Hidden Brain - Episode 48: Men: 44, Women: 0

Episode Date: October 18, 2016

A century after women won the vote in the US, we still see very few of them in leadership roles. Researchers say women are trapped in a catch-22 known as "the double bind." Note: an early version of this episode incorrectly stated that Carol Moseley Braun was the first African-American U.S. Senator. She was in fact the first female African-American Senator.

I recently looked up the number of women in Congress. Fewer than one in five legislators are women. At Fortune 500 companies fewer than one in twenty CEOs are women. And look at all the presidents of the United States through Barack Obama. Now, I know there was a long time when women couldn't be president, but if men and women had an equal shot at the White House, the odds of having 44 presidents in a row all be men, about 1 in 18 trillion. What explains the dirt of women in top leadership positions? Is it bias, a lack of role models, the old boys' club? Sure, but it goes deeper than that. Women are trapped in a catch-22, a paradox so deeply embedded in our culture that there are a few means of escape.

And so it is really that very, very fine line between being a shrew on the one hand and a puppet on the other that any woman in public life has to walk. The puppet, the shrew, and the double-bind facing women who want to lead. This week on Hidden Brain. A few years ago, one of our listeners decided to switch careers. So, my name is Deborah Metta and I am a second year marketing student in an MBA program. Deborah had been a successful teacher, but the business world appealed to her. She thought she would be a good fit, so did the program to which she applied.

She was awarded a full scholarship. Soon, she was sharing the good news with an old friend. We met for coffee one day and she is very nice. I'm still really good friends with her, but she said to me, I really can't see you in business. I think you're, you know, too sweet for the business world. It was the beginning of a series of comments that undermined her belief that she could be

a leader or a manager. Later that year, Deborah's voice was the problem, specifically her habit of ending sentences on a higher pitch. A professor during a class mentioned that I do that, that I raised my, you know, pitch at the end of a sentence. The implication was that Deborah sounded like a lightweight, not manage a material. Deborah said she wasn't prepared for the offhand remarks. I mean it really was leading me to lose confidence, criticism of my voice, and then you know

everyone, not everyone, but several people telling me I'm too sweet for business. I think it really affected me. This is one side of the Catch 22. Women like Deborah are seen as not tough enough to be leaders. Another listener, Tully Winson, made a different set of choices. As a manager at a construction company, a female leader in a man's world, she decided to be strategic. From the way she dresses, I've definitely chosen to go a more masculine path, wearing Oxford shoes and button-downs, a straight pulled-back hair and pants. To the way she greets clients. You just, you know, just go in there and grab that hand and squeeze it because you have muscles too. I think that tends to help

them go, oh wow, this is not just a lady. Tully doesn't want to appear soft or overly feminine because she knows that would be seen as weakness. But appearing tough turns out to create its own set of problems. It's definitely a double-edged sword because if I'm outspoken, all of a sudden, the men in the office will joke about,

oh, whoa, whoa, watch out for Tuley, watch out, she's dangerous that one. Dangerous, not driven, not strong, dangerous. We tell you their stories because together, Tuley and Debra's experiences reveal a powerful phenomenon that plays out when women strive to become leaders. The problem doesn't end with getting to the corner office, women confront the same issues when it comes to exercising power. It's a double-bind. Social psychologist Alice Eglie says the double-bind comes about because of a series of unconscious interlocking stereotypes we have about men, women, and the nature of leadership. The female gender role is based on the stereotype that women are nice and compassionate, but it's also expected.

So people expect women to be kind of diced friendly. And smile. Now, Saisalis, consider a cultural stereotype about leaders. In a leadership role, what is expected to take charge? And sometimes, at least least to demonstrate toughness, make tough decisions, be very assertive in bringing an organization forward, sometimes fire people for cause, et cetera. So what's a woman to do? Be nice and kind and friendly

as our gender stereotypes about women require, or be tough and decisive as our stereotypes about leadership demand. To be one is to be seen as nice, but weak. To be the other is to be seen as competent, but unlikeable. The double bind exists for women like Tuley and Debra in the business world, but it also exists in public life, even for women with enormous power and experience. We talk to two women elected to high office, one is a Democrat, the other is a Republican.

