Is Gender Equality Still an Issue? Taking a Look on Women's Day 2020

Today is International Women’s Day. I was shocked by what I learned in my research for this post. Will the words below surprise you as new information? Perhaps some of it will. Perhaps you’ve heard it all already. I acknowledge that for many women, much of what I have to say is old news. But until it is the stuff of history books, it is a reality that we must continue to keep top of mind, and top of action.

Gender issues go far beyond what can be covered in a few pages, and much further beyond my own limited knowledge. I am publishing this not to be comprehensive, but to boost the signal on what I feel is one of the important conversations of our time.

We’ve come a long way

Gender equality today is better than it has ever been. This is great news, but our past continues to influence today’s cultural context in both obvious and subtle ways. For almost all humanity’s time on this planet, women have been owned by men and have not enjoyed agency over their bodies. The evidence could fill an entire book, but I’ll pick out a handful of vignettes to illustrate this here.

First, look at the rules of behavior of the world’s most popular religion. The Tenth Commandment says this: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his manservant, or his maidservant, or his ox, or his ass, or anything that is your neighbor’s.” Your neighbor’s wife was an object to be owned - not in some esoteric text but in a key section of humanity’s most printed book. I am not suggesting that modern Christians think women are objects to be owned, rather that this was a belief for a long time.

Almost without exception, societies of antiquity viewed women as possessions. Take the Knights of Medieval times, from whom we get the term ‘chivalrous’. You might imagine brave and honorable men, protecting women from the many dangers lurking in those perilous times. Knights did indeed bring women under their protection, but only so they could be the only man to rape them. Hardly what we now consider to be scrupulous behavior.

Powerful female leaders such as Boudica and Cleopatra were rare exceptions, who do not disprove the overall point.

Signs of this history are still all around us. Most women have by now removed the promise to ‘honor and obey’ their husbands from their wedding vows. But when the bride’s father proudly walks her down the aisle, depositing her with her husband-to-be before taking his seat in the front pew, make no mistake about the symbolism: he is ‘giving her away’ to the groom, a transition of possession from one man to another. None of the involved parties may consciously believe it is a transfer of ownership, but that is the origin of this tradition, and it could reinforce the unconscious gender biases that still pervade our society. Add to that the tradition of women taking their husband’s names. Women who eschew this tradition often have to fight hard for this and justify it. Even women who keep their name rarely pass on that name to their child. One couple I know played “Ro-Sham-Bo” (or Rock/Paper/Scissors) a few weeks ago to decide whose last name their unborn child would get. The woman won the game, but the man is still arguing his case.

Think of a heterosexual couple you know and say their names out loud, before you read on.

Did you say the man’s name first? Everyday biases abound.

In the US, the Constitution of 1787 declared that “All men are created equal”, but it took another 133 years for women to get the right to vote - and this only after many decades of concerted protests. I am reminded of the lines from the ground-breaking musical Hamilton:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident
That all men are created equal
And when I meet Thomas Jefferson,
I'm 'a compel him to include women in the sequel!”

We rarely confront the fact that it’s a new idea, born of the last 100 years or less, that women are truly people with full autonomy over their bodies. One illustration of this is in the treatment of marital rape. The traditional US definition of rape was a male who has forced sexual intercourse “with a female, not his wife”, a definition that was ratified as recently 1962 Model Penal Code. Starting in the 1970s, the States began to make marital rape illegal, with the last state doing so in 1993. I used the U.S. as an example but we are not laggards in this regard. Many developed nations outlawed marital rape in the last decade of the twentieth century. (Interestingly, the Soviet Union was far ahead of its time in this, outlawing marital rape as early as 1922.)

We have now reached the point, at least in the US and in many other nations, where women have their rights equally protected under the law, and in theory have equal opportunities. Women can vote. Women can hold any job. Women are considered full people (yay!). These rights have been hard-won by the women who fought for this and by the men who supported them. There is cause for genuine celebration here, and I want to take a moment to say YES - WE HAVE MADE PROGRESS! I stand in awe of the brave women who risked so much to bring us to where we are today. At the same time I acknowledge that hundreds of millions of women live in oppressive regimes and do not have anything approaching equal rights.

Women in the workplace

We now have more female CEOs than ever before: 33 of Fortune’s 500 top companies are women-led. Ten countries are led by women. A quarter of the U.S. Congress is women. All these numbers are up significantly over the last two decades. The tide of women in leadership really seems to be turning. Perhaps here in the U.S. we will eventually put aside our dislike of female Presidential candidates (though clearly not in 2020).

It is commonly assumed that women don’t advance as frequently because there are fewer of them graduating from elite schools, they fail to self-advocate, or they simply don’t try as hard. These are all false. Women are now the majority of university graduates and outperform men academically in all subjects [0]. Women’s under-representation at more senior levels is also not because they aren’t trying hard enough. The gap in promotions among women versus men is too large to be explained by different rates of leaving the workforce (which women are more likely to do than men) [1]. Sheryl Sandberg’s bestseller, Lean In, put the onus on women. She claimed that if women tried harder and avoided ‘coasting’ while anticipating leaving the workforce in the future, this would solve their problem. I respect Sheryl Sandberg and admire her for contributing to the national conversation about gender in the workplace, but her thesis is flawed, not supported by the data, and misses the most important point. It is this: what is different is not how women behave, but rather how they are treated by those in power. Women work at least as hard as men and, for the most part, have the same visibility amongst senior management as their male peers [2]. One study found that women were just as likely to ask for raises as men, but were less likely to get them [3].

