Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Women in the workforce

This is obviously a contentious topic, and like a few others out there (Syria comes to mind), the greatest disparity is in the solution. That's enough preamble, let's get to the good stuff.

A couple of years ago, Harvard Business School decided that while they can't necessarily change the business world, they can change the people going into it by taking a long hard look at their own practices and how women do at their school. The resulting article is quite thorough, but I'll give you the Cole's notes and a few thoughts. I highly recommend giving the original a read if you have time.

The Case Study

A search of "Business Women" gives me this image
of a woman in a suit checking her make up. Seriously?
Image courtesy of mrsiraphol/ FreeDigitalPhotos.net
The basic line of reasoning used by HBR was what they saw as a hyper competitive environment
(which makes perfect sense considering what it takes to get in) that seemed to foster almost hostile attitudes towards women. Interestingly, both female students and staff commented about the prevalence of this. It came in a variety of shades. Many women felt pressured to find a partner while there, which meant they would refuse to speak up in class to avoid being intimidating to potential spouses, miss out on opportunities to prepare for exams to go on dates with fellow classmates, and put more work into their appearance in school and their social ranking than their academic performance.

There were citations of secret societies that network and get job opportunities that women were locked out of, men who ranked female students by their looks, and a very small number of tenured female professors (even less female professors that were popular with students). In fact, quite a few female lecturers have left in the past over a lack of support from administrative, lack of opportunity to get tenure, and being objectified by their students.

So what did they do with all this information? Among other things, more extreme moves included cracking down on social activities, instituting hand raising in class, putting all female professors under review and auditing every single one of their classes to help them improve as lecturers, putting in stenographers into classes to ensure class participation grades aren't reliant on a professor's memory, and bringing in software that would give a professor a gender breakdown of their grades (to help with individual biases).

A tremendous amount of students felt anything from angry at being guinea pigs (at $50k/year, that's a costly experiment to be a part of), to irritated by being treated like children, to resentful to grateful and every shade of grey in between. There were protests by students and the relationship between then and the administration was publicly very sour.

Of course, by the end of year 2 of the experiment, female professors were receiving substantially better evaluations from students, female participation in class skyrocketed, and the number of women performing at the top 5% of the class was at almost 40%. In fact, in strange contradiction to the public feud, student satisfaction rates were the highest they'd been in years.

Commentary

What does this all mean though? On the one hand, I am offended by the idea that women need to be babied into performing at the same level as their male counterparts, and that these upper echelon professionals are sacrificing their future for a chance at nabbing themselves a stockbroker husband, but on the other hand it is difficult to argue with results, even when they sort of infuriate me. Of course, even the administrator responsible for jump starting this experiment at HBR noted, when asked about whether it was successful, “We made progress on the first-level things, but what it’s permitting us to do is see, holy cow, how deep-seated the rest of this is.”

First and foremost, I think it's commendable that such a high profile school (with no shortage of applicants) takes such a public and strong stance on its commitment to creating equal opportunity for all their students and staff regardless of gender. Secondly, one of the most powerful ways to influence the business world is to influence the people entering it, especially since the demands of the cream of the crop are more likely to be taken seriously by potential employers. I wish them all the best in their continued efforts to make their campus truly accessible.

Unfortunately, I fear that this experiment deals only with the symptom. The men and women that arrive there have been subjects to decades of social conditioning that affects their behaviour and simply catering to those mental roadblocks will never be enough to achieve legitimate and lasting equality. We as a society learn to treat women as equal members whose primary value is not to be decided based on her looks or male affiliations. Not only that, but we cannot celebrate one gender to the exclusion of the other. Alienating men because we want women to feel better about themselves is no better than the opposite. We need to get beyond gender in the workplace entirely. There are much bigger issues the world needs to deal with than the genitalia our coworkers have.

If nothing else, it certainly opens the door to a greater frankness on the subject I can't say I've seen before.