Are Two a Crowd?

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has discussed how she was often confused with Sandra Day O’Connor when they sat on the Court together, despite not looking alike and holding significantly different ideological views. It’s important to note that this mistake was not made by passersby being interviewed on late night television but by the lawyers arguing before the Court itself.

This is one of many examples that Professor Denise Lewin Loyd employed at this week’s WAPPP seminar, "Are two heads always better than one? Stereotyping of minority duos in work groups," to explain the unique problems that individuals who are part of the minority on boards, task forces or committees often face. Loyd, an Associate Professor of Business Administration at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, argues that in many cases, being part of a minority duo on a larger team is even worse than being the only minority.

Past research indicates that single minorities within a group are often subject to “token pressure,” whether in the form of increased visibility, stereotyping or pressure to assimilate. Loyd conducted a study of 228 students on the issue, which concluded that this token pressure leads to discomfort, demonstrating that it’s a negative experience for the minority groups in question.

Though we might assume that token pressure would decrease when another minority member is added to the group, there is evidence to the contrary. Research featured in the Harvard Business Review even suggests that the presence of two women on a board may be seen as a subgroup and that those individuals have to give extra care to not look like they're conspiring.

Professor Loyd tested this hypothesis via an experiment she conducted with colleagues Mary Kern of Baruch College, CUNY and Judith White at Dartmouth. Using avatars, Loyd et al collected responses from 170 male participants to see how they viewed women in different settings in which they were the minority. Participants were asked to read a narrative involving a female employee who was part of a team where she was (1) the only woman, (2) one of two women or (3) one of three women on a team of seven, ten or 14. The decision-making and production tasks assigned were relatively agnostic so as to control for the fact that certain tasks may be perceived as more masculine or feminine.

Loyd et al found that women were viewed as significantly less potent and marginally warmer as part of a duo than while acting solo. While there are some limited situations where warmth is advantageous, being perceived as less potent is a clear negative. As part of a trio, women were not seen as less potent but were perceived as marginally warmer than as a duo. A second study involving female-minority groups performing a complex task revealed that men gave female duos worse performance evaluations, despite no significant difference in completion time and quality.

This research suggests that there is something uniquely negative about being part of a minority duo in a larger group. The phenomenon could be partly explained by the claim that minority duos make the category to which they belong more salient to the greater group. This could be a concern for women, who while still significantly underrepresented on corporate boards and in public office, are slowly gaining ground.

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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How Does Media Bias Affect People's Perceptions?

In December 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was meeting with the press in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. She had just spoken about the challenges of being female in legal practice, where women are often judged on more critical and superficial standards than are men.

A few minutes later, the moderator asked, with no irony, “so which [clothing] designers do you prefer?” The Secretary responded, “Would you ever ask a man that question?” before moving to the next question.

Media coverage of female politicians---with a focus on appearance, on “women’s issues” like education rather than economics, on communal rather than individual qualities---is clearly different than that of men. This week’s WAPPP Seminar speaker, Exploring Viewer Reactions to Media Coverage of Female Politicians, Joanna Everitt, a Dean at the University of New Brunswick and current WAPPP Visiting Fellow, explored the effects of that coverage on voter perceptions.

She starts with the assumption that, in many cases, media simply reflects cultural biases and stereotypes---rather than actually creating them. One of these is that politics is what men do; for women, playing that ‘power game’ is out of the ordinary.

Gov. Jennifer Granholm (2003–2011) speaking at 2012 DNC.

Professor Everitt and her colleagues broke down even visual cues into those that represent decisiveness and individual power---like up-and-down vertical hand motions---and those that represent communal inclusiveness---like horizontal hand gestures. (I bet you’re moving your hands right now; if not, try it. You’ll see what she means---plus it’s been confirmed by repeated social psychological tests).

The media even more subtly reflects some of these biases in how they present female candidates in short clips. Professor Everitt’s study played short videos of different politicians using ‘agentic’ versus ‘inclusive’ poses in front of 100 human lab rats (students that took part in surveys).

The result? There were no differences in whether the participants liked the candidates overall. But those male politicians that were shown using the up and down hand gesture were seen as more impressive, while those going side to side were less so. Female politicians were seen as more impressive and likable when they didn’t use expansive gestures and were actually less liked when they used the up and down hand gestures.

So what does that say about us as people? Sometimes women and men (of different races) succeed by ‘mastering’ and using some of the benefits of their own stereotypes. But is that good? Should we understand and master what is accepted---in a sort of social jiu-jitsu to get our work done? Or should we fight to effectively change what’s accepted? If so, how?

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Are Women Less Competitive Than Men?

