The double bind, yet again

[astra_nomer]

I can't recall if I ever got around to posting a review of the book "Women Don't Ask" by Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever. It's very good reading, looking into how women are conditioned to avoid negotiation, and end up losing out because of it. It's a strong driving force behind the gender pay gap.

One would think that the solution would be to encourage women to stand up for themselves, be more assertive, and go out of their way to get what they want. But you'd be wrong.

This article from today's Post refers to a new study that shows that when women do ask for more, they get penalized for it. This conclusion shouldn't be terribly shocking - it's the same old saw about assertive women being perceived as bitches, even though the exact same behavior in men is not only accepted, but rewarded. However, it certainly helps explain why women are reluctant to ask for more in the first place.

It's evidence like this that shows that it's not women's fault that we aren't getting ahead - there are serious cultural hurdles that we need to overcome in order to be successful.

Comments

[capsicumanuum.livejournal.com]

Things like that depress me so much.

I know I lost out on one job offer because they asked me how much I expected to be offered. I told them "Graduates from my year with my degree are currently earning $N. Students graduating this year are being offered between $Y-$Z, according to the careers office at my university. I would be happy with an offer anywhere between $Y-$N." I wasn't made an offer, and I was unofficially told by a friend who works there that I had bid out too high. But I know for a fact that other (male) freshouts had been offered salaries well within the range I had asked for.

::sigh::

[astra-nomer.livejournal.com]

That's so uncool. You'd think that having statistics on salaries like that on hand would work in your favor, but apparently not. My condolences.

[capsicumanuum.livejournal.com]

Yeah. Heaven forbid a woman actually apply statistics and logic to a problem. I wonder if they expect female engineers to build circuits based on feelings instead of empirical data.

I shouldn't have been surprised. In this company of 50 employees, the only woman was their secretary, who, I kid you not, brought coffee in to the technical leads. She even knew how much sugar and milk each person liked. Honestly, given the number of "Heh heh, we saw Bill naked in the gym locker room. Heh heh" jokes I heard when I interviewed, I probably didn't want to work for them anyway.

[nuclearpolymer.livejournal.com]

Although some of the women we know who have gotten jobs lately have negotiated, and gotten stuff. So it does seem that asking can work in some places.

[astra-nomer.livejournal.com]

What said anonymous below. The problem that this article brings up is that even when women do manage to successfully negotiate, it can backfire on them by coloring future interactions.

[astra-nomer.livejournal.com]

Err, "What anonymous said below..."

[(Anonymous)]

It's not that asking didn't work. People were able to negotiate for better salaries, but that negotiation was held against them (in terms of the person in power not wanting to work with the person who had negotiated). This was much more the case with women negotiating with men.

[lokiect.livejournal.com]

oh, that bit at the end of the article is interesting, that women always hold negotiating against you while men will reward men for it. I think it's kind of funny, but it almost sounds a little boys-club-ish or something. I mean, you could look at it the other way and say that the women aren't lacking assertiveness, the men are just spoiled ;9 (and man, I didn't phrase that well at all. hm..)

[astra-nomer.livejournal.com]

My opinion is that it IS all a boys' club - whether it's the business world or academia, these structures were set up by and made for men.

Maybe the phrase you're looking for is that men have a greater sense of entitlement?

[lokiect.livejournal.com]

I just get this image of high-power meetings in a tree house. But then, that's what golf courses are for. it's kind of like reverting to little boys playing in mud trying to not get caught by mom.

[dcltdw]

oh, that bit at the end of the article is interesting, that women always hold negotiating against you while men will reward men for it.

Where do you see that? I saw that men and women were both penalized for being assertive, and that women were penalized at 2x the rate of men.

[capsicumanuum.livejournal.com]

It said that a female decision maker will hold negotiation against the applicant, regardless of the applicant's gender, but that male decision makers held negotiating against the applicant when the applicant is female at a much higher rate (but did not quantify that rate) than when the applicant is male.

""What we found across all the studies is men were always less willing to work with a woman who had attempted to negotiate than with a woman who did not," Bowles said. "They always preferred to work with a woman who stayed mum. But it made no difference to the men whether a guy had chosen to negotiate or not.""

