gender bias

Advancing Women: Best Practices Roadmap

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Many best practices exist for creating organizations where women can advance. The ones listed below, from a variety of sources, are current, innovative, and comprehensive ideas that can act as a roadmap for what works:

  1. Implement sponsorship program—Enhance the quality of and access to sponsorship. Hold senior leaders accountable for achieving measurable targets for increasing the visibility and opportunities for advancement for white women and women and men of color.
  2. Eliminate bias in hiring, performance reviews, and promotions—Use gender-balanced panels and third-party review of performance feedback to screen for possible bias.
  3. Have a flexible life-work infrastructure—Provide and support the use of flexibility to balance work and family. Organizations often have flexible work policies but then discourage their use.
  4. Create accountability and share failure—Build accountability by setting targets and measurements. Hold leaders accountable through a reward system. Address implementation failure and policies that are in place but fail in their execution. Acknowledge and reward trial and error—one size does not fit all.
  5. Develop men as allies—Educate men on gender dynamics, double binds for women, and unconscious bias.
  6. Create immersion experiences for men—Challenge men to experience interruptions during team meetings, pay gaps, and other forms of gender discrimination to humanize the experience for them of the gender dynamics women often deal with.
  7. Listen to the needs of both women and men—Women and men often want similar workplace policies and practices that support family life but are reluctant to ask for them.
  8. Reduce the “only” dynamic—Increase the representation of women and people of color so no one is the only —— at the office.
  9. Diversify networking practices—Networking is different for women. Women need to build small, intentional, and diverse networks of other women, as well as a broad network that includes men. Men need only the broad network.
  10. Create an anti-harassment culture—Offer multiple avenues for reporting sexual harassment, ensure that no one will experience retribution for reporting harassment, and institute appropriate responses to findings of sexual harassment, including counseling for less severe offenses and firing for severe ones.

These best practice ideas are adapted from the following sources:

Photo by Alvaro Reyes on Unsplash

Gender Bias—Past Is Present

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Gender bias in the workplace, defined as forms of discrimination against women that reflect the values and mind-sets of the men who created the settings and practices, is a deeply ingrained part of our culture. While many of these gender-biased mind-sets and practices are changing, Marisa Porges, writing for the New York Times, points out many interesting ways that the legacies of gender bias from the past are still impacting the present:

  • NASA didn’t have enough space suits that fit female astronauts. Only a few days before the much-publicized first all-female spacewalk was to take place in April 2019, it had to be canceled because of the lack of space suits that fit women.
  • Two years after Porges began flying jets for the navy, somebody noticed that the ejection seat on her jet was not designed for her five-foot-two-inch female frame. It had been designed and tested by and for only men, which increased the risk of major injury for a woman if she needed the safety equipment.

The legacies of gender discrimination are also present in small ways that affect the daily lives and careers of women. Porges notes that while women face many systemic barriers, such as wage gaps, family leave policies, and blocked career pipelines for women in underrepresented fields, the small legacies are also significant:

  • Lack of adequate lactation rooms in most office buildings
  • Antiquated office dress codes that require female employees to wear high heels
  • The size of safety gear available for female astronauts
  • Temperature settings in most workplaces, which are calibrated to men’s metabolic rates and are too cold for women

While Porges focuses on legacies of past gender discrimination reverberating in the present, new sources of gender discrimination are also concerning. Megan Specia writes about the broad gender disparities in the technology and artificial intelligence (AI) sectors, noted as problematic in a new Unesco study released in conjunction with the government of Germany and the Equal Skills Coalition. Specia reports that women are grossly underrepresented in AI, making up 12 percent of AI researchers and 6 percent of software developers in the field. The Unesco study states that “a lack of diversity within the industry . . . is reinforcing problematic gender stereotypes.” The report states several alarming examples:

  • Most virtual assistants like Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa have female names, female voices, and often a submissive or flirtatious style. They also often have a “deflecting, lackluster or apologetic response” to insults, which provides a powerful illustration of gender biases coded into technology products.
  • Gender and racial biases have also been built into sexist hiring tools developed by Amazon and facial recognition technology that misidentifies black faces.

