CHAPTER 3
Gender Cultures
Look out, America! Women are taking over the joint. Women now hold more managerial and professional jobs than men,1 and urban women under thirty now make more money than their unmarried and childless male counterparts.2 To scale the socioeconomic ladder, the fairer sex is using decidedly American ratchets: education and entrepreneurship. Women now earn more bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees than men, and as many or more professional degrees in most fields.3 On the entrepreneurial front, women own or half-own 47 percent of all U.S. firms.4
Meanwhile, American men seem to be languishing. The Great Recession of 2007–2009 hit men harder than women—so much so that bloggers dubbed the economic spinout the “he-cession.” As the male-dominated manufacturing, construction, and finance sectors sustained the recession’s hardest hits, 5.4 million men lost their jobs, compared to 2.1 million women.5
Men now shoulder not only the consequences of the recession, but also the blame. “The aggressive, risk-seeking behavior that has enabled men to entrench their power—the cult of macho—has now proven destructive and unsustainable in a globalized world,” political commentator Reihan Salam wrote in Foreign Policy.6 The people of Iceland and Lithuania agree; in the wake of financial collapse, both nations pointedly elected women to head their governments.
The younger members of the XY set are faring poorly, too. In the same years that girls made gains across the academic board, boys dropped out of high school in record numbers. Girls’ standardized test scores continued to climb a right-sloping curve, but boys’ scores slumped down a left-leaning luge, widening the gender gap in education.7
For all their hard-won triumphs, women and girls aren’t exactly doing a victory dance in the end zone. Women have always suffered more from depression than have men. But now women are getting sicker, younger, than ever before, psychologist Stephen Hinshaw documents in The Triple Bind. Today, self-mutilation, eating disorders, depression, violence, and suicide acutely endanger 25 percent of American teenage girls.8
Beneath these upticks in suffering, we detect the clash of independence and interdependence. As we will reveal in this chapter, women’s selves, ways, and worlds are more interdependent, while men’s selves, ways, and worlds are more independent. Now that men and women are sharing spheres to a degree not seen since before the industrial revolution, their culture cycles are grating against each other.
Take a look at high school girls. During their teenage years, young women are expected to hone their “girl skills,” which Hinshaw describes as “making people feel comfortable, figuring out what they need, and then giving it them.”9 Yet they are also under increasing pressure to triumph at all the traditional “boy stuff”—namely, excelling at school, sports, and extracurricular activities so that they can get into good colleges and secure fulfilling careers. This combo puts girls in an impossible situation: they must beat out the competition without hurting anyone’s feelings. And they must do so while conforming to increasingly narrow notions of beauty—the third bind that Hinshaw describes. Like the old quip about Ginger Rogers, who danced all the same steps as Fred Astaire, but backward and in high heels, young women must not only shine at independence, but also do so interdependently and while looking effortlessly hot.
Among men, the clash of independence and interdependence likewise forms the core of much anguish. When the base of wealthy nations’ economies moved from manufacturing and construction to service and information, labor demands likewise migrated from male to female bailiwicks. “A white-collar economy values raw intellectual horsepower, which men and women have in equal amounts,” journalist Hanna Rosin explains. “It also requires communication skills and social intelligence, areas in which women, according to many studies, have a slight edge.”10 Even before they enter the workforce, men begin to lose their footing on the socioeconomic ladder when their budding independent selves fail to thrive in classrooms dominated by the female form of interdependence.11 As you will see, this way of being interdependent is not identical to the East-Asian interdependence we discussed in the past chapters. Indeed, throughout this book we will show the many shapes that independence and interdependence may take. At their cores, however, independent folks everywhere see their selves as separate from and prior to their relationships, while interdependent selves see their relationships as a fundamental part of who they are.
The integration of men and women is not complete. A few traditionally female professions—nursing, teaching, social work—remain estrogen enclaves, despite the decent salaries they would pay to men willing to jump the gender line. Meanwhile, the very highest levels of government, corporations, and academia remain testosterone zones. Only 17 percent of U.S. representatives and senators are women—the lowest proportion of any industrialized nation12—and only 3.6 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are women.13 Men still dominate physics and engineering, the most lucrative of the sciences. Partly because they are locked out of these elite ranks, women still earn only seventy-seven cents to a man’s dollar.14 For women, the other side of the glass ceiling remains tantalizingly elusive.
Women are quickly closing the gap, however, and men are slowly wending their way into the female fold. For both to succeed in this increasingly mixed-up, muddled-up, shook-up world, each will have to accommodate the other’s self—namely, men will need to extend an interdependent hand, while women will need to wield their independent sides. Mustering your better self for the situation is not as hard as it may seem. Using your newfound understanding of the culture cycle, you can move institutions, interactions, and I’s to help bridge the gender divide.15
If asked to list the hotspots of the gender revolution, few people would likely mention the symphony orchestra. Yet that is precisely where psychologists Jutta Allmendinger and J. Richard Hackman went to explore what happens when women enter male-dominated institutions—especially elite institutions whose success depends on individuals working well together.16
The researchers’ laboratories were seventy-eight professional symphony orchestras in the United States, the United Kingdom, and former East and West Germany. Despite the fantastic talents of their individual members, the symphonies soured when they introduced women to the mix. As the proportion of women in an orchestra crept up, players’ attitudes, relationships, and performances all slid down. These unhappy patterns held true regardless of the prestige of the orchestra or the place the orchestra called home.
