Right now I’m reading Women Don’t Ask by Babcock and Laschever, the book they gave out to everyone at this year’s Life After Scripps conference. Study after study and anecdote after anecdote about how much women are missing out in comparison to men–in salary, in career advances, in allocation of home duties–because they’re adverse to negotiating. Basic learning point for everyone: when an employer gives you a salary offer, it’s gonna be significantly lower than they can afford to give you. They *expect* you to bargain with them. So do it!
So the beginning part is a simple story: women don’t negotiate; once they start negotiating, that erases most of the wage gap between them and men. Fair enough. But then the middle part (where I’m at now) gets tricky. The authors delve into where women’s aversion to negotiating comes from–boys’ chores being paid while girls’ chores are done for “love,” the subtle but insidious gender prejudices that pervade the raising of children, etc etc. But then we get to adulthood and–guess what!–these prejudices don’t go away, despite how much the mostly-college-educated guinea pigs of academic psych studies would like to aver otherwise. The reason women don’t negotiate–the reason so many successful women feel like “imposters” and shortchange themselves–isn’t just that they were brought up that way once upon a time. It’s because there’s a real threat of consequences for Negotiating While Female! Women who negotiate like men are seen as pushy, called bitches, have their authority undermined and reputations trashed. Ever heard of Bully Broads? It’s a program that companies send professional women to–on pain of firing–to adopt an unassuming demeanor, to premise their statements with a pile of self-disparaging qualifiers, even to tear up during meetings (Hillary’s “emotional moment”, anyone?). Jesus Christ, it’s like a de-gay-ification program for the boardroom! While, sure, that’ll definitely make businesswomen seem more “feminine,” I find it unlikely it would make them any more successful. They’ll just be ignored instead of loathed. Lovely.
It appears that, while finding the Bully Broads approach abhorrent, the book’s authors advocate that women, instead of negotiating like men, learn to be assertive while still acting like women. They point to studies showing that for women, a “social” mode of speaking is the most persuasive–where you firmly assert your argument, but couch it in sweet, social rhetoric. They’re probably right–this seems like it would be the best female strategy, from a practical point of view. But from an ideal perspective, it shouldn’t be ignored that it’s total bullshit that women have to walk a fragile assertive-feminine tightrope while men can just talk. (I’m sorry, was that un-feminine of me?)
Assuming I don’t end up in a cardboard box, in three months or so I’ll have a professional life of my very own to worry about. I’ll have to deal with this issue. I’m not sure yet how. For one, not only am I not a particularly feminine person, I’m not an especially socially-adept person either, my gender notwithstanding. I don’t know if I even *could* pull off that tightrope walk without explosively losing my temper or getting an ulcer.
Which makes me want to believe that this book doesn’t apply to me. Other than dismal dating prospects* and once getting thrown out of an otherwise all-male AP US History assignment group**, my being female and assertive hasn’t disadvantaged me in ways that I’ve noticed. I might be snarky, but most people won’t call me a bitch (other than in the affectionate sense). If guys were (are?) intimidated by me, enough of them were able to put it aside enough to be my friend that I didn’t really notice. Hell, I’m not quite sure if some of my male friends even process me as female to begin with. And who would want to be friends with an insecure cock anyway?
But I guess that’s the difference. You can choose your friends, and I never had a problem with a teacher/professor who didn’t like me speaking up in class. (What kind of prof doesn’t want kids raising their hand? Most of them beg for it!) In the corporate world, however, you don’t choose your co-workers or your boss. If one of them is a sexist pig and/or has tiny penis issues, you’re still stuck with them 9-to-5. You still need to find a way to work with them. I guess Women Don’t Ask‘s social persuasion method is that.
Well, I’ll work on it. Until then, here’s hoping for friendly, nerdy, enlightened co-workers?
* Sophomore year, before my confirmation class was confirmed, my pastor met with each us privately. During my conversation with him, for some reason he brought up my dating life–or rather, at the time, the utter lack thereof. “You know why guys aren’t asking you out, right? They’re intimidated, because you’re smart. But once they get their act together, it’s not going to matter anymore. So don’t worry about it.” Random, but he was right.
** Funny story. To this day I have no idea why one of the guys decided to kick me out (and the other two passively went along with it), other than bare-faced sexist insecurity. As a result, for the rest of the semester I essentially became my own group and stayed up nights doing the work of four people. When, at the end of the semester, I got the highest grade in the class on the midterm, it was possibly the sweetest moment of my academic career. Ha ha! Fuck you, asshole!
And yet we see there is a real benefit to men who do more chores (whether or not their spouse negotiated for it): http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080306/ts_alt_afp/usfamilymenwomensex
New book reviewed in paper: Seducing the Boys Club: Uncensored Tactics from a Woman at the Top by Nina DiSesa. In the interview, she admits she could have used “Charming” instead of “Seducing”, but knew “Seducing” would sell more books.
Please welcome an unpopular argument.
I think gender can advantage women in the corporate world in a number of ways, but these advantages may vary greatly depending on culture (and therefore geographic location).
First, I would suspect that most female hiring managers share your concerns that females don’t get hired as often, that if hired, they don’t get paid as much as males, and that this is unfair. As such, we should expect female hiring managers to have a strong bias toward other females (while male hiring managers may also share this bias). In an effort to avoid gender discrimination lawsuits, companies may also have the incentive to designate a disproportion of females to be hiring managers (an empirical question deserving investigation).
Second, males tend to compete with each other (as rams butting heads). A male hiring manager is likely to see a prospective male employee as competition. He may be unwilling to hire a male that is “too†qualified for fear of losing his own position to him at some point in the future. He may be less likely to view a qualified female in this way. Alternatively, he may be more likely to hire an attractive female, especially if the company does not have strong (and enforced) policies against dating co-workers (this is statistically testable given the right dataset).
I acknowledge that the biases described above are still sexist and, in some cases, against females even while benefiting them in terms of employment. For example, a male hiring a female to increase his chances of sleeping with her is still sexist against her even though she gets the job.
So, there is reason to believe that certain companies would have a bias toward hiring women (while there may be others who hold the opposite bias). It would be interesting to identify which factors (size, demographics, policies) contribute to these biases, but I doubt the data exists or would be made available for free.
I acknowledge that the biases described above are still sexist and possibly sexist toward women even while benefiting them in terms of employment.
The empirical reality on the ground is that as you go up the corporate food chain there are fewer and fewer women (something like 3% of CEOs are women), and women as a whole make less than men for the same work. There may well be countervailing factors like those you mention–but statistically they can’t represent a bias in *favor* of women, just aspects that make the bias *against* women less severe than it otherwise might be.
But this is largely due to a disproportion of females voluntarily cutting their career short in order to raise a family. As you go up the corporate food chain, there are also fewer young people. The most successful females I know in business are old and single, and the most successful males I know in business are old and married.
While this may only be anecdotal, I think that it indicates that females face a very different cost structure than males when it comes to choosing to raise a family and/or pursue a career. This difference in costs affects the demographics of business leaders, but that is different than discrimination.
I was not suggesting that there is an aggregate bias toward women in general (clearly there isn’t), but I suspect that certain firms do have a bias toward hiring women, especially at the entry level. A female may get paid less for doing the same work (unfair), but I suspect that females are also more likely to be hired for the same position as males (also unfair) given the same qualifications. The former injustice is very substantiated in the literature. The latter is just a suspicion, but it deserves investigation.
This is an investigation that will have to be carried out by someone with more resources than I. I don’t even have access to this related article (http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a785833040).