Should women be encouraged to compete?

An article on “The Confidence Gap” between men and women has been making the rounds this week. In it, Katty Kay and Claire Shipman argue that women too often doubt their own abilities as compared to men, leading to an imbalance in women’s representation in most fields. This may have to do with socialization, evolutionary biology, the structure of our social systems, or some combination.

In his seminar on whether “boys and girls respond differently to academic competition,” Prof. Robert Jensen of the University of Pennsylvania explored how this carries over into the realm of competitiveness. He and his co-authors used a real-life experiment in which a math and verbal prep technology suddenly introduced a peer competition in the form of a “leader board.” Prior to the leader board, students would simply answer a series of questions and be told, individually, how well they’d done. After the “leader board”, students were given points for correct answers and the names of the top-three point-earners were displayed for all the participants to see.

Before the points system, girls tended to perform better in both English and math. But after the introduction of the competitive system, girls performed worse than they previously had, and also worse than boys, particularly in math.

Whether it had to do with social stigma of being publicly seen as a “nerd” or just the aversion to and stress associated with competition is unclear. But Professor Jensen concludes that a competitive system simply wasn’t conducive to better learning outcomes for women in this education technology.

So should we reduce competition in how we raise and educate girls? As one seminar participant remarked, “we live in a society of competition in every sphere; to discourage that is to encourage girls to opt-out of success. Instead, perhaps we should raise our daughters and sons the same way so that they can both learn to compete effectively.” Indeed, as Elizabeth Plank writes, instead of telling women to change their personalities, maybe it's time we take a look at the entire system and adjust all of the structures that hold them back.

To this, WAPPP Executive Director Victoria Budson responds that, “Whenever the frame and context for any competition is set in today’s world, it will necessarily be biased---by gendered components, racial components. So we need to understand  what choices are made and how those choices impact outcomes. It’s not that one shouldn’t compete…but to create a new competitive frame.

“When you understand what the mechanisms are and what they produce, you can then guide how institutions create structures. Because whenever we set up structures, we’re really creating pathways toward outcomes that we can predict when we study them effectively. So rather than telling us how we should feel about this, all of these studies are just data that can help us create a world where the majority of our talent is effectively utilized.”

WAPPP Director Iris Bohnet adds that we should do both: “we should enable people to be competitive in the world that we live in, but we also have to change the world to make it easier for everyone, based on whatever preferences they have, to survive and compete in that world.”

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How do we fix the work-life balance for everyone?

Over the last generation, we've seen a lot of changes. These days, more than two-thirds of children have two parents that are working full time. Meanwhile, those parents are simultaneously responsible for elderly, babyboomer dependents---which cuts into their financial responsibilities as well as their time. Add on other vital hobbies, leisure, a social life, and other priorities, and we see that balancing work and life is getting more and more difficult.

This was the challenge that Jane Waldfogel of Columbia University addressed in her recent seminar on “Work-Family Policy in the United States.”

Some private companies have allowances for personal leave, but low-income workers, who wouldn’t be able to pay for supplementary help (like babysitters or nurses), don’t necessarily benefit from this. So there’s clearly a need for the public sector to get involved.

While the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) of 1993 requires companies with more than 50 employees to provide up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave, the United States does not have paid maternity leave. Some of the states that are considering laws of that nature---California, Washington, New Jersey, and Rhode Island among them---are the same ones that currently have Temporary Disability Insurance. TDI is a publicly funded pool of money (taken from a small amount of payroll tax) that provides about 55% of wages for employees that are temporarily unable to work for up to six weeks, and job protection upon their return. Of course, when the US Supreme Court mandated that TDI must cover maternity leave as well, no other states adopted it.

Some other options for assisting with work-life balance have been paid sick leave, flexible work hours (outside the 9-5 box), and assisted care. Currently, child and elderly care only exist in a very expensive private market, while middle income families are often eligible for tax credits. Lower income families receive some subsidies---and since the welfare reform of 1994, HeadStart programs have been expanded to care for younger children. But those programs still cover only 30% of eligible families due to a lack of funding.

So what’s the next step?

One big challenge is simply framing the issue. The feminist movement in the US has been reluctant to talk about family issues out of fear that doing so will hamper equality in the workplace.

