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The Skills: From First Job to Dream Job - What Every Woman Needs to Know
The researchers found that male students were much more likely to rate other men as knowledgeable, a tendency that lasted throughout the academic year and persisted even after controlling for class performance and outspokenness. Female students showed no gender bias, nominating both fellow female and male students. The authors also found that there were some students who stood out in the eyes of their peers and were nominated multiple times, and that these students were always male. It wasn’t as though there weren’t women with similarly high grades in their classes, who also spoke up frequently and demonstrated their knowledge, but somehow they never gained the same ‘celebrity status’ as their male counterparts.29
When I read this study I started to imagine what the scene in the classroom might have looked like. The ‘celebrity’ students would no doubt have been aware of attracting their peers’ attention when they spoke – heads would have turned to listen to them, perhaps nodding in agreement. It’s a good experience to have, one that’s certain to make you feel more at ease, happier with your command of the subject material and probably spurred on to make further points. Could these apparently small interactions build up and develop capacity in a subject so much so that attainment is higher – or the chances of further study or a career in the field are increased? I started to think more and more about expectations of behaviour – whether in a classroom, smaller tutorial-style gatherings of students, or the first day in a new job. If we grow up with assumptions, even ones of which we are barely conscious, that men will speak first or take the lead, that can easily turn into a pattern that validates and reinforces those assumptions.
Consider this alongside what we already know about what can happen in the workplace or before people even get there. One meta-analysis of studies conducted in OECD countries over a twenty-five-year period found that discrimination against ethnic minority applicants in the hiring process was commonplace.30 In 2009, a major study commissioned by a UK government department reported high levels of name-based discrimination when researchers sent out multiple applications for real-life openings. The main difference between the applications was the likely ethnicity associated with their name: ‘Andrew Clarke’ was used to denote a white British male; ‘Mariam Namagembe’ for a black African female and ‘Nazia Mahmood’ for a Pakistani or Bangladeshi female. White names were favoured over equivalent applications from ethnic minority candidates.31
More recently, the power of big data has been harnessed to take a broader snapshot of the workplace and analyse it in terms of promotion rather than recruitment. The US-based neuroscientist and artificial intelligence expert Vivienne Ming took a vast data set of millions of real-life professional profiles collected by a tech recruitment firm and used them to compare the career trajectories of software developers whose first names were either ‘Joe’ or ‘Jose’. She found that those named ‘Jose’ typically needed a Master’s degree or more to be equally likely to get a promotion as a ‘Joe’ who had no degree. She called this a ‘tax on being different’, because of the extra costs and time involved in gaining the higher qualifications.
When Ming then used her model to compare the profiles of software engineers with male names against those with female names, she also found a ‘tax’. Typically, women needed a Master’s degree in order to compete with a man with a Bachelor’s degree. No wonder people who face these extra hurdles sometimes decide it’s not worth pursuing a particular path, she concluded: ‘The tax comes from the cost of studying at more prestigious universities, on more and higher degrees, in increases in minimum experience, and more exceptional professional backgrounds.’ In the face of this, any decision to drop out is rational, reflecting ‘a cost almost entirely absent from their more privileged peers’.32
Having invested in recruitment and development, few companies or organisations would want to see good staff reach a conclusion like that, disappearing from career tracks they had embarked upon. When that happens, both the individual and the employer generally lose out, with evidence of wider economic impact too. Yet without a forensic approach to achieving progress and change, where we are now could easily be where we stall.
The best hope of avoiding that is probably to be as laser-like as possible about identifying where the pressure points arise and why. What is it that deters or derails people with potential, who have much to give, and what might just keep them in the game or at least reaching the next milestone? Data and new analytical tools should help provide the evidence and illustrate patterns beyond the individual experience. Only with that degree of clear-sighted focus are we likely to get to better solutions for the twenty-first-century workplace.
Growing Up Female
We say to girls, you can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
What do we see and hear, growing up as girls, that might have a lasting impact on our sense of self? I remember frequently being asked what I wanted to become, but a few years ago I realised that when it came to conversations with the young daughters of friends, I was doing something quite different. Too often, that conversation would begin with a comment on their appearance – something that seemed innocuous enough at the time but also unlikely to be said to boys. It started to bother me. If it would be odd for my sons’ hair or clothes to be the source of comment when they were introduced to another adult, why was I doing that when it came to their female peers?
