gender bias

Gender-Neutral Family-Friendly Policies: The Unintended Consequences for Women

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Where are the senior women scholars? Universities have been concerned about the underrepresentation of women at senior tenured levels for more than twenty years, especially in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) disciplines. I wrote about several studies seeking to explain this dearth of senior women scholars in a previous article. In response to the underrepresentation of women, many of these institutions implemented gender-neutral family-friendly policies in the 1990s. Justin Wolfers, an economist writing for the New York Times, reports new research on the careers of economists in the United States that shows surprising, unintended consequences of these policies for female economists. Wolfers reports that in fact, some gender-neutral policies have advanced the careers of male economists at the expense of women’s careers, which is probably also true in other disciplines. The specific gender-neutral policy under investigation here is the tenure extension policy, which grants one extra year to the seven-year tenure process to both women and men for each child. The intention of this policy is to create some family-friendly flexibility in the early years of an academic career, when the pressure to achieve tenure (publish or perish) in order to keep an academic job collides with the years when young women and men are ready to start families. Wolfers reports that new research by three economists—Heather Antecol, Kelly Bedard, and Jenna Stearns—shows a significant differential impact of the tenure extension policy on the careers of women and men. These researchers compiled data on all untenured economists hired over the past twenty years at fifty leading economics departments. They then compared promotion rates at institutions with tenure extension policies to those without them. This is what they found:

  • Tenure extension policies resulted in a 19-point rise in the probability that a male economist would earn tenure at his first job.
  • In contrast, women’s chances of gaining tenure at their first jobs fell by 22 percent.
  • Before the implementation of tenure extension, a little less than 30 percent of both women and men at these same institutions gained tenure at their first jobs. Consequently, the new policy significantly decreased the number of women receiving tenure.
One of the main flaws in the logic behind the gender-neutral tenure extension policy is that women and men experience the same distractions from their writing and research after the birth of a child. Wolfers cites Alison Davis-Blake, dean of the University of Michigan’s business school, as saying, “Giving birth is not a gender-neutral event.” Wolfers goes on to observe that “women receive parental benefits only after bearing the burden of pregnancy, childbirth, nursing, and often, a larger share of parenting responsibilities. Yet fathers usually receive the same benefits without bearing anything close to the same burden.” In fact, the study authors found that men who took tenure extension used the extra year to publish their research, resulting in higher tenure rates. No parallel rise in publication rates was seen for female economists. One of the study authors, J. Stearns, cautions that not all gender-neutral family policies are harmful. She notes that standard parental leave policies for both parents have reduced the stigma for women. Let’s note that it took female economists to uncover the harmful impact of this tenure extension policy on women—and there are not many female economists. What other unintended consequences could be negatively accruing for women from well-intentioned family-focused policies? What else might we be discovering if we had more female economists asking these questions? Do you have experiences or thoughts about the possible unfair impact of employment policies where you work? Let me know.   The image in this post is in the public domain courtesy of anekarinebraga.]]>

