Never the earner, always the bride: How male breadwinners view women in the workplace

Across a series of studies, a new article demonstrates that married men who have a more traditional 'breadwinner role' at home tend to have more negative views on women in the workplace.

Across their studies, Sreedhari Desai, Dolly Chugh and Arthur Brief defined traditional marriages as those where the wife was not employed, contrasted with couples that were dual-earning.  Firstly they employed data from US national surveys. In the first data set - 282 married men in 1996 - those in more traditional marriages showed some discomfort with a gender-mixed workplace, being more likely to disagree with statements such as 'if a mother chooses to work, it doesn't hurt the child.' Does this abstract opinion dissolve when it meets the reality of the workplace? The second dataset from a 2002 survey suggests it does not, as of the 89 men analysed, traditionalists were less likely to see their workplace as running smoothly when it had a higher composition of women.

Turning to experimental work, Desai's team showed that compared to those in a dual-earning marriage, traditionally married undergraduate students rated recruitment literature intended to attract job applicants as less effective when it contained cues of high female involvement in the company, such as all-female (vs all-male) recruiter names and an equal opportunity reference that included the note 'For example, representation of women on our board of directors far exceeds the average representation of women in Fortune 500 companies.'

The next experiment found managers just as susceptible; when traditionally married, managers were less likely to recommend a fictional candidate for an MBA program if they were a woman. This is noteworthy because managers wield substantial influence, Interestingly, dual earners as a group gave higher ratings to the female than the male applicant.

Returning to survey data, the researchers were able to gather data across two data points of the British Household Panel Survey. 304 men were surveyed in 1991 prior to marriage, and 1993 following marriage, using the same scale as study one used on attitude to women in the workplace. Desai's team didn't find these attitudes to predict the marriage structure men ended up in - other factors appear to have more real influence, with older and more educated men more likely to end up in one-income marriages (this may reflect opportunity rather than preference). But the type of marriage did affect subsequent attitudes to women at work, with a traditional set-up leading to less sympathy for women being represented in the workplace.

This last study gives the strongest evidence of causality in this relationship. So why might marriage be shaping these attitudes? Status construction theory suggests that we tend to use our own social conditions to extrapolate how the world works more generally. If every day you engage in work duties while your wife focuses on home life, not only are you incentivised to believe that this is a sensible division of labour, but increasingly it will seem true to you, as your differential experiences give you more work-related resources such as contacts, influence, knowledge and competence. This can lead to the false conclusion that 'men are just more suited to work.'

Desai emphasises that the bulk of their studies don't speak to this causality argument and that more research is needed. Also, we should bear in mind that some of the survey data is now fairly odl, and attitudes may have shifted somewhat. However, the repeated finding is clear: men in traditional marriages have a smaller appetite for women-heavy workforces. The researchers conclude that as well as seeking a diverse workforce, where traditional views do not crowd out other perspectives, attention could be given to "the challenging psychological position that men in traditional marriages face when alternating between their two daily realities", and find ways to illustrate to these people that their personal life decisions may be driving their workplace attitudes, possibly in an unconscious fashion.

Desai, S., Chugh, D., & Brief, A. (2014). The Implications of Marriage Structure for Men's Workplace Attitudes, Beliefs, and Behaviors toward Women Administrative Science Quarterly DOI: 10.1177/0001839214528704

Further reading:

Bolzendahl, C. I., and Myers, D. J (2004). Feminist attitudes and support for gender equality: Opinion change in women and men, 1974–1998. Social Forces, 83: 759–789.

Why we flirt at work: the performance perspective

When we think about sexual behaviour in the workplace, it's easy to conjure up the Christmas-party fling or the clandestine affair; or, if we're in a more sober mood, we might turn to the topic of sexual harassment. Harassment and office romance are also the focus of most of the research in this area. Yet workplace sexual behaviour comes in many flavours, according to a new paper by Marla Baskerville Watkins and colleagues.

