NewMusicBox: Why Women Aren’t Equals in New Music Leadership and Innovation

Source: www.newmusicbox.org/articles/the-power-list-why-women-arent-equals-in-new-music-leadership-and-innovation

Quotes:

“My quartet once sought feedback on a Barber quartet from a male coach I had come to love and respect. “Honestly, you sound like a bunch of polite women,” he said during the coaching. I likely don’t need to clarify that this was not a compliment.”

“Why aren’t more women being recognized for visionary artistic leadership in Chicago’s contemporary music scene—and why aren’t more women providing that visionary leadership in the first place? … the research Sandberg discusses in Lean In can help us answer these questions.
1. Women musicians, like all women, pay a “likability tax” when they are self-promoting, assertive, and successful. …
2. Women musicians are less likely to embark on high visibility projects, take professional risks, and conceive of themselves as leaders—which leaves them at a distinct disadvantage in developing entrepreneurial careers. …
3. Women consistently underestimate their own talents and abilities, leaving them at a disadvantage in the essential realm of self-promotion. …
4. When choosing who to hire, men are significantly more likely to choose a man. …
5. Similarly, senior men are more likely to mentor young men than young women. …
6. Women are taught from an early age to worry about whether they can have children and a career. …

I bring these findings, and my own experiences and observations, forward for three very important reasons:
1. I believe that women rarely get the opportunity to discuss the psychological and emotional limitations that gender socialization has created within them. …
2. I believe that many men are not aware of these issues, because their life experience has not required them to be. … But I also believe that my male colleagues care deeply about equality and want a thriving musical ecosystem where all voices can be heard. …
3. … I had a responsibility to share what I had learned.”

NYTimes: Sponsors for Women

Source: www.nytimes.com/2013/02/05/opinion/sponsors-for-women.html

Quotes:

Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, suggest that women are partly responsible for their absence in the executive suite in all professions. What might help is a sponsor, someone with power in the organization who sticks (more likely) his neck out to endorse a woman in whom he sees leadership potential.

Much of this comes by way of those informal networks that women lack but that come so easily to men by virtue of simply being, well, men.

… Data suggest that women with sponsors are more likely to attain a leadership role than those not sponsored.”

PNAS: Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favor male students

Corinne A. Moss-Racusina, John F. Dovidiob, Victoria L. Brescollc, Mark J. Grahama, and Jo Handelsman (2012). Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favor male students. Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences.

Abstract: Despite efforts to recruit and retain more women, a stark gender disparity persists within academic science. Abundant research has demonstrated gender bias in many demographic groups, but has yet to experimentally investigate whether science faculty exhibit a bias against female students that could contribute to the gender disparity in academic science. In a randomized double-blind study (n = 127), science faculty from research-intensive universities rated the application materials of a student—who was randomly assigned either a male or female name—for a laboratory manager position. Faculty participants rated the male applicant as significantly more competent and hireable than the (identical) female applicant. These participants also selected a higher starting salary and offered more career mentoring to the male applicant. The gender of the faculty participants did not affect responses, such that female and male faculty were equally likely to exhibit bias against the female student. Mediation analyses indicated that the female student was less likely to be hired because she was viewed as less competent. We also assessed faculty participants’ preexisting subtle bias against women using a standard instrument and found that preexisting subtle bias against women played a moderating role, such that subtle bias against women was associated with less support for the female student, but was unrelated to reactions to the male student. These results suggest that interventions addressing faculty gender bias might advance the goal of increasing the participation of women in science.

Read the full article at www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474

Two of three figures from the article:

Figure 1. Competence, hireability, and mentoring by student gender condition.
From www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.figures-only

Figure 2. Salary conferral by student gender condition.
From www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.figures-only

NYTimes: Women Hurting Women

Source: www.nytimes.com/2012/09/30/opinion/sunday/kristof-women-hurting-women.html

Quote:

“Metrics like girls’ education and maternal mortality don’t improve more when a nation is led by a woman. There is evidence that women matter as local leaders and on corporate boards, but that doesn’t seem to have been true at the national level, at least not for the first cohort of female leaders around the world.”

“I still strongly believe that we need more women in leadership posts at home and around the world, from presidential palaces to corporate boards. The evidence suggests that diverse leadership leads to better decision making, and I think future generations of female leaders may be more attentive to women’s issues than the first.”

“Misogyny and indifference remain obstacles for women globally, but those are values that can be absorbed and transmitted by women as well as by men.”

Forbes: Why Is It That Women Are Seen As Less Competent

Source: www.forbes.com/sites/85broads/2011/04/14/why-is-it-that-women-are-seen-as-less-competent/#39274906d32b

Quotes:

“gender schemas: culturally bound assumptions about men and women that are unconscious.”

“One assumption is that women are first assumed incompetent until proven otherwise. It’s the opposite for men. So right from the start women are not perceived as leaders. If a woman is successful it’s because she’s a hard worker, or was lucky; if she fails it’s because she’s incompetent. If a male succeeds, it’s because he’s competent; if he fails it’s because of bad luck or a scandal.”