We send messages about behaviour, too – expecting girls to be polite and well-behaved while making a fuss of boys when they are. And girls notice. Girlguiding UK, which carries out an annual survey of opinion among nearly two thousand girls and young women, aged from seven to twenty-one, said the overwhelming message from its 2017 results was the entrenchment of gender stereotypes in all aspects of life: ‘From a young age, girls sense they face different expectations compared to boys and feel a pressure to adjust their behaviour accordingly. Girls encounter stereotyping across their lives – at school, in the media and in advertising, in the real and the virtual world, from their peers, teachers and families.’ Among the seven- to ten-year-olds questioned more than half said gender stereotypes would affect them saying what they thought and how much they participated in class.1
One group of US researchers has suggested that six is a key age at which impressions about the different potential of boys and girls start to set in. In their study, groups of children were told a story about someone described as ‘really, really smart’, i.e. clever, and were then shown pictures of two men and two women. They were asked to guess who the story they heard was about. Among five-year-olds, boys were most likely to pick men and girls women. But when the same process was repeated on six- and seven-year-olds, the girls in that age group were less likely than the boys to associate brilliance with their own gender. The boys hadn’t changed their tendency to prefer men.
The same researchers then focused on the way two games were described to six- and seven-year-olds and how that might affect their interest. One game was said to be for ‘children who are really, really smart’ and the other for ‘children who try really, really hard’. When the children were then asked about which game they wanted to play, girls were less likely than boys to express an interest in the one said to be for the ‘really, really smart’. The authors said their work provided preliminary evidence of how gendered beliefs about intelligence develop and how they relate to young children’s decision-making.2
If this sort of perception takes hold so young, how much might it then be exacerbated by words we use differently for boys and girls and men and women? ‘Ambitious’ is usually seen as a positive if you’re male, much less so if you’re female. ‘Pushy’ is similarly negative for women, but tolerable in a man, an indication that he is going places. And then there are the flattering ways to convey respect and professional standing – by referring to someone as ‘distinguished’ or ‘esteemed’ – that are very rarely used for women.
In a striking visualisation, Professor Ben Schmidt of Northeastern University illustrated this in a study based on student feedback placed on the website RateMyProfessors.com. It revealed that words such as ‘genius’ and ‘brilliant’ were more likely to be used to describe male academics.3 Women, on the other hand, were more likely to be called ‘nice’ and, in general, described in terms that related to personality, attitude and behaviour (‘helpful’ or ‘friendly’), rather than purely to their academic or intellectual capability. ‘When we use these reviews and evaluations to assess people,’ says Professor Schmidt, ‘we need to keep in mind that the way people write them is really culturally conditioned.’4
Ben Schmidt did not find as much comment on female lecturers’ looks or clothing as he had expected, but in many instances details about women’s appearance and private lives creep into discussions that are supposedly about their professional abilities. Hillary Clinton once said that if she wanted to knock a story off the front page, all she needed to do was change her hairstyle, but it can get much more personal. Within hours of thirty-seven-year-old Jacinda Ardern becoming leader of New Zealand’s Labour Party she was asked in an interview whether she had made a choice between having a career or having babies. Sometimes, women’s achievements are described with references to their personal lives that would jump out as ludicrous if used for a man: when the businesswoman Rona Fairhead emerged as the preferred candidate to chair the then BBC Trust, one newspaper headline read: ‘Mother of Three Poised to Lead the BBC.’
Once you focus on the imagery we consume from an early age, other oddities become apparent. That was the experience of the Oscar-winning actress Geena Davis after she started to watch children’s television and films with her young daughter. ‘I immediately noticed that there seemed to be far more male characters than female characters,’ she later said. ‘This made no sense: why on earth in the twenty-first century would we be showing fictitious worlds bereft of female characters to our children?’5 Deciding that she needed data to convince executives that there was a problem, she founded the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media in 2004. Its studies have shown that even among animated family films, a ratio of three male speaking characters for every female one prevails and that two types of female characters tend to dominate: the traditional and the ‘hypersexual’. These girls and women might be unusually thin and in sexually revealing clothing, or in animated films they might be depicted with an unnatural body shape, such as an exaggeratedly tiny waist.6
Earlier on, the cartoonist Alison Bechdel had drawn attention to the portrayal of women in film in her own way, with a 1985 strip in which two women discuss going to the cinema. One has a rule – she’ll only go to see a film with at least two women in it, who talk to each other about something other than a man.7 It sounds basic, but once you start applying what’s come to be called ‘the Bechdel Test’, it is remarkable how few films pass it – only half of those that have ever won the Best Picture Oscar, according to a 2018 BBC analysis, and even then some of those had just one or two instances of conversation that met the requirements.8
