On Women. It’s 2015. It’s time

A syzygy of experiences and articles has jolted me back into a state of outrage about the status of women in 2015. So I have decided to start a new blog. I promise that all of my posts won’t be this long, but this one has been brewing for a long time.

About a month ago, a female colleague told me a story how she coached her children to compliment their father liberally on those rare occasions that he cooked. Regardless of whether they liked the meal, she encouraged them to thank him for cooking and tell him how great it was. When the kids asked why they needed to do that for Dad, she responded, “Men are like that, they need to be praised.” The next night, Dad donned his man apron and grilled, and the kids slathered him with compliments. He puffed up with pride. This little orchestrated round of applause increased the likelihood that Dad would put meat to grill in the near future and give Mom a break from her daily cooking routine. She ingeniously worked with her kids back-channel to get Dad to cook more often. I imagined the other six nights a week when Mom cooks, kids rushing away from the table, throwing their dishes in the dishwasher, and heading off to do their homework. The take home message is that when moms do what they have to do, they neither need nor expect thanks or praise, but when dads do something ordinary, you better bring out the gold stars.

Soon thereafter, I was awarded a very handsome research grant and an unnamed official announced this achievement in a meeting. Had the awardee been a man, cigars would have been smoked and there would have been back pats and man hugs all around. This person in authority announced the amount of the award and congratulated me, but then erased any semblance of praise by saying, “But it is a 10 year award so if you do the math it comes down to just about $5.99 a month.” Caught off guard, I reflexively laughed along with the gang as the tape delayed ire rose in my cheeks. I would have walked out of the meeting had I not had important business to attend to related to female colleagues.

As I continued to process the meaning of these two encounters, three excellent pieces of writing came to my attention. Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant wrote a revealing piece about why women stay quiet in the workplace. No surprise to many of us who have been there, when women speak up they are likely to get interrupted (by men) or alternatively, male colleagues will jump in and appropriate their ideas. Whereas men get performance kudos for speaking up, women do not; in fact they get judged negatively for speaking up or labeled as too aggressive. This article hit home with me as I tallied the number of times that I have opted not to speak up in meetings but rather strategized to talk with the chair later one-on-one to make my opinion known. I realized that my approach was a learned behavior rather than something characterological. I vividly recall one teleconference when I made a suggestion, which was re-introduced later in the call by a male colleague whom we will call John. At the time I debated whether to say something like, “John, so glad to hear that you liked my idea!” or to take it one step further and say, “Yes, as I suggested earlier, John also thinks that my idea is a good one.” But I opted not to because I didn’t want to sound petty. Then at the end of the call when the idea was adopted and the chair thanked John profusely for his brilliant contribution, I fumed. None of the women on the call said anything, but I got four emails from them within two minutes of hanging up saying that it was appalling that John got credit for my idea. Sometimes it all happens so fast that you don’t have your wits about you to do the right thing. And, we don’t stand up for each other in real time.

The second piece that grabbed me was a Science article and the popular press that ensued revealing that academic fields whose members most valued sheer intellectual brilliance (e.g., philosophy, physics, and math) were the least likely to have high ranking women. I swallowed hard when I read this line, “The disciplines in which the “spark of genius’ was least emphasized such as education, psychology and anthropology had greater numbers of women.” I will add that even though the results about women got all of the press, the data held for African-Americans as well. How many careers has this brilliance bias detoured? On a more general level, if we don’t expect women to be brilliant, are they less likely to explore and express brilliance themselves? This bias starts young. The most enlightened of primary school teachers will heap more praise on boys than on girls for the same level of performance. Is it that men need more praise than women or are they just conditioned to get it from early on and women become complacent with not being recognized? “Dad, the steak was awesome! Thank you so much for cooking.”

The final nugget was a fascinating article reviewing two studies that explored what makes some teams smarter than others. The magic ingredient for smart teams was not IQ, motivation, or extroversion and it wasn’t just having greater diversity. The critical three ingredients were: 1) everyone participated (rather than having one or two people holding court), 2) team members were better at reading other people’s emotions (whether face-to-face or online), and 3) there were more women. The take home lesson wasn’t that you should just make sure you have a woman on the board, but that you should have more women and they should all speak up!

To illustrate how deeply ingrained this tendency to overpraise men and underpraise women is, I saw it in my own behavior. I had just transferred all of our old home movies from my childhood to digital format. It gave me the opportunity to watch my parents parent me from the day I was born until about age 12. I sat down and watched some of the videos together with my parents and found myself going into the living room and giving my dad a hug and telling him what a great dad he was. I kicked myself mentally because it was my mom who was behind the camera taking pictures of him playing with me and there were no videos of all of the things my mom did with me and for me on a daily basis doing when he wasn’t around to take videos! So I made absolutely sure that I gave her a parallel hug and thanked her for having been such a great mom.

Back from college for winter break, I overheard one of my daughters thanking my husband for taking her clothes out of the dryer. It’s not that he folded them and delivered them lovingly to her room; he just took them out of the dryer and tossed them into the basket so he could dry his own gym clothes. Yet this simple action garnered heartfelt thanks. I am not saying that she never thanked me for the twenty odd years that I did her wash (including folding and delivering), but it struck me that he got thanked for something entirely ordinary that I would never have been thanked for. Did I teach her that? Did I model that behavior?

Collectively, these forces create a treacherous vortex for girls and women. Maybe when we’re young we start off speaking up in class, but then we get interrupted or we see boys getting more praise than we do for things that equally or less brilliant. We become quieter in groups. We watch and learn to praise boys and later men. We don’t ask for or expect praise for our efforts. We are workhorses. Dads are less likely to remind their kids to thank Mom for what she does, so all she gets is a carnation on Mother’s day if she’s lucky. Since we are saying less, we are perceived as less brilliant. We are less welcome in the fields with brilliance bias because since we are often quiet, we rarely let our brilliance shine and if we do we might get interrupted or scooped. We suffer from misperceptions about what we are capable of. There are fewer of us on teams because of this learned withdrawal. Teams without us are less smart. The world suffers from our absence.

How do we change this? Clearly, it is not as simple as making sure your board or your team has a woman on it. We have to look at how we compliment, pay attention to, engage, and praise other women. We have to be mindful of our own tendencies to overpraise men and under-acknowledge women. If someone interrupts a woman, we need to stop him or her. If someone scoops a woman’s idea, we need to rightfully re-attribute the idea in real time, not back-channel. We need to start thanking our mom too and telling her that dinner was great—even if she only had time to do mac and cheese from a box because she had to drive us to soccer practice. Dads need to coach their kids to thank Mom, and not just on Mother’s day.

This systemic prejudice needs addressing via multiple channels. We have a responsibility to ourselves, to each other, and to our daughters to work toward change on a micro- and macro-level. We don’t need to become arrogant and demand strokes at every turn, we just need to become accurate in our self- and other- perceptions and expect equal treatment and recognition. We need to encourage each other to use our voices so that we can be that smart team. It’s 2015. It’s time.