Ask any professional woman whether they have noticed men behaving differently towards them versus towards other men. Every single one will tell you story after story of being interrupted and patronized. The women I have interviewed are so familiar with having their ideas taken and then men getting the credit, that it’s not even surprising anymore. It has become a sad fact of professional life, to be accepted and navigated, not challenged (if you challenge it, you are perceived as being ‘difficult’). Lots of studies back this up. In one example, women delivered equal job performance on objective measures, but when evaluated subjectively negative descriptors were far more common [4].

Since men predominate in senior roles in most companies and government hierarchies, the system reinforces itself.

#metoo

When I mentioned this post to a single friend, she told me she just got off the phone with a male investor in her company. Mid-way through their business call, he asked her without any context, “Are you seeing anyone at the moment?”. Why is this a big deal? How would you handle this? Would you ignore it and risk seeming rude? Directly point out the inappropriateness and seem even ruder? Lie and say you’re seeing someone? Answer the question truthfully and possibly invite unwanted attention? It puts her in the position of having to focus her mental energy on figuring out the delicate balance of how to respond. The finesse needed to do this takes away focus that she could otherwise apply to the content of the meeting. It’s a seemingly-small but dismayingly pervasive example of how the playing field is tilted.

The #metoo movement brought to the fore what women already knew, which is that sexual assault and discrimination remain rampant in our society. Seventy-seven percent of women have experienced verbal sexual harassment, and fifty-one percent have been sexually touched without their permission. Forty-one percent said they had been sexually harassed online, and 27 percent said they had survived sexual assault. [5]

As was revealed in Ronan Farrow’s Catch and Kill, Harvey Weinstein went to enormous lengths to try to keep his crimes out of the news and keep himself out of jail, which he was able to do successfully for decades. Tactics included working with the National Enquirer to fabricate stories to discredit his many victims. Upon discovering that NBC's Farrow was investigating the story, Weinstein hired a private Israeli intelligence service, Black Cube, to spy on Farrow and his sources. He not only succeeded in pressuring NBC News to kill the story, but also Farrow was fired. The New Yorker published the story. Fortunately, few offenders are as egregious or have access to those kinds of resources, but many male harassers have gone scot-free while their victims opted out or were quietly pushed out. I have heard enough first-hand accounts of this to believe it remains widespread. As one example among many, a 23 year-old woman and a male company founder were in a relationship. Upon learning about this, the CEO hired an HR consultant to fabricate a case against the woman so she could be fired. The consultant engaged in gaslighting, commenting to the woman that she was ‘bipolar’ despite having no medical training. Years later she was still dealing with the psychological aftermath.

I bring this up because workplace harassment is particularly pernicious. The common power imbalance between Senior Man and Junior Woman opens the door to situations in which the woman faces an ugly dilemma: the choice between bodily autonomy and self-respect on the one hand, and career progression on the other. This is generally a tougher one than, let’s say, the annoyance of a wolf-whistle on the street. The sexualization by men of professional women is corrosive. Women carefully dress just well enough to walk the fine line between appearing frumpy and overly sexual. In doing so, they still garner seemingly-innocuous comments about their clothes (“nice jeans”) which often have a sexual subtext (“nice butt”).

This issue goes far beyond harassment. The hard-to-face reality is that all of us have gender bias, regardless of our own gender. This is not just a case of a few bad apples, it is widespread amongst both women and men who believe they have no bias. Much of it sits beneath the surface of our conscious narrative, manifesting itself in ways we don’t ourselves perceive as biased. Women are almost never told “You’re not getting a promotion because you’re a woman.” We are still a very long way from women having equal career opportunities because of this discrimination.

The gender pay gap is real. Women are paid $0.83 on average for each dollar men earn [6]. Some of this difference (64% of it according to Glassdoor research [7]) is attributable to men having higher-paying jobs than women on average, which of course has multiple causes. The rest of the difference (36%) is not, meaning that women are getting paid less for doing the same job. Research suggests that this is at least in part due to negative perceptions of female job performance. Managers, especially men, are likely to rate women’s work as lower quality even when it is the same. Various studies of performance evaluations have pointed to this. In one controlled experiment, women were rated lower as job candidates than men with identical qualifications, and were offered lower salaries. This bias existed among both female and male evaluators [8]. Women have to achieve more to be evaluated similarly. That’s hard to do, especially since women do almost double the housework men do in dual-career couples [9]. I am reminded of the old Bob Thaves quote about Fred Astaire, who tops many lists of the greatest dancers ever: “Sure he was great, but don't forget that Ginger Rogers did everything he did, backwards…and in high heels."