Even where a film is based around a strong female protagonist, she may be outnumbered in terms of her lines. In a study of film dialogue, the data website The Pudding found that was the case in Mulan, where the eponymous heroine’s dragon has considerably more lines than she does. Overall, male characters dominated the dialogue in 73 per cent of Disney/Pixar films analysed, including family favourites such as Toy Story, The Lion King, Monsters, Inc. and The Jungle Book.9 And a study made of films across the world found that women not only have fewer speaking roles than men, but that their characters are less likely to be portrayed having an occupation than women in the real-life workforce of those countries.10
Thanks to sustained and detailed work by Dr Martha M. Lauzen at San Diego State University, we also know that there has been little change in the presence of women working behind the scenes in the film industry. Her data shows that the number employed as directors, writers, producers, cinematographers and editors hasn’t really budged in twenty years: today, just 11 per cent of directors and 4 per cent of cinematographers are women.11
Where films do have at least one female director, there is a greater likelihood of other women being employed – a correlation that makes all the difference to someone like Lucinda Coxon, who wrote the 2015 film The Danish Girl, and who needs to find enough work to sustain her livelihood. ‘Directors are really the top of the creative tree in film,’ she says, ‘and the presence or absence of women in that role has a serious knock-on effect.’12
Thanks to the Harvey Weinstein allegations, the entire industry is under a new degree of scrutiny, with Melissa Silverstein, founder of the pressure group Women and Hollywood, calling it rife with ‘toxic masculinity’. ‘This is an industry that is run by men and for men,’ she says. ‘The movies we see have mostly male leads. The women depicted are mostly young, scantily clad and have little agency – all too often they are glorified props.’13
One of Weinstein’s own accusers painted a chilling picture of how women are widely perceived and used. ‘In this industry, there are directors who abuse their position. They are very influential, that’s how they can do that,’ wrote Léa Seydoux. ‘Another director I worked with would film very long sex scenes that lasted days. He kept watching us, replaying the scenes over and over again in a kind of stupor. It was very gross. If you’re a woman working in the film industry, you have to fight because it is a very misogynistic world. Why else are salaries so unequal? Why do men earn more than women? There is no reason for it to be that way.’14
Lucinda Coxon believes that everyone consuming the output of this industry, one with the power to tell stories that engage and influence us, should think about the implications of its make-up: ‘The vast, vast majority of dramatic product that you, your friends, family and co-workers have access to, in the cinema or on DVD, Netflix or plain old telly has been shaped by – and often exclusively shaped by – men. And that results in some serious distortions.’ She points to her experience on a BAFTA jury one year, where she watched thirteen hours of prime-time British TV drama and saw female characters brutally attacked again and again, to the point where it was barely noticeable any more. ‘We need to start noticing again. We need to consider how little we learn and what a warped perspective we get on the world when the gender imbalance driving its description is so strong.’
Reese Witherspoon thinks you can often see the effect of the imbalance in the lines assigned to female characters. ‘I dread reading scripts that have no women involved in their creation,’ she said in 2015. ‘Because inevitably, the girl turns to the guy and says, “What do we do now?”’ She has a point – it’s happened in films from Gone With the Wind to Toy Story to Judi Dench as ‘M’, speaking to James Bond.15 Perhaps it is to make women more likeable, something the screenwriter Cami Delavigne says she is often asked to do in the creative process. ‘It is not “likeable” for a woman to say “No”, to say “You can’t do that”,’ she says. ‘That is not charming. That is not sweet.’16
When you grow up female all of this surrounds you, whether or not you are aware of it, but the mirror image of that is the effect of gendered beliefs and expectations on boys. ‘We stifle the humanity of boys,’ said the writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in a 2012 speech which was later sampled by Beyoncé and distributed to every school in Sweden. ‘We define masculinity in a very narrow way, masculinity becomes this hard, small cage and we put boys inside the cage. We teach boys to be afraid of fear. We teach boys to be afraid of weakness, of vulnerability.’ For girls, the parameters are different: ‘Because I am female, I am expected to aspire to marriage,’ she said. ‘I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important. Now marriage can be a good thing, it can be a source of joy and love and mutual support. But why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and not teach boys the same?’17
I see this overemphasis on marriage a lot in my own community, whether among those of south Asian heritage in Britain, or when I visit Pakistan. Women who have done extraordinary things can be perceived as somehow deficient because their private lives did not take a course in line with societal expectations. Sometimes those expectations are so internalised that young women pursuing advanced qualifications, such as medicine, can see them more as a route towards a better marriage than a professional future. ‘It is much easier for girls to get married once they are doctors and many girls don’t really intend to work,’ said one medical school vice-chancellor, Dr Javed Akram. ‘I know of hundreds and hundreds of female students who have qualified as a doctor or a dentist but they have never touched a patient.’