Hillary Clinton and Theresa May: How Gender Bias is Still with Us

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Every so often things happen in the world that, for a moment, make underlying biases and stereotypes visible that are usually underground and hard to see. I believe this happened in the United States with the subtle, and not-so-subtle, emergence of racism when Barack Obama ran for president, was elected, and tried to govern. I believe gender bias and sexism are emerging now with the first-ever nomination of a woman, Hillary Clinton, by a major party for the presidency in the United States, and with the election of Theresa May as Britain’s new prime minister. Julia Baird of the New York Times writes, “The fact that a cluster of men lead the world merits no comment. But if women start to slowly enter the ranks—Theresa May, Angela Merkel in Germany, possibly Hillary Clinton in the United States—it’s treated as . . . some kind of gynocratic coup d’etat: a new ‘femokratie’ . . . the ‘dawn of a female world order. ’” One British paper warned, “The women are coming!” Baird notes that several insulting stereotypes have been used to describe May as a leader, including the Nanny (because she will now have to “mop up” after the Brexit mess created by her male counterparts) and the Thatcherite label of Iron Lady because she is known to take strong positions and be persistent. Baird observes that “our notions of mature women in power urgently need updating.” In the online publication Vox, Ezra Klein surfaces some other sources of gender bias in presidential politics when he tries to understand and explain the gap between Clinton as a public speaker—described as careful, calculated, cautious and uninspiring—and Clinton described by staff and colleagues as brilliant, funny, thoughtful, effective, and a good listener. Being a good listener is the hallmark of Clinton’s campaign style. In 2000, she conducted her senate campaign in New York State by doing “listening tours.” She won her senate seat against long odds because she listened and came to deeply understand what people in New York cared about. Once in office, she got legislation passed that addressed the concerns of her constituency. But, as Klein writes, “modern presidential campaigns are built to reward people who are really, really good at talking”—not listening. Klein goes on to point out that “we ran a lot of elections in the United States before we let women vote in them—a process developed by men, dominated by men and, until relatively late in American life, limited to men. ” Our election process also favors traits particularly prevalent in men—talking over listening. Klein cites one of my favorite gender linguistics scholars, Deborah Tannen, who explains that women value listening to build rapport and relationships. She contrasts this preference with that of men who emphasize the status dimension of communication—talking to increase status, or to win, versus listening to gain allies and build coalitions. A point by Klein that I find most interesting is that “presidential campaigns are built to showcase the stereotypically male trait of standing in front of a room speaking confidently—charismatic oration versus deep relationship.” Klein also offers observations by Brookings scholar Elaine Kamarck, author of Why Presidents Fail and How They Can Succeed Again. She found that “successful presidential leadership occurs when the president is able to put together and balance three sets of skills: policy, communication, and implementation.” Campaigns only test communication. Clinton is criticized for not being an inspirational speaker, but she has a long track record of making policy and getting things done in government through relationship and coalition building. While I agree that she has made some mistakes in her political career, isn’t it sad that her depth of policy and legislative experience and her track record for getting things done are overshadowed by an opponent who is all entertainment bluster with no accomplishments or experience in governing? Trump loves to talk about the process being “rigged” against him, but it seems to me it is actually rigged for him as a man who loves to talk to large audiences and increase his status by putting other people down. This is a form of gender bias I had not seen before, and it explains a lot. Is it new to you, too? What other gender bias is getting clearer for you in this election? Please share your observations in the comments section.   The image in this post is in the public domain courtesy of Jens Junge.]]>

3 Reasons Why There are Fewer Women in STEM Professions: New Research Brings Hidden Barriers to Light

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The fact that there are so few women in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) professions has been a mystery for a long time. A. Hope Jahren of the New York Times writes that according to the most recent statistics released by UNESCO, “women’s enrollment in graduate education in the United States has been greater than men’s for each of the last 30 years.” But every year, female students drop out of STEM graduate programs in large numbers and are denied tenure at high rates when they do complete their studies and move into faculty positions. Women are also poorly represented as senior STEM leaders. Jahren notes that women do not drop out of graduate programs because of performance—there is no difference in GPAs between women who drop out and those who stay in. And women are not denied tenure because of a failure to publish. So what is going on? Several new important studies reveal reasons why women struggle to be successful in the sciences and point the way to changes that will make it possible for them to succeed in the STEM professions.

Reason 1: Research Funding Is Significantly Lower for Female Scientists

Priyanka Dayal McCluskey of the Boston Globe reports that at big biomedical research institutions, including hospitals, universities, and other research institutions in New England, male scientists beginning their careers receive more than twice as much funding to support their work as female colleagues. A study conducted by a Boston nonprofit group, Health Resources in Action, found that male scientists beginning their careers as faculty researchers receive median start-up funding of $889,000 to establish their research labs compared to $350,000 for women. These funding packages are negotiated confidentially between researchers and department heads, and with no transparency, this pattern of gender bias had not previously been visible. Smaller start-up budgets make it harder for women to publish research and attract new grants, which impacts tenure and promotions for them.

