Jezebel jumps on the "act like a man!" in the workplace bandwagon

The NYTimes has a new piece on guidelines for women seeking raises.  The article, in general, avoids most of the old sexist tropes and manages to come up with some actual good advice, including that women might be perceived differently when using the exact same negotiating tactics as men.  The article also suggests that an additional barrier women may face is that their reference group for how much they "should" be making is their peer group, mostly other women, who experience same wage gap they themselves are trying to subvert.  My takeaway was "might not be a bad idea to ballpark those numbers with a few men in the same industry, too."  Jezebel's takeaway was "Want a raise?  Talk to a dude!"

While your female colleagues can certainly help and should be consulted (particularly the ones who are natural negotiators themselves), your male ones will probably bring to your negotiation issue the same sense of entitlement that they brought to their own. (Generalizing wildly here, of course.)

....Put yourself in your boss's position, and in the company's position, and if you think you deserve a raise, pick up the phone and call the most successful male friend you have. Chances are, he'll jump at the chance to be a little part of your success.

Lindsay, who wrote the article, is careful to say that she's speaking in generalizations, and that female friends can be helpful, too, but the body of the article focuses on her experience getting a male friend to rewrite a contract for a new job to be more hard-nosed and foolproof.  From the anecdote to the article's title, the message is that men are more competent businesspeople than women, a notion I find both untrue and highly damaging.  After all, if women can't even handle our own salary negotiations, how can we be expected to negotiate on the behalf of our companies?

Jezebel has also implied that the gender wage gap could be partly explained by the fact that women aren't as good at talking about money explicitly as men.  It's fine to phrase these concerns as: "don't be afraid to ask for what you're worth"; "don't hesitate to talk about money explicitly"; and even "don't only consult female friends and colleagues."  But to somehow imply that women are simply less well equipped to deal with matters of salary and self promotion than men is absurd!  Moreover, it's blaming the victim.  The problem we're fighting with the gender wage gap is the component of it that comes from women being treated differently than men despite their equal skill and preparation.  Discussing ad nauseum women's (in my opinion, imaginary) shortcomings in managing their affairs simply provides an excuse for those who don't see gender inequality as a problem.  "It's not discrimination--women are just different," they'll say.

So enough of this sexist nonsense.  The next time you need to negotiate for your salary, ask for a raise, or market-price yourself, talk to your most bad-ass, successful, confident friend (who's in a similar industry)--male or female--and ask their advice.  Then go out there and do it the way that feels right to you, and the way you know how.  I believe in you.

Health Care Reform Passed the House of Representatives (again)… Now what?

Image Credit: ThomasThomas

Last night, the House Democrats voted to pass the Senate’s comprehensive health care reform bill. In the end the vote was 219-212. The vote, as expected, was pretty much along party lines. The Republicans all voted Nay and all Yea votes were from Democrats. However, 34 Democrats went against their party and voted Nay. Eric Kleefeld of Talking Points Memo put together a spreadsheet looking at how their districts and political ambitions may have affected their vote. The chart showed that 26 of the Representatives came from districts that voted for McCain in 2008.

The House then voted by a similar margin, 220-211, to pass a companion bill making several changes to Senate bill that were needed to gain enough support from the Democrats.

What Is Next?

The gender wage gap: So true that it's just a textbook example?

Last week, as part of my graduate student duties, I had the pleasure of grading some undergraduate econometrics midterms. Now, I've taken a few economics/statistics classes in my life, and I've noticed that all professors have the same two favorite textbook examples of basic linear regressions that they like to put up on the board to explain how regressions work and write on their tests for students to derive: the "returns to education" equation and the "gender wage gap" equation. Following suit, the econometrics midterm that I was grading featured the latter. And maybe my brain was a little fuzzy by the 70th midterm, but I started thinking - is the fact that the "gender wage gap" equation is seen as a textbook example good because it means that people acknowledge it (and hence maybe would support efforts to push for more equal pay for women)? Or is it not so good because it just means we take it as a basic fact that's not debatable and hence it can function as a classroom example or a test problem without much controversy?

Saudi Arabia: Can it be the 13th easiest place to do business when women can't do business there at all?

Saudi Arabia has been named the 13th easiest place to do business by the Doing Business Project and the World Bank.  Sure, they still have some things to work out, reports the Financial Times, like getting visas for foreign workers and enforcing contracts.  And, oh yeah, not allowing women to share workplaces with men or participate in any number of careers deemed "inappropriate."  Says the FT:

The rankings do not take into account issues such as rules on segregation of women in the workforce. Businesses that employ women must either build special sections to accommodate them or risk being closed or fined. 