Today, while 70 per cent of Pakistani medical students are women, they make up less than a quarter of registered doctors. The barriers range from families frowning on daughters-in-law going out to work, to the practical – childcare, transport and security.18 Now, two entrepreneurs are trying to address the shortage of practising female doctors through an initiative called ‘Sehat Kahani’ or ‘Health Story’ – using live video to connect a doctor who is at home with her children to patients, often women in remote areas with little access to healthcare.19
In the West, too, there are generational shifts in women’s expectations. Gail Rebuck, the publishing executive whose company was behind Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, contrasts her experience with that of her mother. ‘For my generation it was all about escaping from our mothers’ shattered dreams,’ she says. ‘Most of them were products of the 1950s, intelligent women and absolutely capable, but the mores of the day dictated that as soon as they got married they would be at home bringing up the family. We grew up with that sense of unfulfilled possibility, almost a silent rage.’
Gail herself was born in 1952 and started her career in the 1970s, taking charge of a major publishing house in 1991. ‘When I was coming through I could only do my best and it certainly wasn’t perfect in many ways,’ she says. After publishing Lean In, she observed something different among Sheryl Sandberg’s generation – a sense of ‘necessary excellence’ and a feeling that they needed to be the perfect executive and perfect mother. ‘Today’s forty-somethings are often angst-ridden, partially empowered but conflicted because of the equal impetus coming from this notion of excellence.’
How true this rang for me, both in terms of the age group and the feelings. I had grown up with a stay-at-home mother but found myself making my way in the world with a different set of circumstances – wonderful opportunities and possibilities, but also being pulled in more disparate directions. I could not fully model myself on the example of motherhood that I had experienced as a child and concepts of excellence, perfection or guilt were more likely to hinder than help. What I found empowering was the simple act of being open about the juggling act: these were intense phases in my life and I was fortunate that that was due to choices I had made rather than adverse circumstances.
Openness can also be a powerful tool and motivator where women and girls might feel daunted by barriers or the lack of a female role model. In a 2013 study, researchers in the United States set out to test several theories on interventions that might encourage girls to consider careers in the physical sciences. They looked at single-sex education, exposure to a female physics teacher, bringing female scientists in to the school as speakers and class discussions on both the work of women scientists and the lack of women working in the field. That final intervention was the only one found by the researchers to have a significant positive effect. ‘Explicit personal discussions regarding issues that women face in pursuing the physical sciences may help female students realize that feelings of inadequacy or discomfort they might have stem from external norms and pressures rather than from their capabilities, interests, or values,’ they said.20
In other words, we need to talk about this, and we need to do so in a way that is not hinged on celebrating a few particularly successful women who are then perceived as exceptional, or as ‘superwomen’. When Helen Fraser was leading a network of girls’ schools she spoke about the pressures she witnessed, first on girls to have the perfect appearance, school record and friendships, and then ‘on young women in their twenties, who as they start to build a career, form a relationship and find a place to live, are told that they need to start having children fast, or their fertility will be gone’. Against that backdrop, she worried about the impact of an ‘inner critic’, holding girls and women back if they thought that what they had to say wasn’t good enough, interesting enough or valuable enough. ‘If the female half of the population are routinely censoring themselves,’ she said, ‘their great ideas aren’t getting aired or implemented and the world is a poorer place.’21
I think back to my own childhood and the frequent question ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ and wonder if, today, a better question to a girl might be ‘What is your ambition for when you grow up?’ It stakes a claim to a word so often used negatively for women. With only sons of my own, I have no real-world experience of looking close up at girls as well as boys at the age when the effect of stereotyping sets in. But in my sons I see a self-belief that I don’t remember experiencing at a comparable age. Moments after one first managed to ride a bike on his own for a few wobbly metres, he asked if he might do the Tour de France one day; another, on being told that Sadiq Khan, also from a British Pakistani background, had been elected mayor of London, said: ‘I think I’ll go for prime minister.’ Without really knowing the word ambition, they appear to set their sights high as a matter of course. Life will teach them in time what else is required, but it’s not a bad base from which to set out.
Planning
Progress depends on the choices we make today for tomorrow
Hillary Clinton
How should we think about the arc of our individual working lives, given the twin challenges that are disrupting the way they used to be understood? One is the reality of our longer life spans, the other the changing impact of technology on jobs – one 2013 study suggested that 47 per cent of total US employment was at risk from computerisation.1 We can’t at this stage know precisely how a field we are interested in or have already chosen will be affected, but somehow we need to get as close as possible to having both a short- and a longer-term horizon for what we want to do. It’s about having a purpose with what you are doing now and thinking about how to lay the groundwork and gain the right CV points either for your next role or further down the line.
For me, the most useful approach has been to think in terms of five-year plans – five years being a period of time that is reasonably foreseeable and easy to keep in mind. Not long after I started on Today, I mentioned my five-year approach in an interview, only to realise that, with echoes of the Soviet Union’s economic plans, it probably had a slightly sinister ring to it. What it meant to me was thinking about the possibilities of the future in manageable chunks of time.