Reason 2: Women Do Not Receive Tenure Credit for Their Publications

Justin Wolfers of the New York Times reports on research by Heather Sarsons at Harvard that compiled data on the publication records of young economists recruited by top universities over the past 40 years. Wolfers notes that the career path for economists is largely organized around tenure, which is based on “publish or perish” criteria. The study indicates that while women in the field publish as much as men, they are twice as likely to perish or be denied tenure. Sarsons’s research found that the only women who enjoyed the same rate of tenure success as men were those who published as solo authors. And here is where the study findings get interesting. Consider that most scholarly papers are coauthored and that economics is a male-dominated field, and note these findings:
  • When a woman and a man coauthor a paper, the man receives full credit toward tenure and his female coauthor receives no credit. It is assumed that only he deserves the credit.
  • Only when a woman publishes a paper alone or coauthors with another woman is she given full credit toward tenure.
The study found strong statistical differences and suggests this bias may account for female economists being twice as likely to be denied tenure.

Reason 3: Sexual Harassment

Sexual harassment is pervasive and underreported, creating an intimidating environment for young female scientists. Jahren, a female professor of geobiology, suggests that sexual harassment accounts for much of the huge dropout rate for young females in the sciences—along with a sense of isolation. Only recently has the lack of attention and responsiveness to claims of sexual harassment in several large academic institutions become public. Jahren notes: “From grad-school admission on up through tenure, every promotion can hinge on a recommendation letter’s one key passage of praise, offered—or withheld—by the most recent academic adviser. Given the gender breakdown of senior scientists, most often that adviser is a man.” Jahren suggests that often, in the face of harassment from a powerful male mentor, the only choice a student feels she has is to leave the profession to get away from him. Women feel that if they reject their mentor’s advances, they will not get a good recommendation and their career in science is over. What are the lessons learned from these new studies? We need transparency and accountability to interrupt and change these systemic patterns of bias. As long as they are hidden, and there are no consequences for unfair treatment, nothing will change.     Photo credit: Laboratory Science – biomedical by Bill Dickinson, on Flickr]]>

The “Woman Card”: What Is It?

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According to Donald Trump and others on the right like Rush Limbaugh, Hillary Clinton is playing the “woman card.” What does that really mean? Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times explains that the implications are that women, and in particular Hillary Clinton, have some kind of unearned advantage because they are women. Kristof challenges this assumption with the following facts:

  • There has never been a woman president of the United States.
  • Only one-fifth of senators, 20 out of 100, are women.
  • Women earn 92 cents to a male worker’s dollar.
  • A bare 19 percent of corporate board seats are held by women.
  • An assault on a woman happens every nine seconds.
  • Men and women judge women more harshly for the same job application, résumé, or essay when, in several research studies cited by Kristof, the names on the documents are switched from John to Jennifer.
  • In the same studies, salary recommendations for the job applicant with the masculine name were 14 percent higher than for the same applicant with a feminine name.
Kristof notes that these disadvantages for women reflect unconscious bias, which he defines as “a patriarchal attitude that is absorbed and transmitted by men and women alike—which is one reason women often aren’t much help to other women.” I talk about this same dynamic in my book, New Rules for Women: Revolutionizing the Way Women Work Together, as an example of internalized negative stereotypes that result in women not supporting other women and being harder on each other in the workplace.

Why Do We Need More Women in Politics?

Jill Filipovic of the New York Times suggests that we need more women in elected office. Because of our life experiences as white women and women of color, many elected women:
  • Get more cosponsorship for legislation.
  • Bring more money home to their districts.
  • Focus on priorities such as the need for access to affordable health care, contraception, quality education and low-cost college tuition, living-wage reforms, and criminal justice reforms.
Kristof concludes that if the polls show Clinton leading Trump, it is not because she has a “woman card,” which is less than worthless. He notes that a “woman card” is “like a credit card that isn’t accepted anywhere but carries a $3,000 annual fee.” If Clinton wins the election, it will because of her “experience, policies, temperament and judgment.”   Image credit: FreeImages.com/Julia Freeman-Woolpert]]>

New Research: Work Is Valued Less When Women Do It

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Why is the gender gap so persistently stalled at annual median earnings for women of about 20 percent below men’s? It has been 53 years since the Equal Pay Act was passed by the US Congress in 1963, yet women still don’t get equal pay for equal work. Claire Cain Miller of the New York Times reports on several new studies that reveal a core reason for the pay gap—work is valued less when women do it. Miller notes that a number of factors once thought to explain the gender wage gap are no longer true, yet the gap remains. For example:

