity, gender diversity and more.

The same should go for government delegations sent to peace negotiations.

Some might make the same argument but in utilitarian terms. Countless studies have shown that businesses that effectively leverage diversity — including gender diversity — do better in a multitude of ways. They’re more profitable, they’re more fulfilling places to work, and they’re more likely to retain talented staff.

It’s been claimed that women are inherently more peaceful than men. This utilitarian argument would therefore predict that having more women sat at the negotiating table would increase the likelihood of success at the next stage of the peace process between Palestine and Israel.

I resist essentialist arguments: That any one group of people exhibits any particular strength or deficiency based on any given biological trait they bear: like the gender they identify with, or the color of their skin. And since there’s evidence for and against the idea that women are more inherently peaceful than men, I’m not going to try to make any conclusions about that.

The more important conversation is about how to make gender front and center in future negotiations between Israel and Palestine.

That starts with having greater diversity in the two parties’ negotiating teams, but it certainly doesn’t end there.

The conflict and the occupation have profoundly different effects on men and women. And when peace processes fail to integrate women, peace agreements fail to address these differential gendered effects.

Those issues might include the impact of the occupation on girls’ access to education; how women’s sexual and reproductive health rights are threatened; how women’s economic opportunities are particularly constrained.

Leaders from Palestine, Israel and the international community can’t afford to regard these gendered consequences of conflict as an afterthought, to be dealt with once settlement construction, incitement to violence and movement and trade restrictions are resolved. They are part of the problem, and must be part of the solution.

So while having greater gender diversity at the table doesn’t necessarily mean those negotiators will be inherently or biologically more inclined to peace, it might prevent these issues being left off the agenda.

Hanan Ashrawi once remarked that “gender does not constitute a structured role in negotiations [between Israel and Palestine.]” It must if future rounds of peace talks are to succeed.

Gender Inequality: A Comparative View of the Challenges Ahead

The WAPPP Seminar this week was very special. Professor Mary C. Brinton, Department Chair of the Department of Sociology at Harvard and Professor Claudia Goldin, Henry Lee Professor of Economics also at Harvard, introduced the new Weatherhead Initiative on Comparative Gender Inequality (WIGI) at the University to "study comparative gender inequality in OECD countries and outline some of the major scholarly and policy challenges relating to the structure of work and its articulation with the family". This is an exciting three-year interdisciplinary, cross-Harvard project, that will work closely with WAPPP at HKS, but whose creation is motivated by a set of very specific questions that are increasingly important for post-industrial economies:

• Why are some industrialized countries moving rapidly towards gender equality while others are not?
• Why are changes in gender roles producing more household disruption in some rich societies than in others?
• How will US households share care duties for seniors?
• How do changes in the welfare state differently affect the wellbeing of men and women?
• How can public policy facilitate the dual earner/dual caregiver model?
• How can employers level playing field for all genders?
• What are the economic and productivity implications of not fully integrating high human capital women into the workforce?  

  Professor Claudia Goldin presents the Weatherhead Initiative on Gender Inequality

To answer these difficult questions, WIGI's first task is to build a community of students and scholars that are committed to studying these topics. There will be a strong focus on bringing in undergraduates, in fact, two of the first three events in Spring of 2016 will involve undergraduate seniors and juniors who will present their senior thesis research or will begin working on one. Graduate students are also welcome and expected to play a significant role.

WIGI will work on the intersections of different thematic areas each year. In the first year, the focus will be the intersection of labor markets and household decisions related to gender. The second year will address issues at the intersection of household decisions and public policy, and the third will feature activities involving labor markets and public policy.

 

  Professor Mary C. Brinton

 

Professor Brinton went further into detail about the topic of discussion for WIGI's first year. She started by showing the situation of workers in a place with which everybody in the audience was very familiar: Harvard University. Using the 2013 Faculty Climate Survey, she showed the number of hours per day that faculty allotted to work and to domestic and care duties, and found that although male and female faculty work the same amount of hours, the women at all levels of seniority engage in significantly more hours of housework than their male counterparts. This difference is much larger for Junior Faculty. On average, female tenured faculty members put in ten more hours of work in the home than male tenured faculty. Untenured female professors put in twenty more hours than male untenured professors. "This is very, very local," the Professor warned, "this is us".

Female faculty at Harvard spend 10-20 more hrs. 

on domestic work than male faculty

She also spoke about higher relative stress levels for female faculty, with some of the most common cited reasons being childcare and children's education. She explained that on the one hand, women have become increasingly educated, and their college graduation levels now surpass the men's in developed economies, but that on the other hand, not much has changed in the domestic arena, where women are expected to work more. This tension, she believes, is a driving force behind lower fertility rates and the aging populations in rich countries: "It's really, really hard to work full time and be mothers".

She then discussed the case of Japan, where she conducts a good amount of her research, and where this phenomenon is producing difficult consequences. Fertility rates in Japan have been under population replacement level, that is, under 2 children per woman, for over thirty years. The country is running out of a labor force, but the model has not yet become friendly to a dual earner-dual caregiver family model. Instead, many highly skilled women are pushed out of the labor force when they become mothers by a context that requires long working hours of both genders and does not provide incentives for males to take part in caregiving duties.

Professor Goldin continued this discussion by touching the topic of occupations, to see what makes some more friendly for the dual family model than others. She mentioned how sometimes the gender wage gap is explained by stating the fact that women tend to go into lower-paying, care-related occupations, and used data evidencing within-occupation pay gaps to show how that explanation is incomplete. For example, women in finance can earn up to 35% less than men in finance, while women in tech are earning 10% less than males in that sector.

But why is there a gap between occupations? She explained this by pointing out an important difference in the wage structures of each field. Using O*NET data from the Department of Labor, she showed that the gender gap is larger in occupations like finance, where there is a linear relationship between earnings and hours worked, than in tech, where people are remunerated more based on output. The latter structure favors women because, as was mentioned, they face higher demand for their time outside the workplace. In industries where there is temporal flexibility, women thrive (although it remains noteworthy that even in these fields there is still a gap, albeit smaller).

She suggested that a possible way to make any workplace more time-flexible would be to make employees more interchangeable. If in each workplace there are two workers who can easily substitute for each other at any point, they will have much more freedom to step in and out at times that work for them. This model can free men and women to take on more roles in the home. You can "fix the men", you can "fix the women", but until you actually "fix the firms and the occupations", modify the whole model, inequality will persist, she argued. 

Want to stay updated about activities related to this promising new initiative? Email jbarnard@wcfia.harvard.edu to subscribe to the mailing list!

The Influence of Decision Contexts and Role Models on Female Risk Preferences

If you missed the last WAPPP Seminar, you wasted an opportunity to meet a former Jeopardy! contestant who is actually using Daily Doubles for more than just game show glory. Heidi Liu, Ph.D. Candidate in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and J.D. Candidate at the Harvard Law School, used a large dataset of Jeopardy! contestant betting patterns that allowed her to test whether female contestants exhibited different attitudes towards risk depending on the "gender context".

Heidi Liu, PhD and JD candidate at Harvard and former Jeopardy! contestant

How does this work? Heidi had a group of former contestants and another larger group of survey responders rate over 1,200 categories in the game show on the likelihood that men or women would correctly answer a question from that category. The categories where men were expected to perform better were coded as 'male categories' in the dataset, and in the same way, those where women were expected to do better were coded as 'female categories'. After noting that male and female contestants actually performed equally well on both types of categories, Lui presented her findings on the betting patterns of male and female contestants.

She found interesting differences between the genders. Men exhibit aggressive betting patterns across all categories. In contrast, women bet less aggressively overall. This result goes in accordance with robust evidence in the existing literature that categorizes risk-taking as an attribute of the masculine psychology. But the key contribution of Liu's research lies one level deeper. It turns out that women were found to be more risk averse when they were betting on 'male' categories, in which they are societally expected to underperform, than on the 'female' categories, where they were expected to do well. In other words, when dealing with a more masculine context, women tended to 'play it safe'.

