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This is a trip. When a woman competes
in a man's area he complains but when she doesn't follow his work rules he
complains. I wonder how he would do at carrying a baby for nine
months and then giving birth. The Huichol's decided to find out when
the men were bragging too much about the hunting while the women tended the
fields. They tied a leather thong around the man's genitals and as the
wife gave birth she was given the thongs to pull along with the labor
pains. I wonder if she was a socialist?
REH
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday, June 28, 2003 12:34
PM
Subject: [Futurework] Why men succeed at
work
The following is from this week's
Economist:
<<<<
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.
>>>>
Keith Hudson, 6 Upper Camden Place, Bath, England
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