Post No.: 0692
Fluffystealthkitten says:
The glass ceiling is a metaphor for how women find it difficult to enter the highest echelons in their industries and thus obtain the highest salaries and decision-making powers e.g. c-suite executives in large corporations.
The glass escalator attempts to highlight how men are often over-represented in the highest echelons even in female-majority industries e.g. more teaching staff are women yet more men are in headmaster/principal roles.
There are glass walls where women aren’t just generally confined vertically/hierarchically but also horizontally within organisations e.g. more women are in PR or human resource roles, and fewer employees from these departments get a chance to be promoted to top executive positions within their organisations.
Also suggested is a glass cliff where women are promoted to top positions only when a situation is dire and thus failure is likely e.g. promoting a female to head of government during tough international negotiations.
There are ‘old boys’ networks’. Those currently in power (usually men) prefer to hire others who are similar to them. There are assumptions about the attributes that are required for good leadership, and assumptions that women who are in high positions must’ve slept their way there. Women’s voices are considered less authoritative than men’s, so they’re forced to deepen their voices. Even discussions about sexism appear biased if a woman gives her view yet more objective if a man gives his(!)
This all affects the gender pay gap, where women are, on average, paid less than men. Even if women manage to get to the same positions as men, their salaries aren’t always equal.
Work of equal value should be paid an equal rate by law. But work that’s of high value to families, communities and societies – like raising children or looking after the elderly – is severely undervalued economically. Money isn’t what determines what counts as work, so unpaid work is still work, and unpaid/lower-paid work can be harder than higher-paid work too.
‘Man’s work’ is typically valued more highly than ‘woman’s work’ when nature didn’t make it this way. If ‘men’s work’ typically pays more, and childcare costs are high – most families are forced to decide that it’ll be the woman who stays at home, which reduces the woman’s own financial security, power and independence. Financial power isn’t the only kind of power but is a key source e.g. one could philanthropically donate to or lobby for the causes one personally wants to further.
We should hire the individuals who are best qualified or experienced for a role regardless of their gender. But we must also investigate why certain education and experience inequalities exist for there might be systemic or structural discriminatory reasons? Girls might be dissuaded from taking science-based subjects, which consequently affects university admissions, graduate numbers, and the number of qualified female engineers entering the workplace. It all leads to a loss of potential talent. Women who take time off for motherhood may also lose experience and skills that affect their career progression.
Support for (especially lone) parents in the workplace includes affordable childcare, crèche facilities, flexible working options (in hours, working from home, job sharing), and shared parental leave. We must however be careful because if flexible roles are designed in ways that offer less training or opportunities for progression e.g. if flexible workers receive less exposure to managerial experience – they’ll retain some disadvantages.
Even a perhaps negligible initial disadvantage can compound into a sizeable disadvantage over time. And even if a woman now receives equal pay – unless she’s back-paid for all historic losses, plus interest, it’s not really going to be equal. If a male got paid $30k in each of the last 3 years, and if a female got paid $25k, $25k and finally $30k for the same period – she would’ve still lost $10k relative to the male, plus compounding interest. It affects her pension amount after she retires too. So there’s far more to it than just giving all genders equal voting rights. We cannot forget the compounding advantages/disadvantages up to this point, for any form of unfair discrimination.
Women, for being more likely to take on unpaid domestic work like looking after children, are more likely to do local and part-time work. They may be overlooked for training, promotions, networking opportunities or research grants at childbearing age because they’re regarded as more likely to take time off work, or overlooked for their lack of experience if they do take time off to have children. It affects their economic power, the perceived value of their work, and power in general to influence rights, rates of pay and working conditions related to maternity or for the types of caring roles they disproportionately take more of.
The erroneous assumption is that lower-paid work is less difficult and less important, and since women are more likely to do lower-paid work like cleaning and caring despite how critical these are for public and private health – women are expected to also do more of the unpaid household chores to ‘make up for’ doing this lower-paid work outside of the home. We often say we do unpaid, voluntary or low-paid work because of the other, more intrinsic, non-monetary rewards they give us – yet we mustn’t be taken advantage of and undervalued. Meow.
People are considered to be ‘taking time off work’ to do crucial unpaid work like looking after a newborn – even though unpaid work is still work! Unpaid work like domestic work isn’t only unpaid but totally undervalued economically despite the real financial cost to a country if no one did it! Imagine the cost to the family unit to employ someone else to child-mind, cook, clean, etc.? Imagine the opportunity cost to the primary parent who takes on this role i.e. what they could be doing in their professional career instead? This understanding should elevate the value of this work and level out the perceived hierarchy of status in which the breadwinner is assumed to contribute more to the household than the one who actually runs it. Post No.: 0671 analysed gendered roles some more.