The article is interested in how the workplace contains sexual performances, meaning the act of presenting yourself to others in a way that includes a sexual component. Just like a pop concert or piece of theatre, an effective performance is something that has value for its intended audience. The value of a sexual performance can be implicit - such as when a flirtation promises the possibility of something more - but can also be self-contained, such as a flirtation enjoyed simply because flirtation is enjoyable.

The authors emphasise that while some performances snowball into torrid affairs, the vast majority may just bubble along as the froth on top of everyday social interactions. Their purpose, Watkins argues, is ingratiation – getting another party on-side. But the purpose and methods may be quite different for men and women. Women's sexual resources have a high value, so common performances involve emphasising these by adjusting dress and other aspects of appearance. Meanwhile, men tend to enact sexual performance through chivalry and giving favours. Both men and women tend to use a third type of performance, other-enhancing, which involves compliments and raising the status of the other party.

Watkins and her co-authors suggest the general male goal is to maximise the exchange of sexual performances – flirt for the chance of more flirting - whereas women act more tactically to redress power imbalance. For instance, women working in highly masculine industries adopt more instrumental forms of sexuality.

But sexual performances aren't a fail-safe strategy.  The existing literature on workplace ingratiation shows how behaviours  perceived as excessive and insincere end up hurting the performer's status. Here, this may involve being pigeonholed as 'that kind of girl', or for a particularly clumsy man, spill over into harassing behaviour. The paper argues that we shouldn't act as though sexual behaviour in the workplace is binary – you're not doing it or you are doing it wrong – but that there is a continuum of unremarkable behaviour filling in the gaps. A woman judged for being a sexual operator may only be magnifying what her co-workers – women and men – are already doing in moderation.

The authors are aware that their analysis is heteronormative – that is, it focuses on heterosexual norms and interactions – and point out that sadly in many environments sexual performance towards people of the same gender is tacitly or actively discouraged, meaning that it is fairly invisible in the literature and would benefit from more active research.

There may be a benefit to sexual energy at work, and in any case it would be hard to eliminate it entirely: “the reality is that humans are sexual beings and that simply joining an organization does not magically extinguish their desire to express their sexuality.” Rather than taking a zero-tolerance approach, Watkins instead recommends ruling only on behaviours that are clearly out of bounds and letting local culture and individual judgment sort out the subtleties.

Marla Baskerville Watkins, Alexis Nicole Smith, & Karl Aquino (2013). The Use and Consequences of Strategic Sexual Performances The Academy of Management Perspectives, 27 (3), 173-186 DOI: 10.5465/amp.2010.0109

Further reading:
Hearn, J., & Parkin, W. (1995). Sex at work: The power and paradox of organization sexuality. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
 

Women leaders don't get a free pass for acting tentatively - but men do

Women seeking leadership have historically been hampered by stereotypical beliefs that they don't - and shouldn't - behave actively, confidently, with agency. Leaders need to be agentic, shaping an organisation toward a desired vision. But traditional gender roles demand that women take a more nurturing, passive stance, and when they do not, as copious research from the 1980s and 1990s found, they are met with disapproval.

However, society has changed over the decades, to the extent that agency in female leaders may no longer be an impediment. However, researchers Renata Bongiorno, Paul Bain and Barbara David suspected that the lifting of this barrier may reveal another, more subtle one for women leaders: that non-agentic behaviour is unfairly punished.

Why might this be? Real-life demonstrations that women can demonstrate agentic behaviour enter into culture (and are propagated through media and narratives) and change baseline beliefs. But these successes may be considered curious exceptions, with the associative link between 'leader' and 'male' still largely intact. This means that women may be considered as possible leaders, but scrutinised much more carefully for any evidence of non-leadership behaviour - scrutiny that men, as 'leaders-in-waiting' - may escape. There already exists some evidence that men have a freer hand in leadership - they receive positive endorsements for a wider range of leadership styles than female leaders do.