  • Women now have more education than men.
  • Women have nearly the same amount of work experience as men.
  • Women are equally likely to pursue many high-paying careers.
One of the new studies, coauthored by Paula England of New York University, was conducted using US census data from 1950 to 2000. This research tracked the movement of women in large numbers into previously male-dominated occupations. When the occupation switched from being male dominated to female dominated, the pay declined for the very same jobs men were doing before, even when accounting for education, work experience, skills, race, and geography. For example:
  • When women became designers in large numbers, wages fell 34 percent.
  • When women became biologists, wages dropped 18 percent.
  • When women became housekeepers, waged declined 21 percent.
The reverse was true when an occupation, such as computer programming, attracted more men and switched to being male dominated. Another of the new studies, conducted by Claudia Goldin at Harvard University, shows that women and men are paid differently, even when they do the same job. For example:
  • Female physicians earn 71 percent of what male physicians earn.
  • Female lawyers earn 82 percent of what their male colleagues earn.
In other words, whether women have become the majority in an occupation previously dominated by men or are doing the exact same work as their male colleagues, these studies show that the work is valued less when women are doing it. We also know that there are significant differences by race—women of color are paid less than white women in the same occupations.

What Can Help?

I have shared several possible strategies for closing the gender wage gap in previous posts. In addition, some innovative policies and tools are being introduced at the state level. Shirley Leung of the Boston Globe reports on one exciting new tool introduced by Massachusetts state treasurer Deb Goldberg—an online salary calculator where you can look up the wage gap by sector. The calculator also allows you to send an anonymous e-mail to your employer, encouraging the recipient to download an “Employer Tool Kit” that explains how to close the gender wage gap. The data behind the calculator comes from the US Census, and the wage categories are large. The city of Boston is in the process of collecting actual wage data from city employers, on a voluntary basis, but that data is not yet available. Leung notes that there is power in numbers. Many employers do not report or analyze their wage data by race and gender and do not realize that pay discrepancies may exist. In addition to sending an anonymous e-mail to our employers, urging them to take steps to identify and remedy pay discrepancies in the organization, another step we can take is to elect women to state and federal offices. The record shows that women in government—like state treasurer Deb Goldberg and the US congresswomen who keep unsuccessfully introducing the Paycheck Fairness Act to remedy problems in the 1963 legislation—are committed to closing the gap. It will take action from all of us to close the gender wage gap.   Photo credit: Víctor Santa María from Buenos Aires, Argentina – Suterh Solidario – Víctor Santa María, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23362803]]>

Are Women Candidates Changing Presidential Politics?

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It is really significant that two women ran as candidates in the 2016 presidential campaign. Kelly Ditmar, writing for Ms. magazine notes that while Hillary Clinton felt she had to prove that she was “man enough” to be commander in chief in the 2008 campaign, both she and Carly Fiorina ran on their own terms in 2016, “disrupting the images, tactics, and rules of the game that have been determined by men.” Neither woman denied the influence of gender on her experience:

  • Carly Fiorina talked about how being a woman informed her bid for office. She also shared her own battles to overcome sexism in corporate America as an example of her toughness.
  • Hillary Clinton has talked about the “merit” of gender in that it shapes our lived realities and the perspectives we bring to policy making. She has discussed her understanding of the need for paid family leave by sharing her experiences of being a primary caregiver and a working woman. She gives equal attention to the concerns of both women and men in her campaign agenda.
Even though Fiorina dropped out of the race during the primary season, the fact that for awhile two women were running for president representing two different political perspectives may help normalize the image of women in leadership in the future. Both Fiorina and Clinton also influenced the agendas of their parties. Fiorina, responding to Trump’s attacks on her appearance as “unattractive” in his Rolling Stone interview, called women’s attention to how these attacks demeaned women. Clinton has pushed her party to make paid family leave, pay equity and the provision of affordable, quality childcare central to the party agenda. But double standards remain for women candidates. Dittmar notes that Clinton must still confront the double bind of “needing to prove her strength without being characterized as unfeminine or unlikeable.” She was recently characterized by a well-known journalist as unacceptably aggressive for “shouting” during rallies and debates—behavior considered normal for her male opponents. Dittmar also observed that “gender shapes the experience and behavior of each candidate and, like any identity, brings variety and richness to the race. In this respect, every candidate is playing a gender card, women and men alike.” Amen to that.   “Carly Fiorina at NH FITN 2016” by Michael Vadon and “April 14, 2015 – Jones Street Java House in Le Claire, Iowa” by Michael Davidson for Hillary for America are licensed under CC BY 2.0. Both images have been cropped.]]>

