Despite efforts to eliminate gender bias at work, women still face barriers their male colleagues don’t. How can companies today identify whether gender bias has crept into their organization and create cultures that are supportive of women?

On this episode of The Culture Kit, hosts Jenny Chatman and Sameer Srivastava are joined by Laura Kray, a professor at Berkeley Haas and the faculty director of the Center for Equity, Gender, and Leadership. Laura has been studying the psychological barriers that hold women back at work for decades. Her work sheds light on the hidden biases that persist today.

Jenny, Sameer, and Laura chat about the perceived differences between male and female leaders in terms of power versus status, as well as how age plays into how women are perceived. Laura discusses her research debunking the notion that pay disparities between men and women come from differences in negotiation skills and shares strategies for business leaders to uncover and correct inequities.

*The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*

3 Main Takeaways from Jenny & Sameer’s interview with Laura Kray:

  1. Be open minded to the possibility that gender bias may have crept into your company’s culture.
  2. Engage in systematic tracking and auditing of things like pay and performance reviews and adopt a data-driven approach to correcting inequities.
  3. Be a confronter rather than a bystander. You don’t need to be at the top of an organization to inspire change..

Show Links:

Transcript

[00:00:00] Jenny: Hi, I’m Jenny Chatman.

[00:00:03] Sameer: And I’m Sameer Srivastava.

[00:00:06] Jenny: We’re professors at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. And we’ve dedicated our careers to studying and advancing effective workplace cultures.

[00:00:15] Sameer: Jenny is a psychologist who helped create the field of organizational culture research.

[00:00:20] Jenny: And Sameer is a sociologist who is pioneering new ways to use big data, AI, and deep learning to uncover insights about what happens inside organizations.

[00:00:33] Sameer: Together, we founded the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation to help business leaders create and cultivate healthy and effective workplace cultures.

[00:00:42] Jenny: In this podcast, we’ll tackle hard-to-fix issues that your organization is facing as we look to the future of work.

[00:00:51] Sameer: We’ll take your questions about culture and give you practical advice that you can put to work right away. Join us for The Culture Kit with Jenny and Sameer and start building your culture toolkit.

[00:01:05] Sameer: Hey Jenny.

[00:01:05] Jenny: Hey, Sameer.

[00:01:07] Sameer: So, what’s our question today?

[00:01:08] Jenny: Well, our question today comes from a senior manager with a 25-year career in risk at a major financial institution. She preferred to remain anonymous. So, I’m just going to read the question. We’re about to enter the second quarter of the 21st century. And there’s still gender bias in the workplace. A culture that isn’t friendly or supportive of women can impact their desire to fully engage and stay with the company. What do you think are the root causes for this bias? And what can be done to correct for it and create a culture that is friendly to women?

[00:01:45] Sameer: Well, this is a question that I think many organizations are still thinking about and struggling with. And we’re very fortunate today to have an in-house expert to help us answer this question. I’d like to welcome our colleague, Laura Kray, who is a professor here at Berkeley Haas in the Management of Organizations group.

Welcome, Laura. It’s so great to see you.

[00:02:05] Laura: Thanks so much, Sameer and Jenny. I’m delighted to be here.

[00:02:08] Jenny: So, Laura’s been studying the psychological barriers that hold women back at work for decades. And I would say a theme of her academic work is to make hidden biases visible. She’s published some really interesting papers, which we’ll hear a little bit about today. Laura’s also the Faculty Director of the Center for Equity, Gender, and Leadership, known as EGAL, here at Haas. We’re so pleased to have you, Laura.

[00:02:33] Sameer: I should also add that Laura created the Women’s Executive Leadership Program through Berkeley Executive Education, and she’s been the Faculty Director of that program since 2008. Laura, I’m curious, over all those years of teaching so many women leaders, what changes have you noticed?

