What Works for Women at Work

Four Patterns Working Women Need to Know

Joan C. Williams, Rachel Dempsey

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781479871834
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

“Clearly and vividly detail[s] the double standards and the dead ends that so many women face in the workplace.” – Sheryl Sandberg, author of Lean In “If you’re a working woman searching for the best pocket guide to success at work, here it is.” – Arlie Hochschild, author of The Outsourced Self and So How’s the Family? and other essays “A must-read book for everyone committed to creating gender-fair workplaces.” – Alice H. Eagly, author of Through the Labyrinth

1

Introduction: It’s Not (Always) Your Fault

The test for whether or not you can hold a job should not be the arrangement of your chromosomes.

— BELLA ABZUG

Jennifer is a consultant at a large management consulting firm. Since graduating from business school, Jennifer has worked hard, played by the rules, and thrived professionally. Things are going great for her: a few years ago, she was promoted to the prestigious position of director. Having achieved a measure of job security, she and her husband—a lawyer at a big law firm in town—decided to have a baby and got pregnant. She took off the full six months allowed at her company; her baby is now 11 months old.

Recently, though, Jennifer found out that her compensation is lower than her co-worker Mike’s, even though he started after her and brings in less business to the firm. Jennifer, who has never really seen herself as different from the men she works with, realizes that she might have made a mistake in not asking for an increase in compensation earlier. She goes to her boss, Rick, to discuss the matter. To her surprise, instead of being supportive, he tells her he’s heard some concerns from other people in her department but reassures her he has her best interests at heart: “You’re a valuable part of the team. I know there were questions among the committee about whether your performance is sustainable, but I’ll be sure to bring up your contributions when we’re deciding on compensation for next year.”

Surprised by Rick’s easy dismissal of her concerns, Jennifer goes to her mentor, Jane, for help. Jane, who does not have children, tells Jennifer there’s not much she can do about it. “Once you have children,” Jane says, “it gets harder and harder to balance everything. You just need to work extra hard to prove you’re willing to do what it takes to stay in the game.”

Jennifer leaves Jane’s office feeling more unsure of herself than ever. She’s starting to think there’s more going on than meets the eye—but what can she do about it that won’t make things worse?

As recently as a decade or so ago, gender discrimination was so obvious it was all but impossible to ignore. In 1982, Ann Hopkins was denied a promotion to partner at the accounting firm Price Waterhouse because, as male co-workers said, she needed to “walk more femininely, talk more femininely, dress more femininely, wear make-up, have her hair styled, and wear jewelry.”¹ In 1997, Goldman Sachs financial analyst Cristina Chen-Oster was sexually assaulted by a co-worker after a business meeting that took place at a Manhattan strip club called Scores.² Sex discrimination cases this egregious are dwindling. Some holdouts certainly exist, but the age of the Boom Boom Room—of referring to female employees as “whores” and “playboy bunnies” and of holding meetings in men’s clubs—is largely past.³

“Twenty years ago, it used to be visible to any woman,” said a longtime consultant. “We were forced to wear a skirt. It was so overt. We were expected to get the coffee.” Another woman, who started working in finance in the 1980s, remembered being made to go in the back door and up the back elevator to attend a meeting in a club that didn’t admit women. As recently as 10 years ago, she said, she would regularly be the only woman at corporate golf tournaments. When she won, the prize was a men’s shirt.

These days, litigation and changing cultural standards have eliminated many of the more blatant examples of sexism in the professional world. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean it’s disappeared. For this book, we interviewed over 125 women about their experiences with gender bias: women at the top of their fields in law, in business, in politics, in science; married and unmarried women; mothers and women without children; women in their 30s and women in their 70s.

“For the younger women who look at me and think, ‘Why are you dredging up history?’ ” said one executive about her efforts to talk to young women about gender bias, “my response is, ‘You know what? I hope you are so lucky that you make it through this life with no unfortunate encounters like those I’ve just described. But, in case you do, you should be able to identify them and understand what is occurring.’ ”

Which takes us back to Jennifer, who is facing bias of several distinct types. The bias she’s facing may seem subtle, but it’s having a huge effect on her career. In short succession, she ran into each of the basic patterns of bias:

Prove-It-Again!—Women are forced to prove their competence over and over, whereas men are given the benefit of the doubt. Why didn’t Rick acknowledge that Jennifer had more seniority and brought in more business than Mike?

The Tightrope—Women risk being written off as “too feminine” when they’re agreeable and “too masculine” when they’re aggressive. Did Rick think Jennifer was too assertive in asking about her compensation?

The Maternal Wall—Women with children are routinely pushed to the margins of the professional world. Is Rick worried that that Jennifer might have lost her commitment to work now that she has a child—or does he think she should?

The Tug of War—All of the above pressures on women often lead them to judge each other on the right way to be a woman. Are Jane’s judgments shaped by her own choices?

The conventional advice is that women’s careers derail because they don’t have enough ambition, because they don’t ask, because they choose children over career—in other words, because they’re not enough like men. This advice can hurt women’s careers, because while women who don’t ask get in trouble for failing to make it clear what they want, women who do ask get in trouble for failing to fulfill people’s expectations about how a woman should act. Take Jennifer: she followed the advice that’s out there and was left wondering where she went wrong. This book is for Jennifer and women like her.

The Stubborn Gap at the Top

In the past several years, there’s been a renewal of interest in the gender gap: why it’s still there and what to do about it. Women like Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and former Obama administration official Anne-Marie Slaughter have jump-started an important conversation by bringing attention to an issue that many people hoped would resolve itself: while women have made extraordinary strides in the professional world, something’s going wrong at the top.⁴

The good news is, in many ways, women are doing better than ever. Women outnumber men in college by about 57 to 43 percent, and a 2010 study found that young, single women in urban areas actually earn median salaries about 8 percent higher than comparable men.⁵ In an influential article (and later a book) called “The End of Men,” journalist Hanna Rosin suggests the possibility that the “modern, postindustrial economy is simply more congenial to women than to men.”⁶

The problem? As women get older, advance up the corporate ladder, and begin to have families, their advantage not only disappears, it turns into a striking handicap. As of 2011 only 3.6 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs were women—16 white women, 2 women of color, 17 men of color, and 465 white men.⁷ That’s one table of women in a restaurant packed with 27 tables of men. Professional women in other fields are in better shape, but not by much. In 2010, women made up 47 percent of first- and second-year law firm associates but only 15 percent of full-fledged partners in the United States, a number that has been fixed for the last 20 years.⁸ In science and technology, the numbers are even worse: women constitute a mere 22 percent of software engineers and only 6 percent of chief executives at top technology companies.⁹ We can talk about equality until we’re blue in the face, but the numbers are pretty sobering.

So how does this happen? The answer is twofold. First, even if the disadvantages women now face in the workplace are small compared with disadvantages women faced a century (or even a decade) ago, relatively small problems have surprisingly large effects over time. Very small differences in how men and women are treated can lead to huge gaps in pay, promotions, and prestige, a phenomenon often called the accumulation of disadvantage. Psychologist Virginia Valian writes that “the well-meaning advice often given to women—not to make a mountain out of a molehill—is mistaken. That advice fails to recognize that mountains are molehills, piled one on top of the other.”¹⁰ She describes a meeting from the perspective of an outsider: John asks Monique to get the coffee, Rahul interrupts Cara. In those apparently inconsequential interactions, the outsider is left with a distinct impression of who is respected and powerful within the group: “people who were equal in my eyes when it began are [now] unequal.”¹¹ Because small instances of bias like these are cumulative, women like Jennifer (from our original story) sometimes don’t start to feel the effects of bias until they are already established in their careers.

“It’s not until women have been around a long time that they start to say, ‘Oh. Now I kind of get what you 50-year-olds have been talking about,’ ” said a consultant.

We’re also just beginning to recognize some of the most powerful patterns of gender bias that kick in as women move up the ladder in their careers. New research shows that motherhood is the strongest trigger for bias: women with children are 79 percent less likely to be hired, only half as likely to be promoted, and earn a lot less money than women with identical resumes but without children.¹² The same results don’t hold for fathers. In a country where 82 percent of women become mothers, that puts women at a huge disadvantage in the workplace relative to men.¹³ Yet we talk a whole lot about women’s choices surrounding motherhood and very little about the pressures driving them out of positions of leadership or the workplace in general. In order for things to change, we need to recognize and start to break down the Maternal Wall.

Another theme that’s conspicuously missing from the way we talk about gender is that bias against women often translates into conflict among women. The resulting Tug of War has been taboo, silenced by the quest for sisterhood. Talking about conflict among women seems to confirm negative stereotypes about women as catty and petty. And we know instinctively that, as an underrep-resented group in many industries, infighting isn’t going to get us anywhere, so the impulse is to hush it up.

But the Tug of War exists, and denying it hasn’t worked. When there’s only room for a few women at the top, women will scramble to take those spots. And when women are conscious of being judged, some will be quick to jump on the other women they think are hurting their cause, whether it’s because they feel those women are acting too much like men or because they’re reinforcing stereotypes of femininity. When women receive the message that their hold on power is tenuous, they do what they feel is necessary to protect their futures.¹⁴ Gender bias is built into office politics such that, as long as people pursue self-interest within that system, men will find it easier to get ahead than women. The problem is not a few rotten apples. It’s the barrel.

Our basic message is simple: it’s not your fault that the men at your company consistently progress up the career ladder more quickly than women do. It’s not your fault that last year’s review said you needed to speak up for yourself, and this year’s review says you need to stop being so demanding. It’s not your fault that you came back from maternity leave ready to dive back in, only to find yourself frozen out of major assignments. And it’s not your fault that the woman you thought was your mentor has been arguing against the promotion you seek. Plenty of things may happen to you that are your fault, but gender bias isn’t one of them.

UNDERSTANDING SUBTLE BIAS

Some bias—notably Maternal Wall bias—is both strong and blatant. But today, much bias is subtle.

Even subtle bias can have a strong effect. Inspired by research from Alice Eagly (coauthor of the excellent book Through the Labyrinth: The Truth about How Women Become Leaders), a group of scientists built a computer simulation of a fictional company with 500 employees at the bottom and only 10 at the very top. Each employee was assigned an evaluation score and promoted according to who had the highest score. The scientists gave the male employees in the simulation 1 percent higher scores, on average, to represent the effe...