The report points out that “the more that [technology-enforced] culture teaches people to equate women with assistants, the more real women will be seen as assistants—and penalized for not being assistant-like.”

The absence of diversity in engineering teams that are overwhelmingly staffed by men means that gender bias continues to be perpetuated. Our whole culture needs to change and confront the multilayered problem.

 

Photo by Diego Gavilanez on Unsplash

Google Update: Gender Pay Gaps and Disparities

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Google’s pay gaps and disparities have been in the news since employees took matters into their own hands. In 2015, employees informally began collecting their salary data, which was published in 2017. The survey revealed significant gender and race pay disparities. Bryce Covert of the New York Times writes that after denying for years that it had a gender pay gap and refusing to make its pay data public, Google was embarrassed by its employees into instituting an annual pay equity analysis. In March 2019, Google announced the results of this year’s analysis. Covert reports, “It gave most of the raises to adjust for unequal practices to men.” This was a surprise to many. In 2016, the Department of Labor (DOL) found that Google had “systematic” disparities, which were described as “quite extreme.” Women at Google cried foul about the new pay analysis and protested that it left out important information:

  • The annual pay review compared only people within the same job categories.
  • Women are “hired into lower-tier and lower-paid positions while men start in higher-level jobs with higher pay brackets.”

In other words, the analysis was not comparing whether women and men were hired in the appropriate job categories. It is a flawed and incomplete analysis. Covert notes that Google continues to refuse to release all of its pay data publicly or to the DOL for analysis, making it difficult to know the real situation with its pay gap. In 2016, President Barack Obama proposed a rule that would require all companies with one hundred or more employees to collect and report pay by race and gender. When President Donald Trump took over the White House, however, he stopped this rule from going into effect. In March 2019, a federal judge ruled that the Trump administration had failed to prove its argument that the rule created an undue burden on companies. She ordered the government to move forward with implementing the rule and cleared the way for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to start requiring companies to collect and report their pay data. Google, along with all other employers with more than one hundred employees is now required to fully disclose pay data, and the public will get to see it. Transparency is important if the stubborn pay gap is ever going to be closed. American women who work full time make 20 percent less than men. Some experiences with pay transparency are instructive and encouraging:

  • A study in Denmark found that requiring pay transparency reduced the gender wage gap.
  • A review of British workplace surveys found that pay transparency raised the wages of all employees.
  • Studies in the United States found that pay gaps are smaller in public sector and unionized workplaces where pay scales are available to anyone.

On another front, in November 2018, after twenty thousand Google employees walked off the job to protest sexual harassment policies and practices, Google agreed to stop requiring forced arbitration in sexual harassment and assault cases. Daisuke Wakabayashi of the New York Times writes that in March 2019, Google did away with all forced arbitration agreements and is now dropping the requirement in employment contracts for all employees—including temporary and contract workers. This is a huge victory for the Google employees who banded together to organize the 2018 walkout. But, alas, Google still has a culture that protects high-ranking executives credibly accused of sexual harassment and rewards them with big payouts. Wakabayashi reports that most recently, a shareholder lawsuit revealed that the board of directors of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, agreed to pay as much as $45 million to a top Google executive accused of groping a subordinate. In October 2018, a $90 million payout to a different executive accused of sexual harassment sparked the 2018 walkout. Between federal court rulings requiring pay transparency, employee activism, and shareholder lawsuits, Google may yet be dragged kicking and screaming into becoming an equitable and ethical organization. Let’s not forget though that this is just the tip of the corporate iceberg. These are baby steps—but in the right direction.   Photo courtesy of https://www.istockphoto.com/photo/young-woman-programming-at-her-home-office-gm874016084-244060556]]>

