How To Handle A Gender Stereotype In Business

Starting out in rocket science and computer technology, I was often the only woman in the room.

That’s another way of saying, the stereotype others had of me didn’t fit with the group. I was well aware of these assumptions.

I’ll bet you’ve had the feeling—at one time or another—that people have stuck a stereotype or label on you that made you out to be less than you are.

You may have felt like an outsider to their groups.

In their minds they could be thinking:

• She’s not important,
• She’s not educated,
• She’s not capable,
• She’s not assertive,
• it could even be, “Oh, she’s a mother.” and further questions might end right there.

You can see how this limits the opportunities a person is willing to offer you.

It’s not a good feeling when it’s directed at you, is it? Why do these stereotypes keep popping up? Unfortunately, each of us has a little bucket in our brain that acts like an autopilot to help us survive. This would have been a good idea a long time ago, when you were being chased by a fast 4-legged creature with big teeth out on the Pleistocene Plain.

But today, this bucket is full of quite a few wrong assumptions.

Well the next question we need to ask is:  How do stereotypes die?

Let’s take a look at how scientists say a stereotype disappears in your brain.

1.  A stereotype disappears when it’s popped up enough times and you’ve been proven wrong

—or—

2.  A stereotype disappears when you’ve been terribly, terribly wrong—as in embarrassingly wrong.

What can you do to counter a negative (incorrect) stereotype about yourself that might pop up when you meet someone new? You know, when someone assumes you are less than you really are.

Here’s my Women in Business Tip, which deals with this.

Women in Business Tip of the Week:

This is unpleasant to think about, but you need to do this exercise once. You must think of how others might be stereotyping you. What negative or incorrect assumptions do you think they may be making? Yucky mental game, isn’t it? Well, this is all for your benefit.

After you pinpoint the stereotypes and labels, work up a few sub-comments to add when you introduce yourself to someone new. These sub-comments should be designed to directly contradict what the other person might be thinking. Trust your intuition as to which one would be most beneficial in each situation.

You can also do this with a stereotype-breaking action—you can go out of your way to be

more reasonable, more helpful, more intelligent than the other person might expect.

Don’t be naïve—be prepared! Now, get out there and cancel those stereotypes, one by one!

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Confronting the Gender Gap in Wages