A recent New York Times article asks, “Why are there still so few women in science?” Focusing on American society, the article explores some of our cultural biases related to women in science. The TV show “The Big Bang Theory,” for example, features a crew of geeky men with physics PhDs with a few token women (the “hip” ones are all math duds), while in the movie “Mean Girls,” the female lead hides her mathematical talent to impress a boy and fit in.

But does it start even earlier? In Thursday’s WAPPP Seminar, “Gender,Competitiveness, and Career Choices,” Stanford University’s Muriel Niederle, presented some of her research on whether there are some non-cognitive reasons: do women simply shy away from competition? Do men compete too much?

In her experiments of simple math competitions, Professor Niederle found that even the lowest performing (i.e. “stupidest”) men were much more willing to join a competitive game with rewards than even the smartest women. In fact, 73% of all men chose to enter the competition while only 35% of all women did. (There was pretty much an even distribution in peoples’ actual results and intelligence, by the way).

Muriel Niederle, “Gender, Competitiveness, and Career Choices”

What adds to this are a few factors: women tend to be more risk-averse generally; and despite their objective talent, women also tend to rate themselves as lower than they are. And though these tests were done on college students, apparently similar trends on willingness to compete are visible by age three!

Though proclivity to compete with other people per se ought not determine aptitude and success, the reality is that it does. In the classroom, this has path-dependent effects: how young women perceive themselves to be at math influences which course of study, and later career, they pursue. And years later, we see the effect of that in the paucity of women in math and science---but not in subjects like literature.

Some fields have had lower and harder glass ceilings than others. The reason for that may certainly be structural, in terms of decision-makers denying career mobility. But those structures start to oscillate based on the stories we tell ourselves and each other. Eileen Pollack, the author of that Times piece, writes that “the most powerful determinant of whether a woman goes on in science might be whether anyone encourages her to go on.”



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Role Models as "Social Vaccines"

Do you have everyday role models? Successful people in your field who look like you and aren’t superhuman?


Though I have become comfortable at male-dominated tables, I always look for fellow women in politics. I don’t just mean Hillary Clinton. She certainly inspires me, but she is a super star! It’s the regular women – the chiefs of staff, the policy advisors, and some Members of Congress – that I can look to and think “yeah, that could be me in a few years.”

Nilanjana (Buju) Dasgupta, Professor of Psychology at UMass Amherst, demonstrates that exposure to such role models can act like a “social vaccine” against negative stereotypes. This kind of vaccination by inspiration is especially important for minority groups in high-achievement fields – think women in politics, business, or science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) careers.


Professor Dasgupta and her team tested the Social Inoculation Model with numerous quasi-experimental studies in the real world. They focused on women in the STEM field, which is increasingly going to drive the economy. In STEM careers, women are both a numeric minority and a group facing negative stereotypes (perceptions that women are bad with numbers, etc).

In one study, unsuspecting college students signed up for a calculus class – a required gateway course for all STEM majors. There were 7 female and 8 male professors teaching 15 sections. The professors were also unaware of the experiment’s hypotheses. They had similar experience levels and teaching styles. The syllabi and tests were the same and the grading was done blindly by all professors across the sections.

Twice during the semester the researchers measured students’ attitudes toward math, their self-confidence with math (what grade they thought they would get), and their personal identification with the professor. They found that the female students taught by male professors were less likely to self-identify with math than did their female peers in the sections taught by female professors. Female students were also found to have negative attitudes toward math in sections taught by men, but not by women.

Women in male-taught sections were less self-confident about their mathematical ability – they estimated a lower final grade than did women in the sections taught by women. It is striking that with their final grades the female students in this study significantly outperformed men, regardless of their professor’s gender.

These women obviously had the aptitude for math, but they doubted their own competence...unless their professor was female.


Professor Dasgupta conducted a number of other studies to test various aspects of her theory, trying to understand the mechanisms by which the “social vaccine” worked. She also looked at effects of peers, exposure to experts through media and the effects of the teacher’s gender on students of younger ages.

Drawing on her experiments and the body of related literature, Professor Dasgupta makes a compelling case that for underrepresented groups in high-achievement fields ability alone is not sufficient to succeed. Exposure to relatable role models can mean the difference between staying in and dropping out.

That is why being able to look around and think “sure, I can do what she does” is so important for me and other professional women outnumbered in their fields. And it is even more important for the young girls considering a career in STEM, politics or business.


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.

Social Norms and Stereotypes: What Happens When Everyone's a Little Bit Sexist?

Upon seeing one of those “reuse your towel” cards in a hotel, have you ever wondered how many people were actually reusing their towels? An experimental study found that when the message was supplemented with information that “nearly 75 percent of hotel guests reuse their towels,” the guests receiving the message became more likely to reuse their towel than the guests who got the standard note. This is an example of the power of social norms – when the desired action is perceived as the norm, compliance increases. The same mechanism is at work in reverse for an undesirable behavior – people are less likely to litter when they perceive that only a few “anti-social types” litter.