Yet a funny thing happened when orchestras hired enough women to have a 40-percent-female ensemble: Both men and women started liking their jobs and their colleagues more. They viewed their finances as more abundant and their positions as more stable. They also thought their playing was more musical.
Why did the addition of a few women hobble entire orchestras? And what happened at that 40 percent tipping point to make both men and women feel more content?
Some thirty years of research show that orchestras are not alone. No matter the organization, industry, or sector, when women make serious inroads into organizations, the going gets bumpy.17 Part of the problem is just human hijinks; ours is a conservative species that likes to keep its social roles clear. In many cultures for the past few millennia, labor was divided so that men won the bread and women made the homes. (Yet as we reveal later in this chapter, many other cultures more equitably divided labor between the sexes, with surprising effects.) Upsetting that well-worn pattern is stressful for everyone.
At an economic level, men rightly perceive the entrance of women into their workplace as a threat to their earnings. Across industries, the rising of the women means the falling of the wage. This is because women command lower wages, so their entrance into a field drives down how much a given industry pays on average.18
For the women storming the castle, being the new kid on the block is no fun, either. Pioneering women are greeted with less social support and greater isolation than males.19 They also face greater pressure to perform, partly to defy the stereotype that women are less competent than men—a stereotype broadcast in cultural artifacts such as Teen Talk Barbie. Push a button on her back, and Barbie ditzily exclaims, “Math class is tough!”
Women’s attempts to disprove these stereotypes often backfire, psychologists Michael Inzlicht and Avi Ben-Zeev find. These researchers randomly assigned undergraduate women to take a math test in the presence of either two men (a triad that is only 33 percent female) or two women (a triad that is 100 percent female). They discovered that, like the orchestras with less than 40 percent women, the women in the 33-percent-female triads performed worse on the math test than did women in the 100-percent-female triads. The overwhelming male majority threw the ladies off their game, as the women were so anxious about confirming the women-can’t-compete stereotype that they choked on the test.20 Psychologist Claude Steele calls this fear of confirming negative beliefs about one’s group “stereotype threat.”21 As we will discuss here and in following chapters, when people are distracted by stereotype threats, they cannot dedicate 100 percent of their brains to actually doing a test. Consequently, their performance suffers, and they ironically wind up validating the stereotype they fought so hard to disprove.
Once the proportion of women in an organization reaches a critical mass, however, things turn around not only for them, but also for the organization as a whole. For instance, psychologists Anita Woolley, Thomas Malone, and their colleagues demonstrated that the more women a group has, the better it performs on a wide variety of tasks—an ability the researchers call collective intelligence.22 In their laboratory experiments, groups with more women crafted better solutions to an architectural design problem, scored more points against a computerized checkers opponent, and more deftly performed other feats of reasoning, negotiation, and creativity.
Organizations may already be taking women’s collective intelligence to the bank. Economist Judith Hellerstein and her colleagues find that, among manufacturing plants with considerable market power (that is, they are influential enough to affect the price of products), the more women in the workforce, the more profitable the plant.23 Sociologist Cedric Herring likewise finds that the more gender-balanced an organization, the greater its sales revenues, customer base, and profits.24
Fewer studies examine what happens when men infiltrate traditionally female fields, largely because men so rarely defy the gender divide. Yet as we will discuss, some studies suggest that women get their revenge by discriminating against men. Males in female places also face a peculiar challenge that sociologist Christine Williams calls the glass escalator. Even if these men want to stay on the front line, they get “kicked upstairs” into higher-paying, higher-status, traditionally male positions.25
In addition to these organizational obstacles to achieving gender balance, we see a deeper psychological one: the selves of women and men are slightly, but significantly, different. In the next few sections, we explore what these psychological differences are, where they came from, why they collide, and how to commingle them more peacefully.
For the past millennium or so, a popular pastime has been to list the many ways that men and women are not the same. Favorite entries are that women are less intelligent, less mathematical, less logical, less assertive, less rational, more Venusian than men; while men are less caring, less verbal, less emotional, less gentle, less intuitive, more Martian than women. Often built into this game is the assumption that these differences are innate, hard-wired, essential, biological.
In the past few years, spoilsports have tried to ruin the game by arguing that these alleged gender differences are just stereotypes. Gender differences, they say, are only social constructions, mere figments of the collective imagination. People can choose whether to believe them or not.
Both groups are quite wrong, yet also a little right. Women and men are indeed biologically different, but not as different as the stereotypes about them suggest. And those stereotypes are not wimpy will o’ the wisps that we can brush away or summon on a whim. Instead, stereotypes are human-made products that help drive the culture cycle. Over time, as they insinuate themselves in the I’s, interactions, institutions, and big ideas of culture cycles, stereotypes exert tremendous force in shaping the lives of men and women.
True, men are bigger and stronger than women, and only women can gestate and nurse offspring. These biological differences may give rise to a few psychological ones. But not many, finds psychologist Janet Shibley Hyde.26 To survey the dizzying pile of research on sex differences, Hyde reviewed all the existing meta-analyses on the topic. (A meta-analysis is a powerful statistical test that combines the findings of many studies so that researchers can tease out which effects are “really real” and which are flukey one-offs.) She found only two psychological features with very large gender differences: motor performance and sexuality. In particular, men can throw faster and farther, and have stronger grips. They also masturbate more and feel better about casual sex.
Not exactly earth-shattering results.
Of the remaining gender differences, 78 percent were small or close to zero.