Revealing Root Causes: What Keeps the Glass Ceiling in Place in the Financial Sector?

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So many talented women entrepreneurs with great technology business ideas cannot raise the capital needed to start their businesses from Silicon Valley investors. Likewise, many women in Wall Street firms cannot make partner, or otherwise advance, no matter how well they perform. Even with lots of publicity, such as the recent gender discrimination lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, programs put in place to help women advance, diversity programs on unconscious bias, and millions of dollars spent to settle class-action gender discrimination cases, not much has changed on Wall Street for women. What keeps the glass ceiling in place? New research reveals some root causes that could open pathways to change.

Silicon Valley Venture Capital Firms

Let’s be clear. Only 1 percent of the ideas pitched to venture capital firms get funded. The problem is those that get funded are overwhelmingly pitched by white men. Claire Cain Miller of the New York Times notes that of the people who get investment funding to start new businesses, 1 percent are black, 8 percent are women, and 12 percent are Asian, according to data from CB Insights. Here are some of the underlying structural causes of the problem:
  • Men make up 94 percent of partners at venture capital firms, and the business is insular. Miller notes that most investors accept pitches only from entrepreneurs who come through an introduction via their personal networks.
  • Venture firms with female partners are three times more likely to invest in a company with a female chief executive—but a Babson College study found that just 6 percent of partners at venture capital firms are women.
  • Miller cites a 2014 study published by the National Academy of Sciences, which found that investors prefer pitches by men (68 percent), particularly attractive men, to those by women (32 percent), even when the content of the pitch is exactly the same.

Wall Street

Maureen Sherry, reflecting back on her career as a managing director at Bear Stearns, looks at the current statistics for women at Wall Street investment banks and notes that very little has changed, despite hundreds of millions of dollars paid out to settle gender discrimination suits—most recently $46 million paid out by Morgan Stanley and $39 million by Bank of America. She cites a 2015 Bloomberg Businessweek survey that tracked MBA graduates from 2007–2009, which found the following:
  • While women received almost the same pay upon graduating, six to eight years later their pay averaged 20 percent less than the pay of their male classmates.
  • Female graduates of Columbia Business School, who went to work primarily for Wall Street financial institutions, earned 40 percent less than their male colleagues.
Sherry reveals a very interesting root cause for the Wall Street glass ceiling:
  • New employees are required to sign a U4 arbitration agreement “that binds a worker to settle any job dispute with her employer in-house,” usually with arbitrators chosen because they are friendly to the bank. Not surprisingly, roughly two out of three cases are decided in Wall Street’s favor.
  • When settlements are awarded, the employee must sign a nondisclosure agreement, and the stories and patterns of discrimination remain hidden from the public.

Solutions

Maureen Sherry states unequivocally that mandatory arbitration needs to be banned so that action, in the form of laws, regulations, and public pressure, can be taken to change the culture of Wall Street. As long as the stories and patterns stay hidden, and the deep-pocketed banks barely notice the settlement payouts, there is no incentive to change. As for venture capital firms, we must keep the spotlight on their insular and discriminatory practices and assert public pressure for them to be more inclusive. Bringing these root causes into the open will help us all know what to look for and how to bring pressure for change.   Image courtesy of Ambro at FreeDigitalPhotos.net]]>