Social norms are often more powerful than explicit messages. The signs in the Petrified Forest National Park used to read something like this: “Don’t take petrified wood, 14 tons a year are being stolen in small pieces.” That last part essentially signaled to the visitor: “everybody is doing it.” When that part was removed, compliance improved.

Now, let’s connect this information to racial and gender stereotyping and bias – generally, people view bias as undesirable and actively work against it. However, the 2000’s saw a growing body of research on unconscious biases. The notion that most people have unconscious stereotypes and biases captivated the popular press. The cover of the Washington Post Magazine on January 23, 2005 read: “Many Americans believe they are not prejudiced. Now a new test provides powerful evidence that a majority of us really are.” So, it’s like the song from Broadway musical Avenue Q, “Everyone's a Little Bit Racist.”
 
But what does that mean for social norms? Does knowing that everyone has unconscious biases make it seem permissible to let our own biases slide?

Those are the questions Melissa Thomas-Hunt, Associate Professor of Business Administration at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business, set out to answer with her colleague Michelle Duguid, Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Washington University in St. Louis Olin Business School. Thomas-Hunt and Duguid designed a series of creative experiments to test how messages of high and low prevalence of stereotyping affect behavior.
 
In one of the experiments, pairs of women and men were negotiating a car sale. All of the men were told to avoid thinking of others in a stereotypical manner. Some of the men were primed with a “high prevalence of stereotyping” message – they were not told what gender biases might be, just that an influential body of research finds that the majority of people do stereotype. Other men were primed with a “low prevalence” message – that very few people hold stereotypical misconceptions. Yet another set of men received a “high prevalence of counter stereotyping” message – that most people actively try to overcome biased misconceptions.

After the negotiation, the women, who did not know anything about these messages, were asked to rank their opponents' assertiveness. The researchers also compared negotiated price outcomes. The men who were told that most people stereotype, despite being cautioned not to do so themselves, consistently claimed more value in the negotiation and were ranked as more assertive by their female counterparts than were the men in both other groups. The division of value was more equitable in the pairs where men received “few people stereotype” and “most people work to avoid stereotyping.” The men were also perceived to be less assertive by their female counterparts. In other words, the men who perceived the social norm to be in line with stereotypes of women as weak negotiators were more likely to treat them as such, while the men who thought the social norm was to counter stereotypes treated their negotiating partners more equitably.

Thomas-Hunt’s and Duguid’s experiments point to the conclusion that it’s not enough to be aware that we have conscious and unconscious biases. We need social norms to counter these biases. We need a culture in which most people work hard not to stereotype. In companies, this could be a consistent internal message from the highest ranks, but in society it will take all of us holding each other accountable and working not to be even a little bit sexist.

Melissa Thomas-Hunt presented at a WAPPP Seminar titled, "Condoning Stereotyping: How Awareness of Stereotyping Prevalence Impacts Stereotype Expression in Negotiations and Beyond," on April 4, 2013.


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.

Race in Your Face

This will be uncomfortable, so try to relax. Examining our own race and gender stereotypes can be as pleasant as sitting in the dentist’s chair. But for Kerri L. Johnson, Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at UCLA, discovering awkward truths about people’s biases is an occupational hazard. Dr. Johnson investigates how people use physical cues to categorize other people.  Sometimes she even gets hate mail and coverage by Rush Limbaugh.

At the Social Communication Lab at UCLA, Dr. Johnson and her social psychologist colleagues do things like asking students to decide whether a point-light display figure is a man or woman and to categorize faces of different races as male, female, gay or straight. They even have a program that analyzes the relative femininity or masculinity of a person’s face.  Despite the ill-informed hate mail, the researchers persist, because understanding how biases are formed is the first step to combating unfair stereotypes and discrimination. 

In one study, Dr. Johnson demonstrated that race is gendered. For example, in the United States, there is overlap in stereotypes of Asians and women (soft-spoken, shy, family-oriented), while the stereotypes about Blacks overlap with stereotypes about men (dominant, athletic, competitive). The same pattern surfaced when the researchers measured whether respondents were more likely to misidentify the Asian men’s faces as female and Black women’s faces as male. The faces in question were digitally created so that only the race varied (see above). Sure enough, subjects more quickly and more correctly identified the Black men and Asian women than the other way around, and the respondents’ own race or gender did not seem to make a difference.   

The Social Communication Lab runs dozens of similar experiments, finding, for example, that even when information was limited to just photos of faces, subjects were better than chance at categorizing the person as “gay” or “straight.” And, as another angry-letter-provoking study demonstrated, categorizing someone, whether by race, gender or sexual orientation, has implications for how we will interact with that person given our own baggage and biases.

