Eilene Zimmerman* says that gender stereotypes often make women feel they are not smart enough or qualified enough to climb the career ladder.
Photo: Jonathan Hoxmark
Conversations about the gender gap are usually focused on dollars and cents, because women still earn 80 cents for every dollar a man makes.
Yet the gap is wider than that and encompasses more than just wages.
A new report from the compensation data company PayScale found that in 2019 women remain less likely than men to hold high-level, high-paying jobs; they also move up to management at a slower pace than their male counterparts.
The report was based on surveys of nearly two million people and concluded that women in the workforce are “often undervalued for the work they do”.
Even in technology, where the wage gap is significantly narrower than it is overall — 3 per cent, according to a recent report from Hired, a job search platform for the tech industry — 65 per cent of women say they’ve been discriminated against because of their gender.
Being undervalued has led to women being underrepresented in management positions, in C-suites and on corporate boards.
Although the causes of this disparity are numerous and often complex, one of the most significant is gender stereotypes.
“We definitely socialise our girls to be perfect and we socialise our boys to be brave,” said Reshma Saujani, founder and CEO of Girls Who Code, a nonprofit that aims to increase the number of women working in computer science.
Ms Saujani, also the author of Brave, Not Perfect was speaking at the recent New Rules Summit in Brooklyn, a conference on women and leadership hosted by The New York Times.
“We raise our boys to be risk-takers, to be fearless,” she said.
“And when boys become men they ask for outsize raises, they ask for promotions they’re not qualified for, they launch start-ups with abandon.”
“Different case for us.”
Many influential psychological theories of gender and power underscore the central role stereotypes play in keeping women from attaining leadership positions.
Those stereotypes often make women feel they aren’t smart enough, qualified enough — perfect enough, essentially — to climb the career ladder.
And we unwittingly perpetuate these gender stereotypes, and the resulting psychological barriers they create, in the ways we socialise our children, Ms Saujani said.
“So, if women are waiting to be perfect to lead,” she said, “we’ll never close the leadership gap.”
And that gap is not narrowing.
Women in senior leadership positions are dramatically outnumbered by men, according to a 2018 report on women in the workplace from McKinsey & Company that found only about one in five C-suite leaders is a woman.
Yet when women propel themselves toward senior leadership positions it can backfire, said Alicia Menendez, who shared the stage with Ms Saujani.
She is the author of the forthcoming book The Likeability Trap.
Women often question whether or not they are “good enough” professionally, Ms Menendez said, but the question could also be “do other people think I am good enough?”.
When she began researching her book, Ms Menendez imagined that professional women who didn’t care whether they were well-liked were “living their best lives and marching to the beat of their own drummer”.
But the reality, she said, was that they, too, “pay a price for being brazenly themselves, especially women who are ambitious and strive to lead”.
“And that often happens in the early part of a woman’s career.”
These women start out confident and eager, with lots of new ideas, but soon learn that others see something wrong with the way they conduct themselves.
“She is either too soft, too warm, not seen in the eyes of other people as a leader, or too strong, too assertive, too aggressive, too much,” Ms Menendez said.
“The problem is not that she’s doing it wrong, it’s that it’s nearly impossible for a woman who strives to lead to do it right.”
One way forward, she posited, is to shift the focus from how women work to the quality of their work.
Another may be to strive to be the kind of leader others want to follow, not necessarily “like”.
Robin Ely, a Professor at Harvard Business School and the Faculty Chairwoman of the School’s Gender Initiative, said female leaders can navigate the likeability trap by having a clear purpose — one in which those around them are also invested — and by creating conditions that allow others to rise and thrive in service of that shared purpose.
“That’s not to say you won’t experience the competence and likeability trade-off,” Professor Ely said.
“But you have a better shot at making your way through the gender stereotypes if you focus on your purpose as a leader and making sure it is a purpose in which others are also invested.”
* Eilene Zimmerman is a journalist. She tweets at @eilenez and her website is eilenezimmerman.com.
This article first appeared at www.nytimes.com.