“Consequently, cultural biases consistently overrate men and underrate women. Self-assessment studies show that men and women do the same to themselves. Women tend to evaluate themselves two points lower than reality, while men will evaluate themselves two points higher.”

“In one global experiment called the “Goldberg paradigm,” researchers asked men and women in one group to evaluate a particular article or speech supposedly written by a man. Then they asked a similar group to judge the same material, this time supposedly authored by a woman. In countries all over the world, participants rated the very same words higher coming from a man than from a woman.”

“The fact that women often assume other women are incompetent may, in part, explain why women traditionally haven’t been so great at helping each other up the ladder. That’s changing however, with the plethora of organizations and initiatives dedicated to women supporting women. A revolution is underway; a level of collaboration among women as we have never seen before.”

“Some women use the negative gender schemas against them to their advantage. These women play along as if they don’t know what’s going on, when in reality they are five steps ahead of the guys. As Mae West put it, “Brains are an asset, if you hide them.” Being under-estimated can work to women’s advantage when she is covertly outsmarting him, but that’s a short-term benefit. In the end, feigning ignorance only helps perpetuate a misperception. As one of my favorite leaders, Linda Rusch, former VP of nursing in Hunderton Medical, told me, “What you permit, you promote.””

Nature: German University Head Lauds Progress of Women Scientists

Source: www.nature.com/news/2011/110410/full/news.2011.223.html

Quotes:

“The professors are predominantly men, and they seek out other men to be their assistants and successors. The men have excellent networking systems, and the unwritten rules of the academic game have been designed by them. It is no surprise, then, that men dominate academic committees, and continue to perpetuate themselves in academia.”

“It is an opportunity for us to identify our research strengths and decide where we want to create a major research focus – and what infrastructures should support them. It’s also an opportunity to try to recreate the Humboldtian philosophy that teaching and research should be closely connected. Economy-driven demands have made many of us lose touch with these principles.”

“We have to take off the pressure. Scientists are expected to generate floods of papers to get grants or promotion. That doesn’t always give them time to do thorough science, to replicate their data properly and perform the necessary quality control before publication. It doesn’t give them enough time to think. Also, most journals do not have the time to impose good quality control. … If you think about it, even top scientists don’t normally have more than five really ground-breaking papers to their name. But in clinical research you are often expected to have more than five papers a year. How could that be possible if you have true quality control?”

NYTimes: When Women Rule

Source: www.nytimes.com/2008/02/10/opinion/10kristof.html

Quotes:

“A notable share of the great leaders in history have been women: Queen Hatshepsut and Cleopatra of Egypt, Empress Wu Zetian of China, Isabella of Castile, Queen Elizabeth I of England, Catherine the Great of Russia, and Maria Theresa of Austria.”

“Scholars find that women, compared with men, tend to excel in consensus-building and certain other skills useful in leadership. If so, why have female political leaders been so much less impressive in the democratic era?”

“In monarchies, women who rose to the top dealt mostly with a narrow elite, so they could prove themselves and get on with governing. But in democracies in the television age, female leaders also have to navigate public prejudices — and these make democratic politics far more challenging for a woman than for a man.”

“In particular, one lesson from this research is that promoting their own successes is a helpful strategy for ambitious men. But experiments have demonstrated that when women highlight their accomplishments, that’s a turn-off. And women seem even more offended by self-promoting females than men are.”

“A woman can be perceived as competent or as likable, but not both.”

“Clothing and appearance generally matter more for women than for men, research shows. Surprisingly, several studies have found that it’s actually a disadvantage for a woman to be physically attractive when applying for a managerial job. Beautiful applicants received lower ratings, apparently because they were subconsciously pegged as stereotypically female and therefore unsuited for a job as a boss.”

“An M.I.T. economist, Esther Duflo, looked at India, which has required female leaders in one-third of village councils since the mid-1990s. … by objective standards, the women ran the villages better than men. For example, women constructed and maintained wells better, and took fewer bribes. Yet ordinary villagers themselves judged the women as having done a worse job, and so most women were not re-elected. That seemed to result from simple prejudice.”

“Modern democracies may empower deep prejudices and thus constrain female leaders in ways that ancient monarchies did not.”

Spelke-vs-Pinker on Gender & Science + Follow-up

The Science of Gender and Science

On January 16th, 2005, Lawrence Summers (President of Harvard), made a few public comments on women’s careers in science and engineering, suggesting that the gender difference is due to “different availability of aptitude at the high end” rather than discrimination and/or socialisation. These remarks sturred further public discussion on the under-representation of women in tenure-track faculty in elite universities in physical science, math and engineering, sciences (with preponderant emphasis on US). 

On April 22, 2005, Elisabeth Spelke and Steven Pinker held a debate under the Harvard University’s Mind/Brain/Behavior Initiative, focusing “on the research on mind, brain, and behavior that may be relevant to gender disparities in the sciences, including the studies of bias, discrimination and innate and acquired difference between the sexes”.

The debate can be watched here, and the slides of both speakers are available there.

Source: www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Hb3oe7-PJ8

Related materials: