Women often have to choose between having children or not maximizing their career potential. According to fairly common ethical code, they cannot have both because they find it immoral to raise kids without devoting so many resources to them that their career suffers (whether that means leaving the work force or making other sub-optimal career choices because of the kids. Men with the exact same ethical code don’t have to make that choice: they can have both. That’s not sexism on the part of employers, but it’s structural sexism.
Because for most women the response to sexual harassment is to change jobs. Sometimes they have to because they get no support when they do complain, or the “support” they get is a transfer. Other times, they just leave. Now, maybe sometimes those jobs work out: it can certainly happen. But an unplanned career move based on something like seems likely to be a bad thing for your career, on the balance.
That doesn’t cover the situation where all the managers make the same, yes, but 5 men are promoted to management for every woman because “Mary” seems bitchy and “William” is so assertive. And my impression was that the general agreement was that about 5% of the difference was attributable to sexism. You comfortable with a 5% pay cut? That’s not negligible.
Huh? A simple look? It is only the focus of her entire career:
Your first study is done in a lab and not looking at real world data. That makes it suggestive but not necessarily an accurate portrayal of what happens in the workplace.
I worked for a multinational corporation and their HR department was tasked with making sure reviews and pay structure was free of sexism. Managers were on notice to be aware of this when dealing with employees and deciding on pay raises. Indeed where possible pay raises were a fixed system imposed by the company. Managers simply did not have a lot of latitude (mostly you got a raise as specified by the corporation or you didn’t).
It is not a perfect system and there are always some jerks in such a big place but it was something they sought to address. And of course not all places of work have this but I am willing to bet most places with an HR department do this ins some fashion. The companies do not want to find themselves in court and/or the news over something like this.
That structural sexism is being changed. Perhaps not as fast as you’d like but then these things rarely go fast. When I got married my wife and I had numerous and lengthy discussions about how we’d run the household if we had children. It was far from a foregone conclusion that she’d be the one who stayed home. I think those conversations among young couples is the norm today and not the exception precisely because women now have much greater opportunity in the workforce than they did in, say, 1950.
And again, as noted, a majority of women, given the choice, would rather stay home today and be a homemaker than work at a job.
The glass ceiling is real and yes, women have to struggle in management to be tough but not “bitchy”. It is a difficult problem. Anecdotally at my first job I had two female managers overseeing me. One was bitchy and one was outstanding. To this day the good one remains, far and away, the best boss I ever had. She was tough, firm and fair and somehow managed it all without seeming “bitchy”.
That said men, instead of being called “bitchy” are assholes instead and I have worked for a LOT of them. Somehow we are more ok with that than a bitchy female boss (which to me just means a woman being an asshole instead of a man).
I should have stated it differently. I’ll try again: Goldin has taken a complex situation and simplified it for the targeted audience. And she’s not wrong. It’s just not the entire picture.
Of course it’s done “in a lab.” That doesn’t invalidate it; it makes it possible to control variables that might make taint the study or make interpretation difficult. There have been several “lab” studies that have shown that applicants who have names that are associated with African-Americans are less likely to get interviews. In the “real world,” it’s hard to control all aspects of data, so someone might argue that the candidates had different educational backgrounds or better references. What IS true is that more studies are needed, which doesn’t invalidate this study. It does strongly suggest there are subtle, unconscious biases that come into play, biases HR departments don’t yet recognize.
How is this addressed in terms of the subtle sexism in performance reviews? Are manager’s evaluations screened to determine if they’re making suggestions about personality or behavior any more or less frequently in the evaluations of one gender more than another? A single evaluation won’t show this, which is why an employee is less likely to take an employer to court. Since liability is what is the chief concern of HR departments, this is the issue that’s unlikely to be on their radar. This is why it’s more difficult to deal with this form of bias, which is often unconscious, than with more obvious forms.
A lot of men wish they had a choice, any choice. My father sat on a bullshit communter train for 35 years to keep the family fed and housed.
My mother chose to work full time, or to work part time, or to look after her children full time, to have someone look after the children some of the time, etc, etc, etc.
Meanwhile, my father still sat on the bullshit commuter train, compromising his values every day in a bullshit work hierarchy.