Their stories have many similarities. By the way, you may notice we refer to our guests by their first names, their agenda biases in the way the media use names. Journalists regularly refer to women by their first names, the way the media use names. Journalists regularly refer to women by their first names and men by their last names. On this podcast, in the interest of being conversational, we use first names for all guests. When Carol Mosley-Bron was elected to the US Senate, she achieved a powerful first. She was the first female African-American senator.

Carol says growing up, her parents shielded her from finding out how bias might limit her choices. My parents had never given me a notion that I was limited anyway by my race or my gender. And that, you know, I could just do whatever it was that I thought I wanted to do and could do. But when she got into politics, Carol realized that race and gender did matter. Of the two, she thought that racism would be the bigger barrier. And I have to tell you that I think in some regards, the gender biases are more profound and more central to our culture than even the racial ones. And that, for me, was the surprise.

I was expecting some pushback based on race and or gender. What I wasn't expecting was that the gender pushback would be as pronounced as it was, even more so than the racial ones. But shortly after Carol won her race, she says she confronted a second trap, the other side of the double bind. One time, she made an impassioned plea on the floor of the Senate, but she felt her colleagues were just tuning her out.

She opened in this country and getting rid of that safety net is what this so-called welfare reform is all about. All they could hear was a stril black woman. Just because it hasn't worked, and I submit to you, Mr. President, that it had... I came home that night. I was so upset and demeaning to use the word that I thought,

OK, that's it, I can't take this anymore, I'm going to quit. She didn't quit. But Carol still vividly recalls how unfair it felt. And it wasn't just over how she was being treated, she saw her experience in the long light of history. In the 15th century, women who talked back, they would put weights on their tongue and make them walk around the square. That's a shrews punishment. The idea of being that

that you're not supposed to have opinions about things outside of the home. And so that's a real danger for any woman in public life. So every stranger gets to comment on how they what they think about you and what they think about what you just said. And if you said too much, that becomes a danger. If you said too little, that's a danger also. And so it is really that very, very fine line between being a shrew on the one hand and a puppet on the other that any woman in public life has to walk.

After serving one term in the Senate, Carol lost re-election in 1998. There is a sense that a woman has to be gracious and civil and smart and smile. This is Connie Morella. Connie served for 16 years as a Republican Congresswoman from Maryland. But she's got to be strong also and indicate that she's going to persevere. Like Democrat Carol Mosley-Bron, Connie says at times she struggled to be heard. In a committee room when I wasn't chair of the committee, I would respond to a question or a comment on an issue. And I would say, well, thank you, Connie.

That's great. And then a little later, Representative Smith said the very same thing I did. And it was, oh, Congressman Smith, that was fabulous. Let the record show that you have accomplished that or whatever. And I think, gee, I just said that. Connie Morella, Cal Mosley-Bran, Tulio Winson, Debra Metta, all these women feel they've experienced bias. But here's the thing, how do we know scientifically that they're right?

Carol Mosley-Bran senate colleagues may have felt that perception of her was accurate. The newspaper cartoonist may have felt she really was easily manipulated. In fact, Carol herself, in her interview with us, listed numerous misstep sheet made as a campaigner and as a senator. How can we tell with scientific certainty where the Carol was the victim of bias? When we look at a woman leader who appears incompetent or shrill, how do we know if we are seeing reality or just seeing the world through the lens of our own unconscious biases? This is where laboratory experiments are essential. They allow us to see precisely what's happening.

We keep everything identical. We expose people to the various, what we call, experimental conditions. And at the end of the day, if we find a difference, we can say that it has to be due to that thing that we were studying. And that's the nature of a controlled experiment. Stay with us. When we judge a person's character, we usually think our opinions are based on fact. What we forget is that the world that enters our brain has been filtered.

Figuring out what those filters are and how they distort our vision has long intrigued Madeline Hylman. She's a psychology professor at New York University who focuses on gender stereotypes and bias, particularly when it comes to leadership. What we have found consistently is that when we present women and men with exactly the same credentials, qualifications and backgrounds, for a job that is traditionally male, held

by men in our culture, thought to require male attributes, we consistently find that the woman is seen as more incompetent than the man. The problem doesn't end there. Sometimes women really do show their competence and it's unavoidable and we can't, we can't deny it. And what happens then? Well the research that I've done has shown that when women are truly successful in areas where they're not expected to be, there's a very negative reaction, there's disapproval,

and they are penalized, they're disliked, but they're also seen as really almost really awful depictions of what kinds of people they are, words like bitter and quarrelsome, selfish and deceitful and devious and manipulative and cold. These are words that are attributed to these women who are successful where they are not supposed to be, and I should put that in quotes. We have terms for these people, you know, ice queen and dragon lady and iron maiden and so on and so forth. I want to emphasize these aren't Madeline's opinions. They are the findings of her experiments.