Continued forward progress?

The evidence on current forward progress is mixed. Just this week, the UN released an in-depth report about gender [10]. The report finds little support for optimism on a global scale: two recent decades of progress have given way to a stall and even a slight reversal in the downward trend in inequality. Those ten women who lead their country? Down from fifteen in 2014.

Concerningly, 84% of women and 91% of men worldwide were found to have an open gender bias against women -- for example in agreeing with the statements “Men make better political leaders than women do” or “Men should have more right to a job than a woman”. Globally, we became more biased in the 5 years of the study to 2014, not less.

Here in the US the recent news was directionally more encouraging. The percentages of people with a consciously-stated bias towards men fell to a still-shockingly-high 54% of women and 61% of men. This only measured the biases of which we are self-aware, rather than more widespread unconscious biases, and the study ended in 2014. We will see in a few more years whether having a President who boasted about sexual assault has reversed this positive trend. Turning to the workplace, a study found that from 2015-2018, the percentage of C-level positions in business held by women increased from 17%-22% [11].

In some ways, this is when progress gets harder. With discrimination outlawed, it can be tempting (especially for men) to think that we have reached the finish line. I have often heard men say that gender equality is no longer an issue and that we need to stop wasting our time thinking about this. Some even justify the inequality with the nonsense that women take advantage of men by stealing their money through marriage, alimony, child support, etc. Given the vast amount of highly-publicized data proving these men wrong, this seems to be nothing better than willful ignorance. The reality is that women wouldn’t need to rely so heavily on men for income if they had equal opportunities to earn it.

Furthermore, the biological reality that women bear children puts them at a disadvantage when it comes to careers. Many women have paused or given up their career to have and raise children. While more women are returning to work post-kids than ever before, they still bear, by far, the disproportionate burden of child-care. Outside of a sci-fi future where all births are from artificial wombs (a la Brave New World), this division of labor will always exist to some extent. This means that more women will opt out of the workforce and will continue to be under-represented in the most senior positions of government, business, and non-profit, because they are more likely to choose to not be part of the workforce, or to do so in a reduced role to support their home-life.

This is a shame. Women-led organizations are both more successful [12] [13], and have happier employees [14]. Having more female leaders is a good thing, not only for fairness but also so we can all benefit from the resulting improvements in workplace conditions and the rising economic tide.

Importantly, this is therefore not a zero-sum game: we should all desire progress. While I am optimistic about that, it is not guaranteed. Some people, almost exclusively men, believe this problem is largely solved. It is not. I have noticed that when you start to become aware of the continuing gender gap in opportunity, it becomes more obvious. I used to be blissfully and shamefully unaware. My wife Roxy educated me about these issues, and I remember one day taking a look at the salaries of the employees on my team as a result. Sure enough, on average the women were paid less for the same role than their male counterparts. I was fortunate to be in a position to close the gap, and I did so. I have spoken with women who have noticed that senior male leaders who have daughters are more likely to support female advancement in the workplace, whereas those without tend to dismiss the issue, saying it is “something we no longer need to worry about”. A large 2011 study [15] supported this, showing that male CEOs closed the gender pay gap at their companies after having a daughter. To me, this clearly points to the fact that those whom it impacts (women and men with daughters or other women in their lives), see that the problem is real.

If you’re a man, there are lots of things we can do about this. Here are three suggestions. 1) We can ask the women in our lives whether they have experienced gender bias, and listen to the answers. 2) We can take a subconscious gender bias test like this one: the results can be quite interesting. 3) We can increase our awareness and vigilance of inequality and be prepared to stand up for what is right.

Continuing to build on gender equality will require action from people of all genders. Women must keep showing up as their best selves, trying twice as hard to get the same recognition, and fighting for that eventual day when the playing field will finally be level. And as men, we need to support the women in our lives to achieve their goals. We need to educate ourselves about our own biases without waiting for women to raise the subject. We need to care even if we don’t have a vocal woman or daughter in our lives. We need to accept that we aren’t living in a post-gender world - at least not yet.

Sources

0 https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/girls-get-better-grades-boys-even-stem-subjects-study-finds-n912891

1 https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/gender-equality/women-in-the-workplace-2018

2 https://hbr.org/2017/10/a-study-used-sensors-to-show-that-men-and-women-are-treated-differently-at-work

3 https://hbr.org/2018/06/research-women-ask-for-raises-as-often-as-men-but-are-less-likely-to-get-them

4 https://hbr.org/2018/05/the-different-words-we-use-to-describe-male-and-female-leaders

5 https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/02/21/587671849/a-new-survey-finds-eighty-percent-of-women-have-experienced-sexual-harassment

6 https://www.nola.com/news/business/article_1f490c18-c58b-50f0-aa09-6d3ac6e7ac32.html

7 https://www.glassdoor.com/about-us/gender-pay-gap-2019/

8 https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/unofficial-prognosis/study-shows-gender-bias-in-science-is-real-heres-why-it-matters/

9 http://www.familiesandsocieties.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/WP48Fahlen2015.pdf

10 http://hdr.undp.org/en/GSNI