How to Close the Gender Wage Gap

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The gender wage gap is persistent. Claire Cain Miller of the New York Times reminds us that fifty years after President John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act, women still earn only 79 cents for every dollar men earn in the United States, and the gap in different occupations varies. Miller notes that women who are surgeons earn 71 percent of what male surgeons earn. I have written in a previous article about differences in pay for different racial/ethnic groups, with recent research showing that Hispanic women in Massachusetts make 56 percent of their male counterparts’ salaries. In her article, Miller offers ideas that are starting to generate interest and be tested by a few state governments and private employers for closing the gender wage gap. I believe these ideas are promising:

  1. Publish everyone’s pay. Miller notes that “when employers publish people’s salaries, the pay gap shrinks.” President Obama required federal contractors to report salaries by gender in 2014, and the state of California passed a law to require municipal governments to publish salaries. A few pioneering companies have done the same with very positive results. Salaries got corrected and/or aligned.
  2. Coach, or curb, negotiation. Miller notes that “men are paid more partly because they’re more likely to ask for it. When receiving job offers, 51.5 percent of men and 12.5 percent of women ask for more money.” Miller is basing her information on the work of Professor Linda Babcock who also notes that women are penalized, deemed unlikeable, and often not hired for negotiating like men. Consequently, women need coaching on how to negotiate differently to be effective. Best of all, Miller suggests, would be to ban negotiation all together and set the salaries for positions, with a small range to allow for differences in experience.
  3. Don’t rely on previous salaries. Women get stuck in a lower-wage cycle when pay for a new job relies on an employee’s previous salary. The Massachusetts State Legislature is currently considering a bill that prohibits employers from seeking job candidates’ salary histories. More states should pass legislation like this.
  4. Make it easier for mothers to stay in the workforce. Affordable childcare, paid sick days, and paid parental leave need to readily available so that women can more easily stick with their careers.
  5. Build flexible work places. Miller notes that the pay gap is greatest in occupations with the least flexibility, such as medicine and finance.
  6. Change the law. Federal legislation languishing in the US Congress called the Paycheck Fairness Act would require companies to report salary data, give grants for negotiation training and make class-action lawsuits easier—but it has been stalled for a long time. It does not yet have enough support to move it forward.
The gender wage gap can be eliminated. We know how to do it, but we need to put more pressure on organizations and our government to do the right thing. Do you know of companies or state governments that are pioneering efforts to eliminate the wage gap? Let us hear your examples of what’s working. Image courtesy of Ambro at FreeDigitalPhotos.net]]>

Diversity Improves Performance: New Research Findings

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Exciting new research reported in the New York Times from Columbia University and the University of Texas provides much needed evidence that racial and ethnic diversity on teams improves performance. While I have always felt the truth of this finding from my own experiences, it is good to see empirical evidence that supports the practice of inclusion. This new research, added to other studies showing that gender diversity also improves performance, should encourage more intentional inclusion of race and gender diversity on teams and in classrooms. The new study on racial and ethnic diversity was conducted in both the United States and in Singapore. Participants were assigned to either homogeneous or diverse groups to make decisions on the sales value of stocks. To ensure that any differences in outcomes were the results of diversity and not culture or history, diverse groups in the United States included whites, Latinos, and African-Americans. In Singapore, the diverse groups were Chinese, Indian, and Malay. The authors report that the findings were “striking.” The decisions of the diverse groups were 58 percent more accurate, and the more time they spent interacting in diverse groups, the more their performance improved. In contrast, the homogeneous groups in both the United States and in Asia were more likely to copy others and spread mistakes. The authors suggest that the homogeneous groups seemed to “put undue trust in others’ answers, mindlessly imitating them. In diverse groups, across ethnicities and locales. . . . diversity brought cognitive friction that enhanced deliberation.” In other words, the presence of diversity produced better outcomes due to the following:

