Women Moving Forward: Collected Insights

Dan Loney: Hello, and welcome to a special edition of the Ripple Effect podcast. I’m your host, Dan Loney. As we dive into March, we’re celebrating Women’s History Month with this year’s theme, “Moving Forward Together: Women, Educating and Inspiring Generations.” In this special best-of episode, we’ve gathered key insights from past episodes, highlighting research by Wharton School faculty. Join us as we explore various aspects of women moving forward in leadership and at work.

Gender bias is one of the most impactful burdens on women in the workplace. Wharton professor Katy Milkman has done a wide range of research in this area. She spent time with us to discuss some of her work, as well as her thoughts on improving outcomes for women’s careers. Part of this research leads us into questions around the effectiveness of diversity training programs.

Katy Milkman on Diversity Training

Katy Milkman: I wish I had a really simple answer for you. If I had to boil it down to one thing, I would say diversity training wildly underperforms expectations. But it’s subtler than that. On average, we see that it has bigger effects on attitudes than on actions. Very little evidence of movement in terms of behavior. In terms of the attitudinal lift, though, we do see that it’s having an impact particularly on those who [belong to a sub-population that] suggests they had more room for growth, because the average attitudes in that sub-population started out lower at baseline. This means it’s helping maybe change the attitudes a bit more for men, in international settings in particular.

How about behavior change? What I think is really interesting about the behavior changes was actually the opposite. The people whose behavior was shifted most tended to be the people whose attitudes were the most aligned with the training to begin with. In fact, women are the group that ended up changing their behaviors the most. But one of the interesting things is that some of the behavior change we saw was not the kind we were expecting. We were expecting to lead more people to sign up to mentor women if they’d gone through the training, for instance. And we do see that. But we actually also saw women looking for mentorship themselves at a higher rate when they’d gone through the training, which was really interesting.

One of the key results — and P.S., this also happens with minorities who go through the training — is that we may, through the training, have made it more salient to women and minorities that they needed sponsorship. That there were threats to their success in the organization, and they needed to look out for themselves and find other women and minorities to support them. That’s not normally what we think of as the goal of a diversity training, right? The goal of a diversity training is [to] ensure that our workforce, particularly those in positions of power, is providing more support to women and minorities. Instead, what we’re doing is alerting women and minorities to look out for themselves.

Loney: One of the ways she believes we can see meaningful change for women is to alter the systems in place in the office around promotions, being part of important projects, and more. Like fixing the system, rather than focusing on the individuals within the company — also known as fixing the people.

Milkman: If we just try to, you know, fix attitudes, change beliefs, try to change people, the result is it’s just much harder to do that. This is true not only when it comes to gender diversity issues in organizations, which is what we’re talking about now, but any kind of human biases. And I tend to study decision making more broadly. I look at gender diversity, but I also look at other biases and judgment besides biases against certain groups of people that can lead us to make mistakes. They’re incredibly hard to train away.

What we find in both situations is that what works much better than training is changing systems so systems support better decisions. And that’s really what we’re finding time and again. Don’t fix the person; fix the system they’re embedded in, so the system is better structured to support the outcomes we want to see.

Loney: Milkman also gave a high level of importance for women to develop their own advice clubs, especially with other women in somewhat similar career paths or periods in their careers.

Milkman: I think a really interesting thing that women can do is actually build these kinds of advice clubs so that they have stronger networks, stronger social connections. They’re benefiting from others who can see clearly in places where they can’t — how to not conform to stereotypes but make those decisions that are better for their career. And in advising others, they’re going to gain benefits in competence, confidence, and social support. So, I would advise all women to have advice clubs. And P.S., men should have them as well. But this may be a particularly useful tool for women who can’t say no.

Nancy Rothbard on Gender Stereotypes in Leadership

Loney: How does having power in the workplace impact women differently than men? In many cases, people who make waves and object to moral concerns in the workplace are viewed differently depending on whether it is a man or a woman. Wharton’s Nancy Rothbard has researched this area, starting with how women are viewed and, in many cases, stereotyped.

Nancy Rothbard: I think that some of the gender stereotypes that are really important when we think about women in the workplace are stereotypes around other-orientedness, around communality, right? Are we doing things on behalf of the group? Are we pro-social? Are we in it for everyone?

That plays out here as well, in that it’s related to perceptions of self-control. But what you also often see in many other types of work on gender in the workplace are the perceptions of warmth — that women need to be warm and friendly. You’ve seen or heard about how women need to smile more. That’s sort of an expectation of women, that they are more connected to others in the workplace. And that’s really very hard, oftentimes, because it’s an additional layer of responsibility that women have, to really engage with other people while they’re having to be highly competent at their jobs at the same time.

Loney: But her work focused in part on the component of retaliation and the impact it can have on women speaking their minds. One of the questions that Professor Rothbard tackled was whether it was better to address behaviors or the system.

Rothbard: I think that we have more leverage over individual behaviors, often, as individual actors, right? As a woman who is in a power position, it’s important to know that this is a tool that you can use right to level the playing field. But again, I think that to make systemic change, we really need to do more, and we need to raise that awareness at a broader level.