Gender Bias at Goldman Sachs: Fired for Taking Maternity Leave

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A recent Los Angeles Times story by Sabrina Willmer shines a light on the hypocrisy of many corporate family leave policies in the United States. Willmer explains that Goldman Sachs proudly promotes itself as a family-friendly company that offers four months of paid family leave as part of a widely publicized diversity initiative designed to attract talent. When women take maternity leave at Goldman, however, their careers are often damaged, and some have been fired using “business case” justifications that do not align with their performances. Goldman Sachs is not the only company to offer a family-friendly policy and then punish women and men for using it. Stories like the one reported by Willmer are common in many other organizations as well. The case discussed below is one of many being litigated in a class-action gender bias lawsuit against Goldman Sachs based on complaints of reprisals when women took maternity leave. Willmer presents the case of Tania Mirchandani, a vice president and employee of fifteen years at Goldman Sachs in Los Angeles. When she reported to her supervisor, a father of four children, that she was pregnant with her third child, he expressed skepticism that she could balance the demands of her job with such a large family. Toward the end of her maternity leave, just before returning, her boss called to tell her she was terminated “for strategic business reasons” and that men in the office were also being laid off to cut costs. In Mirchandani’s gender bias complaint she states that, in fact, she was the only person cut in the Los Angeles office and male colleagues kept their jobs even though their performances were not as good as hers. Mirchandani’s experience is not unusual at Goldman Sachs, and other women have also report reprisal and pressure after maternity leave. Specifically, after maternity leave, many women at Goldman

  • Are assigned to a different position when they return and lose the accounts or clients they developed before taking leave
  • Report being passed up for promotions
  • Are pushed onto a “mommy track” where they are not eligible for promotions
  • Are not assigned to a team and are left to develop new business on their own
  • Report that it is “standard practice” for Goldman to pressure women to take shorter maternity leaves than allowed by policy
This same story is playing out for women in many corporations. Is it any wonder that, although most companies have updated their family leave policies, the number of women taking paid maternity leave in the United States each month has remained unchanged since the 1990s, according to a 2017 study by Boston University? Willmer reminds us that family-friendly policies are empty words on paper when the cultures of organizations do not change. The same will be true for all of the new sexual harassment policies being published as a result of the #MeToo movement. Organizations’ cultures do not change without vigilance, transparency, and accountability. We have a long way to go. Is your organization truly trying to change its culture? Please share what is working.   Photo courtesy of NIAID (CC BY 2.0)      ]]>

Pregnancy Discrimination and the Motherhood Pay Gap: We Need a #MomsToo Movement

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We have heard a lot in recent months about sexual harassment and gender discrimination in the workplace, thanks to the #MeToo movement. But one form of gender discrimination we don’t hear a lot about is the deeply ingrained antimotherhood bias that takes a heavy toll on women’s pay and careers. Antimotherhood bias includes bias and discrimination against pregnant women, as reported by Natalie Kitroeff and Jessica Silver-Greenberg of the New York Times, who share a range of painful stories of women being fired or demoted for being pregnant. It also includes bias and discrimination against women once they have children, which is often casual, open, and unapologetic, according to Katherine Goldstein of the New York Times, even though this discriminations is illegal. This systemic bias is found in large corporations, such as Merck and Walmart, government organizations, and small businesses. Claire Cain Miller writes that antimother bias may account for most of the stubborn gender pay gap. Miller, Goldstein, Kitroeff, and Silver-Greenberg note these recent findings:

  • Research regularly shows that mothers are routinely viewed as less competent and committed to their jobs, even by other women, despite evidence to the contrary. This bias can result in women being bypassed for promotions, high visibility assignments, and bonuses when they have a child.
  • A study published in the American Journal of Sociology found that in instances where job candidates were equal in every other way, being a mother reduced the chance that a candidate would be offered the job by 37 percentage points. The recommended salary for mothers who were offered the job was $11,000 less on average than for childless female candidates. This hiring bias does not affect fathers at all. In fact, fathers tend to make more money than their childless male counterparts.
  • Couples today tend to have similar incomes at the beginning of their careers until their first child is born. Immediately after the first birth, the pay gap between spouses doubles, entirely driven by a drop in the mother’s pay, while men’s wages keep rising.
  • When women have their first child between the ages of 25 and 35, their pay never recovers, relative to that of their husbands. This is less true if the first child is born before 25 or after 35 because the woman’s career either has not yet gotten started before 25 or is already established by the time she is in her late 30s.
  • Each child chops 4 percent off a woman’s hourly wage, according to a study conducted in 2014 by the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and the pay gap grows larger for each additional child born.
  • Even in families in which both parents work full time, women spend almost double the time on housework and childcare. This often means that women work fewer hours, are paid proportionately less, and become less likely to get promotions or raises.
Why don’t women speak out about being passed over for promotions, visible assignments, and raises because of motherhood? Goldstein suggests that women may feel they have more to lose by speaking out. Women who are trying to have both a career and a family are pushing against negative judgment from both employers and society. They may internalize this judgment and feel guilty—and they have families to support and cannot risk being laid off or further penalized. Many lawsuits are working their way through the courts, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has had more complaints filed in recent times than ever before about discrimination against working mothers, but we still don’t hear much about this issue. What will it take to bring about change? Miller points out that more women running for political office may mean that this issue gets addressed. For example, Senator Tammy Duckworth recently became the first United States senator to give birth while in office, and she subsequently fought for changes in accommodations and practices, such as availability of a lactation room, to support mothers in the Senate. Research has also shown some other policy changes that can help women who are mothers:
  • Programs to help women reenter the workforce
  • Flexibility in when and where work gets done
  • Subsidized childcare
  • Time off for men after children are born so they can spend more time on childcare
Women may need to share their stories in a #MomsToo movement. What are your stories?   Photo courtesy of Ran Allen (CC BY 2.0)]]>

