Are Women Punished for Seeking Power?

One of the catch-22s of gender relations these days is that women are hemmed by both realistic power structures that do exist, as well as by perceptions of what ‘should’ exist.

Specifically regarding gender stereotypes, many people expect not only that women are more modest in their presentation and interactions, but that they should be more modest.

So what happens when women violate these stereotypes?

That was the question that Professor Victoria Briscoll of Yale University posed in her seminar on “Women and Power: Hard to Earn, Difficult to Signal, and Easy to Lose.” She broke her answer into three parts.

First, women often have to manage people’s impressions of their rise to power. Their intention of seeking power and authority appear inconsistent with people’s perceptions that women should be communal and not dominating. So even female politicians like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Patty Murray, who are essentially in the business of power, often downplay the fact that they are there, insisting that they “never expected to run for office.”

Second, once in power, men and women often communicate differently to continue this impression management. According to a great deal of social psychological research, ‘powerful’ people are often given a license to talk more than people with less power, who signal deference. Moreover, women tend to lead in more democratic, non-hierarchical fashions than men. So in spaces like the US Senate floor, men talk to display power, while women tend to talk to establish and maintain relationships and advocate for communal rather than personal causes. This is often in the effort to avoid backlash.



Finally, women’s power is often more fragile and easily lost than that of men. In the case of expressing anger, women are almost always penalized for this, while angry white men are sometimes rewarded for being assertive. But when women can explain their anger away to an external source, women are rewarded.

So clearly there’s a lot of work for society to do. To get there, do women need to keep on adjusting what they do? How can we get societal expectations to change in the long run?

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Does full time work affect childhood development?

Over the last generation, there have been an increasing number of working parents---a phenomenon that’s enabled more couples to be more financially comfortable, on the whole. But it’s come with the healthily and effectively raise children the way parents would like.

The last few decades have produced research on the effects of full time maternal employment on the behavior and achievement of children---but the conclusions of this research have been mixed, and largely reflected the prevailing ‘wisdom’ of the moment.

Understanding the perceptions of these effects, however, can tell us multitudes about the decisions that women are making today. In her seminar on “Stereotype Accuracy: Do College Women Miss the Mark when Estimating the Impact of Maternal Employment on Children’s Development?,” Professor Wendy Goldberg of UC Irvine discussed how college women frame the issue---and how accurate those stereotypes are.

She and her team found that most women overestimate the negative effects of motherhood on their children---i.e. they’d assume that working mothers would raise children with worse behavioral problems like aggression and depression, and that perform worse academically---and that women underestimate the positive effects: that having a working mother would provide a roll model as well as greater financial opportunities for her children, among others.

Accordingly, many mothers may seek to adjust their work lives accordingly, with part-time work or opting out entirely. The effect of this might be either a greater inclusion of mothers into the workforce, or a gender-segregation by jobs---particularly those who seek to advance after a break for childcare. Moreover, steady work reportedly offers the greatest mental and physical health benefits to women. Stereotypes regarding the negative effects of working mothers must thus be dispelled.

Of course, full time work is not a choice for many women and parents. Not all women have equal access to long-term, full time work, while women of disadvantaged economic backgrounds have even less flexibility. Thus more attention to paid parental leaves and subsidized childcare would help us get to a better place for all mothers, fathers, and children throughout society.

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Marriage Market: Love and Financial Planning

“I take thee as my lawfully wedded husband and my social insurance for old age” makes for an awkward wedding vow, but a plausible one. Petra Persson, Ph.D. Candidate at Columbia University and a WAPPP fellow, examined the effects of social insurance policies on the marriage market. Through econometric modeling, she demonstrated the effect of a specific policy change in Sweden in 1989 on the decision of couples to marry.

The idea is that when Sweden changed its survivor benefits policy in 1989, there was an announcement that unmarried couples who had a child could get married by the end of the year and still qualify for the “old” benefits. The new benefits were significantly lower – a one-time payment to the surviving spouse, versus an annuity to the surviving wife under the old system. Lo and behold, a record number of couples got married in the last quarter of 1989. There were also differences in divorce rates and other indications that the marriage market responded to the change in social insurance policy.

In the case of Sweden, the reform was not intended to incentivize marriage, but the fact that there was a marriage market response has implications for when it’s optimal to separate social insurance from marriage. Ms. Persson argues, convincingly and quantitatively, that the society’s gender wage gap is the key determinant of whether it’s optimal to separate social insurance from marriage.

In a hypothetical country with large gender gaps and a traditional structure where everyone marries for life and husbands are the breadwinners, there are economic gains from tying benefits to marriage. The social insurance helps the surviving woman who cannot provide for herself. In the opposite hypothetical scenario, where not everyone marries but everyone works, there are no gains from tying benefits to marriage. In fact there are losses when money is transferred to a survivor who is self-sufficient without it. In a realistic society where there is an intermediate gender wage gap, a social planner faces the trade-off between protecting the elderly women from poverty and distorting the marriage market.

To illustrate the trade-off, consider that the reforms in Sweden took place for budgetary reasons, but were couched in gender equality rhetoric – under the new system, it didn't matter whether a man or woman was the survivor, he or she would get the same one-time benefit. Sweden in the 1980’s, of course, still had its share of traditional marriages and women who did not work. Since women typically live longer, the removal of the widow annuity resulted in an increase in number of destitute old women. The government then had to step in again and provide welfare payments to these women – essentially creating a safety net program where the social insurance proved insufficient.

On the one hand, providing a safety net for the elderly is more equitable – a social safety net does not distinguish whether the man or woman was ever married. Why should we reward marriage, distorting the marriage market? On the other hand, social insurance is something every working individual pays into to tap in old age; so if this person dies before claiming the benefit, it is plausible that his or her family deserves some share of that money. 

These are the fundamental questions of social policy design. As evidenced by the Swedish example, the policies that flow from these questions have practical financial planning implications for couples contemplating taking the plunge…because nothing says “I love you,” like a conversation about social insurance.

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.