Only 21 percent fell in the range of moderate to large differences. In that 21 percent, we see two characteristics that reflect differences in notions of the self. No matter the measure or context, men are more aggressive, and in a way that reflects a more independent self.27 In contrast, women are more agreeable (more trusting and more “tender-minded”), a quality more indicative of the interdependent self.
The remaining midsize effects point to the oft-reported finding that females have greater verbal prowess while males rule the visual-spatial roost. But as we shall see later, many of these so-called ability differences vanish when testers dispel stereotypes by reassuring women that they are not, in fact, born idiots, and men that they are not, in fact, callous brutes.
Hyde’s study did not consider gender differences in independence and interdependence, because meta-analyses on gender and self do not yet exist. Yet a growing body of research suggests that women more often deploy an interdependent self—that is, their relational, similar, adjusted, rooted, and ranked side. Meanwhile, men more frequently front an independent self—that is, an individual, unique, influencing, free, and equal (yet great!) I.
In one of the largest cross-cultural studies of the selves of men and women, for example, Australian psychologist Yoshihisa Kashima and his team found that undergraduate women in Australia, the United States, Japan, and Korea scored higher than men on “relatedness,” a construct that reflects ideas such as “I feel like doing something for people in trouble because I can almost feel their pain.”28
To zoom in on this relational aspect of interdependence, psychologist Susan Cross created the Relational Interdependent Self-Construal (RISC) scale. Closer to the notion of interdependence than many existing scales, the RISC asks respondents how much they agree with items such as “When I think of myself, I often think of my close friends or family also” and “My close relationships are an important reflection of who I am.” Subsequent studies find that women score higher on this scale than men.29
Meanwhile, men score higher on measures of independence. And when they describe themselves, they list more unique, internal abilities (e.g., “I am smart”), preferences (“I like basketball”), and traits (“I am tall”) than do women, who list more roles and relationships.30
Of course, like all people, men are inherently social animals. The project of crafting an independent self requires other people to individuate from, to compare with, and to influence. In addition, individuals must band together to create the interactions, institutions, and ideas that sustain and stem from independence. You can’t be a self—even an independent self—by yourself.
For women, thinking, feeling, and acting reverberate with connections to other people. Recall the Woolley and Malone team’s finding that the more women a group has, the higher the group’s collective intelligence. Suspecting that what drives collective intelligence is social sensitivity, the researchers gave participants the “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” test. For this test, participants view photographs of the eye regions of different actors. They then choose which of four words best describes what the person in the photograph is thinking or feeling. Developed by psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen—who is, incidentally, a cousin of comedian Sacha Baron-Cohen, of Borat infamy—this test reliably distinguishes between people who have autism (and thus are often not very socially sensitive) and people who do not. Malone’s team found not only that women scored higher on this test, but also that women’s greater social sensitivity was the reason the female-ful groups performed better than the lady-lean ones. In other words, social sensitivity was what made the groups with more women smarter.
These findings are only the latest in a long line of studies showing that women more accurately read other people’s thoughts and feelings.31 In several classic demonstrations, for example, psychologist William Ickes and his colleagues paired strangers (in either same- or mixed-sex dyads) for five minutes of interaction, which researchers surreptitiously videotaped. After the five minutes, the pairs split up so that each participant could watch a video of the conversation. While the tape rolled, participants wrote down what they were thinking and feeling, moment by moment, and their guesses about what their partners were thinking and feeling. The researchers found that the women, compared with the men, more accurately described their partners’ thoughts and emotions during the videotaping. This mind-reading ability took effort; women sat closer to their partners and looked at them more than did men. Women also smiled and gestured more.32
Memory follows attention. So perhaps not surprisingly, study after study finds that women have better memories for the names, faces, hair, and clothes of both strangers and friends.33 Within marriages, wives have more vivid memories of important moments in their relationships than do their husbands.34
Women’s interest in other people is not merely academic. Their hearts and health rise and fall with those of close others. When women’s friends or relatives are hurting, women’s own well-being takes more of a hit than does men’s. Likewise, divorce and other kinds of relational strife take a bigger bite out of women’s psyches and bodies than men’s, while marriage and new friendships give women a bigger boost.35 To untangle the kinks in their social networks, women apologize more often than men.36 And when women face threats, their first instinct is not to fight or flee, as has been the mantra of the mostly male scientists who study conflict. Instead, psychologist Shelley Taylor finds, it is to “tend and befriend”—that is, to seek out alliances and launch a coordinated front.37
Because of women’s greater interdependence, if you want to know how a woman is doing, you must look at both the height of her self-esteem and the state of her relationships. The smoother her social world, the better her physical and mental health. But if you want to predict a man’s well-being, you need look no further than his self-esteem—a measure on which men routinely register higher levels than do women.38
When women ascend to the top of the corporate ladder, they don’t leave their interdependence behind. Instead, they adopt a more participative, democratic, “transformational” style, as psychologist Alice Eagly calls it. People with this leadership style communicate values, consider new views, and attend to the individual needs of their reports. In contrast, men more often employ a more command-and-control, “transactional” manner, with which they focus on rewarding successes and punishing mistakes. Eagly and her colleagues’ research also suggests that transformational leaders are more effective than transactional ones, inspiring extra effort from their subordinates, eliciting better reviews of their leadership, and driving better results from their teams.39
Men, of course, are not robots, staring at their navels and contemplating the awesomeness of their solitary selves. Instead, while the gals are smiling and gesturing and reading other people’s minds, the guys are flexing and separating and sizing other people up. In other words, they are tracking and broadcasting cues about their independent selves.
The most obvious way that men individuate and influence others is through aggression. Across cultures, situations, settings, eras, ages, measures, and flavors (physical or verbal, direct or indirect), men are the more aggro half of the species. Their belligerent advantage emerges early, with more rough-and-tumble play starting at age two, and more verbal aggression, such as insults, curses, and taunting, quickly following. (Some theorists have argued that girls are meaner and inflict more indirect aggression, but research has not held up this claim.) Men’s violent tendencies reach their zenith between the ages of eighteen and thirty, as a quick survey of your local prison, hockey rink, or civil war will attest. Even when men mellow out at midlife and old age, they never lose their edge over women in the aggression department, and continue to clock higher rates of homicide and other violent crimes until their dotage, when they are more likely than women to commit suicide.40
Male humans are not alone in their penchant for pugnacity. In most mammalian species, the males are the scrappier half. This is because baby-making males are a dime a dozen, while fecund females are fewer and farther between. To have a shot at reproduction, males must often physically compete for access to females. Their size and strength assist them in this enterprise.
Unlike other mammals, however, human males have also evolved psychological selves that plan for the future, reflect upon the past, and observe social mores in the present. To do violence in the ways that evolution requires calls for a more independent self that can suspend empathy and value one’s own interests over those of others.41 Laboratory experiments confirm that when men are induced to think of themselves as even more independent than usual, they express even more dominance over other groups.42 Inside and outside the lab, both experiments and observational studies show that the higher a man’s self-esteem, the easier he can be roused to violence. Previously thought to suffer from low self-regard, bullies actually log the highest levels of self-esteem. Mess with the bully, though, and you get the horns, psychologist Roy Baumeister finds. Bullies (whose ranks include more men) most readily react to assaults on their egos.43
Every bit as angry as men,44 women, too, have their witchy ways. Backbiting, rumor-mongering, and ostracizing are the favored weapons of the she-set. Women also throw their fair share of punches in close relationships.45 Yet when it comes to absolute levels of barefisted bandying, men are far more likely than women to put their bodies on the line.
Men are also more likely to sign up for subtler forms of risk.46 Teenage boys’ risk-taking in drinking, driving, and sex is the stuff of insurance company profit margins. Many boys who survive their adolescence later capitalize on their risk-seeking ways by making bank in high risk, high-pay-off professions such as investing or trading. What risk giveth, however, risk can also taketh away, economists Brad M. Barber and Terrance Odean find. Examining six years’ worth of data for some thirty-five thousand households, the researchers discovered that men built riskier stock portfolios than did women. Men’s overconfidence in their trading abilities also led them to trade equities 45 percent more often than women. The market rewarded men’s risk-seeking and overconfidence with returns that were 0.93 percentage points less than women’s.47
Having constructed their independence through aggression and risk-taking, American men then add their own special twist: self-serving biases. Compared with people in East-Asian cultures, Americans more often pull the psychic tricks that make their selves seem better, including the self-serving attribution bias (congratulating yourself for your successes but blaming situations for your failures) and the false uniqueness bias (viewing yourself as better than most others).48 American men, moreover, outdo American women when it comes to seeing themselves as legends in their own eyes. Starting in childhood, boys boast about their abilities more than girls do.49 In high school, boys systematically rate their math chops higher than do girls with the same grades—a tendency that fully explains why more boys than girls take calculus.50 In adulthood, women outgrow their self-serving biases, while men maintain their self-kvelling across the lifespan.51
Around the world, high-status groups are perceived as more agentic—that is, more assertive, independent, and masculine—while low-status groups are perceived as more communal—that is, more relational, interdependent, and feminine.52 Coincidence? We think not. Instead, we see that the different selves of women and men both reflect and support the culture cycles of worlds where men have historically enjoyed higher status than women. In other words, a big reason women more often employ interdependence is because that is what many lower-status people do—namely, support the higher-status people. And a big reason men more often employ independence is because that is what many higher-status people do—namely, control the lower-status people, and earn a higher wage for doing so (stay tuned for more on status and class in our next chapter).
Yet the higher status and independence of men are not biological birthrights. Nor are the lower status and interdependence of women genetic inevitabilities. If you thought that gender differences in selves and statuses arose mostly from biology, you could be forgiven. For the past several hundred years, scientists and philosophers have busied themselves with locating the sources of gender differences inside the body. As each purported site of sex differences disappeared under closer scientific scrutiny, another cropped up to replace it, not unlike a game of anatomical Whack-a-Mole.
This hunt for the biological sources of gender differences continues unabated, recounts psychologist Cordelia Fine in her incisive and witty work Delusions of Gender.53 Replacing the tape measures and scales of yore is a cast of new technologies: functional magnetic resonance imaging, hormonal assays, genetic sequencing, and other shiny tools. For all the big guns of modern biotech, however, many of the “harder” sciences still suffer from wildly biased inferences. The result, Fine argues, is not a new and improved neuroscience of sex differences; instead, it’s that old canard of “neurosexism” dressed up in the emperor’s new machines.
Meanwhile, the “softer” social sciences have amassed their own arsenal of explanations for why Jane is relational and Dick is sometimes so aptly named. Rather than coursing through the veins, leaping across the synapses, or lighting up the cerebral lobes of men and women, the causes reside in the products and practices of men’s and women’s daily lives. In other words, they’re cultural. These everyday interactions not only convey the good and right way to be a man or a woman, but also become self-fulfilling prophecies, at once prescribing and describing the sex differences we see in the world.