Bongiorno and her colleagues' first study presented students with manuscripts that detailed a speech on action on climate change. In a first condition the speech was designed to be assertive, with unapologetic speech and italicised components to denote emphasis. The other was tentative, containing hedges, hesitations and qualifiers. The speech was attributed to a male or female politician, who participants then rated in terms of likeability, perceived influence and agency. After controlling for communality (a measure of the speaker's warmth and sensitivity), the sample of 167 partcipants rated the male politician's likeability and influence the same regardless of the agency of his speech. But the female politician was rated more poorly on both measures when her speech was tentative rather than assertive. When acting assertively, the male and female leaders were rated the same way, but when the male example became tentative, he received a free pass that his female counterpart didn't.

A second study replicated this using audio speeches and a topic more personally relevant to their student sample, tuition fees. The only difference in findings was that in this case the assertive female leader was rated as even more likeable than the male one. My one nit to pick with this is that  having the audio produced by four different actors (two men, two women) introduces a lot of variance. Perhaps the agentic and non-agentic women have vocal attributes that really set them apart in terms of likeability, whereas the men were much of a muchness.

As the authors note, this is a subtle form of prejudice. It is legitimate to hold your leaders to certain standards of agency - it is part of the job. But observers – both men and women in this study – are far more forgiving of men when their behaviours deviate from this. We still need to understand why, or the many whys: there may be unfairly high expectations that women demonstrate 'female capability', whereas others may use this as a safe outlet to express sexism. And while leadership is still dominated by men, the curiosity factor of female leadership may draw attention and disproportionate scrutiny. It's on us to be aware that successful leaders can operate in many different ways, whether they are male or female. 

Bongiorno R, Bain PG, & David B (2013). If you're going to be a leader, at least act like it! Prejudice towards women who are tentative in leader roles. The British journal of social psychology / the British Psychological Society PMID: 23509967

Do we make too much of workplace conflict between women?

This month, the Women's Business Council released a report revealing that underuse of women's workplace potential costs the economy £160 billion.

As well as structural issues, such as inadequate workplace childcare, psychological factors can also provide obstacles to an unrestricted workplace.  A recent paper by Leah Sheppard and Karl Aquino suggests one may be the tendency to overstate the consequences of female-female workplace conflict.

 There is a pedigree of research into female-female conflict, sometimes framed in terms of the 'Queen Bee', and the data is explained through plausible psychological mechanisms. For instance, social identity theory predicts that when a group has a low status in its social environment its members will partly inherit that status, unless they distance themselves from the group and define themselves by other means.

Men tend to hold higher status roles in organisations, so women are incentivised to minimise identification with their gender, focusing on their non-feminine attributes and distancing themselves from other women. When in a position of power, these attributes are often described in the literature as hallmarks of a 'Queen Bee', and there is interesting research (reported by our Research Digest) on how such an attitude can be the consequence of workplace conditions.

However, Sheppard and Aquino highlight that there is very little data showing behavioural consequences - that women in power are more likely to actually deny positions to other women, for instance. In fact, data from a related field points the opposite way: female mentors with female proteges tend to put in more mentoring effort than men with male ones. And this points to a second critique: the lack of attention to whether male same-sex conflict has a similar incidence or severity. On an evolutionary account,  same-sex competition is likely to be more commonplace for either sex. But it is specifically tensions between women that get communicated as a phenomena, possibly because it is in violation of gender norms – women are supposed to be nurturers – and hence both more salient and judged as more negative.

Sheppard and Aquino looked at this systematically through an online experiment, where an even mix of male and female participants were presented with a single account of a fictional conflict between either two men, two women, or one party of each gender. In their feedback, the 152 participants in the various conditions saw the conflict as comparably bad for the organisation, long-term. However, those in the female-female condition believed it was less likely that the parties would reconcile, and that the personal consequences for each - in terms of satisfaction, emotional identification with the organisation and willingness to stay in role - were also worse. Both effects were statistically significant.

Such perceptions have implications: as the authors note, 'a manager might decide against assigning two female subordinates to a task that requires them to work together if he or she suspects that they cannot set their interpersonal difficulties aside'.  The message to take away is that scientific findings matter, but baselines do too. Research in a vacuum can be counterproductive to understanding the true nature of things, and as things stand it's not clear whether workplace conflict between women deserves a special status in public perception. Most of all, we need research that goes beyond attitudes to what actually happens in the workplace, in all-male relationships as well as all-female.

