Anne Litwin

Robin Lakoff, a linguistics professor emerita at University of California, Berkeley, is one of the foremost scholars on the impact of language on our attitudes and behaviors. Jessica Bennett of the New York Times cites Lakoff as saying, “We are uneasy with the president as ‘she’ because encountering it forces us to have in mind a new conception of ‘president.’” Lakoff’s point, as well as the findings reported by Bennett on new research on language used in the 2016 presidential election, is that the language we hear and use influences our behavior, including who we vote for.

Try this experiment, which I have been using for years: simply switch the order of the gender you name first in a sentence. Say and write “women and men” instead of the standard usage of “men and women.” One workshop participant recently said to me, when I put “woman” first in a sentence, “You’re trying to mess with our minds.” He was right. I became aware at some point that when I change the order of the gender pronouns, it does register as “not right” with listeners and opens the possibility of a conversation about unconscious bias. And, if you are like me, you have noticed how much concentration it takes to use gender neutral pronouns like “they” and “them” in reference to gender expansive people who do not identify as either female or male. Our brains don’t have an existing pathway that we can reflexively travel to say “they” and “them.” The same is true with putting “women” before “men” in our language use. But these new pathways can be formed with conscious intention and practice.

Bennett offers other examples of the way “man” is still often the default in the English language, such as maestro, manning the command post, freshman and ombudsman. She cites new research from linguists and cognitive scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Potsdam, and the University of California at San Diego who found that during the 2016 presidential race, Americans were reluctant to use the word “she” in the context of a hypothetical president. Even just reading the words “the president, she” caused subjects “considerable disruption” in reading time as their brains “stumbled” over the deeply ingrained bias of “president = he.”

The researchers decided to use the 2016 election as a natural experiment. The hypothesis was that the use of the “she” pronoun in reference to who would win the race would go up or down based on the beliefs of voters about who would win the election. Even though Hillary Clinton was expected to win by a large margin by the research participants, the use of the “she” pronoun did not increase. In a study repeated twelve times between June 2016 and January 2017, the twenty-five thousand participants were asked to predict who would win. While over 60 percent predicted that Clinton would win, the use of the “she” pronoun did not go up.

The researchers conclude that using male language “could indirectly contribute to a culture where women are not typically seen as typical candidates” or leaders. The study’s main author, Dr. Titus von der Malsburg, notes that this could influence elections “because women would have to do extra work to convince voters that they can do the job.”

During the 2020 Democratic presidential primary debates, I remember how it was almost jarring to me when the women candidates would say, “the president, she . . . ” I realize now that they were trying to break through our deep and unconscious bias toward men as leaders. It’s deep. Unfortunately, none of the numerous talented and capable women running for office were successful in breaking through. Let’s all try to change the pronouns we use to be more inclusive as a way to open up more possibilities for who our leaders are in the future. Each time you can put women first by saying “women and men,” you will help move us forward as you disrupt the deep patterns of bias carved in our brains.

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Women have historically been underrepresented in medical research, and it is happening again in the United States with research for a COVID-19 vaccine. Alisha Haridasani Gupta, writing for the New York Times, notes that because data being collected on the virus and in clinical trials does not bother to record sex breakdowns, we will not know the answers to these questions and more:

• How many women are infected versus men?
• Are men and women equally likely to get infected?
• What is the fatality rate for each sex?
• Are symptoms exactly alike for men and women?

Gupta writes that “sex data blind spots can be traced back to the fact that, historically, science didn’t study the female body.” The assumption in science persists that there are no fundamental differences between male and female bodies, even though a vast amount of research shows otherwise. Instead, scientists still assume that any deviation in research studies from the white male archetypes is an anomaly to be ignored. Gupta cites a recent clinical trial in 2015 on “female Viagra,” which included twenty-three men and two women, as an example of the mindset of scientists who assume that including women is not important, even for a drug being developed specifically for women.

Why is it important to include women in medical research?

