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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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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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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Lie to Her

This may or may not come as a shock: people think that women are more trusting. Laura Kray, professor at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, demonstrates that in negotiations such perception of women encourages people – men and women alike – to lie to their female counterparts much more than to males. So what can we do about it? Before we get there, let’s see how Professor Kray arrived at her conclusions.

First there was a survey that asked respondents to predict what kind of a negotiator either “Michael Taylor” or “Patricia Taylor” would be in a scenario where that hypothetical person was looking to buy the respondent’s car. With statistical significance, people whose buyer was “Patricia” were more likely to expect that she would be trusting, good-natured and well-intentioned. Those dealing with “Michael,” on the other hand, were more likely to expect that he would be hostile, aggressive, confident and skillful.  Well, how about that?

An attentive reader may say – but that’s because we’re talking about cars here, a stereotypically male subject. Fair enough. In her second study, Kray drew on three semesters of data from a negotiations exercise in an MBA program. In the exercise, students were either buyers or sellers of a property and all relevant facts were in the case itself, no outside expertise mattered. There was also an incentive for the buyers to deceive the seller with regard to intended property use, even though the buyer was also motivated by own reputation. Did the buyers lie?

Yes, yes they did! In their post-negotiation responses, buyers reported on their own truthfulness. Those who negotiated with a female seller were more likely to have lied. Similarly, the sellers were asked what their buyers had told them. Their responses were coded to show who was “lied to”, who was “misled” and who was “told the truth.” Consistently with the buyer self-reports, the women were more likely to be lied to, while the men were more likely to be told the truth. There was no difference among those who were misled.  By the way, the gender of the buyer did not matter – women were just as opportunistic with their fellow women as were the men.

Kray’s third study was a laboratory variation on the negotiation game. This time all the buyers were deceiving the sellers. Unbeknownst to the sellers, the buyers had instructions. This allowed Kray to see how the men and women reacted when they were, in fact, lied to. Women were worse at recognizing deceit, though it was tough for both men and women – 89 percent of women believed the buyers’ intentions, while 80 percent of men did. In addition, when the women asked questions to scrutinize the buyers’ claims, their trust increased. On the other hand, the men who probed the buyers became rightfully more skeptical.

So, ladies, we are likely targets of opportunistic lying. However, the awareness that Professor Kray’s studies bring give us a tool. As a woman currently taking a negotiations course, I will now be more vigilant. I’m not advocating for adoption of blanket distrust, but next time you get that hunch that the car salesman is ripping you off, you should look into it! 

Anya Malkov is an MPP2 at the Harvard Kennedy School, a WAPPP Cultural Bridge Fellow, and an alumna of From Harvard Square to the Oval Office. 

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.