[00:02:48] Laura: Well, I’ve noticed a change in terms of the participants’ recognition of the potential for being impacted by implicit biases. So, for example, when I first started teaching the program, I would have participants fill out a survey and asking them to identify a woman leader that they most admired. At the time, the most common answer was that they couldn’t identify one. It was really a shock to hear.

Today, we’re in a post “Lean In” and a post #MeToo world, and these barriers are more broadly known. And thankfully, everybody is able to name women in their own lives and in society, more broadly, who they greatly admire.

[00:03:31] Jenny: Oh, that’s awesome. And we’re definitely making progress. So, McKinsey has just released its 10th Annual Women in the Workplace Study, and it reports that women’s representation has increased at every level, and particularly, in senior leadership, which is fantastic to hear. Women today make up 29% of C-suite positions compared to just 17% in 2015, so that’s a big gain.

But McKinsey also reports that, earlier in the pipeline, too few women, and especially women of color, are advancing into management positions. So, let’s talk about some of the biases that affect women in terms of how they’re perceived as leaders and how that might show up in organizations.

I know, Laura, that you recently looked at gender differences in power and status. So, can you define the difference between power and status?

[00:04:25] Laura: Sure. Both power and status are what we think of as pathways to climb a social hierarchy, right? It’s a way to attain leadership. And power is defined as possessing control over valuable resources, and status is defined as being respected in the eyes of others.

As a result of these differences, powerful people are better able to pursue their own egocentric goals; whereas, maintaining status requires individuals to attune to others’ needs to maintain their position.

[00:04:57] Sameer: So, Laura, how do those distinctions play out in your research?

[00:05:00] Laura: Right, so you’re referring to research that I recently published with Charlie Townsend and Sonia Mishra, who are two graduates of Haas’s Doctoral Program in Management of Organizations. And we got curious about the most powerful people in the world and whether there were gender differences in how they attain those positions. We hypothesized that power aligns with masculine stereotypes, suggesting men are agentic, and status aligns with feminine stereotypes, suggesting women are communal. As a consequence, we expected that male leaders would be perceived as more powerful than female leaders and female leaders would be perceived as having more status than male leaders.

[00:05:43] Jenny: So, that’s interesting. How did you test that?

[00:05:46] Laura: So, to test this idea, we drew from Forbes Magazine’s World’s Most Powerful People list, which included 75 people, only five of whom were women. So, that, in and of itself, says something. But we also added in Fortune Magazine’s 100 Most Powerful Women list. And according to these lists, you know, people like Vladimir Putin and Taylor Swift run the world.

And so, in our first study, we presented photos of each leader to our research participants and asked them to indicate whether they recognize the person. We, then, provided each leader’s name and title and asked participants to rate their perceived power and status using statements about authority and control, asking them, how many subordinates do you think they supervise? Are they able to administer discipline or rewards to tap into power? And then we ask them whether the person was admired, respected, and sought out for their opinions, to measure status.

[00:06:42] Sameer: Super interesting design, Laura. So, what did you find? And how might those findings play out in organizations?

[00:06:48] Laura: Right. So, across the board, and maybe not surprisingly, the male leaders from the Forbes list were more recognizable than the female leaders, and they were rated higher in power, but lower in status. What’s more, the men were more likely to be recognized if they were perceived as powerful, while the women were more likely to be recognized if they were viewed as having high status.

This pattern held true for both direct recognition by research participants and indirect measures, like social media and news attention. So, these findings, I think, have significant implications. The fact that status is more easily lost than power means that people who are leaders on the basis of status have to maintain their warmth and fairness to, to hold on to those positions.

The persistent association of women with status and men with power risks marginalizing women in terms of their ability to control resources, despite their perceived respect. And ultimately, this may confine women to prestigious roles without actual power, and, ultimately, could perpetuate gender inequality and social hierarchies. And I would say furthermore, the lower recognition of powerful women may discourage them from pursuing leadership positions, even exacerbating gender imbalances in high-level roles.

