Louise Roth

This post originally appeared on the Huffington Post on December 2, 2007 at this URL.

A Dec. 1 NYT article, “Top Ranks of Women on Wall Street are Shrinking” tells tales of political infighting and the subprime mortgage crisis as catalysts for the ouster of Zoe Cruz from a high executive position at Morgan Stanley. Since she was Wall Street’s best bet for a woman chief executive, it now seems there are no women with “a viable chance of becoming chief executive anytime soon.” Are women back to square one, circa 1970, on Wall Street?

Landon Thomas Jr. says that industry insiders wonder if this high-powered executive’s “status as a demanding woman in a male-dominated industry” may have tipped the scales against her. Of course her gender was part of it.

When I interviewed women and men who worked on Wall Street in the 1990s, I found that stereotyping profoundly influenced the way that women were treated. Like Zoe Cruz, some women were able to be successful, especially if they had powerful mentors. But women who moved up were increasingly held to double standards: expected to be tough, competitive, aggressive workaholics on one hand, and yet to be nice, nurturing, kind, and family-oriented because they were women. It is, of course, impossible for anyone to fulfill these expectations simultaneously. I found that women who had proven themselves and attained positions of power on Wall Street were often especially negatively regarded.  These women faced expectations that they would behave in appropriately feminine ways, even though cultural ideas of femininity clashed with definitions of managerial competence in Wall Street’s male-dominated culture.  People have a difficult time accepting aggressive and dominant behavior from women, like speaking with a stern facial expression, making a lot of eye contact while speaking, or making verbal or non-verbal threats.  At the same time, women on Wall Street had to exhibit these types of “masculine” personality traits and contradict expectations of femininity to prove their competence within Wall Street’s culture.

This created a double standard for their actions, made it difficult for them to wield authority in the workplace. One of the women I interviewed observed, “I’ll talk firmly to an analyst and say, ‘I need these numbers by this time.  And you better proof it.  And I want it right and formatted.’ That will come back to me that I was being a ‘bitch.’  I’ll get a call from the staffer that says, ‘You can’t talk like that.’ Whereas a guy, my officemate, would say to some guy – same guy – ‘You know, you’re such an asshole. How can you be so stupid? Don’t you know this is how you do this?  And don’t come back into my office until it’s right.’ And that doesn’t warrant a phone call.” Women in high positions receive more negative evaluations than men who exhibited similar behavior. When expectations for their behavior are so contradictory, how can women compete?

It’s unfortunate, perhaps tragic, that industry insiders like Elaine La Roche are saying “I think in recent years the advances made by women in the 1990s have reversed.” Things weren’t so great for women in the 1990s, as my research shows, but there were some women making headway in this lucrative industry. Is retrenchment a sign of a general backlash against principles of gender equity in the Bush era (as denial of systematic gender inequity has escalated while statistics about it have been removed from government webpages)? Or is a sign of backlash against the lawsuits and settlements of the past decade?

Louise Marie Roth is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Arizona, and author of Selling Women Short: Gender and Money on Wall Street published by Princeton University Press.

Originally written May 31, 2007.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court delivered a huge blow to the fight against pay discrimination for women in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., Inc. (See http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/30/washington/30scotus.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin and http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/30/us/30pay.html) In the case, the only woman supervisor at a Goodyear Tire plant in Gadsden, Alabama was paid less than any of her 16 male colleagues, including those with less seniority. She did not learn of the pay discrepancy until late in her 20-year career at Goodyear. But in arguing that pay discrimination cases require a formal complaint to be filed within 180 days after pay is set, the 5-4 decision ignored the fact that most workers have no knowledge of how much their coworkers make. Most employers do not make pay rates public and, in fact, make every effort to conceal salary information. Only state organizations are required to make such information public. Because most employers lack this transparency, the ruling takes all accountability away from employers – and permits them to discriminate with impunity on the basis of sex, race, religion, or national origin.