Parents’ different expectations for boys and girls emerge even before their children are born. Talking with mothers-to-be in their last trimester, sociologist Barbara Rothman noted that women who knew they were having sons described their fetus’s movements as “vigorous” and “strong,” while the mothers who were having daughters defended the jabs of their unborn daughters as “not violent, not excessively energetic, and not terribly active.” Mothers who did not know the sex of their fetuses, in contrast, described the rumblings in their uteruses in similar ways, regardless of the sex of the baby they eventually had.54
When newborns greet the outside world, adults are standing by to shape the infants’ selves in gendered ways. In their classic study, psychologists (and spouses) John and Sandra Condry asked college students to watch a video of a nine-month-old infant. Half the participants learned that the baby was a boy named “David”; the other half learned that the same baby was a girl named “Dana.” In the video, David/Dana startles, cries, and then screams in response to the repeated eruptions of a jack-in-the-box. Undergrads who thought they were watching a boy named “David” viewed him as angrier, more active, and less fearful than did the undergrads who thought they were watching a girl named “Dana.”55
In a follow-up experiment, the Condrys found that female high school students responded more quickly to a crying sixteen-week-old baby named “Andrea” than they did to the exact same baby when it was named “Jonathan.” (Male high school students were equally slow in responding to the allegedly male and female infants, a point we shall return to later.)56 On the blank slate of these experimental babies, adults were already projecting their belief that boys are more independent and girls are more relational.
Real mothers give their real daughters the interdependence treatment as well. They talk with their daughters more than they do with their sons, even though male infants are just as receptive to speech as female infants.57 Mothers also discuss emotions with their daughters more than they do with their sons.58
The toys that adults put in children’s hands likewise send a message about where those children belong and how they should behave. Dolls, kitchen appliances, and other “toys of the home” populate girls’ playtime, while vehicles, machines, and other “toys of the world” rove through boys’ recreational spaces.59 Parents then reinforce which toys are gender appropriate—especially to boys, who get considerably more flack for flouting the gender rules.60
Media add a tailwind to the teaching of gender. A popular refrain among today’s egalitarian-minded parents is “We didn’t raise our daughter (son) to be a pink princess (bombastic brute). She (he) must have been just born a priss (hellion)!” The heartbreaking reality, of course, is that parents are only one part of the culture cycle. As journalist Peggy Orenstein recounts in Cinderella Ate My Daughter, media shout loud directions about the “right” way to be a boy or a girl.61 Ever notice that all Dr. Seuss’s main characters are male? Most children’s books, television shows, and movies feature male lead characters. Video games also overwhelmingly spotlight boys or men saving the world from mayhem. Even advertisements targeting children depict boys as more knowledgeable, active, and effective than girls. Meanwhile, in these same media, most portrayals of girls and women are either in traditional nurturing roles or as sex objects. These representations of women reinforce the idea that their value lies not in the content of their psyches, but in the contours of their flesh and in the care they give to other people.62 Note that this is not just the stuff of 1950s sitcoms; most of this research was conducted in the past ten years.
For the past few centuries, Western boys and girls rolled along these parallel tracks relatively peaceably, cultivating and reinforcing their complementary selves. Upon arrival at adulthood, women took their interdependence to the domestic sphere (or, if they worked, into teaching, nursing, or “pink-collar” professions), while men unleashed their independence in the working world. But after several major wars, social movements, and other cultural jolts, women are infiltrating the independent spheres of men and, to a lesser extent, men are wandering into women’s worlds. In these places, both genders stumble into culture cycles that do not foster or reflect their selves.
In college, for example, many women find the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) decidedly unwelcoming. Women thus feel discouraged from entering STEM fields, which offer some of the most stable and lucrative jobs in the new economy. Part of the problem is that STEM is represented as an independent undertaking—the province of Lone Rangers and cutthroat geniuses who can abstract theories from applications and separate signals from noise. Because women thrive on social connection, default to cooperation, and are rumored (though not proven) to think more practically than abstractly, women and STEM seem to be bad cultural “fits.”
Women also allegedly lack the knack for STEM. As we mentioned at the opening of this chapter, one of the larger and more consistent findings in the long tradition of sex differences research is that women excel at verbal tasks while men excel at spatial ones. Yet in the past decade, a host of studies has shown that women perform just as well as men, and often better, when testers take the time to dispel the stereotype that women have little talent for STEM. For instance, when the test directions on the math portion of the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) state that the test has never detected a gender difference, women actually outscore men. But women falter in a condition that arouses stereotype threat by communicating (like many standardized tests) that the GRE is designed to discern why some people are better at math than others.63
Even when thoughtful educators cleanse the air of threatening stereotypes, the artifacts of everyday life convey the message that women simply do not belong in STEM. For instance, in an attempt to understand why so few women enter computer science—a field that started out as “women’s work”—psychologist Sapna Cheryan and her colleagues took a look at the typical computer science lab. Suspecting that the junk food wrappers, disemboweled electronics, Star Trek posters, and technical magazines made a poor welcoming committee for potential female recruits, the researchers created an alternative lab environment, one with healthy snacks, coffee mugs, art posters, and general-interest magazines. They found that female undergraduates who were randomly assigned to complete a career development survey in the alternative lab expressed more interest in computer science than did the women who completed the study in a “geek lab” outfitted with the typical computer science detritus. Indeed, women in the alternative lab were just as interested in computer science as were men in both the alternative and geek labs.64
STEM is not the only realm whose artifacts put women off. Entrepreneurship’s alleged requirements likewise seem inconsistent with women’s more interdependent selves. Popular culture overwhelmingly portrays entrepreneurs as aggressive, risk-taking, and self-promoting men. Yet the evidence that these stereotypically masculine qualities are actually necessary for the successful pursuit of entrepreneurship is lacking. Indeed, generous and self-effacing billionaires such as eBay’s Jeff Skoll and Zappos’s Tony Hsieh are walking rebukes to the entrepreneur-as-asshole model.
