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

[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.