My mom told me that when she was just beginning work as a lawyer, her boss told her that women were never going to be able to work as much as men. My mom was a very carreer-driven women and, I guess, hadn't thought about the possibility of gender as a limitation. He told her the same answer that we've been tossing around in class: because women will always have a home to take care of, a family, children. I had assumed that this explanation was only discovered by those who really thought about this issue, but the offenders give it as valid explanation. I googled "why aren't there more women leaders," just out of curiosity, and in the first comment of an article which read, "NO matter what you do, women still have another part of their life that they place a higher value on than men. For men, career success is still far higher in priority than family and children." For some reason, it didn't hit me that this explanation was so well-understood and recognized.
Another comment on that post got me thinking about the idea of choice. Women choose, for instance, to not try so hard to obtain positions of leadership because they have their husband to fall back on (as explained by Sheryl Sandburg). So I did a little more research and one article I read gave this interesting quote:
"It's the opposite of what we'd expect," says Pinker. "You'd think the more family-friendly policies, and richer the economy, the more women should behave like men, but it's the opposite. I think with economic opportunity comes choices, comes freedom."
The article goes on to explain that, while factors like family and stability influence women's desicions, when we approach societies with more and more choice, women choose something different than men more and more often. The article deals with women in more technological fields, claiming that women tend to want to work with organic things (ie. biomedical sciences, social sciences, humanities) instead of inorganic things (physics, chemistry), while men prefer the opposite. But I think the take-away is applicable to the discussion of leadership: it's more about what women would naturally want than what they are somehow pressured into doing. When Dr. Harris talked to our class, we learned that women are naturally more interested in building relationships than men. So maybe women simply prefer to "work" with family members are build relationships that way--maybe it's a product of our biological makeup or whatever causes us to be more interested in social interaction (nature more than nurture).
(Still, I find a pretty big loophole in the article's argument: if women are more interested in working with inorganic things (namely, people), why aren't there more women in management?)
For me, it's easy to blame the men for not allowing women into leadership positions they deserve or creating an enviornment in which women feel that their priorities should always lie with their children. But all these points and statistics remind me that gender inequality, particularly in leadership, like everything (ever), is a complicated, interconnected web of causes and effects and subjects. I'm having a really hard time untangling that web to find even a step that would help put us on the path toward closing the gender gap when choice does not seem to be enough.
Another comment on that post got me thinking about the idea of choice. Women choose, for instance, to not try so hard to obtain positions of leadership because they have their husband to fall back on (as explained by Sheryl Sandburg). So I did a little more research and one article I read gave this interesting quote:
"It's the opposite of what we'd expect," says Pinker. "You'd think the more family-friendly policies, and richer the economy, the more women should behave like men, but it's the opposite. I think with economic opportunity comes choices, comes freedom."
The article goes on to explain that, while factors like family and stability influence women's desicions, when we approach societies with more and more choice, women choose something different than men more and more often. The article deals with women in more technological fields, claiming that women tend to want to work with organic things (ie. biomedical sciences, social sciences, humanities) instead of inorganic things (physics, chemistry), while men prefer the opposite. But I think the take-away is applicable to the discussion of leadership: it's more about what women would naturally want than what they are somehow pressured into doing. When Dr. Harris talked to our class, we learned that women are naturally more interested in building relationships than men. So maybe women simply prefer to "work" with family members are build relationships that way--maybe it's a product of our biological makeup or whatever causes us to be more interested in social interaction (nature more than nurture).
(Still, I find a pretty big loophole in the article's argument: if women are more interested in working with inorganic things (namely, people), why aren't there more women in management?)
For me, it's easy to blame the men for not allowing women into leadership positions they deserve or creating an enviornment in which women feel that their priorities should always lie with their children. But all these points and statistics remind me that gender inequality, particularly in leadership, like everything (ever), is a complicated, interconnected web of causes and effects and subjects. I'm having a really hard time untangling that web to find even a step that would help put us on the path toward closing the gender gap when choice does not seem to be enough.
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