Women are more likely to take risks when they're dealing with
more feminine contexts, regardless of ability

The Jeopardy! study is only one of the four studies that Liu presented to show how context can influence women's attitudes towards risk. She is building on previous research that identified increased risk-taking by men in physical tasks or financial decision making, but found no gender difference in risk attitudes in contexts such as prosocial heroism, as exhibited by some Holocaust survivors or even kidney donors, where women were just as likely to risk their lives or their health to save somebody else. Liu studied whether the gender content of certain contexts would be useful to predict women's attitudes towards risk. In one of the studies, she looked at women's decisions regarding a travel destination. When deciding on a destination for a professional conference, a male setting, women were much more likely to go with the safer option; in contrast when they were making a decision about a vacation destination, a more female stereotypical task, they tended to opt for the risky option. She reported similar findings for the other two studies. Women were more likely to choose risky options when making shopping decisions and less when making investment decisions, and the same happened with product choices.

Helping women become more comfortable with risk in male-dominated environments is important because they are contexts that greatly reward such behavior. Common attributes listed by venture capital firms, for example, as desirable in entrepreneurs often include words like 'aggressive', 'competitive', 'ambitious', 'relentless', 'with an appetite for risk', among many others that signal risk aversion as a negative. For this reason, Liu set up two additional studies that consider possible interventions to move women into risk-seeking territory. They focus on a critical aspect for any person's professional career: Role models.

Her first one exposed people to three different narratives of women who exhibited different degrees of counter-stereotypical behaviors and relatability. Only exposure to the story about a woman who was highly counter-stereotypical but also highly relatable had the effect of increasing risk-seeking among women. This means that the ideal role models may not necessarily be hyper-successful and unattainable, but rather, regular people who reach success on their own terms. The second study analyzes survey data from an Indian tech firm and finds that women who have a female supervisor are more likely to take risks at work. This goes in accordance with the results from the first study.

Heidi Lui is continuing her research on this topic as she works towards her PhD. Stay tuned to her work to continue learning about ways to get less women to play it safe and more women to just go for it.

Risky Business: How Environment Affects Women's Decision-Making

The concept of risk as a major factor in decision-making has been thoroughly examined since the 2008 financial crisis began. In this week’s WAPPP Seminar, “Risk in the background: How Men and Women Respond,” risk was examined using the lens of gender to better understand the causes and effects of the choices individuals make. Alexandra van Geen, a 2014-2015 WAPPP Fellow and Assistant Professor at Erasmus University's School of Economics in the Netherlands, discussed her research on the effect that gender has on risk-taking in different contexts.

While acknowledging that previous research states women are generally more risk averse than men, Professor van Geen pointed out that this assumption is based on experiments involving isolated risks. Decisions to take risks rarely occur in isolated situations, however, due to the fact that there is both background risk (current risk) and realized risk (past risk) to consider. Instead, van Geen sought to measure the effect that gender has on risk in more realistic decision-making situations.

In a study conducted at Harvard’s Decision Science Laboratory, 160 students split evenly by gender were placed in an experiment where a third party threw a die to determine each student's payoff. To simulate what van Geen refers to as “background risk,” each participant had a 50% chance of receiving either $2 or $30. In addition, there were two fixed sum groups, one that received the low payout of $2 and one that received the high payout of $30, automatically.

Some of van Geen’s findings confirmed what many already understand to be true about gender and risk: as a baseline, women are more risk averse and less risk-seeking than men. However, van Geen found that women take more risks after receiving the fixed sum or with the presence of background risk, i.e. the roll of the dice in the experiment.