• Gupta cites Caroline Criado Perez from her award-winning book as saying, “Researchers have found sex differences in every tissue and organ system in the human body.” Gupta notes that consequently, women and men are likely to have fundamentally different reactions to the virus, vaccines, and treatments. In fact, research found that SARS, influenza, Ebola, and HIV all affect women and men differently.
• Because of sex differences, correct dosages of vaccines and treatments are likely to be different.
• Between 1997 and 2001, eight of the ten FDA-approved drugs withdrawn from the market “posed greater health risks for women than men,” including valvular heart disease and liver failure.
• Sex-disaggregate data was collected during the H1N1 pandemic, which determined that pregnant women were at a higher risk. Consequently, they were the first to receive the vaccine.

Sex-aggregated data is not being collected for the COVID-19 virus in the United States, even though it was collected in other countries. Gupta notes the following challenges to changing the practice in the United States to include women and people of color:

• Medical researchers in the United States are predominantly male and white.
• The mindset that white women and people of color don’t need to be included in clinical trials is deeply ingrained. Including white women and people of color is perceived to be an added complication.
• The data collection systems are not set up to collect the information, and no leadership is coming from the top of the government to do so. In fact, Gupta reports that the White House’s initial twelve-person Coronavirus Task Force was entirely male. Two women were finally added, Dr. Deborah Birx and Seema Verna, but they are outnumbered and not senior enough to push through systemic changes.

We have to keep asking the questions raised by Gupta in the opening section of this article. This situation is shameful and potentially harmful to white women and people of color.

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

I am always surprised to see research showing that the attitudes of young men about gender equality in the home are not changing. Claire Cain Miller of the New York Times writes that “young people today have become much more open-minded about gender roles . . . in politics and sports . . . [but] they are holding on to traditional views about who does what at home.”

Miller cites a new Gallup survey of opposite-sex couples ages eighteen to thirty-four that found no difference between the younger couples and older ones about how indoor chores like cooking and cleaning are divided. This longitudinal survey, or a survey that is repeated over time, shows that “women now do a little less housework and childcare, and men do a little more. But a significant gap remains.” For example,

• Women spend about one hour more a day than men on housework.
• Women also spend about one hour more a day than men on childcare.

Miller notes that, like me, researchers are surprised that home life doesn’t look that different for young people than it did fifty years ago. They are surprised because attitudes about gender roles have changed in so many other ways:

• There is now almost universal support for women to pursue careers or political office.
• Women get more education than men.
• Young people are much more accepting of gender-fluid identities—when people do not identify as either a woman or man.

What could be keeping the gender inequality in the home in place? Here are several possible factors:

• Some traditional norms are reinforced in childhood. In a previous article, I wrote about research showing that boys are not required to do as many chores as girls are as children.
• Miller notes that masculinity is strongly tied to earning an income and avoiding all things considered feminine.
• Studies have shown that men can feel threatened if their wives earn more than them.

Miller did report on some positive changes in attitudes about gender roles in the longitudinal studies:

• The biggest change has been among white men—one in six now say they prefer a traditional marriage, while a majority said this in 1976.
• Young people whose mothers work full time are more likely to want a similar arrangement.

Not surprisingly, Miller reports that black women have been most in favor of dual-earner arrangements throughout the years of the longitudinal research.

Miller concludes that the disparity in time spent on household chores and childcare impacts women’s careers and “is a leading cause of the gender gaps in pay and promotions at work. . . . Making relationships more equal inside the home could have far-reaching effects outside of it, too.” Amen.

Photo courtesy of indy138 (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Two well-known scholars of gender inequality, Robin J. Ely of Harvard Business School and Irene Padavic of Florida State University, recently published new research in the Harvard Business Review with surprising findings about why women don’t advance. This research expands our understanding of why the advancement of women to senior leadership positions has been stagnant for the last twenty years.

Ely and Padavic explain that companies complain of high turnover of women and problems with promoting women to senior levels. They note that the problem is pervasive: “Women made remarkable progress accessing positions of power and authority in the 1970s and 1980s, but that progress slowed considerably in the 1990s and has stalled completely in this century.”