[00:08:06] Jenny: So, I’m thinking that our questioner today, she talked about how gender bias might contribute to a culture where women don’t feel they’re on equal footing with men. Laura, have you found evidence of specific ways that gender biases are affecting women in leadership?

[00:08:21] Laura: Yes, we have. Research coming out of my lab has identified several ways that gender bias can contribute to a culture where women don’t feel they’re on equal footing with men, particularly, when they’re in leadership positions. And I can give you two examples.

So, starting with work I published with Dr. Margaret Lee, we found evidence that people think men are more authoritative in their leadership style while women are more democratic. So, it’s another, you know, instantiation of these stereotypes, that men are agentic and, therefore, can, you know, lead with authority, and women are communal and, therefore, they lead with a, you know, more democratic process.

And what we found is that these biases can lead men and women to lead teams of different sizes. So, you know, being an authoritative leader, people tend to associate with leading a large team, where you can be very command and control and, you know, sort of, issuing orders. Whereas, people perceive leading a small team as requiring these more, you know, sort of, democratic and communal skills. And so, what this can lead to is men leading larger teams than women. And it could be that, you know, that, in and of itself, isn’t a problem, but where it becomes problematic is that we subsequently found that people think that managers who are leading large teams should be paid more than people… managers who are leading small teams. And using real-world data of MBA alums, we found this pattern held, that our female alums were leading smaller teams than men, and they were experiencing a significant pay gap in line with labor statistics.

[00:10:04] Jenny: I’m wondering how you would separate out the effects of women, maybe, not seeking out those larger teams, like, not going for it.

[00:10:11] Laura: Yeah. Well, so, we… I mean, we can design surveys to ask people specifically. And in some of the preliminary work we did, we didn’t see differences in their aspirational level of, how many team members would you like? I think our business students said, on average, around 11. And that was true for men and women alike. So, whereas men achieved that, women were getting to about 6 or 7 team members, on average.

But I think the question speaks to a more general distinction that’s important to make between supply side and demand side explanations for the gender pay gap. So, the supply side explanations, those are focusing on factors related to, you know, characteristics of individual workers, their choices, the behaviors of women themselves. Whereas, demand side explanations focus on factors related to implicit bias and, you know, discrimination, et cetera.

[00:11:05] Sameer: Yeah. Well, let’s talk about that, because one of the supply side explanations that’s been proffered is that women are either less able to or less engaged in negotiating for better outcomes for themselves. So, what does your research tell us about that?

[00:11:19] Laura: Right. And so, there’s, you know, 25 years of research suggesting that one reason why women are paid less than men is that they are less inclined to try to negotiate a job offer. I was always a little suspicious because I teach negotiations and I teach…I’ve been teaching it for 25 years, and I never see any real big differences emerging in how men and women perform in the classroom.

And so, with my co-authors, Jessica Kennedy and Margaret Lee, we had an opportunity to ask a large body of MBA graduates whether they had negotiated their most recent raises and promotions. And in fact, what we found is that, today, women are asking more than men. So, there… if there’s a gap at all, it’s that women are negotiating more than men. However, they’re being told “no” more often.

[00:12:11] Sameer: Interesting. So, just switching gears a little bit, Laura, I wonder if you could comment on Claudia Goldin’s work on the pay gap. And, of course, she recently won the Nobel Prize in Economics for her work. But she talks a lot about the idea of greedy jobs. So, tell us a bit more about that and your understanding of how that might influence the pay gap.

[00:12:30] Laura: Yeah, Claudia Goldin is… has really been a trailblazer in this area. So, greedy work includes jobs that disproportionately reward long hours and specific work schedules. And what she finds is that, when you start getting into greedy work, compensation goes up non-linearly, right? So, you’re, you know, disproportionately rewarded for that extra 5 hours than if you are staying within a normal range of a typical work week. And these occupations often require constant availability, facetime, limited flexibility, people tend to get penalized when they reduce their hours or seek out flexible arrangements.