This reduction in risk aversion can be explained by women's sensitivity to the income effect, as in, the potential to earn money without risking a loss. In fact, the effect of income and potential income from past wins (via winning in the dice roll) eliminated gender differences in risk-taking altogether. One potential explanation for this is that women are more sensitive to income because of their higher baseline risk aversion. Additionally, men may narrowly frame a decision and not consider past or present risk in the same way that women do.

The income effect does not explain all the behavior around risk, however, van Geen argued. The effects of the experience of winning in and of itself was also examined. Winning produces several outcomes: (1) emotion, (2) subject expectations (i.e. belief an individual will keep winning once they have, or "gambler's fallacy"), and (3) an elevated level of hormones, namely testosterone. This study found that men increased their risk-taking after winning, despite the fact that there was no apparent income effect on men, indicating that it was the experience of winning itself that altered future behavior.

From these experiments, van Geen concluded that women experience an income effect that reduces risk aversion, while men don't experience an income effect at all. This effect is transient, however, and women eventually return to their baseline risk preferences. The presence of background risk also decreases women’s risk aversion but not men’s, which can also be explained by the effects of income and potential income. Lastly, men increase risk-seeking behavior after winning, while there is no effect for women.

Risk can have serious impact on decision-making, which in turn affects policy, van Geen argued, closing with a few potential policy implications of her research. Policy changes could encourage women to make riskier microfinance investments that lead to better outcomes, while behavioral nudges could discourage male day traders from being overconfident and seek too much risk after a win. Understanding how context affects gender's relationship with risk may help us close these micro-gender gaps, which could then chip away at larger inequities.

The Contingent Power of Women in African Armed Groups

This week’s WAPPP seminar, “Rebel Queens and Black Diamonds: Gender Politics in African Armed Groups,” was named after two female rebel fighters, Rebel Queen of Sierra Leone and Black Diamond of Liberia. In the seminar, WAPPP fellow Zoe Marks discussed the research on gender politics within rebel groups that led her to these women, primarily with Sierra Leone's Revolutionary United Front (RUF).

Through her field work in Sierra Leone, which experienced a brutal civil war from 1991-2002, Marks found that 17% of women reported experiencing sexual assault in their lifetime, which she argues is likely an underestimate. However, Marks discussed how these statistics have created a paradigm in which women are victims and men are perpetrators that has led to the dominant discourse over sexual and gender-based violence. While sexual violence in Sierra Leone varied over time, it was less common than other forms of abuse, and women also participated in the violence.

Women and girls make up 10-30% of non-state armed groups worldwide, which is a much higher rate than in state militaries. Marks hypothesizes that this is due to the fact that rebel groups use broad based recruitment because they need all the people they can get. In addition to serving as soldiers and spies, women carry supplies and work on base producing and cooking food. They are also the wives and girlfriends of the male fighters, though a significant number of the relationships are forced and oftentimes violent, as was the case with the RUF.

To try to better understand the social-organizational context for women in rebel groups, Marks looked into the sources of female power in the RUF. She found that power largely existed on the individual level, not in groups or networks of women. As is traditional in Sierra Leonean culture, age and marital status contributed significantly to a woman's status in the group. Martial status, i.e. whether a woman was trained in warfare and had weapons herself, could also elevate her position. Marks argued that though some women were able to obtain military dominance, this rarely translated into political power once the conflict has ended. Instead, it was largely the commanders’ wives who were invited to peace talks.

She added that gender relations within rebel groups varies greatly, ranging from the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front, with its progressive stance on gender equality, to the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda. Made famous in 2012 by Joseph Kony, LRA uses marriage as a reward for commanders and to clamp down on immoral behavior, with the understanding that civilian rape hurts the public image and mission of the group.

Marks closed by citing research from Hudson et al, which listed the micro-aggressions of global gender inequality as (1) lack of bodily integrity and physical security, (2) lack of equity in family law, and (3) lack of parity in decision-making. Marks argues that these issues aren't actually that micro; they all help explain women’s experiences in war and gender politics in rebel groups, both in western Africa and worldwide.

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)