Instead, Professor Waldfogel has proposed something different: speak more broadly of the importance of work-life balance for not just fathers and mothers---but for caregivers. And more broadly, for those who have responsibilities and personal priorities outside of work---a balance is important not just to one’s self, but to an employee’s health, sanity, and ensuing contributions to hir organization.

Frankly, the nature of work has changed in America, and not necessarily for the better. We value even the perception of quantity over quality; as Anne-Marie Slaughter rightly wrote, “more time in the office does not always mean more ‘value added’.”

While we rethink the work-life balance, we really ought to reconsider the work-work balance itself.

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. 

Changing the Face of Corporate Governance

In an attempt to promote gender diversity on corporate boards, a number of countries including Norway, France and Spain have adopted quota-based models. According to constitutional lawyers, such a model has no chance in the United States. So when large institutional investors lobbied the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to collect information about corporate board diversity practices, the US adopted a disclosure-based approach to the issue.

In 2010, the SEC began to require publicly traded companies to disclose in their proxy statements certain information about diversity considerations in board nominations. A proxy statement is a special report sent to shareholders in advance of the company's annual meeting.

Aaron Dhir, Associate Professor of Law at the Osgoode Hall Law School at York University, combed through the proxy statements of all S&P 100 companies for 2010 and 2011. Two years is not enough time to actually see board composition changes, but Dhir’s qualitative and quantitative content analysis presents a picture of the corporate response so far and raises questions about the efficacy of the SEC rule as a nudge toward greater board diversity.

In contrast to the command and control quotas, the idea behind more subtle nudge-based new governance models is that behavior can be changed by regulations that facilitate reflection by senior executives upon diversity and disclosure of relevant outcomes to the interested public. The approach takes longer to bear results than a simple requirement would, but it is supposed to facilitate change that is perceived less as an imposed burden and more as an organic development.

Under the 2010 SEC rule, annual proxy statements had to include whether the board nominating committee considered diversity in director nominations, if so, how the consideration was made, and if there was a board diversity policy then how this policy was carried out and evaluated.

The SEC did not provide any particular definition of diversity. As a result, Dhir found that the vast majority of companies considered diversity in terms of experience. Some of them considered demographic factors alongside the experiential diversity, but a number of firms limited the discussion at experience, which is, arguably, something that any board would do without any rules. So while the SEC regulation shed light on corporate board practices, it may not have changed those practices in any appreciable way.

Berkshire Hathaway Board of Directors, photo by Gregg Segal, CNN Money

Further bringing into question the rule’s efficacy as a “nudge” is Dhir’s finding of very little change between 2010 and 2011 statements. Ongoing reflection about board diversity would, presumably, be reflected in some kind of practice change from year to year, but it seems like in this case the rule prompted creation of a boilerplate language to be used and re-used. This raises another troubling question – if the rule simply allows corporations to “check the box” on diversity, then it may actually inhibit meaningful progress.

While the spirit of the rule is arguably to foster greater corporate diversity, the letter of the rule as it currently stands does not push companies to change their practices in any way. In fact, it even allows for responses like Berkshire Hathaway’s:

“In identifying director nominees, the Governance, Compensation and Nominating Committee does not seek diversity, however defined.”

Since the rule does not require companies to consider diversity, just to disclose whether or not they do, BH's response is completely appropriate.

This is where the shame factor comes in. For a disclosure-based policy to be effective in changing behavior there has to be an internalized social norm that certain responses will be met with disapproval. However, if there is no such social norm then the disclosure is meaningless.

Dhir argued that while the importance of diversity has been recognized by corporations on an operational level, this mentality has not yet permeated the thinking of boardrooms about their own diversity situation. Several audience members went further, positing that diversity is not even a broadly recognized social norm in the U.S.

Having engaged in discussions on the matter and read comments on articles dealing with race and gender, I recon more Americans would endorse some notion of meritocracy than embrace the intrinsic value of diversity.

To change the face of corporate governance, I believe we need not only a stronger nudge from the SEC, but also more pressure on companies from the institutional investors who pushed for the rule from the beginning. (Like this "Say No to All-Male Boards" campaign). We also need to see more research from organizations like Catalyst, demonstrating that diversity is a smart business practice. Perhaps with a concerted effort we can convince enough people to tip the balance toward making diversity a widely-held social norm.

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.