. . .

"A new group of 285 volunteers were again asked whether they would be willing to work with the candidates after viewing the videos. Men tended to rule against women who negotiated but were less likely to penalize men; women tended to penalize both men and women who negotiated, and preferred applicants who did not ask for more."

[dcltdw]

Paragraph above the one you quoted says twice the rate for via-paper events.

Neither says that men are rewarded for engaging in salary negotiation.

[capsicumanuum.livejournal.com]

Paragraph above the one you quoted says twice the rate for via-paper events.

Sure. But you asked about where it said that female decision-makers behave differently from male decision makers.

Neither says that men are rewarded for engaging in salary negotiation.

I didn't say they were. Although one could easily argue, if they wanted to be pedantic, that receiving better salaries and bigger raises counts as a 'reward.'

[dcltdw]

Lokie was asserting that men are rewarded for being aggressive. I was trying to figure out if I was missing something, because her assertion is, I believe, not supported by the article.

I'll agree with your pedantic point, including that it's pedantic. ;)

[astra-nomer.livejournal.com]

I see it this way: men are rewarded in that they get what they want without penalties. Women not only have a tougher time negotiating in the first place (this assertion is not the subject of the article, but is addressed in "Women Don't Ask") and then suffer again in future negotiations.

It's a matter of semantics - you can say women are penalized or men are rewarded, but in the end it comes to the same thing.

[dcltdw]

It's a matter of semantics - you can say women are penalized or men are rewarded, but in the end it comes to the same thing.

Guy 1 interviews for a job, gets an offer, accepts it.

Guy 2 interviews for a job, gets an offer, counterproposes, accepts higher pay, suffers no consequences.

To me, "in the end it comes to the same thing" is false for Guy 1.

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

To me, "in the end it comes to the same thing" is false for Guy 1.

Really? Guy 1 is not aggressive, Guy 2 is. Guy 2 is rewarded for his aggression with the higher pay.

Sure, Guy 1 isn't being rewarded, but it was a logical conditional. He didn't X, therefore he doesn't Y.

[twe.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I thought the interesting tidbit was that men hold negotiating against women but not men, whereas women just hold it against everyone equally. Too bad there aren't more women in higher positions.

[dcltdw]

What do you think are the cultural factors that lead to the behaviors as described in the studies?

[astra-nomer.livejournal.com]

Is it not obvious?

Women are conditioned from a very early age not to be aggressive, but rather look pretty and hope that someone will notice. Take your average children's fairy tale - Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White - they all involve women being passive, even unconscious, while the men do all the work to get to them.

Men are expected to put themselves forward and do whatever it takes to get what they want. If women do the same, they are called bitchy or bossy - women are expected to be subservient, especially to men.

Haven't you ever been to a family gathering where all the women are in the kitchen preparing food while the men are in the living room, watching TV and eating, never lifting a finger to help? Those attitudes get carried over into the business world, too, intentionally or not.

[dcltdw]

Oh, hardly obvious. Sure, there are the things you point out, but I very much doubt that fairy tales, by themselves, have that much of an influence on kids.

Now, the gathering you describe, that I can imagine, but rarely see.

---

Part of what I mean by "hardly obvious" is that I think it's easy to oversimplify. "Never lifting a finger to help" is one way to oversimplify. "Being bossed out of the kitchen" is another. I think both are equally absurd.

Put another way, I think your original post -- which was good -- did not oversimplify. It didn't say "men are evil and just want to oppress women". No, it said, "in this specific manner, women are getting hosed". And well, awareness of the problem is the first step.

So I'm trying to reach what I think is step two, and figure out how exactly we got here. This is why I'm resistant to (what sounds to me like) overly simple answers.

[astra-nomer.livejournal.com]

I think fairy tales and children's stories have a greater effect than you think.

My point is that the cultural influences that define gender roles are all around us, to the point that often we don't even notice them until they are called out. The family gathering scenario was perhaps too obvious.

It really wasn't so long ago that gender roles were very explicit - men were supposed to go to work, while women stayed at home, barefoot and pregnant, to throw in an extreme oversimplification. But you get my drift. Men were supposed to be competitive go-getters. Women were supposed to be meek and submissive and obey their husbands. However far we've come today, a lot of those attitudes still persist.

