Today I return to a topic I have written about before; I will almost certainly write about it again, hopefully using different words and a different angle. It is something that continually comes up, and therefore needs to be addressed frequently.

KEEPING UP

Many women start out strong in the business world, but fall behind. There are myriad reasons for this, though media often boils it down to “women just aren’t assertive enough”. Many anti-feminist polemics posit that women are demonstrating their innate inferiority where it comes to logic and business. Others just say it’s because women are naturally more nurturing, kinder, and gentler. Nobody really gives a damn what the actual reasons are; everyone knows their own preferred narrative, and will stick to it no matter how correct it is (or isn’t).

I have given a lot of thought to this, read the studies (many of which are poorly done and not particularly robust), and observed. Keeping mouth shut while keeping eyes and ears open can lead to a lot of information. What do women say when they are talking to each other…or to themselves? What happens in office and home environments? What keeps women from succeeding as spectacularly as men?

One thing I notice is the constant media drumbeat for the “Mommy track”. Endless stories of women who leave the workplace to be mommies, and don’t return. If they do return when their children start school, it is often in a lower level job because they no longer have the up-to-date experience required in a fast moving world, and because employers assume they will miss work with their children. Men with children do not face this same prejudice; it’s assumed they will dump child care on their wives and get on with business. For a long time, that has been the pattern; for many, it still is.

Bosses may actually expect that. An anecdote (not evidence, of course). When my son got the chicken pox, the day care would not accept him until he past the contagious period. This meant we had to stay home with him. My husband and I arranged our schedules so we would alternate days off; the first day I stayed home, the second day he did. From that day on, it was just men. Why? His boss wouldn’t give him the time off, saying that it is the job of the wife to stay home with sick children. Never mind that I was working more hours and making more money than he was; we were expected to play by rules written by long-ago patriarchs who have been dead since before I was born.

In addition to the “Mommy track”, there are other things working against women. One of them is raw sexism. Women have to face an obstacle course at work. Hands, mouths, arms, even penises, greet them when they join the workforce. They are expected to be feminine and attractive to men, but also to be tough as nails and get the job done. Many women enter the job market believing that is a long-past situation that our mothers had to endure, but we are living in the enlightened twenty-first century. Sure, you got groped and grabbed in school, but boys grow up, right? You will be working alongside men, professional men. Or at least, that’s what you thought. But apparently a lot of men carry the locker room into adulthood with them, never letting the adolescent get too far away. To them, a female in the office is a challenge, a gift, an opportunity. Grab, grope, rinse, repeat.

Even women who are able to deal with that, and who choose not to have children, are often held back by the expectation that they will have children, someday, and will need to take off time from work. At what point does this attitude change, and women gain equality? What age? From what I can tell, none. There is no age at which a woman is to be regarded as someone who contributes equally to a man, even when she does twice the work in an effort to prove herself.

It has been demonstrated that there is a considerable bias against women in hiring. The same resumes, one with a man’s name and one with a woman’s, are sent to HR departments. The male name will be more likely to get a call, an interview, a job offer. When resumes are sent in blind, the differential disappears. When auditions are held blind for symphony orchestras, the disparity between men and women disappears. When submitted plays are reviewed blind, plays written by women are as likely to be selected as those written by men (which isn’t very likely; there are always hundreds to thousands more plays submitted to any given theatre than are selected. Take those numbers and adjust for bias, it’s no wonder women playwrights get so few performed).

I’d also like to address the assumption that women are gentler, kinder, and more nurturing. If anyone has ever watched women interact with each other, they are not likely to believe this. Women can be kind, gentle, and nurturing…but they can also be ferocious fighters and formidable adversaries. There is no one particular way to be a woman. And the different approaches may occur within the same woman, even within the same day. In fact, like men, women can be best friends one minute, and worst enemies soon after. We all have that capacity, even if some of us never do that.

So, are women failing to keep up because of some innate inferiority, which, of course, no one will admit they see as an inferiority? Most people will give you some version of separate but equal. “We’re not saying women are less than men, only different.” That fails to convince when women make less money, earn less respect, and have less prestige, even when doing the exact same things as men. The reality is more complex than innate differences; there are a lot of differences that are expected, and in many cases imposed, by the societies that surround us. For women, those stereotypes keep them from achieving all they want to without fighting through a minefield. For men, even the negative stereotypes (burping, scratching, remote control surfing) do not keep them from achieving; in fact, the more unpleasant the stereotype, it seems the more the men achieve.

So let’s turn off the pundits, who are actually somewhat lazy in their analyses and tend to copy what someone else has said, repeating without giving it the work to verify. Let’s ignore those who assume that of course women are inferior. Let’s examine the issue with an impartial eye (if that’s possible, which I doubt), using empirical, proven methods, and let’s check for biases in ourselves and others before assuming a study was interpreted correctly. Then we might be able to start answering the question of why women struggle to keep up with men in business.