  1. Better and deeper critical thinking. The presence of cognitive friction might mean that people work harder to examine their own assumptions and deepen their reflections in the presence of conflicting opinions and information.
  2. More engagement with different perspectives. Different perspectives bring new ideas, and working harder to understand a different perspective can bring about a change in position.
  3. Better error detection. Deeper critical thought and engagement provide more opportunity for errors to be revealed.
  4. Less groupthink. Individuals are more likely to form their own opinions in diverse teams than to just follow along with those like them.
Studies on gender diversity in teams, reported in an earlier article, found that gender-balanced offices produced 41 percent more revenue than single-sex offices. The factors that might account for higher performance in gender-balanced teams are probably similar to those accounting for higher performance in racially diverse teams:
  1. More voice for everyone. When there are roughly equal numbers of women and men on a team, it is more likely that both women and men will be able to get their ideas heard and be able to influence the culture of the team.
  2. More perspectives. A diversity of perspectives is bound to result in better decisions and solutions and help avoid groupthink.
  3. More skills. A broader range of skills and experience is available in diverse teams which could contribute to better results.
Given these findings, shouldn’t all work teams, leadership teams, and classrooms strive to be intentionally diverse? We can all benefit from diversity.     Image courtesy of Ambro at FreeDigitalPhotos.net]]>

Why We Need Women’s Leadership Programs: The Pipeline Is Clogged

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Women have entered the professional and managerial ranks of organizations in large numbers since the 1970s and have entered at about the same rate as men for the last twenty-five years in Western industrialized countries. Nonetheless, women remain poorly represented at the senior levels of organizations and constitute only 3 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs and about 15 percent of company board seats in the United States. The numbers are worse for women of color, who represent only three of the 500 CEOs. The situation for women in Europe is no better. It seems fair to conclude that earlier approaches—preparing women to be leaders by teaching basic leadership skills, “fixing” their behaviors to be more like those of men, and then waiting for them to work their way through the pipeline—have not produced the desired result of having more women in senior leadership positions in the West. Research reported in 2009 by DDI (Development Dimensions International), involving 12,208 global leaders in seventy-six countries and 1500 organizations, found that women have not progressed as far as men of similar tenure and age in all major global regions. The study’s authors note that even in the United States, more than 70 percent of the top 1500 US firms have no women on the senior leadership team. The authors conclude that the deck is stacked against women from the start of their careers because women do not have equal access to development experiences. Other scholars at Harvard suggest that it is important for women to learn to use a broader and more theoretical lens to understand why development opportunities are not as available to women, as well as why other barriers to women’s advancement exist. In other words, potential women leaders need to understand that systemic forces are at work to create these barriers in order to change them. It is not enough to learn new tools and skills without learning to use them within a systemic context. These scholars suggest that subtle forms of gender bias, which they call second generation bias, create internal and external barriers for women’s advancement to senior levels. Second generation bias is defined as practices and beliefs that equate leadership with behaviors believed to be more common or appropriate for men, which communicates to both women and men that women are ill-suited for leadership roles. This bias interferes with a woman’s ability to see herself or be seen by others as a leader. For this reason, the authors propose that women’s leadership development needs to be grounded in a coherent, theoretically based, and actionable framework, incorporating both theories of gender and leadership. In other words, leadership skills and topics need to be taught within an analysis of second generation bias as a framework that helps point the way to actions. A review of the best practices literature on women’s leadership development programs reveals a consensus on the importance of women-only programs that foster learning by putting women in a majority experience. The literature reports agreement that women are best able to develop strong and authentic leadership identities in all-woman settings. While many of the topics and skills that women leaders need to develop are the same as those found in leadership development programs for men, it should be noted that to support the development of effective women leaders, these topics need to be taught within the context of understanding the special challenges that women leaders face. For example, women cannot use exactly the same negotiation strategies that men use because recent studies show that women are not seen as “likable” when they do, and therefore are not as successful when using the same approaches. Consequently, women need to develop negotiation strategies that work for them in the context of second generation bias or other ways of theoretically framing the impact of gender differences. An effective women’s leadership development program needs to reflect current research and best practices for leadership effectiveness in the twenty-first century and address the unique issues and advances affecting women in leadership. Many organizations now offer women’s leadership programs internally, and some good public programs also exist. Two of my favorite public programs are the Women’s Leadership Community in Minnesota and the POWER of Self Women’s Leadership Program in Texas. Let’s continue to support the offering of these programs. They’re important.   Image courtesy of stockimages at FreeDigitalPhotos.net]]>