I think that I interpreted your question as being, "gee, I have no idea why men and women wouldn't be treated equally," as opposed to "wow, we ought to get to the root of the problem and come up with a solution," so forgive me if I came off a little harsh.
It's an insidious cultural problem, and the answers to it aren't simple, I agree.

[dcltdw]

I think that I interpreted your question as being, "gee, I have no idea why men and women wouldn't be treated equally," as opposed to "wow, we ought to get to the root of the problem and come up with a solution," so forgive me if I came off a little harsh.

Well, I like to think that I'm not a total idiot, true.

It's an insidious cultural problem, and the answers to it aren't simple, I agree.

*nod* That's my point. "Now what?" It's one thing to raise awareness, and certainly, that's step one. But as the other sub-thread demonstrates, it's easy to get into summary generalizations that distort (all men belong to a boys club, "men are just spoiled", "men have a greater sense of entitlement") rather than clarify the problem space.

Well, okay, I'm pretty bad at summary generalizations myself. No harm, no foul.

But pointing out 1 or 2 ancedotes doesn't particularly help. I mean, sure, it's illuminating to someone who's never thought about the problem, but I'm trying to delve a little deeper here.

[astra-nomer.livejournal.com]

See, I think raising awareness ought to go a long way just by itself. I say "ought to" because I like to believe that most people aren't assholes and aren't purposely trying to discriminate against women. By raising awareness about the unconscious ways that biases act against women, one hopes that people become more conscious of their actions and work harder to be more egalitarian.

However, I do realize that this is a pretty rosy-eyed view of the world. It's one thing to be aware of unconscious bias, and another thing to actively work against it. There are many who will deny that unconscious bias even exists or think that they aren't part of the problem. Also, there are some real assholes out there who do actively discriminate.

Me, I'd like to thwack people over the head. But that's a lot of people to thwack. And, as it turns out, thwacking is a poor negotiating tool, however fun it might be.

[capsicumanuum.livejournal.com]

The problem is that a single fairy tale is kinda irrelevant. Any single epsilon is insignificant. But if you add up a thousand epsilons, you end up with something that is grotesquely distorted from nominal. (See also, "tolerance analysis" for how this works in engineering disciplines. The phrase that is often used in sociology is "death by a thousand paper cuts" or the "leaking balloon".)

The problem with both "Never lifting a finger to help" and "being bossed out of the kitchen" is that both of these explanations look at symptoms. The symptom is that at Thanksgiving, all the men are in the living room watching the football game and all the women are in the kitchen cooking. What any individual actor does in this scenario is irrelevant. What is relevant are the systemic social factors that make this scenario damn near inevitable in the overwhelming majority of American homes. Those factors are often completely opaque to the individual woman who compains about her jackass husband guzzling beer with the boys instead of helping or to the individual man who feels put upon and self righteous that the gossipy harpies chased him out of the kitchen.

So it's not just the fairy tale, although Sleeping Beauty is a rather dramatic example of the average girl experience. It's the fact that adults by and large expect girls to be quiet, passive, play imaginary games, play dressup, etc etc. and expect boys to play sports, roughhouse with one another, be competitive in school. Kids pick up on their parents subtle cues as to how Mommy and Daddy want them to behave. There is a ton of research done in this field, and frankly, I tend to think that intelligent educated males have enough resources to go look up the research themselves instead of expecting it to spoon fed to them. If, that is, they actually mean it when they say they want to learn about sexism and male privilege in our society and what they can do to eliminate it.

[gigglefest.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I started reading some of the relevant articles online recently when I was considering negotiation. I hadn't thought about this question at all before. Something that just occurred to me though (and this is completely unfounded, just a thought): I wonder if this is sort of like management? How women don't necessarily do well when they try to just adopt men's managerial tactics outright, but can manage quite well when given the same goals ("get these people under you to produce", or whatever) and allowed to do that their own way? The ordering around vs. relational thing.

Now, I know part of women's hesitation to negotiate is that relational thing. So maybe this doesn't hold at all. But I wonder if there are better and worse ways for any particular individual to negotiate, given their preferred ways of dealing/working with people.