And so, Goldin argues that these characteristics significantly contribute to gender pay gaps, as women often seek flexibility or reduced hours, especially after having children, which is penalized in these types of jobs. In contrast, occupations that are not characterized as greedy work, the pay gap tends to be smaller.

[00:13:34] Jenny: So, of course, if women do take time off, they may head back into the workforce and encounter another bias, which are some deeply held stereotypes about middle-aged women. These start to hit when women are in their 40s and are really coming into their own. You know, a paper that you and I, Laura, published on this topic really showed that middle-aged women, women in the middle of their careers, get penalized the most for being very capable and, in fact, are viewed as less warm automatically as a result of being more capable and are viewed as performing less well, even compared to themselves at an earlier age. So, by ascending the hierarchy, are women doomed to be penalized?

[00:14:24] Laura: Yeah, it’s an interesting question, because, if we go back to the work I was talking about with power and status and the ascent of hierarchies, on the one hand, you know, being nice, you know, it’s, sort of, associated with women. But I mean, when you combine it with the increasing agency that, you know, perceived agency that we all acquire as we move through our careers and gain expertise and maybe a few gray hairs, that tends to counteract what would otherwise be a perception of women as having, you know, a high degree of warmth.

[00:14:57] Jenny: Yeah. Well, I remember when we were doing the study that we published together, we did, as part of that, an experiment where we just presented subjects with photos of men and women who were either young, middle aged, or older, and we asked subjects with no other information, aside from these photos, to evaluate their warmth and agency. And what we found was that only those middle-aged women were viewed as higher in agency, which is great, but automatically lower in warmth. And so, these prescribed stereotypes that are associated with gender really do hurt women as they ascend through the hierarchy of organizations.

[00:15:44] Laura: Yeah. It’s remarkable to me that, you know, despite how much progress society has made, we really do filter our perceptions of people through the lens of gender and gender stereotypes.

[00:15:58] Jenny: I guess the other thing that surprised me most about our study is that, what we found, it was a longitudinal study of men and women across their career, and what we found was that men were linearly improving in terms of their performance ratings across their age. But for women, they did well as young women and as older women, but there was a huge dip in middle age in terms of their performance evaluations. And again, they were being penalized for being counter-stereotypic. They were high in agency and then automatically perceived as low in warmth. That was just shocking to me.

[00:16:39] Sameer: Yeah, it’s a pretty stunning result. And the biases you’re both talking about, we know, are really pervasive. So, I want to turn to the question of what organizational leaders can do about it. And what types of cultures might be more friendly to women? Jenny, I think you’ve done some work on this topic.

[00:16:55] Jenny: Yeah. It’s a really great question, Sameer. I mean, there’s some evidence that organizations that emphasize in their culture, collaboration and innovation might be more likely to allow both men and women to engage in thinking up risky ideas. But there are also certain, kind of, orthogonal, if you could say, cultural attributes. For example, in one study that I did with Jack Goncalo, we found that, when groups had a cultural norm of political correctness in mixed sex groups, both men and women were more likely to present creative risky ideas. And it was so interesting that it was only the political correctness norms — it didn’t work if the norm was around politeness or around being sensitive to others. There was something about removing the possibility that people were, were going to be stereotyped based on their gender that allowed them to unleash these creative ideas.

[00:17:54] Sameer: A great example. And Laura, I think you have a paper that may be quite relevant here, too. Can you talk a little bit about your brilliance paper?

[00:18:00] Laura: Right. Well, so, this is actually a work in collaboration with Jenny and other co-authors where we looked at the cultures of organizations in terms of whether they were relatively fixed or growth in their mindset. And we know that there are gender stereotypes associating brilliance and genius with men much more so than women.

