Are women more moral than men?

Are women more moral than men?

There have long been the stereotypes of the “nurturing mother” and the “strict father”. But what does this mean in more real circumstances?

Jooa Julia Lee, a doctoral candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School, recently presented some of her work, with David Tannenbaum of UCLA, on just this subject. In “Gender and Moral Decision-Making,” she looked at how women and their decisions are perceived in society.

Off the bat, there’s the idea that when a white man is “agentic,” he’s seen as assertive, authoritative, ambitious and, fundamentally, a leader. But when a woman is agentic, she’s seen as bossy, aggressive and emotional. Accordingly, when people think of competent managers, they tend to think of males and masculinity. Women, meanwhile, are expected to be “communal”: empathetic, gentle, and compassionate.

Lee wondered whether these associations are driven by the actual decisions that leaders make---particularly when there’s a moral conflict between doing what’s best for the greater good (utilitarian choices) and doing no harm (neutral, deontological choices).

After a series of simulations and psychological tests, they found that when individuals were asked to suppress their emotions, they were more likely to make utilitarian decisions; that cognitive and emotional processes are in conflict when moral decisions need to be made.

How does this affect perceptions of gender? Well, when told about a hypothetical Mayor Edward Jones making massive lay-offs, people saw him as a decisive, moral leader who could make the best decision for the city. But when the name was changed and Mayor “Elizabeth” Jones made those same lay-offs, she was seen as an immoral, bad leader.

Because of these biased perceptions, female utilitarian decision-makers are not given as many leadership positions. To overcome this, Lee suggests that women use the system while advancing what needs to be done: blend agentic and communal leadership styles by making the tough, utilitarian decisions that must be made, while also being empathic and building strong relationships.





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Lean Back: How do we stop working too much?

“He’s a very good employee; he works late every day.”

How many times have you heard someone say something like this, implying that the amount of time someone works is indicative of the quality of their work?

In this week’s seminar on “Imposed vs. Desired Professional Identities: Embracing, Passing, Revealing and their Consequences,” Professor Erin Reid of Boston University looked at whether this idea is true, and how workers at a competitive management consulting firm feel about it.

Professor Reid starts with the idea that the most desirable worker, according to this organization, is one that is always available for and committed to their work---a profile that is assumed to describe men more than women, who supposedly prioritize home life more. And in fact, large firms often assess their personnel based not on the quality of their output, but on the time they put in and their attitude towards doing so; the idea of “billable hours” practically imposes this on an organization.

She finds, however, that even in this competitive, demanding organization, more than 57% of the workers feel a conflict with this norm: they don’t want the time commitment to harm their family lives, they don’t want their health to suffer, and fundamentally, they don’t think putting in more hours necessary means better work or a better life.

But the way they deal with this conflict differs. Those that openly reveal their preferences for normal working hours by asking for leave or telling colleagues about their non-office priorities, were often penalized by the firm: passed over for promotions or outright fired. But others simply passed off their preferences by making others think that they were working longer than they were, or that they were committed to office work mentally even while prioritizing non-office activities. These people were often rewarded by their colleagues and by management.

In the short term, this would indicate that to get the best of both worlds, employees should just pretend to be committed to 18-hour days while actually finding ways around it---ducking out early, making arrangements to work from home, being strategic about who in the office they tell and how.

But more consequentially, this conflict speaks to an American tendency to think that “more time at work” equals “better work,” which is not necessarily true---in fact it’s often the opposite. Not only do work-life balance and social relations suffer, but the quality of work itself suffers when people are overworked and exhausted. And contrary to common perceptions, women and men are realizing this at equal rates.

While the gender equality discourse has recently been dominated by Sheryl Sandberg’s exhortation to “Lean In”---i.e. to work as hard as you must to get a place at the table---Rosa Brooks writes that “We've managed to create a world in which ubiquity” in the office and the home “is valued above all.” This is an untenable recipe for disaster.