Sheppard, L., & Aquino, K. (2012). Much Ado About Nothing? Observers' Problematization of Women's Same-Sex Conflict at Work Academy of Management Perspectives, 27 (1), 52-62 DOI: 10.5465/amp.2012.0005

Further reading:
Epstein, C. F. (1980). Women’s attitudes toward other women: Myths and their consequences. American Journal of Psychotherapy, 34(3), 322–333.
 

Are leaders judged more harshly for mistakes that break with gender stereotypes?

We all make mistakes. A recent piece of research investigates how our feelings about leaders are affected when they slip up, and asks whether we are more forgiving when the error is 'to be expected' because of gender stereotypes.

Researchers Christian Thoroughgood, Katina Sawyer and Samuel Hunter produced a series of sets of emails describing how fictional employees perceived their leader. The leader - male or female, in either a masculine (construction) or feminine (nursing) industry - was presented in one of three error conditions. In the first they were revealed to have made three task errors such as badly managing resources. The second involved three relationship errors such as losing their temper, and the final was a 'no error' condition. The 301 student participants, primarily female, rated how competent the leader was at tasks and relationship, and how much they would want to work for them. Thoroughgood's team predicted that women leaders would be judged more harshly when they make a relationship error, and men for task errors, as these violate expectations of where each gender should be competent. In addition, they predicted this would be compounded when working in a same-gendered industry: a female nursing head has no business being bad with people...or so the story goes.

In fact, the results were a little different. Making errors certainly led to lower ratings, with task competence being hit harder by task errors, and vice versa. But the kind of errors that men and women made didn't seem to matter, neither overall nor when effects in the specific industries were examined. They key gender difference that was established was that for both kinds of errors, men received more severe judgements than women, but only in the construction industry conditions. It appears participants have unequal expectations for men and women's competence, holding the highest bar for men operating in a comfort zone environment. It's worth noting that the gender of participants was evaluated as a co-variate in the analysis, ensuring that the preponderance of women didn't lead to systematic bias.

The authors reflect that the relationship/task errors could have been more sharply gendered; for instance, accurate email planning (a task error) may be seen equally as a female managerial trait as well as a male one. But on the face of this evidence, people expect men and women to be competent across domains if they want to be seen as a competent, desirable leader.

Christian N. Thoroughgood, Katina B. Sawyer, & Samuel T. Hunter (2012). Real Men Don’t Make Mistakes: Investigating the Effects of Leader Gender, Error Type, and the Occupational Context on Leader Error Perceptions Journal of Business and Psychology DOI: 10.1007/s10869-012-9263-8

How does availability of men in the environment affect women's career focus?

A recent article argues the ratio of men to women in an environment may influence women's pursuit of lucrative careers. Authored by Kristina Durante and colleagues, it begins by describing a correlational finding: women in US states with proportionately fewer men tend to have fewer babies and have them later, tending instead to be in higher-earning jobs. The rest of the article describes a series of experiments with female university students conducted to explore this.

The first experiment asked 89 participants to examine a set of photographs, ostensibly to test their ability to count frequencies of men and women in scenes from the local environment. Depending on the condition, photographs depicted more men, more women, or an equal sex ratio. Participants then rated items describing the importance of various life goals. The researchers found that participants exposed to a high-female sex ratio prioritised career over family goals to a greater extent than those in the other conditions. Perceptions of sex ratio appeared to shape personal priorities.

There are at least two explanations for why this effect exists. One is that sex ratio shapes the labour market, fewer men entailing more employment opportunities for women. The second is that sex ratio shapes a mating market, making finding a partner harder and thus encouraging a different strategy for life security. To differentiate between these, another experiment replicated the previous one using a similar exposure technique and also asked the 58 participants to rate how difficult it would be to acquire a good job or to find a mate (phrased in terms of marriage and dating prospects). Those participants exposed to a high-female ratio were more likely to see mate-finding as tough, but their expectations for the ease of finding a job were similar to their counterparts. Pulling the data into a model, the researchers demonstrated that putting career first was mediated not by their expectations that good work would be easier to find, but that a good mate would be harder to find.