And so, having a culture that, sort of, embraces that, you know, all we do is hire the best and the brightest and everything takes care of itself can be a real deterrent to attracting women to these organizations. So, to the extent that organizations adopt a growth mindset, where, you know, rewarding persistence and hard work and learning by, you know, sort of, experimentation, then that is, sort of, a culture that is going to be more likely to attract women and other underrepresented minority group members.

[00:18:54] Sameer: Great. So, why don’t we bring this discussion to a close? And Laura, I’m wondering if you can wrap things up for us by summarizing the advice you would have for leaders who want to identify hidden gender bias in their organizations and then take some steps to correct it.

[00:19:07] Laura: Sure, yeah, this is where a lot of my MBA teaching comes in. You know, the first step is to be open-minded to the possibility that bias may have crept into the organization. Denial and disinterest are two very powerful mechanisms for preserving the status quo. So, I can give you an example, the case of Salesforce. So, Cindy Robbins was a former president and chief people officer there. And she approached Marc Benioff, the CEO, and asked him whether he thought that they might have a problem with unequal pay in the company. And his initial response was, “That’s not possible here. That’s not possible because we have a great culture. We don’t play shenanigans here paying people unequally. It’s unheard of.” Eventually, she convinced him, we agree that we’re going to look under the hood, and we’re going to do an internal audit of pay. And he agreed, and her suspicions were confirmed and they found a pay gap. And thankfully, Benioff agreed in advance that, if they found a problem, he wouldn’t just sweep it under the rug. Instead, he allocated millions of dollars to fixing the problem. And that required a shift from denial of a problem to being a problem-solver.

The second step is to engage in systematic tracking and auditing and, you know, really adopting a data-driven approach. Here, I’m thinking about some great work by Shelley Correll at GoDaddy. The organization realized they had a gender gap in their quantitative performance ratings. And they worked with her and her research team to try to understand why. She found that managers were spending more time talking about women’s personalities than men’s, and this seemed to be hurting women. The conversation was, sort of, about their problematic personalities.

So, she worked with the organization to help them develop a rubric that focused the discussion on key organizational values and ensuring that everyone’s personality was discussed equally, or not at all. And as a result of the implementation of these changes, the performance rating gap went away entirely. And so, leaders can look for ways to standardize evaluations to minimize the possibility that gender bias is going to creep in.

And the third step is to, you know, move from being a bystander where we say, “Oh, I wish things were better,” to actually being a confronter. And this means, no matter where you sit in the organizational hierarchy, you want to be sensitive to what your sphere of influence is and what you can do to make change.

[00:21:50] Sameer: So, Laura, can you give us an example of the confronter role you have in mind?

[00:21:54] Laura: Yeah, a great example pertains to the 50-50 project at the BBC. And it started with Ros Atkins. He’s a presenter on a primetime news program. Basically, he identified the problem of unequal gender representation in expert contributors and designed a simple data-driven approach for teams to track and improve their gender balance. He said, “We’re not ever going to sacrifice quality, we want the best experts on the show.” He was able to get the representation on his show up to 50-50, and this has spread around the globe. So, it’s a shining success story of what one person can do within their sphere of influence.

[00:22:37] Jenny: Well, Laura, thank you. This has been a fascinating discussion. We really appreciate you sharing your research with us.

[00:22:42] Laura: Thank you so much.

[00:22:43] Sameer: Thanks so much, Laura.

[00:22:46] Jenny: Thanks for listening to The Culture Kit with Jenny and Sameer. Do you have a vexing question about work that you want us to answer? Go to haas.org/culture-kit to submit your fix-it ticket today.

[00:22:59] Sameer: The Culture Kit Podcast is a production of the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation at the Haas School of Business, and it’s produced by University FM. If you enjoyed the show, be sure to hit that Subscribe button, leave us a review, and share this episode online, so others who have workplace culture questions can find us, too.

[00:23:19] Jenny: I’m Jenny.

[00:23:20] Sameer: And I’m Sameer.

[00:23:21] Jenny: We’ll be back soon with more tools to help fix your work culture challenges.

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