In one study Madeline asked volunteers to evaluate a high-powered manager joining a company. Sometimes volunteers are told the manager is a man, other times they're told it's a woman. When the person was presented as a very high-power person who was very ambitious we found that the person was seen as much more unlikable when it was a woman than when it was a man. To be clear the high-powered male and female manager are described in identical terms down to the letter. The only thing different is that one is set to be a man, and the other is set to be a woman. Madeline has also looked at what happens

when someone joins a company, but is not set to be in a position of power. If we didn't give information about how successful the person was, just had them applying for a job, we find that the women are as likable as the man, but their scene is less competent. And that is the rock in the hard place, the double-bine, that if it's not clear that you're successful and you have the same information about a woman and a man, the woman is seen

as less competent. If you have very clear indication that there is success, then the woman is rated as unlikable. They see her as competent but unlikable. Madeline says the double binderizes because our minds are trying to align our stereotypes about men and women with our stereotypes about leadership. We have conceptions of these jobs and these positions and what is required to do them well and there is a lack of fit between how we see women and what these positions require. The biases Madeline describes aren't just held by men.

They are held by both sexes, which explains why many female leaders encountered derision and suspicion from both men and women. I think that this comes from the social roles that people have played over time. Women stayed home and they took care, men went out, and they took charge of things. That is the kind of origin, I think, of the stereotypes that we hold. We have very strong feelings about how men and women are, and that leads to the idea that women are less competent than men and a lot of these fields that we're talking about. And we have real strong ideas about how

they should be, and that leads to this dislike when they go over the line, when they tread where they're not supposed to be. There are other aspects to the double-bind. Female leaders can get in trouble for displaying emotion, but also for not displaying emotion. Lisa Feldman Barrett is a psychology professor at Northeastern University and author of the book How Emotions Are Made. There is an implication that if a woman expresses emotion that she's either unsuitable for leadership are made. In one experiment, Lisa showed volunteers pictures of faces

and asked why the subject was expressing an emotion. She found that the volunteers thought men's emotions were shaped by what was going on around them, but that women's emotions were shaped by their nature. Both men and women, when they were looking at female faces expressing emotion, believed that this was caused by a woman's emotional nature. She's just a neurotic person.

She's just unstable. She's just untrustworthy, as opposed to when they were looking at male faces expressing emotion, they were more likely to say, oh, he's just having a bad day, something bad happened to him. Lots of people have suggested ways out of the double bind. Some say women should ignore criticisms about incompetence and plunge full steam ahead. If they then appear unlikable, they should also go out of their way to demonstrate kindness

in order to keep people from seeing them as competent but cold. There is something disturbing about these ideas. They ask women who are the victims here to compensate for the biases of others. Many experts also think that a society changes, our stereotypes will change as well. If more women make it through the labyrinth and get to the top, fewer people will have trouble seeing women as leaders. Many countries and organizations are coming to think of leadership as being collaborative rather than dictatorial.

The less we think of leaders as alpha males, the easier it's going to be for our unconscious minds to see women as leaders. If there's one common thread here, it's that ending the double-bind can't be just on the women reaching for high office or the corner office. It has to be on all of us. This week's episode of Hidden Brain was produced by Jenny Schmitt and edited by Tara Boyle. Our staff also includes Maggie Pennman and Renee Clarre. If you like this episode, I'm going to ask that you tell two friends, one man and one woman, about the show.

Our unsung hero this week is Anja Grunman. She's the person who oversees NPR's podcasts. She's always had our back, and there's a reason her calendar is always maxed out. Anja is the very definition of that collaborative leader we were just talking about. She makes everyone around her better. Today we're also honoring the work of another remarkable colleague, producer Chris Benderev, who's been with us at Hidden Brain for a few months. He's about to return to his role on NPR's Embedded Podcast.

Chris has graded everything he does, which would be a little obnoxious if you weren't also one of the nicest people we know. Thank you Chris, for all the great work you've done on this show. You can find more Hidden Brain on Facebook and Twitter and listen for my stories on your local public radio station. I'm Shankar Veta Antham and this is NPR.