Few women know this, however, says business professor Vishal K. Gupta. So when he and his colleagues randomly assigned female business majors to read an article about entrepreneurship that did not mention gender, these young women showed little interest in starting their own businesses. But when they read an article explicitly arguing that entrepreneurial success requires features that transcend gender (such as being creative, well-informed, and generous), the women’s entrepreneurial ambitions rose.65
Women aspiring to leadership positions likewise stumble into independent culture cycles that conflict with their interdependent selves. Employers too often fail to promote women into positions of power because the latter are thought not to be assertive, competitive, or confident enough.66
Despite these obstacles, some women do reach the top of the corporate ladder. Once there, however, many crash into a subtler, yet stronger glass ceiling, one made of the fact that the very behaviors that get men ahead get women hated. One unsavory manifestation of this hostility is sexual harassment. Fans of the television show Mad Men know: it’s not the office sweetheart, secretary Joan Harris, who get the most vicious gropes and overtures; it’s the office upstart, copywriter Peggy Olson. Psychologist Jennifer Berdahl finds the same pattern in the real world. Men harass women who describe themselves as assertive, dominant, and independent more than they harass women who describe themselves as warm, modest, and deferent. They also harass women in traditionally male occupations more than they harass women in traditionally female occupations.67
Although the situation is changing, men still have more status and resources than do women in most realms, and so men have more power to create and maintain a culture’s interactions and institutions. Yet the culture cycle spins both ways. When women have more status in a domain, they, too, sometimes create worlds that are hostile to the masculine half of the species. The most pronounced example of this is the classroom, where the mismatches between female teachers’ expectations and male students’ proclivities leave many boys feeling frustrated, bewildered, and, ultimately, not in it to win it.
Over the past twenty years, the teaching profession has become more feminized than ever, recounts Peg Tyre in her 2008 bestseller, The Trouble with Boys.68 The percentage of male teachers in elementary schools has fallen from 18 percent in 1981 to 9 percent today. In secondary schools, men now comprise only 35 percent of teachers. This spells not only a lack of male role models, but also a dearth of male voices weighing in on the best ways to meet the needs of boys.
With an overwhelming female workforce, schools are becoming increasingly difficult places for men to get jobs. Just as men in STEM and business view women’s interdependence as incongruent with the demands of the workplace, women see men’s independence as inconsistent with teaching. For instance, in one small experiment Tyre recounts, a mostly female hiring committee evaluated the written interview responses of several male teaching candidates. The committee found the responses to be too confrontational and not sufficiently collaborative, and so did not recommend the candidates for a second round of interviews. Little did the committee members realize that they were evaluating their own district’s most talented and beloved male teachers.
Not only the personnel, but also the practices and paraphernalia of today’s classrooms disadvantage boys. In part to make girls feel less intimidated, teachers have cracked down on the random acts of exuberance that typify young boys’ behavior. At the same time, the no-fun edicts of No Child Left Behind have whittled recess, hands-on learning, and free play down to a few minutes per day. With no way to work off their excess energy, boys now have a harder time paying attention to an increasingly rigid and narrow curriculum.
Reading is no respite. Because girls are ready for language earlier, boys quickly get the message that reading is a girl thing. Female teachers do not help matters when they discourage boys from reading the goofy, action-packed, and sometimes violent comic books and magazines to which they are drawn. As Tyre relates, “It’s an awkward moment when a teacher suggests Little House in the Big Woods, by Laura Ingalls Wilder, and her little male student opts instead for The Day My Butt Went Psycho.”69
As boys flounder first in reading, and then in writing and other subjects, adults more frequently pathologize them than they do girls. Teachers hold back twice as many boys as girls, and doctors give diagnoses of attention and learning disorders to boys four times as often as they do to girls. Boys are less likely to recover from these early slips on the education ladder, so elementary school setbacks ripple throughout their educational careers. This is bad not only for males, but also for the females who would marry them a few years down the road, legal scholar Richard Banks and journalist Kate Bolick portend. For want of suitably educated and employed husbands, more women are forgoing marriage altogether.70
Very little of this gender stratification is intended. Study after study shows that, when asked, most men and women say they like each other and consider themselves equals. But implicit measures and subtle behaviors tell a different story: flying under the radar of conscious awareness, American men and women believe they are different and unequal. And these unconscious beliefs drive our outward behaviors, thereby turning the handle of the culture cycle.71
Although ancient and sneaky, these beliefs are neither natural nor inevitable. Indeed, as we shall see next, they are not even universal. Contrary to the bad rap that many developing cultures get, many of them harbor fewer gender differences than their wealthier neighbors.
Back in the day, our ancestors realized they got to eat more often if they grew their own food, rather than hunting or gathering it. They also discovered that there’s more than one way to sow a cereal. People who lived in places with rocky, sloped, or shallow soils tended to use hoes and digging sticks, while people who lived in places with smooth, flat, and deep soils tended to use ploughs drawn by livestock.