Women in the Military: Signs of Change

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I remember when, in 1995, Shannon Faulkner was escorted by federal marshals onto the campus of the Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina, as the first woman to be admitted to this southern military college. Richard Fausset of the New York Times reminds us that Faulkner fought a two-and-a-half year legal battle to gain admission. Now, twenty-three years later, Sarah Zorn, a twenty-one-year-old college junior, has been selected by a panel of staff members and students to become “the Citadel’s first female regimental commander—the top cadet.” Fausset writes that change came slowly at the Citadel, and administrators now admit that for the first ten years or so after the courts forced the institution to admit women, resistance to change remained deeply ingrained and only slowly diminished. Institutional policies and practices were eventually revamped for the better:

  • Women are welcome and, in many cases, thriving on campus.
  • Ten percent of the graduating class this year were women.
  • Female cadets, on average, maintain a higher grade point average and are more likely to graduate than men; 75 percent of women graduate.
  • Sexist comments directed at women are unusual from male cadets and the women generally feel respected by their male colleagues.
  • The continued evolution of the Citadel culture found uniformed cadets marching for the first time in the Charleston Pride parade.
Let’s stop a moment and breathe in this good news. Change is possible, but it takes clarity and commitment on an institutional level to make it real and lasting.   Photo courtesy by James Willamor (CC BY-SA 2.0)]]>

How Gender Bias in Medicine Affects Women’s Health: A Book Review

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Doing Harm by Maya Dusenbery, a new book recently reviewed in the New York Times by Parul Sehgal, is a rich collection of studies and statistics that reveal sexism at every level of medicine. Sehgal notes that the core message of the author is that the ancient distrust of women to be reliable narrators of their own experiences or their bodily pain is linked to the current “believe women” moment we are in as more speak out in the “Me Too” movement. The author also points out that this suppression of women’s voices is linked to how frequently women get interrupted in meetings and how rarely women are quoted as experts. Women’s voices are ignored or belittled and, in addition to the other challenges we face, this dynamic impacts our ability to get good medical care. Dusenbery offers multiple examples to make her point:

  • Women with abdominal pain wait in emergency rooms for sixty-five minutes compared to forty-nine minutes for men.
  • Young women are seven times more likely to be sent home from the hospital while in the middle of a heart attack.
  • Doctors rarely communicate (or understand) how drugs from aspirin to antidepressants affect women and men differently.
  • Autoimmune disorders have been understudied because a majority of the patients are women.
  • Women are consistently undertreated for pain: male patients are given pain relief while women are given sedatives and told their pain is emotional.
  • For women of color, especially black women, the situation is worse. Black patients are twenty-two times less likely to get any kind of pain relief in emergency rooms.
Sehgal suggests that the solution is not more female doctors because female doctors can have implicit bias, too. The best action we can take is to speak out about sexist and paternalistic experiences we have with doctors. We must share our stories. We can also put pressure on medical professionals to study women’s health. And we have to insist on having our voices heard. I remember when my mother kept going to her doctor and complaining that she “didn’t feel right.” The doctor told her that older women often experience aches and pains and sent her home. But my mother knew something was wrong and she kept going back to the doctor and insisting on tests. Finally, they listened to her and she was, in fact, about to have a massive heart attack. She needed open-heart bypass surgery. She saved her own life by refusing to be ignored. We must not allow ourselves to be silenced.   Photo courtesy of Wellcome Images (CC BY 4.0)]]>