Judd Kessler on the Gender Gap in Self-Promotion

Loney: Research done in part by the Wharton School’s Judd Kessler looked at how men and women self-promote their capabilities and successes in the workplace. Judd explains his research.

Judd Kessler: The first line result is that men and women performed equally well on average. In fact, if you look across all of our subjects, women performed maybe a half a question better. But the men rated themselves much more favorably on all of these scales. On the zero-to-100 scale, men gave themselves ratings that were 25 percent higher than the ratings that women gave themselves.

The first hypothesis that we had was, maybe this is just confidence, just re-manifesting. We looked at the question: How many of the 20 questions that you got asked did you get correct? And sure enough, even though men and women on average each got about 10 questions correct, men said they got 11 correct, and women said they got eight correct. There was clear evidence that men and women had different perceptions of their underlying ability and we wondered whether that was causing the gender gap in self-promotion.

What we did then was we told men and women — after they took the test — exactly how many questions they got correct. So now we’re comparing men and women who each answered 10 questions correctly and have been told that they answered 10 questions correctly. We asked the same questions about stating agreement with: “I performed well on the test.” And even with the same performance, and knowing they had the same performance, there was still a very large gender gap. So, the gender gap shrinks a little bit when you give performance information, but just a little bit — it’s still quite big. That told us there’s something beyond just not being sure how many questions I got correct. There’s something fundamentally different about the way men and women interpret the same underlying score.

Loney: But if there is a consistent gap between how women and men promote themselves, are there ways that women might be able to shrink that gap?

Kessler: We think it’s not the responsibility of women. It shouldn’t be the responsibility of women to change the way that they act, for multiple reasons. One, it’s unfair to put it on them. Two, it’s not clear that we know how to help people change the way they think about their own ability and performance. It’s not clear that we want to encourage women to promote more — because that could be optimizing given the incentives they face.

What that means, then, is that it pushes the fixing of the problem back to the employers, who at interview stages, at application stages, at the performance review stages — we would argue — should rely less on these subjective self-evaluations and should rely more on objective measures, to the extent that they exist, in assessing ability and performance.

Corinne Low on Reproductive Capital and Career Planning

Loney: Women face an incredible challenge in their lives. Many of them want to have a great career, but they also want to be able to start families at a certain point. It’s referred to by Wharton’s Corinne Low as reproductive capital, and it can present quite the challenge for women.

Corinne Low: I think this is something that women think about and this is something that women sort of inherently know. It’s kind of hard for people who are not women to maybe believe that, because it’s not something that they’ve been faced with all their lives. But I have this paper about Israel making IVF free and what we see when IVF is made free — from a naïve perspective, you might think, “Okay, that’s going to impact the women who are between 35 and early 40s, who haven’t had children yet, and now they’re going to be able to use IVF to have children.”

But we actually see a tremendous impact on young women who are looking forward and planning their lives. Now they know that this technology is going to be available to them later in life, and so they make the decision to delay marriage. They make the decision to finish the degree. They make the decision to break off the relationship that was only so-so and maybe play the field a little bit more and wait for somebody else. We see them increasing their representation and getting graduate degrees at fields such as being doctors and lawyers and professors and things that require these long-term investments.

We see young women making decisions in anticipation of how this reproductive time horizon is changing based on the introduction of this new technology. I think this is something that women know is a real constraint. And they inherently plan around it, think about it, talk about it, and they talk about it with their mentors. They map out their careers relative to this reproductive constraint. So, as much as in some ways, maybe, my research is depressing — in that I’m showing, “Now you have this other constraint to think about, that it’s also going to affect your appeal on the marriage market, and it’s worth this much on the marriage market” — I hope that it also makes women feel seen.

Because they’ve been making these trade-offs. They’ve been facing this fundamental catch-22 of, “You can’t do both. You can’t have it all.” And it can be crazy-making to feel like, “Okay, I feel like there’s this big issue that I’m dealing with. And yet the responsibility is all on my shoulders, and it’s treated as something that’s because of me. Because I want a family, because I value this. Now I’m the one who’s stuck in this [impossible position].”

I wanted to tell and show women, “No, this is a real economic constraint you’re facing, and you’re facing it because you uniquely are in possession of something that’s super economically valuable — reproductive capital. You’re trying to figure out how to maximize the value of this depreciating asset that you’re holding, and this other asset that requires your time to invest in it, which is your human capital.”

Martine Haas on Remote Work and Career Growth

Loney: The question of remote work and its impact on women in the workplace could potentially expand some of the issues that they face. Wharton professor Martine Haas says that there could be a multiplying effect.

Martine Haas: I call this a double disadvantage. We know there can be a remote work penalty for anybody who’s not in the office so much, especially when other people are in the office more. If you are a woman in a male-dominated industry or workplace, you automatically probably have a bit of a disadvantage from that. And there’s a lot of research showing that in different ways.