The authors note that a widely held belief called the work/family narrative is commonly used to explain the lack of advancement for women. According to this belief, “high-level jobs require extremely long hours, women’s devotion to family makes it impossible for them to put in those hours, and their careers suffer as a result.” The authors cite a 2012 survey of more than 6,500 Harvard Business School alumni in which 73 percent of men and 85 percent of women cited this scenario to explain women’s lack of advancement. This new research reveals startling findings showing that the work/family narrative is not the cause of the problem and that, in fact, it is used to help keep gender inequality in place.

Ely and Padavic conducted their new study with 107 partners and associates of a global consulting firm that had very few female partners. Nearly all of those interviewed, both women and men, blamed the work/family narrative for the lack of female partners in the firm. An analysis of the interview data revealed a different story:

• Both women and men suffered from the work/family balance problem, but the men advanced when the women did not.
• Women, but not men, were encouraged to take accommodations, like working part-time and taking internally facing roles, which derailed their careers.
• Two-thirds of men who were fathers reported work/family conflict, but only one man took accommodations.
• Employees who took accommodations—virtually all of whom were women—were stigmatized and saw their careers derailed.
• The promotion record for childless women was no better than for mothers.
• The foundational premise that women can’t advance because 24/7 work schedules are unavoidable was contradicted by observations that a culture of overwork was created by unnecessary overselling and overdelivering. In fact, research has shown that long hours do not raise productivity and are associated with decreases in performance and increases in sick leave.

The researchers conclude that it is the culture of overwork that is the problem, something I wrote about in an earlier article. The culture of overwork, combined with deeply embedded societal beliefs that women are best suited to family caregiving and men are best suited to be ideal workers committed to their jobs, sets up women who want to be committed workers and mothers as their primary identity for devaluation. If they want to be both mothers and committed workers, they are labeled as bad mothers or horrible women who are not positive role models for junior women.

The work/family narrative functions to divert attention from the real problem, which is the unnecessary and inhumane cultures of overwork. The work/family accommodations offered as a solution to the culture of overwork serve only to derail women’s careers and cover up the real problem of inefficient work practices and the assumption that long work hours are unavoidable.

It will take a concerted push by employees, both women and men, to force companies to see the advantage of reasonable hours. Because the problem is systemic, the very nature of work needs to change, which will happen only if people demand it. Younger men say they want more involvement in family life. Employers want to keep talent and may listen if young men start to quit. Employers may even decide that they cannot afford to lose out on women’s talents. We need to start a discussion on a national level about the nature of work and how to make it more humane for everyone. Only then will women have the chance to achieve workplace equality.

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Thousands of women in Mexico are regularly being killed as a result of gender-related violence. Jorge Ramos, writing for the New York Times, reports that women are being pushed to their deaths from the upper floors of buildings, dismembered by boyfriends, skinned and gutted by assailants, or are disappearing and are never found by their families. Because these crimes have been largely ignored and often classified as suicides by law enforcement, women in Mexico are declaring, “Enough is enough,” and designating themselves as empowered feminists. Ramos explains that

• In 2019 alone, 1,010 femicides were registered in Mexico by local authorities, more than double those reported in 2015.
• Most femicides, or the killing of women and girls because of their gender, are unreported, misclassified as suicides, or uninvestigated in Mexico. Consequently, the official 2019 figure of 1,010 femicides is likely a gross undercount of the actual cases.

Ramos describes the determination and anger of Yesenia Zamudio, a mother whose daughter was murdered, as an example of “the expression of a new culture against silence and machismo taking root in Mexico.” Zamudio has become a public speaker at protest rallies and a leader of the digital organizing, inspired by the global #MeToo movement, that produced a massive countrywide protest on Sunday, March 8, 2020, and a national women’s strike, #UnDiaSinMueres (#OneDayWithoutWomen), on Monday, March 9, 2020. Smaller protests have been going on for months, some of them violent, which Zamudio explains is justified as long as the government does nothing. “We want you [the government] to listen to us,” she explains as the government continues to do nothing to protect women and frustration grows.