A final study followed the same design, additionally asking participants to rate their self-perceived value to a mate via items such as "I receive many compliments from members of the opposite sex". Durante's team predicted that those who feel they may struggle finding a mate will be most responsive to these mating-market fluctuations, as they are more likely to end up alone. The analysis bore this out: when the environment was framed as containing many women, only those participants who personally felt they had a lower mate value placed a greater emphasis on career.

This article takes evolutionary research on sex ratios into the study of women's career decisions. It would be fascinating to see the same research pointed towards men, who also have desires to produce children and to advance their careers; does the mating market have a similar influence? The evolutionary argument predicts not, as it is based upon the concept of deep-seated divisions of labour based on biological differences. However, it could be that gender-based pay differentials shape this effect, and I wonder how different it would look in a society that had more equal pay than the US.

Durante, Kristina M., Griskevicius, Vladas, Simpson, Jeffry A., Cantú, Stephanie M., & Tybur, Joshua M. (2012). Sex ratio and women's career choice: Does a scarcity of men lead women to choose briefcase over baby? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103 (1), 121-134 DOI: 10.1037/a0027949

The truth about nice guys, mean girls, and pay

Analyses suggest that a personality high in agreeableness is associated with lower earnings. This might seem surprising, given that agreeableness is associated with interpersonal effectiveness, increasingly important in jobs. But at least it helps explain why women experience pay inequality, given that women tend to have warm qualities; if they want to earn more, they better toughen up, right? If this seems reasonable, you'd do well to read on, and appreciate the work of a recent study that seeks to uncover more about why disagreeableness breeds pay, and why the situation for women is rather different.

Timothy Judge, Beth Livingston, and Charlice Hurst investigated the factors influencing pay using three large data sets, each containing data on between 500 and 2000 adults. Each collected personality information using slightly different measures; as each study corroborated the other, I treat this difference as a strength of the paper, as convergent evidence from multiple measures precludes the possibility that the instruments used were generating funky results. In each case, men tended to earn more than women (in one data set this was made explicit as approximately $5,000 less per year), and disagreeable people earned more. However, this mean premium was mostly due to the wage benefit that men received; for women, the premium was much slighter. Across studies, agreeableness made a big difference to male incomes, and a minor one to female ones.

So what makes the mean premium possible? It's not entirely clear - the study investigated some possible reasons such as that disagreeable people find their way into higher status or more complex jobs, but the data didn't support that conclusion. They did find that disagreeable people place more importance on pay and less on communal relationships than others, which sheds light on their priorities but not on how these are achieved. Some possibilities include agreeable people being more prepared to compromise and concede, for example on pay negotiation, or for decision-makers to falsely place warmth and competence as two ends of a continuum (rather than independent factors) and conclude that a people person may be less capable. Highly agreeable men would not only lack those edges, but, as Judge and colleagues point out, are doubly disadvantaged, as they are operating against gender stereotypes by being a soft male. Conversely, the edge that a disagreeable woman gains is blunted by their operating in ways that aren't socially sanctioned. The authors reflect that "exhortations for women not to be nice...might be overblown", and the solutions to gender pay inequality lie foremost with decision-makers.

Perhaps the causality is reversed – well-paid jobs make people less agreeable? There are a few points against this: firstly, the failure to find linkages between job type (such as status) and agreeableness. More convincingly, the investigators ran an additional, experimental study, where 480 student participants made choices in an imaginary scenario as to who they would recommend for a management fast-tract. The pair of candidates only differed according to keywords inserted in the text that speak to the quality of agreeableness, such as modest/immodest. The same pattern emerged – more recommendations for disagreeable people, with a much stronger effect for men than for women. Taken on its own, this suggests that disagreeableness is driving job outcomes, rather than the reverse.