What Gender Bias Looks Like

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Gender bias can be subtle and difficult to understand. At the beginning of my women’s leadership programs, many women cannot see it and eventually discover that it is so much a part of their daily lives, they have become numb to it. The following are some recently published examples of gender bias from the media, finance and biopharma, economics, and Wall Street that silence women’s voices and create barriers to women’s participation in shaping our world. News Media: Amanda Taub and Max Fisher of the New York Times write that women are underrepresented in news coverage by a ratio of three-to-one. Being quoted or cited in news articles helps determine who is considered to be an authority on a topic. Taub and Fisher note that the social machinery that equates expertise with maleness is complex and creates a vicious cycle that shuts women out. For example, news organizations use online searches to find experts to quote or cite. Because women are underrepresented in news coverage, their names do not come up as often in searches and they continue to be excluded. Finance and Biopharma: Rebecca Robbins and Meghana Keshavan of STAT share an example of gender bias at a large annual healthcare conference sponsored by J.P. Morgan: men represented 94 percent of the 540 people making high-profile presentations to biotech executives and investors. Let’s be clear—these events are where careers are made and enhanced by the opportunity for visibility. And women are not visible. This lack of representation of women on panels and in speaking slots at professional conferences is a trend that has been recently reported in several fields. Economics: Justin Wolfers of the New York Times writes about the scarcity of women and women’s voices in the field of economics and the implications for all of us. He notes that “because economics has an outsized influence on public policy . . . [and] many debates are likely to be dominated by men for years to come,” there are so few women in economics. Wolfers cites surveys that show stark differences in opinion between women and men economists: women economists, by large margins, favor policies that promote income equality, big government and government regulation, mandatory employer-provided health insurance, and labor policies that promote environmental quality over economic growth. Women economists tend to focus on different topics than men, and as Wolfers writes, “If there were more female economists, more attention would surely be paid to these issues.” The number of women studying economics has stalled, and women are a minority in every level of training and rank in economics. Wolfers notes that a host of careful studies has identified barriers that discourage and drive women out of the field, such as being held to a higher standard for publishing or not being given tenure credit for publishing with men, while men get credit for publishing with women. Jim Tankersley and Noam Scheiber of the New York Times, also writing about women in economics, share new research on patterns of gender discrimination in the field. One study on the most popular introductory economics textbooks found that the textbooks refer to men four times more than to women and that 90 percent of the economists cited in the texts are men. This new research also notes that the bias against African American women in economics is especially pronounced—only fifty-two black women earned doctorates in the field between 2006 and 2015. Black women are incredibly invisible. Wall Street: A new lawsuit against the investment firm run by Steven A. Cohen, Point72, is reported by Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Matthew Goldstein of the New York Times. The woman bringing the suit explains, “The company is a testosterone-fueled ‘boys club’ in which men comment on women’s bodies, belittle their abilities, exclude women from meetings, and pay them less than male peers.” Further evidence of gender bias is offered: women are fewer than 3 percent of managing directors and, of the 125 portfolio managers, only one is a woman. When women’s voices and perspectives are missing from the classroom, research, business, and government, we all lose. Let’s keep the pressure on for change.   Photo courtesy of businessforward (CC BY-SA 2.0)]]>