Which tool did your ancestors use? We’ll give you a hint: if you have a favorite maize, millet, or cassava dish and you think that women have just as much right to work as men, your ancestors probably farmed with a hoe or stick. But if you hanker for one of your mother’s wheat, barley, or rice specialties and/or you’re not totally jazzed about women working outside the home, chances are your people walked behind a plough. That’s because your forebears’ choice of farm implement ultimately shaped not only which grains they grew and ate, but also whether your mother and sisters work outside the home today. And because people are not rational creatures, but rationalizing ones, your attitudes toward gender equality both stem from and sustain how your people have been dividing labor through the ages.
It all comes down to strength, economist Alberto Alesina and his colleagues argue.72 Ploughs are heavy and unwieldy, as are the animals that pull them. So cultures that adopted the plough delegated the work of the field to men and the work of the home to women. Alesina’s team shows that this pattern persists to this day: even in areas where no one has farmed for generations—say, much of Europe and the Middle East—the progeny of ploughmen tend to send fewer women into the workforce. Mirroring and remaking this division of labor, both men and women in these regions agree more with statements such as “On the whole, men make better political leaders than women do” and “When jobs are scarce, men should have more right to a job than women.”
Hoes and digging sticks, on the other hand, are sufficiently lightweight and maneuverable that a woman can use them. Hoes also cannot break free and trample a small child. So cultures that stuck with sticks and hoes sent the entire family to the field. Thousands of years later, these regions—sub-Saharan Africa, parts of Central and South America, Central Asia, and Siberia—still support greater gender equality in both word and deed.
So accidents of agriculture planted the seed, so to speak, for more or less gendered ways of working and, ultimately, larger or smaller differences between the selves of men and women. Over time, other institutions then joined the culture cycle to reinforce patterns of greater or lesser inequality, including laws that forbade women from working outside the home, going to school, owning property, or voting. Once again, these institutions seldom resulted from people scheming in single-sex cabals about how to make life miserable for the other half of humanity. Instead, they usually arose from shifts in culture cycles that set histories, and psychologies, on a different course.
Make no mistake: men are biologically stronger than women, and women are biologically better at having babies than men. These differences mattered a lot when economies relied on physical strength and when infant mortality was high. But economics and epidemiology have changed. Now what counts isn’t muscles and skeletons, or wombs and breasts. It’s brains. And as women’s success in academics and business attests, they have brains aplenty.
To meet the challenges of the twenty-first century, communities must harness the talents of all their people, including women. This will require changes at every level of the culture cycle—its institutions, interactions, individual I’s, and, eventually, its big ideas. At the institutional level, men still hold disproportionate sway; so the onus is on them to alter their culture cycles to accommodate the selves of women. The prescription is straightforward: get in touch with the better side of chivalry, open the door, and let the women in. Research suggests that the best tool for getting and keeping women in the workplace is affirmative action.73 In their systematic evaluation of diversity programs, sociologist Alexandra Kalev and her colleagues compared the diversity-promotion practices of 708 randomly selected medium-size U.S. companies. They found that diversity training and mentoring programs did little to increase the number of women (and minorities) in these workplaces over a thirty-one-year period. In fact, diversity training programs seemed to slow the tide of integration, perhaps because they inspired backlash against the very people they were designed to help. In contrast, organizations that made a human being or committee responsible for setting and monitoring diversity goals retained more women.
To keep women on their rosters, organizations must also adjust the interactions in their culture cycles. As Cheryan’s research shows, a little mindfulness goes a long way. Thinking twice about which posters to put on the walls, which knickknacks to display on the shelves, and which snacks to stock in the break room helps make spaces that are more welcoming to women. It goes without saying that zero-tolerance sexual harassment policies are de rigueur for a female-friendly culture. Adjusting work expectations to accommodate the fact that women still provide the overwhelming majority of child and kin care in the United States would also help keep women happy and productive at work.
An even better intervention would be for men to become domestic gods in their own right. At every level of income, women do more housekeeping than do men. But a chilling thing happens when women make more money than their spouses: the women start putting in even more hours at home. Sociologists explain that women are trying to make up for violating the man-brings-home-the-bacon norm by zealously following the woman-fries-it-up norm. We humbly submit that this isn’t fair. If women are going to pull more weight in the public sphere, men should pick up more slack at home.74
Although the bulk of the responsibility for achieving gender equality should not fall to the less powerful half of the population, women can adopt a few tricks of independence to help steer their culture cycles in a more equitable direction. As both Hinshaw and Fine document, women must already master many aspects of independence and interdependence to succeed academically and professionally, which results in bewildering paradoxes and exhausting double binds.
The part of independence that women do not sufficiently exercise, however, is asserting their needs. As the title of their book Women Don’t Ask suggests, economists Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever find that women initiate negotiations 25 percent as often as do men. When women do knock on the door for more, they typically ask for and get less than do men—about 30 percent less, in fact. So the gender gaps in starting salaries, raises, and ranks are not just because men discriminate. They’re also because women underestimate, and then poorly negotiate.75
Women’s wariness at the negotiation table is not unfounded. In experimental settings, public policy professor Hannah Riley Bowles and colleagues show that men perceive women who ask for higher pay as less nice and more demanding than women who accept salary offers as is.76 There is a social cost to asking. But women can walk the line between the independence they are seeking and the interdependence others are expecting by framing their requests in terms of what’s best for the organization. This tactic communicates that although the woman intends to get ahead, she also cares about her relationships at work.