So do nice guy finish poorly, and women last? Well, it depends what matters to you. Judge's third study found that agreeableness - and to a lesser extent, being a woman - was positively associated with life satisfaction, stronger social networks, and community involvement, and negatively associated with stress. Essentially, the disagreeable-man priorities are having exactly the impact you would expect; as the authors conclude, "if disagreeable men win the earnings war, it is a victory that may come at some cost."

Judge, T., Livingston, B., & Hurst, C. (2012). Do nice guys—and gals—really finish last? The joint effects of sex and agreeableness on income. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 102 (2), 390-407 DOI: 10.1037/a0026021

Leadership positions for women are often atop a glass cliff

Back in 2003, Michelle Ryan checked her pigeonhole and found an article from the business section of The Times in 2003, stating that the ‘triumphant march of women into the country’s boardrooms has wreaked havoc’ on companies' performance. This was to be the spark for a line of enquiry that has borne years of fruitful research, and the story began her DOP keynote tour of the 'glass cliff'. The term riffs on the metaphor of the glass ceiling – the invisible limit which prevents women from making it to the top of organisations. The glass cliff is an invisible risk, referring to the experience of women who make it to senior positions, only to discover they are unusually precarious.

Ryan began to perceive the glass cliff by scrutinising the claims of that newspaper article, deposited by an unknown friendly colleague. Historical data comparing 19 women appointed to the Board of Directors with a matched sample showed that appointments of women were indeed associated with slumps in share price, but that the slump preceded the appointment. The article had based its claims on a false assumption of causality, and it seemed instead that women were more likely to be appointed to companies in crisis.

Ryan then used experimental investigations involving hypothetical situations. She asked participants to decide how they would fill a position, such as company finance director, by choosing between two similar candidates who differed in gender. When the position was presented within a stable context – a growing company, a winnable political seat – then the candidates were similarly favoured. However, when the situation was presented as one with a high chance of failure – a company in crisis, or an unwinnable seat – the woman was a far more popular selection. People were even more likely to choose a female youth representative for a festival that was experiencing declining popularity.

Perhaps women are seen as better crisis managers than men? (Ryan quoted Eleanor Roosevelt: ‘women are like teabags. You don’t know how strong they are until you put them in hot water.’) In another study, participants judged that a company in a stable context need a leader who was assertive, competitive, or possessed other traits judged to be stereotypically masculine by other participants in a pre-study phase. Meanwhile, leaders in crisis situations should be understanding, tactful, creative – more stereotypically feminine.

But what is it about crises that women are seen as suited for: taking control and improving performance, for instance? Not so; a follow-up that separated out different aspects of leading in crisis found female traits were only favoured for the purpose of soaking up criticism or enduring negative conditions. And another study showed that when the crisis situation had full support of senior leadership, there was no preference for women to take the role. The data suggests that women are preferred when the situation is not just risky but actively precarious, with likely negative repercussions for the situation and themselves.

What are the consequences for female board members? Well, there is evidence that female CEOs have far shorter tenures, and these may reflect the fact that their positions are often set up to fail. Ryan concluded that in the pursuit of equal opportunity, we shouldn't be misled by the raw numbers of women in leadership positions; the nature of the role matters just as much.

In an interesting extension of her experimental work, Ryan and colleagues collected folk theories for the glass cliff via the BBC website. Women tended to believe that women are singled out for precarious positions, or that they have fewer opportunities and therefore accept riskier positions. The majority of men simply didn’t believe that women are differentially placed on the glass cliff.

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Sample article:

Ryan MK, Haslam SA, Hersby MD, & Bongiorno R (2011). Think crisis-think female: the glass cliff and contextual variation in the think manager-think male stereotype. The Journal of applied psychology, 96 (3), 470-84 PMID: 21171729

Impediments to private sector careers for women in science, engineering, and technology

More than ever, women are taking advanced degrees in SET subjects: science, engineering and technology. Yet a 'leaky pipeline' means women are significantly under-represented at higher levels in academia. What's the experience of those who take their expertise into the private SET sector? A recent study investigates.