When I worked as a business consultant, I did a stint living and working in Bahrain, which is right off the coast of Saudi.  We felt the proximity in more ways than one, especially since there was a causeway connecting the two lands, that Saudi men and women would head across on weekends, eager for freedom.  For men, this often meant drinking and women, and for women this meant driving, trying on clothes in a mall, and being without male escorts.  Many of our colleagues who worked in the Mideast office had clients in Saudi Arabia, but of course no female consultants could work there.  I always thought our company should refuse to do business with Saudi under these conditions: like, we're a workplace that values gender equality, and if having you as a client precludes that, we're not interested.  Of course, I was also told not to tell our clients I was Jewish, so I guess we were a long way from perfection on that score.  But how, how can you be considered the 13th easiest place to do business, right between Thailand and Iceland, when 50% of the population can't do business there at all?  Let's say a major bank wanted to set up a division there.  Half of their workforce (ok, who are we kidding, a quarter) would be out of the running.  How can they send their best people?  What if a company that just wants to make a deal with a Saudi company.  What do they do about their female executives at the meeting?  (I'm honestly not sure--can they not come?  Do they have to wait outside?)  I repeat: How can it be easy to do business without half the population?  If Saudi Arabia scores so highly, is the Doing Business Project really measuring the right things?

[Hat tip Institute on Women]

Femonomics reads: Gail Evans' "Play Like a Man, Win Like a Woman"

I recently picked up Gail Evans' 2000 business playbook for girls, Play Like a Man, Win Like a Woman: What Men Know About Success that Women Need to Learn. Unlike many business books, it is actually a quick read, so major props to Evans for that. Too many business reads are 250-page books that should have been a 10-page essay.

Evans has had a very successful career, having served as EVP at CNN, taught B-school classes at Emory, and written a New York Times bestseller. Although retired, she still offers speaking engagements, and has been booked by such multinationals as Coca-Cola, JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft, and Johnson & Johnson. She has a lot to offer any career woman (or man), and much of her advice in the book is solid.

So, the book is a good read, especially for those that have serious inter-personal issues at work, but like most such books, it should be taken with a grain of salt. The hook for this book is not Evans' qualifications, but rather the gendered nature of her advice, and it's not all good.

Feministing writer takes to the WaPo op-eds to declare equality an illusion--what do you think?

The founder of feministing, Jessica Valenti, writes in the Washington Post that women are deluding ourselves into thinking we have more equality than we do.  She writes:

We're suffering under the mass delusion that women in America have achieved equality. ...We're basking in a "girl power" moment that doesn't exist -- it's a mirage of equality that we've been duped into believing is the real thing.
Because despite the indisputable gains over the years, women are still being raped, trafficked, violated and discriminated against -- not just in the rest of the world, but here in the United States. And though feminists continue to fight gender injustices, most people seem to think that outside of a few lingering battles, the work of the women's movement is done.

Women can't be men: Social expectations and salary negotiations

Earlier at Femonomics, we discussed the pressure for women to behave like men to be successful, and why this won't work. The Harvard Business Review brings us more evidence for why this is an unsuccessful strategy, especially when negotiating salary. It turns out women are in a classic catch-22 when it comes to negotiating compensation.

Although it may well be true that women often hurt themselves by not trying to negotiate, this study found that both men and women were more likely to subtly penalize women who did ask for more, the perception being that women who asked were "less nice."

Women cannot succeed simply by changing their behavior if the true criteria for success is others' perception of that behavior. The original study can be found here.

On women and math...What do you think?

I read this interesting article about the debate over women and math, which, like most debates over women and things that they may or may not be good at, focuses on whether gender differences are inherent or learned, in this case, mathematical ability.  The article references a study that shows, among other things, that gender performance in mathematics is highly sensitive to changes in other socio-cultural factors, particularly gender parity.  From Daniel Hawes:

Janet Hyde and Janet Mertz manage to show a significant correlation between the percentage of girls on a country's International Mathematical Olympiad Team, and that country's World Development Indicator Gender Gap Index. The emerging pattern is quite clear: The greater the gender parity in a country, the more girls go to the Math Olympiad; thus indicating a significant role - who could have doubted it - of social equality in girl's performance on this (and other) indicators of mathematical achievement.

This fits into the broader discussion of genotype versus phenotype that plays out elsewhere in economics.  A person's phenotype is what we observe, but too often we attribute this observable characteristic to the underlying genotype, or inherited characteristics.  In reality, not only can social forces during one's lifetime change one's achievement, but also tiny changes in utero can impact gene expression.  For example, this article on iodine deficiency in Tanzania shows that correcting maternal iodine deficiency in the first trimester of pregnancy led to large cognitive gains for daughters of affected mothers.

While it's certainly possible that there are differences in the way male and female brains process numerical information, or develop with regard to this ability (some people say girls simply learn math later), I would say attributing the bulk of observed differences to genotype when we know so many social differences exist is just lazy.

[Hat tip Larry]

Gender discrimination or different preferences? And does it matter?

As an economics student, I've encountered two strands of literature on gender discrimination. There is one side that attempts to expose and document discrimination against women by measuring the wage gap that is unexplained by observable factors, by showing that the hiring and promotion of women orchestra players is increased when there are blind auditions with a screen, and by finding other examples of blatant gender discrimination in the job market. In the rest of the world, people often point out how women are portrayed differently in the media than men (Sarah Palin, for example), or how there's too much focus on women to be thin and young, or how women are stereotyped as being sensitive on the job. On the opposite extreme, there is a strand of literature that dismisses any notion of gender discrimination. This literature claims that women simply have different preferences than men (for example, they want to have children or to stay home with their children rather than work, or to be fit and work out), and that any evidence of "discrimination" is completely explained by these different tastes.