Instead, women “need to fight for our right to lean out...If we're going to fight the culture of workplace ubiquity, and the parallel and equally pernicious culture of intensive parenting, we need to do it together---and we need to bring [men] along, too. They need to lean out in solidarity, for their own sake as well as ours.”



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Heroes and Sheroes - Inspiring Women's Political Participation

All of us have heroes. People we’ve seen succeed; whom we want to emulate. When we have something in common with those heroes, it’s even more inspiring: that success feels even more tangible because, “if they can do it, so can I!”

But female political heroes are unfortunately too difficult to come by. Women represent over half of the population in most countries. And when women are involved in policy-making, there are often better education, health, and economic mobility outcomes for the whole society. Yet women make up only 11% of elected political office in India, 18% in the US, and 22% in the UK and China! Getting a few more women---even by quotas---should inspire others to participate too, right?

At today’s WAPPP Seminar, Lakshmi Iyer of Harvard Business School presented her research on “Path Breakers: How Does Women’s Political Participation Respond to Electoral Success?” Professor Iyer and her colleagues look at state level elections in India to see whether simply having women candidates run and succeed affects whether more women will try to run in the future. They crunch a lot of interesting data, and conclude that there is, in fact, an increase in the number of women who run as candidates after they see other women succeed.

But in looking at some of the details, they also find that most of this increase is simply because earlier female candidates run again (rather than new women necessarily getting inspired), and that there’s no impact on whether more women will vote.

If you want to increase and sustain the number of women in higher elected office, simply encouraging quotas---a requirement on the number of women in an elected body---may not be the best way. In India, the nature of democracy may be a stranger impediment: parties tend to select candidates not based on their aptitude or ideology, but by their "winnability"---which often includes association or family connections. Leaving the process to itself, according to Professor Iyer, may not change the situation for generations.

Yet the effect of their presence---even if enforced by quotas---on policy-making may be an important factor. If the mere presence a woman on a governing body can have a tangible influence on how that organization functions and what it does, it might well be worth it, regardless of how she got there.

The Gender Pay Gap among Stockbrokers

Wharton professor Janice Fanning Madden proves once again that solid social science research can settle lawsuits and chip away at discrimination. Asked to testify in class-action law-suits of female stockbrokers against two large firms, she used company data to tease out the evidence of gender bias and demonstrate that the firms’ arguments had no basis in fact.

Stockbrokers are the highest paid sales occupation, yet it has the largest gender pay gap. Female stockbrokers earn 54-60% of their male counterparts. Since stockbroker compensation is based almost entirely on commission, the obvious explanation for the pay gap is that women simply generate fewer sales.

The trading firms were convinced that this was a matter of sales capacity – low-performing female stockbrokers stayed while low-performing males left, and women worked less intensely due to household responsibilities and other factors. Professor Madden proved their arguments wrong. Through statistical analysis of account records tied to each stockbroker, she demonstrated that when men and women received equivalent clients and accounts, they generated equivalent sales. Yet she found that on the whole women were being given inferior accounts, which led to lower commissions.

The point is not to accuse male managers of blatant sexism. In most cases, their biases were likely unconscious. Decision-making research demonstrates that people are bad at predicting performance, and that in instances where the workplace is overwhelmingly male, the manager is more likely to have a subjective “hunch” that a man might do better than a woman. So if women start off with inferior accounts, they will generate lower sales and become less and less likely to receive a lucrative account.  

The firms protested this explanation. They claimed that the better accounts went to more experienced brokers, who happened to be male, a disparity that would go away as the female workforce matured. That is where Dr. Fanning Madden really surprised them. The company records demonstrated that when a broker left, the managers redistributed more accounts to the newer, “hungrier” brokers, not those with more experience and an already heavy client base.

Thus both the “experience” and the “sales capacity” arguments of the financial giants fell apart, the lawsuits were settled and the women received substantial damage pay. Yet female stockbrokers are still earning less than men, unconscious biases are still shaping practice, and there is not enough pressure for systemic change. 

The challenge as I see it is to take powerful research about the causes of the pay gap beyond academia and federal court, and put it into the hands of managers, operations professionals and HR staff the world over.