Patterns of discrimination are often subtle and difficult to discern at the beginning of one’s career. The more that managers have discretion over pay, the more that pay inequities tend to exist. Small inequities at the beginning of workers’ careers tend to grow larger as their careers progress. And workers often don’t know the extent to which they are underpaid relative to their peers because they have no accurate information about other people’s pay. Often it is far longer than 180 days before workers discover that someone else does the same job in the same organization but is paid more than they are – largely because most discrimination is cumulative in nature. I found this on Wall Street when I did my research for Selling Women Short: Gender and Money on Wall Street, and sound social science research on inequality in a wide variety of occupations and fields has shown the same. The ruling Ledbetter v. Goodyear will make this problem worse by shielding employers from challenges to their inequitable pay practices.

The Supreme Court ruling suggests that the Roberts Court is completely out of touch with the realities of pay discrimination, and with how employers set pay rates. This ruling violates the spirit of equal employment opportunity laws and makes these laws impotent. But this is clearly in step with the intentions of the Bush administration, which has already removed data on discrimination from official government websites and publications, and has undermined efforts to continue collecting such data. In addition to the assault on women’s reproductive autonomy, the recent Supreme Court nominees were appointed to sustain a more subtle attack on vulnerable workers. Bush has succeeded in delivering on his promises in this realm, once again undermining justice and the rule of law.

This post originally appeared on the Huffington Post on April 24, 2007 at this URL.

A new report from the American Association of University Women (http://www.aauw.org/research/behindPayGap.cfm) confirms what many gender equity scholars have demonstrated for decades: while women are more highly educated than men, they enter different majors in university and different jobs after graduation, there is a gender gap in negotiation, and women face greater burdens when it comes to balancing work and family.  The pay gap begins as soon as women leave university and widens over time.  A substantial pay gap remains even when comparing men and women who work the same number of hours, have the same work experience and credentials, and have the same marital and parental status.

In the AAUW report, some of this is attributed to women’s choices, but it’s important that the issue of “choice” not be overblown.  Our culture tends to emphasize choice, and most people embrace this idea – no one wants to think they don’t have choices because it’s disempowering.  But research by Jerry Jacobs has shown that women frequently enter male-dominated university majors and occupations, only to find them inhospitable and end up leaving them in a “revolving door” pattern.  It’s not only that women choose careers in education or social services instead of science – they are often actively pushed to make those choices and discouraged from entering science, mathematics, or technical fields.  The revolving doors continue to rotate women in and out of male-dominated jobs long after graduation.  Often this looks like women’s “choices” to focus more on their families than their jobs, but the push factors are there.  But women (and employers) view this is a personal choice because it’s better than feeling like a victim (or a perpetrator).

Also, the report notes that female graduates with the same scientific and technological degrees do not enter the higher-paying jobs in those fields for some of the same reasons.  This is what many have described as a “leaky pipeline,” in which women obtain jobs in lower proportion than they obtain degrees, and then obtain promotions and salary increases in lower proportion than they obtain entry-level jobs.  Why do women “leak” out of high-paying fields over time, or receive lower wages than men in the same fields?  Salary inequity and blocked promotions are discouraging, leading women to find other “choices” more appealing.

The gender gap in negotiation is also part of the problem, and the AAUW report suggests that women need to become tougher negotiators.  The book Women Don’t Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide (http://www.womendontask.com/index.html) clearly outlines the research on this: men have more sense of entitlement than women and are more apt to promote themselves, while women seek to preserve relationships by acting in self-sacrificing ways.  When women don’t ask, the long-term effects of small differences in starting salaries lead to much larger long-term gaps.  But when women do ask, they are not treated the same way as men – employers and wage-setters need to take some of the responsibility here.  Women who ask do not receive as much as men who ask, especially when those with the power to offer think that women will not leave or will take a low-ball offer more readily than men.

What can we take away from this report and the dynamic metaphors of “leaky pipelines” and “revolving doors”?  We need interventions at every stage: encouragement for girls and women to pursue male-dominated fields and high-paying jobs, sanctions against those who discourage the recruitment and retention of women in these fields, standardization of negotiations, and vigilant review of salary and promotional inequities.  And we need to re-examine the context in which women, and their employers, make choices.

