Benjamin Kessler, Clarissa Cortland and Zoe Kinias* say interventions designed to increase women’s cultural fit can create a better working environment for everyone.
Photo: Mark Gabrenya
Gender imbalance in the workplace is not confined to the gender pay gap or the number of women vs. men in senior leadership positions.
It also has to do with subtler yet deeper cultural cues about who belongs and who doesn’t.
Expected to “prove themselves” within a system that holds them to double standards, women often justifiably feel set up to fail.
The underutilisation and departure of valuable female talent come at a heavy cost to employers.
The second annual Women at Work conference, held in March in Singapore, featured a session of research talks titled “Visibility & Fit”, which explored actions organisations can take to address this problem.
Visual representation
Biased beliefs about what professional roles women fit are deeply embedded in decision-making.
UCLA Professor Kerri L. Johnson presented findings from her research on visual representation and gender fit.
Johnson focused primarily on STEM fields, where stable and well-paid jobs are expected to be increasingly concentrated in the coming years, and where women are dramatically underrepresented around the world.
When Johnson and her team showed study participants images of men and women and asked which were likely to be in a STEM career, men were assumed far more often to have STEM careers.
This confirmed the prevalence of the assumption that STEM is a place for men.
Beyond this, there is a more surprising finding.
When Johnson’s team displayed faces of men and women that ranged widely in gender typicality, or the extent to which they looked masculine or feminine, she found that the masculinity or femininity of the face significantly predicted perceived suitability for STEM within genders as well.
More masculine-looking men were judged more likely to work and succeed in STEM than men with less masculine appearance.
Women with very feminine faces were seen as less STEM-worthy than those with less feminine facial features.
For organisations, having a diverse group of role models — in terms of gender, appearance and occupational role — can revise people’s automatic assumptions and associations regarding gender and competence.
Improving quotas
Numerical representation is obviously crucial as well.
Gender diversity in currently male-dominated fields and top management will eventually become normalised when it is more common.
That is one argument for gender quotas.
Through quotas, advocates hope to create opportunities for women aspiring to lead and also encourage women to aim higher than they otherwise would.
However, Christa Nater, a PhD candidate at the University of Bern, has found that the way quotas work is not that simple.
Nater conducted a study in which male and female management students read one of four different versions of mock job ads for leadership positions.
One ad didn’t mention gender.
Another described a policy of preferential hiring with a 40 per cent gender quota.
One ad explicitly invited “qualified women” to apply.
A fourth ad mentioned preferential policies for “equally qualified women” with no quota.
Only this last ad changed how women saw themselves in relation to the position advertised.
The authors concluded that granting women preferential treatment in hiring works best when requirements other than gender are also emphasised.
When women feel that their gender may simply be an additional asset on top of their skills and abilities, rather than (as is usually the case) a liability, they can be more motivated to strive for leadership positions.
The authors also noted that when women are made to feel that their gender constitutes the core of their advantage — as can be the danger with quotas — the encouragement effect was basically nil.
The answer, Nater said, is not to dispense with quotas, but rather to ensure that qualifications and performance are communicated as crucial selection criteria, especially when quotas or similar mandates are implemented.
For example, one way to effectively signal the qualifications of women would be to explicitly communicate the use of “merit-based quotas”.
Working from home
As workplaces continue to evolve, the need for knowledge workers to come into the office every day is increasingly scrutinised.
Yet a certain amount of conspicuous facetime is still considered essential for aspiring leaders.
For women, who even in relatively egalitarian contexts are doing most of the management of the home, housework and childcare, this obligation creates constant tensions between work and family life.
Some organisations have tried to address the problem by introducing flexible working options, such as job sharing, compressed work-weeks and reduced working hours with pro-rated pay.
But research shows that women (and it is almost solely women) who adopt flexi-work suffer significant career penalties for appearing to back away from work commitments.
Evidence suggests working women are aware of this and often feel compelled to reject flexi-work as a consequence.
Professor Eliot Sherman of the London Business School recently explored a potential alternative.
Partnering with a life sciences company based in the UK, he launched a four-week experiment whereby employees could work remotely as much as they wanted during randomly assigned weeks.
Unlike formalised flexi-work, men and women (both parents and non-parents) chose to work remotely about two days per week.
According to surveys completed by all employees after each week, working from home had no effect on the total number of hours worked, compared to in-office weeks.
However, the vast majority of employees felt that they were more productive when they were allowed to work remotely at their discretion.
This effect was largest for mothers, who also experienced a meaningful reduction in conflict between work and family demands.
According to employees that Sherman subsequently interviewed, working from home helped mainly by restoring time that would otherwise be spent commuting (many mothers’ commutes are lengthened by school pick-ups and drop-offs), avoiding the social distractions that are rife in office environments, and allowing people to catch up on sleep.
These interviews also suggested that employees did not wish to work remotely for more than a few days per week, due to concerns about social isolation.
With broad appeal and especially positive impacts for working mothers, the success of discretionary remote working in Sherman’s context suggests that solutions that improve gender balance can also improve working lives for everyone.
Interventions to explore
The above research points to some possible interventions for resolving conflicts between women’s gender and working identities, so that they can fully contribute to their organisations and receive commensurate recognition.
The big takeaway is that organisations would benefit by implementing interventions that target women’s obstacles and concerns, without over-emphasising gender in ways that call attention to gender differences or solidify gender stereotypes.
* Benjamin Kessler is the Managing Editor of INSEAD Knowledge published by the Institut Européen d’Administration des Affaires also known as the European Institute of Business Administration. Clarissa Cortland is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at INSEAD and Zoe Kinias is an Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour and the Academic Director of INSEAD’s Gender Initiative.
This article first appeared at knowledge.insead.edu.