Why Gender- and Race-Blind Hiring Does Not Work to Combat Bias

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Two years ago, my niece, an engineer in her twenties with solid work experience, started a new job about which she was very excited. She was one of very few women in this engineering company, which was not unusual. When she returned from maternity leave about six months ago, after having her first child, she was treated so badly by her male manager that she eventually resigned. After her return from maternity leave, her manager took away her meaningful projects and gave her boring work that no one in the company cared about. He denied her requests for flex time, for permission to occasionally work remotely, and for permission to leave early on days when she had medical appointments. He made disparaging remarks about her needing breaks to pump and made comments that implied she was useless to him because she would probably have more babies. She complained to HR who said nothing could be done. She could not thrive there. With every day that passed, she felt worse about the company and began to doubt herself. She left. Organizations think they can solve the problems of underrepresentation of white women and women and men of color in their workforce by using gender- and race-blind résumé screening to eliminate bias in the hiring process. Katharine Zaleski of the New York Times describes “blind hiring” as a dangerous trend. In this process, the names of candidates are removed from résumés and voices are altered during phone interviews to “mask” the gender and race of candidates in an attempt to eliminate bias. Zaleski cites studies showing that blind hiring does not work because

  • The résumés of white women and women and men of color still get screened out when gaps in a résumé signal the applicant is probably a woman who took time out for caregiving, or when the names of colleges, college majors, or volunteer activities indicate the applicant may be a person of color.
  • Even if the blind résumé gets a candidate through an initial round of screening, the biases of hiring managers kick in later during the traditional in-person interview.
  • Using blind-hiring processes does nothing to create organizational cultures where white women and women and men of color can thrive. Once hired, they will not stay if the organization has not worked to create an inclusive culture where diversity is valued.
Zaleski notes that blind hiring “is a misguided distraction from the hard work of evaluating and fixing the ways in which their cultures drive out” white women and women and men of color. My niece now works for a different company. Her new boss is a woman with young children who is relaxed and confident about parents being good workers. The organization has solid family-friendly policies and practices. My niece says her goal is to work hard, do her best work, and advance as a professional in her new company. In other words, she feels she can thrive there. Her old company pushed her out and lost a valuable employee because of gender biases. That didn’t have to happen.   Photo by Amtec Staffing, CC BY-SA 2.0.  ]]>

Women in Physics and Medicine: Closing the Gender Pay Gap, Increasing Respect, and Decreasing Burnout

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New studies on women in physics and medicine find continuing disparities in pay and promotions. Audrey Williams June, writing for the Chronicle of Higher Education, reports the results of a new study by the Statistical Research Center at the American Institute of Physics showing a gender pay gap of 6 percent for female faculty members in physics. The study also found that men are overrepresented in senior faculty roles and that women receive fewer grants for research and lab space. For women in medicine, the issues can be severe. Dhruv Khullar of the New York Times reports that female physicians

  • are more than twice as likely to commit suicide as the general population;
  • earn significantly less than male colleagues
  • are less likely to advance to professorships; and
  • account for only one-sixth of medical school deans.
Khullar notes that gender bias begins to impact women physicians during medical residency training and continues throughout their careers. He points out that the structure of medical training and practice has not changed much since the 1960s, when almost all medical residents were men and only 7 percent of medical school graduates were women. Today women account for more than one-third of practicing physicians and one-half of physicians in residency training. Unchanged training structures that assume a stay-at-home spouse to support a trainee’s eighty-hour-work week create work-family conflicts for women. The combination of work-family conflicts and embedded gender discrimination in the profession takes a toll on women’s lives and careers in some of the following ways:
  • In households where both spouses are doctors, women with children work eleven hours less per week, while there is no difference in the hours worked by men with children. This statistic reflects the greater responsibility that women doctors carry for family care that their spouses do not share equitably.
  • Female physicians are more likely to divorce than male physicians.
  • For female physicians, getting patients and other doctors to show them respect by calling them “doctor” is a battle. Women physicians are assumed to be either physician assistants or nurses by both patients and other doctors and are often introduced by their first names in professional settings instead of by their professional title of “doctor.”
  • The gender pay gap for female physicians is significant and was detailed in an earlier article.
  • A recent study at Harvard found that gender bias affects referrals to female surgeons from other physicians.
What can be done to close the gender pay gap, increase respect, and decrease burnout for women in physics and medicine? Both June and Khullar suggest that having more women in leadership and mentorship roles could make a big difference. Khullar also notes that “disparities don’t close on their own. They close because we close them.” Let’s continue to put pressure on our institutions to be more equitable and inclusive. Do these disparities exist in your own profession? Please share with us what efforts your organization is making to close these gaps. Photo by Walt Stoneburner, CC BY 2.0.]]>