The following is from this week's Economist:
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BE A MAN
Men compete harder than women. That is why they do better at
work
How to get more women to the corporate summit? After years of equal
opportunity, female bosses such as Hewlett-Packard's Carly Fiorina and
Xerox's Anne Mulcahy remain rarities. Women, according to a survey by
Catalyst, a lobbying group, now hold nearly twice as many senior
management positions in big American firms as they did in 1995 -- but the
percentage is still only 15.7%.
In Britain, things are no better. A recent report by Laura Tyson, head of
the London
Business School and a former chairman of America's Council of Economic
Advisers,
notes that 30 of British managers are female. But many are in the
"marzipan" layer just below the top-executive icing, from which
non-executive directors are rarely picked; or else in such unfashionable
areas as human resources. Women account for only 11% of non-executive
directors of the largest, FTSE 100, firms; 8% at FTSE 250 firms; and
fewer than 4% at small quoted firms.
Ms Tyson suggests casting the recruitment net wider, and also drawing
more non-executives from professional services, where women do better
than in corporate management. But why do women so rarely reach the
boardroom? The Catalyst survey, published in the latest Harvard Business
Review, finds that senior managers agree that the big problem is women's
lack of line-management experience. In Fortune 500 companies, 90% of
senior line managers are men.
Why don't women get such jobs? One reason may be that they view work
differently to men. New research* by Catherine Hakim of the London School
of Economics finds that men are three times as likely as women to regard
themselves as "work-centred". Women want opportunities, but not
a life dominated by work.
But research by economists at two American universities suggests that,
even in the job market, women behave in ways that disadvantage them. At
the University of Chicago's business school, Uri Gneezy and a group of
colleagues have used novel techniques to show that women and men have
different attitudes to competing. In one study that is about to appear in
the Quarterly Journal of Economics, groups of students were paid to solve
simple maze problems on a computer. In some groups, everybody was paid 50
cents per problem solved; in others, a payment of $3 per problem went
only to the individual who solved most mazes. Female performance was much
the same in both groups; but in the second lot, the average man did about
50% better than in the first.
A second study, of physical tasks, showed similar results. When nine- and
ten-year-old children ran a race alone, boys and girls clocked similar
speeds. When children raced in pairs, girls' speed hardly altered. But
boys ran faster when paired with a boy, and faster still when racing
against a girl. Mr Gneezy points out that, if men try harder when
competing, they will disproportionately win the top jobs, even when to do
the job well does not require an ability to compete. Job selection is
itself highly competitive.
Linda Babcock of Carnegie Mellon University finds that women may do worse
than men even when they win a job, because they take a different approach
to negotiation. Ms Babcock, who recounts her studies in a forthcoming
book**, noticed that male graduates with a master's degree from her
university earned starting salaries almost $4,000, or 7.6%, higher than
female students. But when she asked who had simply accepted the initial
pay offer and who had asked for more, only 7% of women, compared with 57%
of men, turned out to have negotiated. On average, those who negotiated
raised the initial offer by $4,053 -- almost exactly the difference
between men's and women's starting pay. Ms Babcock felt some exasperation
because, "I teach negotiation here, and I'm always telling students
to negotiate."
A laboratory study confirmed her findings. With her colleagues Michele
Gelfand and Deborah Small, she advertised a payment of between $3 and $10
for students who would play four rounds of Boggle, a parlour game. At the
end, hired actors posing as experimenters said to each student,
"Here's $3. Is that okay?" Astonishingly, nine times as many
men as women tried to negotiate for more.
Most studies of negotiation, Ms Babcock points out, miss such findings
because they do not consider why it is that people start to haggle. She
suspects that women feel uncomfortable with negotiating because they
think it inappropriate, or do not feel that they are entitled to ask for
more money, or think it may damage a relationship with an employer.
Instead, they feel unhappy and resentful when they see men ask for and
receive better treatment. But "this is a lightbulb issue," she
says: when she tells women what men achieve by negotiating, they are more
likely to ask too.
* Published in "Choosing to be Different: Women, work and the
family", by Jill Kirby. Centre for Policy Studies.
** "Women Don'tAsk: Negotiation and the Gender Divide", by
Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever. Princeton University Press, October
2003.
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