This post originally appeared on the Huffington Post on April 5, 2007 at this URL.

Why are women willing to fight against legal protections for women in the workplace? A majority of women are in the workforce, and there is solid evidence that women face systematic discrimination. But there are always those who insist that women’s disadvantages are all about choice. In “A Bargain at 77 Cents to a Dollar,” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/02/AR2007040201262.html?hpid=opinionsbox1 ) Carrie Lukas claims that “all the relevant factors that affect pay – occupation, experience, seniority, education, and hours worked – are ignored” in discussions of the wage gap. It must be nice to be able to ignore the evidence that social scientists have been accumulating for decades. Research on the effects of each of these “relevant factors” has consistently found that they cannot explain the wage gap. Even when men and women work the same hours in the same occupations and have the same amount of work experience, education, training, and seniority, women still earn less than men. While the wage gap is often smaller when “the comparison is truly between men and women in equivalent roles,” it is inequitable nonetheless. And sometimes the gap is actually larger – research shows that inequality between men and women in the same jobs is greatest in high-paying positions, where managers have more discretion over pay rates and they use that discretion to pay men more. In my research on securities professionals, women earned 29% less than men in the same jobs with the same credentials, experience, and hours.

Of course, men and women don’t always work in equivalent jobs and occupations dominated by women pay less than male-dominated occupations with similar credentials, skill levels, and working conditions. But if credentials, skill levels, and working conditions are similar, then what is the justification for paying women’s jobs less than men’s jobs? Most social science suggests that it is organizational customs and the cultural devaluation of women that leads to this difference. That’s not my definition of equity.

Interestingly, Lukas claims that men “disproportionately take on the dirtiest, most dangerous and depressing jobs.” I wonder how Lukas has decided which occupations fit these descriptions. There are plenty of jobs dominated by women that are dirty (nurses come to mind), dangerous (sex worker), and depressing (social work).

Lukas also argues that “surveys have shown for years that women tend to place a higher priority on flexibility and personal fulfillment than do men, who focus more on pay.” It would be interesting to know which surveys she is citing, since most research on job satisfaction finds that men and women value the same qualities in paid employment, with pay, autonomy, and responsibility at the top of the list. In order to justify their lot in life, people also learn to accept and value what they have. So any differences could reflect post-hoc justifications for staying in particular jobs despite their lack of remuneration. This makes it all the more striking men and women tend to say they value the same things in paid work.

Lukas then talks about the trade-offs that men and women make in paid work. The reality of many women’s lives, especially women with children – many of whom are single – is that they have to “avoid jobs that require travel or relocation,” and “take more time off and spend fewer hours in the office than men do.” Lukas portrays this as a choice, and many would agree with her, but I doubt that it feels like a choice to most women. Do men choose to travel a lot, relocate, and work long hours – or is this structured by the workplace rather than by people’s choices? Carrie Lukas says that this is all about choice – at least in her case and those of “hundreds of thousands of women” like her. And then there’s the nasty issue of the facts again: systematic research using large random samples has demonstrated that jobs dominated by women actually have less scheduling flexibility and autonomy, and larger penalties for taking time off, than jobs dominated by men. Obviously many women work in low-wage jobs where flexibility is far from a reality, so what advantages lead women to choose these low-paying jobs? Perhaps Lukas isn’t thinking about low-wage workers when she talks about “women.”

Carrie Lukas is worried that the Women’s Equality Amendment and Hillary Clinton’s Paycheck Fairness Act would give “Washington bureaucrats more power to oversee how wages are determined” and that this would make workplaces less flexible for women like her. But there is evidence that manager accountability for non-discrimination can lead women to rise to higher levels within organizations. My research with Doug Guthrie found that equal employment opportunity laws make a measurable difference in the likelihood of women moving to the top of U.S. organizations. And recent research shows that women managers improve employment outcomes for women below them in the hierarchy – possibly increasing, not decreasing, flexibility. So even if we agree with Lukas that we’re “better off not feeling like victims,” why wouldn’t we want anti-discrimination legislation with some teeth?