Another bargaining tactic that is useful for women is imagining they are negotiating on someone else’s behalf. When the haggling gets hairy, women who recruit their interdependence for independent ends persist longer than women who rely solely on their independent drives.77
A final act of independence that individual women can use to smooth their entry into independent domains is to fight the hype. Ben-Zeev arms college students with potent antidotes on the first day of class: “I tell them, you cannot say, ‘I’m bad at math,’ in my class. You can say, ‘I have had bad experiences in math.’” Otherwise, Ben-Zeev half-jokes, “I will kick you out of my class and give you an F.”78
Just as men need to help pave the way for women to enter traditionally independent domains, so, too, must women support the boys and men who would dwell in their realms. This meeting in the middle should start in nursery school, where boys’ ways are increasingly clashing with girl-friendlier products and practices. Giving boys more time and room for rough-and-tumble play and hands-on experimentation helps take some of the wild out of the Y chromosome.
When it comes time to hit the books, Tyre recommends offering stories with a little less conversation and a lot more action. Putting male volunteers in front of the classroom can also help boys understand that school isn’t just for girls.
What isn’t necessary, argues psychologist Diana Halpern and colleagues, is all-boys or all-girls schools.79 Many advocates of single-sex education contend that schools must cater to the hardwired biological differences between boys and girls. Once again, however, the science supporting the existence of these differences is shaky at best. Moreover, high-quality studies fail to find any stable advantages to single-sex schooling.80
Well-controlled studies with random assignment do show, however, that dividing children by sex reinforces gender stereotypes and robs children of daily opportunities to learn how to work together.81 These deficiencies can cast cold shadows into adulthood; one large-scale study in the United Kingdom, for instance, showed that men in their early forties who had attended all-boy schools were more likely to be divorced than were men who had spent their formative years mixing it up with the lassies.82
Likewise, rather than dividing and not conquering, women and men can work together to support men seeking work in traditionally female jobs. Women’s transition to more masculine fields has left many so-called nurturing careers understaffed. These careers include not only nursing and teaching, but also the hardest and least glorious job of all: stay-at-home parenting. Yet as sociologist Jennifer Sherman recounts in her ethnography Those Who Work, Those Who Don’t, a few working-class men are dipping their toes into this hazardous occupation. To make peace with their new roles, these pioneers reframe their newly interdependent behaviors as manifestations of an older strain of independence.
Sherman’s book documents her year spent in a rural Northern California community after federal legislation to protect the spotted owl shut down local logging and milling operations. This move left many men without work and forced many women to work outside the home. Sherman found that the families suffering the least strife were the ones who revised their notion of masculinity from meaning “sole breadwinner” to “active father”—a role replete with changing diapers, helping with homework, and attending sports matches. To make childcare more palatable to their independent selves, the men framed it as teaching the kids to hunt, fish, and camp. And rather than seeing themselves as at the forefront of the liberal feminist agenda, these men saw their new roles as extensions of the older male mandate to work hard and take care of one’s family.
Female-leaning institutions that want to lure more men into their ranks could learn a lot from these loggers turned full-time fathers. Few men want to be the forward scouts of the sex role revolution. Yet many men can get behind the idea of supporting their families with hard work. Spreading this idea through the culture cycles of nursing, teaching, and childcare could make these fields more appealing to men.
As unappealing as it may be to people who yearn for the good old days when men were men and women knew their place, the gender-blending genie will probably not go back in its bottle. Western women are likely to continue climbing up the chain of command and spreading out into traditionally male fields. Meanwhile, Western men’s best hope may be to leap the gender fence and occupy the traditionally female jobs that women are abandoning.
These trends lead to a new topic for parlor game speculation: Will putting women in charge make the world a better place?
Probably not, says Deb Gruenfeld, a psychologist who studies how power shapes people’s thoughts and feelings. Her research shows that when people of either sex are randomly assigned to positions of power, they act more impulsively, feel more optimistic, and have more trouble taking other people’s perspectives, relative to people randomly assigned to positions without power.83 “It’s the power, not the gender” that makes men act in assertive, risk-taking, and slightly antisocial ways, Gruenfeld says. Once women get power, they will likely follow suit. It’s like The Who once sang: “Meet the new boss / Same as the old boss.”
Other research suggests, however, that the day when women are as assertive, competitive, and self-enhancing as men is in the distant future. A major check on power’s corrupting sway is women’s habitual interdependence, several millennia in the making. In one set of experiments, psychologist Serena Chen and colleagues found that power amplifies people’s habitual states and traits. If women are habitually interdependent—and the need to gestate, feed, and rear children will likely preserve that interdependence for many women—then power may actually enhance their relationality, which may in turn improve their leadership.84 Early results on the leadership capabilities of women are promising enough to warrant a larger experiment. For instance, one study shows that when firms add at least one woman to their top tier, they generate $40 million more in economic value.85
This odd time in the history of gender relations could be our nation’s true Sputnik moment. Children of the space age will recall that Sputnik was the name of the Russian satellite whose launch kicked off the U.S.-Soviet space race. President Obama later resurrected the phrase to inspire more investment in innovation so that Americans do not fall even farther behind their competitors. In both cases, Sputnik came to symbolize “the fear of slipping behind in a dangerous world,” as security analyst Frank Kaplan put it.86
In reality, though, the word sputnik has nothing to do with fear, or competition, or danger. To the contrary: in Russian it means “traveling companion”—a rather sweet moniker for the Earth’s first satellite. As men and women embark upon a fragile future plagued with economic, ecological, and political uncertainties, they, too, could become traveling companions, rather than adversaries. With a few repairs to their culture cycles, men and women can make their worlds more comfortable for each other.