You put together the two disadvantages and you have a bit of potential, at least, for a double disadvantage, right? You’re both remote, and you’re maybe a bit more marginalized in the first place, maybe a little bit less likely to be listened to when you speak, maybe a little bit less likely to be given the best opportunities or hooked up with the most senior male mentors, or whatever it might be. So again, over time, that double disadvantage could be a substantial disadvantage for your career. Women may still choose to make that decision deliberately and consciously and understand that and still have really good reasons for doing it.

Loney: But she also notes that there can be an impact from working overseas as well, especially if you move internationally more than a couple of times.

Haas: People who have moved once or twice — this is post-MBA career, so they’re knowledge workers in business careers. If they’ve moved once or twice, it’s actually negatively associated with their pay in the sense that their pay doesn’t grow as fast as people who haven’t moved internationally. And we were a little surprised. This is a negative effect, right?

What we then find on top of that, which is maybe even more surprising, is there are a set of people for whom these international moves are really beneficial, but they’re people that we call super-globals. They’re people who have moved internationally many, many times. In our study, it’s four or more times since their MBA. And those people get a substantial pay premium.

Rebecca Schaumberg on the Perception of Self-Reliance

Loney: Wharton’s Rebecca Schaumberg has researched the component of self-reliance, which is considered to be the ability to independently choose and execute a course of action. While it is something that is discussed as an element of leadership, it may not be discussed as much with women as it is with men.

Rebecca Schaumberg: I think with traits like self-reliance, dominance, or even caring and compassion, we associate these traits with different genders. We associate caring and compassion stereotypically more with women. So, when we hear those traits, we often then have an image of a woman and all the stereotypes that go along with that. But what happens when we put that trait in association with a man? We assume it means the same thing, but that’s an assumption. I think what this work shows, and which I think is a promising area of inquiry, is that these same traits mean something different when they’re associated with different genders. We can’t assume that the meaning of the word or the trait stays the same.

Loney: But Schaumberg adds that this becomes an important jumping off point to see whether there are other traits that we could see a shift depending on the gender of who is being focused on. That can have an impact on how companies proceed forward in looking for leaders and growth.

Schaumberg: Often, these traits change their meaning and what they convey based on who is possessing that trait. Describing myself as self-reliant could be different from describing my brother as self-reliant. My guess is that there are other traits like that, where we think that they might mean the same thing. When we describe, for instance, a man as dominant, or a woman as dominant. Or if we describe a woman as caring, or a man as caring. Once we associate those qualities with a particular gender, the very meaning of the word can shift. I think it’s important to flesh that out so that when we’re talking about who we are seeking as an employee — like, what are the qualities that we want in a leader — we have to know what we truly mean, rather than just using the word.

Nancy Rothbard on Mentorship vs. Sponsorship

Loney: We have also talked about the importance of mentorship in the workplace, especially for women. I asked Wharton’s Nancy Rothbard if there is an even greater benefit for women to have a mentor who is also a woman.

Nancy Rothbard: The answer is sort of yes and no, right? On one hand, it can be really beneficial as a woman to have a woman as a sponsor. On the other hand, it’s much more important to have a sponsor. So, for me, when I was coming up— and look, we still have sponsors at whatever level we’re at. But at different levels in my career, some of my sponsors were women and some of them were men. The key piece was having the right person sponsor me, so I think that’s still the most important piece. We have to recognize that as you go up the hierarchy in organizations, there are not as many women in some of those roles. So, I think having a sponsor is more important than insisting to yourself that that person be a woman.

Loney: I read that women tend to be over-mentored and under-sponsored.

Rothbard: Yeah.

Loney: Explain why that is. Maybe there’s even a component in what you just said, in terms of the numbers of women that are in a lot of these roles, or maybe not in a lot of these roles, to be able to provide this opportunity.

Rothbard: That’s part of the answer, absolutely. The relative comparison between being over-mentored and under-sponsored is such that there are fewer people in these roles who recognize women as having the leadership potential that is going to be of value in the organization. That’s where the under-sponsorship can come from.

One of the things we know from a lot of research is a concept called homophily, which is we are drawn to people who are similar to us. It’s easier for us to relate to people who are similar to us. And because there are fewer women in these executive roles, that sort of trickles down in a way that people actually have to be more conscious about sponsoring people who are not similar to them.

Maurice Schweitzer on Navigating Workplace Bias

Loney: Wharton’s Maurice Schweitzer has researched how people should deal with many of these biases in the workplace around leadership, especially how women handle them.

Maurice Schweitzer: It’s tricky. On one hand, I would encourage women to be very optimistic and very enthusiastic about the opportunities and the way forward. On the other hand, there’s no question that there remains gender bias. And women, as well as minorities [of all backgrounds], are likely to encounter some bias at some point. What do you do about that?

And it’s tricky because we could say, “Well, you want to fight everything everywhere.” But it’s difficult to fight every battle and sometimes, we’ve got to pick and choose what we’re taking on. There’s a cost as you fight things and allocate your resources, the precious time and attention that you have, to figure out where you can navigate your career the best. I’m optimistic these things will change over time, as we see more women leaders succeed and demonstrate that anything that was a historically male position, women can do just the same.