Paulina Villegas, reporting on the #UnDiaSinMujeres strike, notes that “many workplaces across the country were devoid of women . . . some schools shut down.” Even some newsrooms, government offices, and subway ticket booths were closed without women to staff them. Overall, businesses and city governments were supportive and declared they would not penalize the women for missing work. Villegas explains that the march on Sunday—by tens of thousands of women—and the massive strike on Monday represent unprecedented collective action.

The women of Mexico are demanding that their president, Andrés Manuel Lopéz Obrador, acknowledge the seriousness of the femicide issue and create a special prosecutor’s office for femicide and cases of disappearance. So far, he has been tone deaf, insensitive, and condescending to the women. Let’s see if these protests and the nationwide strike get his attention. Let’s hope so for the sake of the women of Mexico.

Photo courtesy of Thayne Tuason

Courage is a rare human quality, and reading about people from the past who had the courage to break through barriers and act on their convictions is uplifting. I share here the stories of four such overlooked people: Bessie Coleman, Ralph Lazo, Clara Schumann, and Homer Plessy.

Bessie Coleman: 1892–1926

“Bessie Coleman was the first African-American women to earn a pilot’s license, thrilling crowds by performing dangerous maneuvers,” writes Daniel E. Slotnik of the New York Times. Coleman decided to learn to fly when her brother returned from fighting in World War I. He reported to her that women in France were so liberated, “they could even fly planes,” Slotnik explains. He went on to tell his sister, in 1919, that black “women ain’t never goin’ to fly”—and she decided to prove him wrong.

Unable to find any pilots in the United States to teach her to fly, Coleman decided to go to France. To prepare for the trip, she learned French, raised money, and saved her own earnings from working in a chili restaurant. In 1920, she left for France, enrolled in flight school, and began a seven-month course on flying. She learned aerial maneuvers, and in 1921, she received her pilot’s license, granting her the right to fly anywhere in the world. Slotnik writes that Coleman saw flying as a way to empower black people in America. Her aerial performances dazzled crowds and earned her enough money to buy two planes. She died at the age of thirty-four in a flying accident and was memorialized at her funeral by the journalist Ida B. Wells.

Ralph Lazo: 1924–1992

In 1942, after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States government, under President Franklin Roosevelt’s executive order, rounded up and incarcerated 115,000 Japanese Americans living in the West. They were torn from their homes and businesses with no due process and sent to internment camps. Two-thirds of them were United States citizens. Ralph Lazo, a seventeen-year-old Mexican American high school student, decided to go with them to be with his friends.

Veronica Majerol, writing for the New York Times, explains that Lazo presented himself at the Manzanar internment camp, pretending to be Japanese-American so that he could be willingly interned. For two and a half years, he gave up his freedom and lived in the harsh conditions of the camp. Majerol notes that by the time he left Manzanar, Lazo had developed a deep social conscience and a sense of indignity over the treatment of Japanese Americans that shaped the rest of his life. He lived as an activist fighting for education for underprivileged groups and working for reparations for Japanese Americans who had been interned.

Clara Schumann: 1819–1896

I love classical music and know the name of the composer Robert Schumann, one of the nineteenth-century master composers. I was very surprised, though, to read in an article by Thomas May that Schumann’s wife, Clara, was also a composer and celebrity pianist in her time. As often happens with women artists, she does not get the same degree of recognition as her husband even though she was at least as accomplished.

Clara Wieck Schumann was a child prodigy as a piano virtuoso in Germany and toured Paris before her teens. She married Robert Schumann, a student of her father’s, and encouraged his development as an artist. May explains that when they met, Robert was an unknown and insecure composer while Clara had an international reputation. She is now often mentioned only in reference to her husband, although she was rediscovered in recent years by women performers who find inspiration in her work.

Homer Plessy: 1863–1925

I have always heard of Plessy v. Ferguson as a famous Supreme Court case, but I did not fully understand it until reading about Homer Plessy, the plaintiff in this case. Glenn Rifkin, writing for the New York Times, explains that long before Rosa Parks refused to move from her seat in the white-only section of a bus in 1955, Plessey refused to leave the whites-only train car for which he had purchased a ticket in 1892. He was dragged off the train and charged with violating the 1890 Louisiana Separate Care Act, one of the new Jim Crow laws popping up all over the post-Reconstruction South after the Civil War. Rifkin explains that these segregationist laws were developed to institutionalize white supremacy movements intent on quashing “any notion that people of color might ever attain equal status in white America.”

Plessy, a racially mixed shoemaker who could pass for white, was a civil rights activist who volunteered to be a test case for local civil rights groups wanting to get a case to the Supreme Court to try to stop these new laws. The judge in the Plessy case, Judge John Howard Ferguson, upheld the constitutionality of the Louisiana law. The case eventually got to the Supreme Court, where the new law was also upheld as constitutional. Rifkin notes that Plessy v. Ferguson came to define the Jim Crow era as a time when people of color were summarily segregated from most public places for the next fifty-eight years until Brown v. Board of Education was decided in 1954.

Who are your forgotten heroes?

Photos courtesy of Wikipedia Commons (BY CC 2.0)

I recently ran focus groups for the senior women in an organization to ask what helps and hinders advancement for women in their company. In addition to the usual issues about men taking credit for their work and ignoring their ideas, these women raised a theme that I found especially troubling: they repeatedly asked for training to help them stand up to men who behave inappropriately. It felt wrong to me that these women felt individually responsible to correct deeply embedded societal misogynistic attitudes toward women by getting training to be assertive. Ruth Whippman, writing for the New York Times, points out that complex, systemic problems cannot be fixed with individual self-improvement.

Whippman goes on to state that the current popularity of focusing on building assertiveness skills for women is in fact blaming the victim. She points out that when companies say women get lower pay because they are not assertive enough to ask, this is a way for corporations to blame female employees rather than pay them fairly. She further notes that it is not true that women don’t ask for raises and promotions. Research shows that women ask as often as men—they just don’t get the raises and promotions.

Shirley Leung, writing for the Boston Globe, notes that “it’s the workplace that needs a reboot when it comes to hiring and advancement,” not the women. She points out that research shows male candidates often believe they are qualified for positions when they are not, while women hesitate to apply because they don’t feel qualified enough. Women don’t need to be fixed, says Leung, they need a nudge to apply. If hiring managers interview only people who apply without looking around at what talent in the organization might need encouragement to apply, they could be missing the best candidate. It’s also not true that women aren’t confident and ambitious. Leung cites a 2016 study by Bain and Company that shows women are confident and ambitious and aspire to senior leadership. “Yet,” she notes, “few companies have gender parity at the management level.”

One problem is that the focus on assertiveness reflects a valuing of masculine characteristics and a devaluing of feminine ones. Whippman asks why we pour tax dollars into encouraging girls to take up STEM subjects, but we don’t encourage boys to become nurses. These actions assume that what men and boys do is normal and desirable. What if, instead, we assumed that feminine characteristics were normal and desirable? After all, overassertiveness in men has resulted in

• Women being talked over, patronized, or ignored at work
• The need for the #MeToo movement
• Campus rape
• School shootings
• President Trump’s Twitter attacks

What if the feminine characteristics that are undervalued were considered normal and desirable? Such as

• Apologizing or taking responsibility for our actions
• Self-examination and moral reflection
• Being more deferential
• Listening and reflecting on what you have heard
• Modesty, humility, and cooperation

Imagine how much more civil and inclusive the workplace would be.

What needs to change?

• Instead of assertiveness training for women at work, let’s have deference, listening, and empathy training for men.
• Both women and men need more feedback to show women they have skills to advance and to give men more realistic feedback to set appropriate expectations about what they need to advance.
• Interview slates of candidates for positions that consist of people from a variety of backgrounds.
• Invite women to apply for positions instead of including just those who self-nominate.
• Focus more on skills and less on “fit” or likeability during interviews.
• Train managers on how to understand the experiences of women in the workplace and how to create conditions that help women succeed.

Let’s stop blaming the victim with assertiveness training.

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