Written by Deborah Kolb, Judith Williams, and Carol Frohlinger

Tuesday, 14 April 2009 20:22

Women are winning the numbers game in the workforce. They now fill almost half of the country’s managerial jobs. In 1999, about 60% of females, 16 years of age or older, worked outside the home, up from 20% at the turn of the century. Source: Business Week Despite equal representation among the ranks of wage earners, however, women continue to come up short in their paychecks. For the past two decades, optimists could take solace in the narrowing wage gap. For every dollar earned by a white man, a white woman now earns $.78. This figure represents a big improvement from the $.63 white women earned relative to white men in 1975. Source: US Department of Labor But recent trends give us reason for concern. The rate of improvement has slowed dramatically. Working from a lower base, white women made up $.11 in the 1980s, but only $.04 cents during the 1990s. And the statistics are worse for minority women: An African-American woman earns $.67 for every $1 a white man earns, while her Hispanic sister earns only $.56. Source: US Department of Labor The government’s General Accounting Office reports that in seven out of ten industries the gap has actually started to widen. Some gains have held. By 2000 women almost reached parity in educational services, taking home 91 cents on the dollar, up from 86 in 1995.   But the big picture is hardly rosy. Over the same period, for example, a female manager in the entertainment and recreation services earned 62 cents for every dollar a male manager made, down from 83 cents in 1995. Given the data, it’s surprising to discover that by a good margin most female managers think they have reached wage parity with their male colleagues. The statistics are sobering: 70% of female executives think they’re paid as much as males; 78% of men agree. The facts, however, show that women in management take home only 62.7% of what male managers earn   (Source: Gallup, American Management Association). Realities and Myths Behind the Persistent Wage Gap Like all entrenched patterns, the gender gap in wages is supported by both myth and reality. Some of the realities behind the differential require policy changes at the highest levels. Gendered notions of the value of work Traditional "women’s work" tends to be in the helping and support professions. These jobs are not yet considered comparable in worth to the work that men do. Clustering To the degree that women are clustered in lower paying positions, they may not think that they have much bargaining power in bridging the gender gap in pay. They compare their salaries to what other women are making, not to what the job should command. In negotiations, when you don’t think you have much clout and are in a low-power situation, you can be overly reluctant to push for what you are worth Interrupted careers Women are also more likely than men to work part-time, take time off for family reasons, and to be the primary caregivers for their children or aging parents.  This affects not only their take-home pay, but their career opportunities as well. Childless women, for example, currently earn 90% of their male counterparts’ salaries. The myths, however, operate under the surface and color the perception of the wage gag—among men and women. Work is seen as a choice for women, a necessity for men. Forty-one percent of working women head their own households—they are single, divorced, separated or widowed—and 28% have dependent children. Yet American culture still buys into the myth of the male breadwinner. It’s easier to say no to a woman. People—men and women—assume that a woman will sacrifice her own needs for the sake of a good relationship and not push for what’s important to her. When a woman is perceived to be accommodating, it’s harder for her to get others to take her demands seriously or, in parallel, all too tempting to take the path of least resistance and not make them. Money is not a high priority for most women. Money may be only a factor for women in salary negotiations, not the determining one. They may value other elements in a benefit package—time, ability to telecommute, etc. That does not automatically correlate to the prevalent assumption that women don’t care about being paid fairly for the contributions they make. The Cumulative Price Contrary to folk wisdom, women are just as likely as men are to negotiate compensation. The problem is, they don’t realize the same results from their efforts. When men negotiate an entry salary or a raise, they achieve on average a 4.3% increase from the initial figure.  By contrast, when women negotiate, they realize only 2.7% more. This gap adds up. Over the span of a career, the lag translates into about a 35% wage differential that can be traced back to starting salaries. According to a recent study, if current wage patterns continue, a 25-year-old woman, who works full time, will earn $523,000 less than the average 25-year-old man will by the time they both retire at 65. That’s a lot of money. But the discrepancy affects more than a bank account or financial security. Salaries are important. They are a good index of the value an organization puts on your skills and contributions. In turn, they shape an individual’s notion of self-worth. Narrowing the Gap What can an individual woman do when she bumps up against the wage gap? Plenty. Take stock Know precisely what skills, talents, and experience you bring to the table. Pay as much attention to your assets as your weaknesses. Once you identify your weaknesses, don’t dwell on them; consider ways of overcoming them. Get additional training where your skills could use some shoring up; figure out what strengths provide a counterbalance to a perceived weakness. Tie those skills and talents directly to what people are looking for. Benchmark Women often begin negotiations without the solid information about comparable salaries and pay scales that would allow them to be confident the demands they are making are both legitimate and realistic. Instead, they tend to compare their salaries to those of the other women in their field or organization and not to the full band characterizing the field. Find out what your experience and talents command in the marketplace generally—don’t just swap stories with other women. Salary figures are readily available across a wide spectrum on websites like monster.com and hotjobs.com and in university placement offices. Talk widely to others in the industry. Tap your informal networks to find out about a specific company, whether you are thinking about joining its ranks or are up for a performance review. The more you know, the more easily you can defend a salary demand. When you can’t figure out your worth, your chances of getting it are slim. Develop alternatives When you must accept what a prospective employer or a superior puts on the table, you are pretty much at his or her mercy. But if you have the possibility of another job offer or opportunities in other sectors to explore—even if they are not exactly what you want—you still have the luxury of choice. You are not held hostage to another person’s generosity. Aggressively pursue those options; they give you greater flexibility, a better sense of the marketplace for your skills and experience, and confidence in what they are worth. When you meet challenges, this knowledge will help you push back. Set realistic and defensible goals Worries about encouraging unrealistic expectations for future performance can prevent women from setting their goals high and pressing those claims. For a variety of other reasons, women tend to bargain themselves down even before they open discussions.  Instead of mentally whittling away at your demands, set the goals high and then test whether they are defensible, whether they can be supported by performance records and other informational resources. Demonstrate value Especially when the playing field is uneven, you must be prepared to position yourself to advantage. Going into a job interview or a performance review, know what you bring to the table and what you have accomplished. Lay out in specific terms what that experience could or has meant to the company and attach a price tag to it. Think of alternative ways of being compensated, not just a high base salary. Suggest a bonus contingent on performance, for example.  careers, Jobs Indonesia, Indonesia Vacancy