Elevating the respect for unpaid/low-paid roles does carry risks though e.g. if we claim that caring roles should be more highly valued then we might think that it’s okay for women to continue predominantly taking these roles, which may divert attention away from ensuring women also have access to key occupations and senior levels in organisations, which grant more influential and economic power.
It’s also easier to feel confident when you start your career if you know you won’t face workplace discrimination that’ll make your journey harder, whether due to your gender, race, sexuality or whatever. You’re naturally going to feel less confident the steeper a mountain looks to climb before you. When you’re at the start of a race and your starting line is metres behind others, you’re going to feel less confident about winning. This lower confidence might mean you’ll hesitate when applying for certain jobs, promotions and pay negotiations.
We might apply for a promotion only when we meet 100% of the qualifications. Meanwhile, overconfident people might apply when they meet only 50-60%. Self-doubt can thus lead to striving for perfectionism. We won’t answer questions, be as vocal or take the lead unless we’re totally sure of the answer or what to do. We won’t submit a blog post until it’s been edited dozens of times! We won’t sign up for competitions unless we feel we’ve prepared thoroughly. We won’t take risks, seek recognition or publicise our abilities but hold back because we don’t think we or our work is good enough. This can lead to misdirected time and forgone attempts to try things, like entrepreneurship, not because we can’t do them but because we don’t think we can. We won’t get out there to network and advertise ourselves to others because we think no one would want us or care. Meanwhile, overconfidence is highly rewarded – more confident people come across as more competent, and vice-versa, because people generally fallaciously conflate confidence with competence.
In an experiment where students were given a list of real and fake historical names and events and asked to tick off the ones they knew – those who ticked off lots of fabricated names and events (the students inferred to be overconfident in knowing more than they actually did) were rated as having more prominence and in turn higher status within the group. One explanation might be because their overconfidence didn’t come across as bluster since they truly believed in their own bull**** and grandeur! Therefore they weren’t faking it, and their self-belief was what came across.
Should we all follow suit, or alternatively call them out and collectively learn to never fall for the overconfident again? Confidence being rewarded over competence explains a lot of problems in politics, business and society in general. Those who work hardest and strive for perfection because mediocre isn’t good enough for them are rewarded less than those who are arrogant in their own abilities but put on a good act. We reward personalities, attention-seekers, over expertise too much. Less critical thinking and more self-belief furthers one’s own career – but one’s mistakes can be costly to others, especially if we’re in a position of power.
Overconfident people are also able to deflect criticism and failure well without feeling discouraged. When they fail, they blame the task, their equipment or others, which protects their self-esteem and thus aids their own resilience. We say we’d like it if politicians admitted to their errors and apologised for their mistakes more often, yet politicians who don’t and just let the dust of their blunders settle down until they’re yesterday’s news can have very lengthy careers around the top! They come across as less shamefaced and thus more authoritative. Meanwhile, blaming oneself, doubting our own abilities and devaluing our own performances may drive us towards actual self-improvement; but can debilitate us. Good enough isn’t good enough. We ruminate and agonise over slips and failures. Therefore self-critical perfectionism is admirable, or should be, yet it can destroy self-confidence, and can come across as less commanding. Other people will devalue us and our work too.
Confidence is fine – and desirable – but overconfidence shouldn’t be. The notion that confidence and action are interrelated implies a virtuous circle – confidence expresses in a belief in one’s ability to succeed, and it’s belief that stimulates action. Taking action then bolsters one’s belief in one’s ability to succeed. So confidence accrues through giving things a go, through hard work, through tasting success, and even through failure.
But, arguably, one of the barriers to progression in the workplace for women is the so-called confidence gap. Even successful women are more likely to experience impostor syndrome.
Yet when women do express confidence (never mind overconfidence) – they’re often labelled as bossy and then penalised for not being modest and ‘ladylike’(!) Confident women can thus find themselves in a catch-22.
Also, if women push hard in their careers, they must either not have children or be judged for neither being the ‘ideal parent’ nor ‘ideal worker’!
…Basically, men generally have advantages over women in the professional workplace. Groups that have gotten used to their privilege over others can feel threatened if they’re asked to relinquish their advantages though, even for the sake of achieving equality. They’ll even likely deny they experience any privilege at all. (This parallels the situation with climate change – despite the average citizen from a ‘developed’ country emitting far more greenhouse gas emissions than the global average for decades, many feel that it’d be ‘unfair’ for them to dramatically curtail their lifestyles to get closer to the global average per capita in an act of global solidarity.) The fortunate aren’t intrinsically incentivised enough to change the status quo, especially if others are going to suffer the greatest costs if things carry on as they are.
Meow. We really need men to support gender equality too!
Comment on this post by replying to this tweet:
