7 Myths About Women and Work

By Catherine Fox

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

Copyright © 2012 Catherine Fox
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74223-347-5

Contents

Acronyms,
Acknowledgments,
Introduction: Why 7 myths?,
Myth 1: Workplaces are meritocracies,
Myth 2: The gender pay gap is exaggerated,
Myth 3: Women don’t want the top jobs,
Myth 4: Women with children don’t want a career,
Myth 5: Quotas and targets are dangerous and unnecessary,
Myth 6: Women should act more like men (and they are their own worst enemies),
Myth 7: Time will heal all,
Myth-busting and beyond,
References,
Index,

CHAPTER 1

MYTH 1: WORKPLACES ARE MERITOCRACIES

The meritocracy defence of workplace dynamics could be first or last on my hit list, because it underpins every one of the other myths in this book. It’s embedded in corporate mission statements, chanted by executives and repeated ad nauseam by a lot of people who should know better, or who really should have a long hard think about what they are stating with such certainty. After hearing merit come up in forums just about every time I have been involved in a gender equity discussion, I have come to realise it is a bedrock belief for many of us, male and female. I reckon it’s so tenacious because we all want to believe that we work in places and with people who are scrupulously fair in all circumstances. In fact, that’s probably particularly true in Australia where egalitarianism is something we pay a lot of lip service to, and could be considered as part of our national psyche. It’s no coincidence that ‘fair enough’ and ‘fair go’ are part of our vernacular.

However, as I often point out when I hear this term glibly stated during a gender and workplace discussion, meritocracies by definition will not result in a startlingly homogenous group rising magically to the top of the pile. If you accept that talent can come from any part of the population – and history would certainly bear this out – then the people who succeed should represent a broad spectrum of backgrounds, ages, gender and race. But take a look at our major organisations and you will see they are still dominated at the top by white, middle-aged men. Can motherhood really be the only reason that the ASX200 have just 2.5 per cent women chairs, 3 per cent CEOs, 13.5 per cent directors and 8 per cent executive managers, according to the Australian Census of Women in Leadership? If that’s a meritocracy then it’s about a very particular kind of merit that must reside in a narrow cohort of the population, sometimes called the pale, male and stale.

A few years ago I heard the then Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard tell a forum on women and work in Sydney that she is a firm believer in the principle that merit is spread throughout the population. In this country it would be reasonable to assume that many of us theoretically agree with this proposition. Great writers, poets, footballers, swimmers, actors and film directors come in all shapes and sizes. When you think about it in that way, clearly talent is not restricted to a particular slice of society or race, religion or gender group. Surely business isn’t so different from other domains that its demand for skill and talent can only be met by one group? As a liberal democracy we have seen a broad range of people changing the complexion of our government, education system, shops, neighbourhoods and, yes, parts of the business community. But go beyond a certain level to those in charge and that rapidly turns into homogeneity.

So after thinking about this, I decided that an examination of the myth of meritocracy and the idea we all work on an ‘even playing field’, would have to be first in the book because it plays such an important part in propping up the thinking that keeps my myths circulating. It’s dangerous on a number of levels, as I will examine, but its popularity over recent years as corporate dogma is probably to do with a certain amount of wish fulfilment by those in power. They use the merit myth to convince themselves that they got where they are today because they – and, strangely enough, a lot of people who look just like them – are simply better equipped than anybody else for the top jobs, and that they received no particular favours along the way. So those who failed to get ahead simply have themselves to blame. As with all the myths, it is also a highly subjective assessment, often based on assumptions and fed by stereotypes, and therefore particularly tricky to pin down and challenge. But this much has become clear to me; when it is repeated with authority by those in charge, or enshrined as a ‘corporate value’, it has an enormously damaging effect literally and metaphorically for those who belong to a group that is conspicuously absent from the top of the ‘meritricious’ pile.

That doesn’t mean it’s not a worthwhile goal. When I speak about the meritocracy myth at forums I often quote Mahatma Gandhi’s response when he was asked by an English journalist in the 1930s what he thought of western civilisation: ‘I think it would be a good idea’. The notion of merit and meritocracies is tenacious, according to Karen Morley, academic and co-founder of Melbourne consulting firm, Gender Worx:

The idea of merit is held very strongly as a value and a lot of organisations are very keen to be meritocracies. There’s a focus on development programs and reinforcing the notion that merit sits under those processes. But it’s not the case that everyone gets the same opportunities and chance of promotion.

While she believes that a meritocracy may be the stated objective, it is important to understand the influence of our models of what a leader and leadership look like, and how this is shaped by informal beliefs and attitudes linked to our social and cultural expectations. Women are still not seen as authority figures, are often less visible because of flexible work arrangements, and are more reluctant to put themselves forward for development opportunities due to family constraints. But even if they are in fact keen to pursue a career, the odds against them making the pool of contenders are pretty bad and reflect a lot of covert discrimination which is known as ‘second generation’ gender bias. These are the largely invisible but potent inhibitors to a true meritocracy, and some large-scale studies in recent years have made this clear.

According to research by not-for-profit US firm Catalyst, men are twice as likely as women to hold a CEO or senior executive position and less likely to be at lower levels, where women are over-represented. Parenthood and level of aspiration do not explain the results, as the findings considered women and men without children, as well as those who aspired to senior leadership positions. Men, in general, were also found to be more satisfied with their careers overall than women. Thus, the report concluded, despite well-intentioned programs, companies around the globe have neglected to develop talented women and failed to build meritocracies.

Even among graduates of elite Master of Business Administration programs, women continue to lag behind men at every single career stage, right from their first professional jobs. Reports of progress in advancement, compensation and career satisfaction are at best overstated, and at worst just plain wrong, said Catalyst’s Nancy Carter and Christine Silva, when the study was released. Well-educated young women generally do not start off on an equal footing with their male peers in the United States, and this is also true in Australia, where Gradstats 2010 data show that female graduates earn $2000 less per year on average than male graduates when they start work. According to Carter and Silva:

Even after adjusting for years of work experience, industry and region, Catalyst found men started their careers at higher levels than women. And that isn’t because women don’t aspire to the top – the finding holds when you include only women and men who say they’re aiming for senior executive positions. It’s not a matter of parenthood slowing women’s careers either. Among women and men without children living at home, men still start at higher levels.

With the odds stacked against women at entry level, the faith that growing numbers of women entering the workplace will rectify the problem is way off the mark (see myth 7). With this kind of evidence it is difficult to understand how most organisations can continue to claim they are meritocracies.

Catalyst also highlighted familiar assumptions about demographics and life choices: that women leave to start families (myth 4) and don’t aspire to upper management (myth 3), and that regional differences skew results. They concluded, ‘These have become handy excuses for gender inequity in the management ranks, even putting the onus on female employees for the discrepancies. But our results suggest they’re red herrings that don’t account for why women continue to lag’.

The conclusion that women’s careers simply don’t progress like men’s is corroborated by another large 2009 study, Holding Women Back; the deck is stacked against women from the earliest days of their careers. The findings revealed that female leaders are under-represented in accelerated development programs early on in their careers, hindering their climb up the ladder.

Because many of the accelerated programs (like high potential programs and one-on-one mentorship) are secret or happen behind closed doors, organizations aren’t held accountable for gender balance. Having women represented in significant numbers at every leadership level doesn’t mean that will carry to the executive level – in fact, there is a backlash against women at the top when they are dominant in leadership roles at every other level.

While these studies don’t exactly lift the spirits, it is helpful to have this kind of thoughtful analysis emerging in recent times, instead of assuming the problems for women are imagined or mostly to do with women’s failings. The studies make it clear that assuming merit is the only criteria to get ahead in workplaces is simply not the case, particularly if you are female. They also confirm that the problems with this myth are similar in many developed economies. UK-based consultant Avivah Wittenberg-Cox works with companies around the world and sees the same thinking in many countries. In her blog, ‘Corporate leadership is still all about the boys’, she said:

Most male leaders in the companies I work with are truly convinced that they work in a meritocracy … Most male managers I work with have no idea how male normed today’s corporate cultures, management mindsets, and policy processes still are. Many haven’t given it a moment’s thought. As anyone who has worked internationally and cross-culturally knows, you have no idea how much you are a product of thecountry you come from until you leave it. And most senior male executives have never (yet) left their male-dominated environments and companies. They have rarely experienced the pleasure of being the only man in a roomful of women. When they do, it usually has a profound impact – and they are very often amazed to discover how uncomfortable it can be.

And many women buy into the idea of a male style of merit too, she added.

The result is that many companies only promote women who adopt male styles that can then be recognized as ‘talent’. This then creates a negative cycle where younger women are demotivated by the inauthentic, adaptive women held up to them as role models. They quit (physically or intellectually), often citing ‘personal reasons,’ and then companies complain about a retention problem.

That’s the problem with and the reason for the strength of the merit myth. Those who do make it up the ladder are more likely to reproduce and endorse it because the system has worked for them and they have a vested interest in defending rather than analysing the status quo. But I believe it has more to answer for.

When you are sure your cohort is the one that reflects merit you also tend to only trust people who look and talk like you. This why the homogenous cohort at the senior levels of many organisations continues to replicate itself (the ASX200 boards anyone?), while regarding any deviation from the norm as a bit risky. Indeed, as Origin Energy and Macquarie Group chair Kevin McCann told a forum on gender in early 2012, most of the men on the top 50 boards in Australia all went to the same schools, universities, married each other’s sisters and go on holidays to the same places.

Margaret Heffernan, author of Wilful Blindness, believes it’s part of our psychology and a very human tendency to favour feelings of comfort and recognition or intuition over evidence. She says there is also a tendency for the powerful to truly believe that their success is all due to innate brilliance, whereas in fact the roles themselves confer a substantial amount of that clout. When a CEO demands that something is done it usually happens. It doesn’t take long for the powerful to believe it is them, not their position, that is having an effect and without some perspective executives can easily fall into the trap of taking all the credit. When they are surrounded mainly by other powerful, white, middle-aged men who believe the same thing, there’s a self-perpetuating tendency to think the people with merit and natural prospects for management and the C suite are mostly these exact kinds of alpha blokes. In fact, the existence of any homogenous power group is actually a sign that there probably is no meritocracy in operation. More and more studies are finding that those like-minded and look-alike groups do not reflect a meritocracy and are actually the risky option when it comes to decision making.

So a mix is the better option, and it turns out women can make a positive difference to groups. The best operating teams tend to be those with more women, according to Anita Woolley and Thomas Malone, writing in the Harvard Business Review. This is not because women are intellectually or morally superior to men, but they do tend to be more socially sensitive. In fact, there is little correlation between a group’s collective intelligence and the IQs of its individual members, according to the researchers. But if a group includes more women its collective intelligence rises.

According to Woolley, ‘Many of the factors you might think would be predictive of group performance were not things like group satisfaction, group cohesion, group motivation – none were correlated with collective intelligence. And, of course, individual intelligence wasn’t highly correlated, either.’ That’s right: the sum of the IQ scores did not predict top performance. ‘When it comes to the best blend, the standard argument is that diversity is good and you should have both men and women in a group. But the data show that so far the more women the better.’ While it is a generalisation to conclude the results are solely due to women being more socially sensitive (after all, some men also have those skills), the findings nevertheless reinforce the message that having a broader range of people with an array of different attributes adds up to a better outcome. The researchers found that a strong operating team seems to be about the dynamic between the members, which is enhanced when a group is diverse in areas such as gender and age and in views as well. Agreement isn’t just an inhibitor to better outcomes, it’s a danger. In fact, the more bonhomie in a team, the higher the chance of group-think.

‘The downside of the cosy feeling of togetherness is that everyone is less vigilant and more vulnerable to bad and dangerous decisions,’ according to Margaret Heffernan. But there are other dangers from a cosy homogenous team: because they become so sure of the superiority of their perspective they are more prone to demonise outsiders or dissenters. ‘In most organisations the good team player is implicitly defined as the person who goes along with the team, not the one who asks hard questions. In fact, of course, being a truly good team player involves having the confidence to dissent.’

A few years ago, as the Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS) was teetering on the brink of collapse, Heffernan was running a panel discussion about board governance in London that included the HBOS chair, Dennis Stevenson. Not only did he show up for the panel, which surprised many, given the chaos, but he then waxed lyrical about the unanimity of the board in the face of the crisis. The concept that this very unity may have been one of the causes of the problem did not seem to have occurred to Stevenson, according to Heffernan.

Not so long ago I heard a well-known Australian business figure and director asked about the low level of women on boards at a panel discussion. He defended the status quo by earnestly explaining that the most important quality for a smoothly operating board was for all the directors to feel comfortable. Needless to say, by implication, more women directors represented less comfort for him. This was not well received by the audience of superannuation fund managers he was addressing, who were critical of the stock market performance of their substantial investment in many listed companies, and keen to see better performing boards. It’s safe to say the women directors sitting on the panel with the comfortable man were not impressed either.

The ingredients of a high-performing group – which sounds more like the result of a genuine meritocracy at work – is about the sum of the parts, as found by the Harvard Business Review research. Great groups are not those where the members are all really smart, according to Woolley, but where the members listen to each other. ‘They share criticism constructively. They have open minds. They’re not autocratic. And in our study we saw pretty clearly that groups that had smart people dominating the conversation were not very intelligent groups.’ So picking a team of colleagues who look and think like you may be standard business practice, but it is usually not going to reflect those with the most merit, will not generate the best results and could well be dangerous.

(Continues…)Excerpted from 7 Myths About Women and Work by Catherine Fox. Copyright © 2012 Catherine Fox. Excerpted by permission of University of New South Wales Press Ltd.
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