Authors Lisa Servon and M Anne Visser surveyed 2,493 women who hold or have held SET management positions in private companies, following up with focus groups. Many women experienced a grind in SET roles, with 8% of the sample working 100-hour weeks, compared to 3% of women in the general workforce. Yet only 9.6% of STEM corporate roles were held by women, worse than the 15.4% in the general workforce. As 41% of junior SET roles in private companies are held by women, this suggests the private pipeline is as leaky as the academic one.

What specific problems are women facing? 23% feel that women are actively held in low regard in their sector, notably in Engineering and Technology. Over half of respondents reported experiencing sexual harassment at work. Balancing work and family life remains a challenge. And a third of the group felt extremely isolated at work: these individuals were 25% more likely to view their career as stalled, presumably because they lacked support systems such as mentors helpful for progression and managing tough times.

Part of the isolation relates to the expectation that a good engineer (scientist, technologist) acts and thinks a certain, often stereotypically male way. One reaction was for women to act more male, even distancing oneself from other women by putting them down or disavowing their work. Another strategy was to find a 'pocket of sanity' in the organisation where being a woman wasn't an impediment to getting on with the job. But such a strategy can undermine career progression: 36% of interviewees reported making lateral job moves, and 29% down-shifted to lower positions at one point. Once a safe space is found, it may feel difficult to leave.

To address these obstacles, Servon and Visser suggest changing organisational culture, developing more diverse career routes and introducing family-friendly policies. Women at the top make a difference too: when women held at least 10% of the top roles, respondents reported higher levels of support and feeling valued. Changes could be of wide benefit as "some factors causing women in management to leave SET careers...may eventually drive men away as well", especially if they disagree that blunt criticism or living in your lab epitomise a functional SET culture.

Servon, L., & Visser, M. (2011). Progress hindered: the retention and advancement of women in science, engineering and technology careers Human Resource Management Journal, 21 (3), 272-284 DOI: 10.1111/j.1748-8583.2010.00152.x

Buying into the idea of 'free choice' makes us less likely to see discrimination

Illustration: Emily Wilkinson, www.mindfulmaps.com

To all our women readers: it's great to be living in a post-discrimination world, right? Right? Is this thing on?

Whatever your view – and regardless of facts such as woman's earnings standing at under 80% of men's - many people seem to feel that way, such as the 53% of Americans in a recent Gallup poll. Nicole Stephens and Cynthia Levine of Northwestern University identify one reason for this: the 'choice framework', a view of the world particularly popular in the US that treats all actions as freely chosen based on our preferences. Seeing life purely in terms of choices can empower individuals, and studies show we can benefit psychologically. But in a new paper to be published in Psychological Science, these researchers explore how it can make us reluctant to see discrimination as a cause of mothers leaving the workforce.

In a first study, 171 stay-at-home mothers revealed through questionnaire ratings that they saw their departure from the workforces as a choice rather than something imposed on them. The more they endorsed the choice explanation, the less likely they were to interpret genuine gender inequality in a range of industries as due to discrimination or structural challenges to women working (such as a default model of work that doesn't adequately account for childcare).

The second study adopted experimental methods to manipulate exposure to the choice framework. While waiting to begin the experiment, 46 undergraduates were unwittingly exposed to a poster on the wall about “women's experiences in the workforce”; in one condition, the title began with the phrase “Choosing to leave”. Participants then completed a questionnaire, and those who had had this slight level of exposure to the choice framework were somewhat more likely to rate gender discrimination as non-existent.

Stephens and Levine note that culture propagates such messages at higher frequencies than those manipulated in their study, thus the baseline influence might be substantial. The consequences are twofold: although people feel happier when they see themselves as an active agent in their own life, this can turn against them when they meet genuine structural challenges, where it “could undermine their sense of competence or deter them from seeking help”. And on a societal level, this tendency may prevent the correction of genuine inequity. We may need cultural and political actors to reframe the debate. And an individual level, it might be enlightening to reflect once in a while on the limits to choice.

Stephens, Nicole, & Levine, Cynthia (2011). Opting Out or Denying Discrimination? How the Framework of Free Choice in American Society Influences Perceptions of Gender Equality Psychological Science