Blaming Women's Choices for the Gender Pay Gap

Written by Hilary M. Lips

Monday, 07 September 2009 22:35

A 2006 article in the New York Times cited labor department statistics that, for college-educated women in middle adulthood, the gender pay gap had widened during the previous decade. The phenomenon was attributed partly to discrimination, but also to “women’s own choices. The number of women staying home with young children has risen …. especially among highly educated mothers, who might otherwise be earning high salaries.” A 2007 report from the American Association of University Women sounded the alarm about a continuing wage gap that is evident even in the first year after college graduation. The authors noted, however, that individual choices with respect to college major, occupation, and parenthood have a strong impact on the gap. Accepting the idea that much of the pay gap can be accounted for by such neutral factors as experience and training, they concluded that, in the first year after college graduation, about 5 percent of the pay gap is unexplained by such factors—and it is that 5 percent that represents the impact of discrimination. The language attributing women’s lower pay to their own lifestyle choices is seductive—in an era when women are widely believed to have overcome the most serious forms of discrimination and in a society in which we are fond of emphasizing individual responsibility for life outcomes. Indeed, it is possible to point to a variety of ways in which women’s work lives differ from men’s in ways that might justify gender differences in earnings. Women work in lower-paid occupations; on average they work fewer paid hours per week and fewer paid weeks per year than men do; their employment is more likely than men’s to be discontinuous. As many economists with a predilection for the “human capital model” would argue, women as a group make lower investments in their working lives, so they logically reap fewer rewards. At first blush, this argument sounds reasonable. However, a closer look reveals that the language of “choice” obscures larger social forces that maintain the wage gap and the very real constraints under which women labor. The impact of discrimination, far from being limited to the portion of the wage gap that cannot be accounted for by women’s choices, is actually deeply embedded in and constrains these choices. Do women choose lower-paid occupations? Women continue to be clustered in low-paid occupational categories: office and administrative support and various service jobs. While they now make up a majority of university students, they are concentrated in academic specialties that lead to lower paid occupations: education rather than engineering, for example. If women persist in choosing work that is poorly paid, shouldn’t the responsibility for the wage gap be laid squarely at their own doorstep? Actually, within groups graduating with particular academic majors, women earn less than men, as illustrated in the AAUW report cited above. And within occupational categories, women earn less than their male counterparts, as revealed in this chart. Furthermore, there is a catch-22 embedded in women’s occupational choices: the migration of women into an occupation is associated with a lowering of its status and salary, and defining an occupation as requiring stereotypically masculine skills is associated with higher prestige, salary, and discrimination in favor of male job applicants. So convincing women in large numbers to shift their occupational choices is unlikely to obliterate the earnings gap. As well, using the language of choice to refer to women’s career outcomes tacitly ignores the many subtle constraints on such decisions. From childhood onward, we view media that consistently portray men more often than women in professional occupations and in masculine-stereotyped jobs. Not surprisingly, researchers find that the more TV children watch, the more accepting they are of occupational gender stereotypes. Why does the acceptance of gender stereotypes matter? Gender-stereotyped messages about particular skills (e.g., “males are generally better at this than females”) lower women’s beliefs in their competence—even when they perform at exactly the same level as their male counterparts. In such situations, women’s lower confidence in their abilities translates into a reluctance to pursue career paths that require such abilities. So, there are many problems with treating women’s occupational choices as based purely on individual temperament and as occurring within a static occupational system that is unaffected by such choices. Women’s employment choices are systematically channeled and constrained—and when women elude the constraints and flow into previously male-dominated jobs, the system apparently adapts to keep those jobs low-paid. If women chose to work more hours, would they close the gap? Women work fewer paid hours per week than men do, but among workers who labor more than 40 hours per week, women earn less than men. Indeed, among workers working 60 hours or more per week at their primary job, women earned only 82% of men’s median weekly earnings in 2006. Furthermore, women do not necessarily choose to work fewer hours than men do. One researcher found that 58% of workers want to change their work hours in some way—and that 19% of women report they want the opportunity to work more hours Also, women have recently brought lawsuits against corporations such as Boeing and CBS claiming discrimination in access to overtime. Thus, in the realm of hours worked for pay, it is probably a mistake to use the number of hours worked as a simple indicator of women’s (or men’s) choices. As in the case of occupational segregation by gender, the number of hours worked reflects some systematic constraints. Choosing parenthood means lower wages only for women. For women, having children has a negative effect on wages, even when labor market experience is taken into account. This may be due to mothers’ temporary separation from the workforce and/or the loss of the benefits of seniority and position-specific training, experience, and contacts. Among married persons working full-time, the ratio of women’s to men’s median weekly earnings is 76.4% for those with no children under the age of 18, but only 73.6% for those with children. And when women and men of all marital statuses are considered together, women with children under 18 earn 97.1% of what women without children earn, whereas men with children under 18 earn 122% of what men without children earn. So, the choice to have children is associated with very different earnings-related outcomes for women and men. In terms of children, it is not that women and men are making different choices, but that the same choices have very different consequences for the two groups. Those consequences reflect society’s failure to value the work of parenting. Yet, if most women decided to forego motherhood, the declining birthrate already causing concern in some parts of the developed world would soon become catastrophic. Women’s choices are not the problem. Individual women can sometimes evade the effects of the gender pay gap by making certain kinds of choices, such as selecting male-dominated occupations, working more hours, avoiding parenthood. However, these choices occur in an environment suffused with subtle sexism and discrimination: there are more barriers for women than for men to making certain choices, and the consequences of some choices are starkly different for women and men. Moreover, these individual solutions are not effective on a societal level; they work only if the women enacting them remain in a minority. For example, if most women moved into jobs that are now male-dominated, signs are that the salaries associated with those jobs would likely drop. But, by making it difficult to go against the tide, the forces of discrimination ensure that most women don’t move into such jobs. And as long as a few women get past the barriers, the illusion persists that any woman could do it if she wanted to—it’s a matter of free choice. However, women’s choices will not be free until their abilities and their work are valued equally with men’s, and until women and men reap equivalent consequences for their choices in the realm of work and family. careers, Jobs Indonesia, Indonesia Vacancy