Yet it was a study of politicians and gender that achieved notoriety and misrepresentation by both Samantha Bee at the New York Times and Rush Limbaugh. The conclusions of the study were that Republican women in Congress had more stereotypical feminine facial features than did their Democratic counterparts; and that uninformed observers were more likely to identify the highly feminine women’s faces as Republican and the less feminine ones as Democratic.

You can take a moment to learn about the methods used in this unexpectedly controversial study, and even start another uncomfortable discussion in the comments section here. Please, just go easy on the hate mail.

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.

Professors Are Biased Too

An ordinary e-mail once caught the eye of Modupe Akinola,Assistant Professor of Management at Columbia Business School. It was from a prospective Ph.D. student, an African-American woman, asking for a meeting.

Dr. Akinola wondered: “Would I have reacted differently if this was from a man? Would it make a difference if the request was for today and not next week?” She joined with colleagues Katherine Milkman and DollyChugh to turn these questions into research questions in a field experiment measuring discrimination in academia.

The creative and elaborate experiment started with putting together a representative sample of over 6,500 faculty members from 260 universities. The team used publicly available demographic information on professors to ensure a good sample. The researchers then created a few prospective Ph.D. students. The names of these imaginary students were tested and proved to be easily recognizable as either male or female and as Caucasian, Black, Hispanic, Indian or Chinese.

At 8:00 am on a Monday, e-mails from Brad Andersons, Latoya Browns and 18 others went out to unsuspecting subjects, asking to meet “today” in half the cases and “next Monday” in the other half. The research team was impressed by how quickly most faculty wrote back and how often they agreed to meet, but when and with whom they agreed to meet was more interesting.

One would think academia, with its affirmative action and enlightened world views, might be a post-racial, post-gender sphere. As it turns out – not so much, especially not when there is time to think about it.

In the now condition, Akinola, Milkman and Chugh found no significant difference between number of responses to white males and to others, but when the request was for later, white men received both more responses and more meeting acceptances than any other prospective students. The white men fared better than all other racial categories across almost all disciplines. The effect remained even when the race or gender of faculty and student matched.

According to construal level theory (CLT) immediate events demand concrete reasoning focused on feasibility, whereas decisions about distant events trigger abstract thinking and a focus on desirability of the event. Thus, future events create more room for unconscious stereotypes and biases to enter the decision-making process. In this study, for instance, the responses received to the “now” requests systematically displayed a focus on “how,” whereas the “later” e-mails were more likely to be answered with a request for credentials or more information – a “why” response.

The point of this experiment and other studies that spotlight the influence of stereotypes and biases on consequential decisions is not to call people racist or sexist. The point is to come up with ways to address the biases and to improve minority outcomes. For instance, referring all prospective students to the Ph.D. program coordinator would take the burden off individual professors and ensure that all students get their questions answered. This is just one option that an experiment like this might bring up for discussion.

Unfortunately, some faculty did not take kindly to the experiment. When debriefed and told that they had been used in a study of bias, many expressed outrage and demanded to speak with the Institutional Review Board.

To me, their reaction suggests the thorny subjects of race and gender are not studied enough in academia. Perhaps academia, more so than other spheres, makes it taboo to have biases, but shaming does not make biases go away! Nobody wants to be called a racist or sexist, not even a little bit, but simply feeling guilty is not productive. We can structure decision-making in ways that level the playing field, and we need creative researchers like Akinola, Milkman and Chugh to make that happen.

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.

Miss Representation - WAPPP Screening Event

Last week WAPPP hosted Jennifer Siebel-Newsom, the director and producer of Miss Representation. The 2011 documentary correlates the negative representation of women in the media to the dearth of females in power and politics.

The film opens with the following statistics:

- Three percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are women.
- 17 percent of government leaders are female.
- Women hold only five percent of clout positions in media.

And the numbers go on and on.

“I’m a firm believer that if you can see it, you can be it. If you can’t see it, you can’t be it,” says Siebel-Newsom. Boys and girls never see women playing the role of the scientist, the president, the CEO; instead, “what the media communicates is that a woman’s value is not her intelligence, it’s her body.”

Miss Representation finds the average teenager consumes up to ten hours of media per day. “The media has this incredible power -- this incredible ability -- to dictate our cultural values and gender norms,” expressed Siebel-Newsom. What boys and girls are seeing are images, story-lines, and portrayals that hyper-sexualize and hyper-masculinize gender roles.

“Women are told the only way to assert power is through sex, and so the only message young girls are getting is that ‘sex is power’. This is not right.” What is worse, finds Siebel-Newsom, is that, “we’re exporting this culture to the rest of the world. The gender norms being perpetuated in the US are influencing millions all around the world.”

Siebel-Newsom says that until women are able to write their own stories, and control their own representations, these stereotypes will persist. How do we do this? We start a movement. Join the Miss Representation movement, or find a screening near you.