The Gender Pay Gap--New Opportunities for Women

By Carol Berman


Many discoveries are made by mistake. Penicillin. Rubber. Even Post-it Notes.

Here's one more: unintended results from business school researchers have provided more insight into the decades-old discussion of why men earn more than women.

Kevin Clark and Patrick Maggitti of Villanova University and Holly Slay of Seattle University looked to research relationships among business networks. They were not targeting gender or potential impacts gender might have. But gender did have an impact in workplace relationships--an impact they could not ignore. Especially when the impact was on pay.

The State of Affairs

According to the Census Bureau, among full-time workers age 25 or older in 2007, women earned an average of $33,759 which was 24% less than the $46,788 average for men.

Are Men Better Brown-Nosers?

The group looked at the influence of relationships that are 360 degrees around an employee--superiors, peers, and subordinates. It found that men build stronger relationships in all three situations which lead to an increased wage gap between men and women. Researchers controlled for starting salaries, job level, and industry.

Relationships with subordinates had the greatest perceived impact on pay. In other words, if you connect with those below you, they will perform well, make you look good to your boss, and you get a raise. But this trail didn't exist for women.

"We speculate that in some cases, men that are bosses make stronger attachments to the male employees," said Maggitti. "You get along better with people who are similar. That's one potential explanation."

So it makes perfect sense when the men are talking about last night's game or the upcoming tee time at a fancy golf course, women don't necessarily fit in. And even if they can talk the talk, it's just not the same.

Good News for Women

The researchers did not want to cast more gloom and doom over the gender gap--an area that is squarely in public discourse at the moment. Instead, the researchers want their study to be used as a way to identify opportunities for women to rectify pay inequities. They suggest:

• Motivate and get to know your team: Maggitti and Clark acknowledge that women are better than men at establishing group consensus and managing teams. But that's only in studies and on paper. When it comes to managing subordinate networks, women need to improve.
• Find out what your friends know: Maggitti and Clark say women are aware of their work communities and groups but don't use peers in obtaining information to advance their careers. Women need to start thinking of it as opportunity to share company information related to the work at hand, rather than gossip.
• Influence your supervisor: Researchers suggest taking advantage of chance run-ins with the boss by having something ready to say. Yes, when your boss is a man, and you're a woman, you won't have those bathroom run-ins. There's always the hallway.

Next Steps

Like many academic studies, results often spark ideas for future research. The folks behind the study hope to revisit the gender of all the people involved in all workplace relationships--the bosses, the peers, and the subordinates; not just the person at the center. They want to look at the perception of the "old boys club" network--does it still exist? But in the meantime, they hope that women will recognize and create opportunities that may exist right now in the workplace.

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