The problem with gender discrimination in the corporate world

Time was, it was easy to spot gender discrimination in the corporate world. A respected female executive would lose a promotion to a male colleague with less experience, for instance, or a talented female manager would find herself demoted after her maternity leave. Today such blatant cases are rare; they’ve been wiped out by laws and by organizations’ increased awareness that they have nothing to gain, and much to lose, by keeping women out of positions of authority. That doesn’t mean, however, that gender inequity has vanished. It has just gone underground. Today discrimination against women lingers in a plethora of work practices and cultural norms that only appear unbiased. They are common and mundane—and woven into the fabric of an organization’s status quo—which is why most people don’t notice them, let alone question them. But they create a subtle pattern of systemic disadvantage, which blocks all but a few women from career advancement. For an example of this modern-day gender inequity, take the case of a global retail company based in Europe that couldn’t figure out why it had so few women in senior positions and such high turnover among women in its middle-manager ranks. The problem was particularly vexing because the company’s executives publicly touted their respect for women and insisted they wanted the company to be “a great place for women to work.” Despite its size, the company had a strong entrepreneurial culture. Rules and authority were informal; people were as casual about their schedules as they were about the dress code. Meetings were routinely canceled and regularly ran late. Deadlines were ignored because they constantly shifted, and new initiatives arose so frequently that people thought nothing of interrupting one another or declaring crises that demanded immediate attention.

The company’s cultural norms grew from its manner of conducting business. For instance, managers were expected to be available at all times to attend delayed or emergency meetings. And these meetings themselves followed certain norms. Because roles and authority at the company were ambiguous, people felt free to make suggestions —even decisions—about any area of the company that interested them. A manager in charge of window displays, for example, might very well recommend a change in merchandising, or vice versa. To prevent changes in their own area from being made without their input, managers scrambled to attend as many meetings as possible. They had to in order to protect their turf. The company’s norms made it extraordinarily diffi- cult for everyone—women and men—to work effectively. But they were particularly pernicious for women for two reasons. First, women typically bear a disproportionate amount of responsibility for home and family and thus have more demands on their time outside the office. Women who worked set hours—even if they spanned ten hours a day—ended up missing essential conversations and important plans for new products. Their circumscribed schedules also made them appear less committed than their male counterparts. In most instances, that was not the case, but the way the company operated day to day—its very system—made it impossible to prove otherwise.

The meetings themselves were run in a way that put women in a double bind. People often had to speak up to defend their turf, but when women did so, they were vili- fied. They were labeled “control freaks”; men acting the same way were called “passionate.” As one female executive told us, “If you stick your neck out, you’re dead.” A major investment firm provides another example of how invisible—even unintentional—gender discrimination thrives in today’s companies. The firm sincerely wanted to increase the number of women it was hiring from business schools. It reasoned it would be able to hire more women if it screened more women, so it increased the number of women interviewed during recruiting visits to business school campuses. The change, however, had no impact. Why? Because, the 30 minutes allotted for each interview—the standard practice at most business schools—was not long enough for middle-aged male managers, who were conducting the vast majority of the interviews, to connect with young female candidates sufficiently to see beyond their directly relevant technical abilities. Therefore, most women were disqualified from the running. They hadn’t had enough time to impress their interviewer.

The Roots of Inequity

The barriers to women’s advancement in organizations today have a relatively straightforward cause. Most organizations have been created by and for men and are based on male experiences. Even though women have entered the workforce in droves in the past generation, and it is generally agreed that they add enormous value, organizational definitions of competence and leadership are still predicated on traits stereotypically associated with men: tough, aggressive, decisive. And even though many households today have working fathers and mothers, most organizations act as if the historical division of household labor still holds—with women primarily responsible for matters of the hearth. Outdated or not, those realities drive organizational life. Therefore, the global retail company was able to develop a practice of late and last-minute meetings because most men can be available 15 hours a day. The investment firm developed a practice of screening out women candidates because men, who were doing most of the interviewing, naturally bond with other men. In other words, organizational practices mirror societal norms.

That the “problem with no name” arises from a malebased culture does not mean that men are to blame. In fact, our perspective on gender discrimination does not presume intent, and it certainly does not assume that all men benefit from the way work is currently organized. Lots of companies run by men are working hard to create a fair environment for both sexes. And many men do not embrace the traditional division of labor; some men surely wish the conventions of a Father Knows Best world would vanish.

Men, then, are not to blame for the pervasive gender inequity in organizations today—but neither are women. And yet our research shows that ever since gender inequity came onto the scene as one of business’s big problems, women have blamed themselves. That feeling has been reinforced by managers who have tried to solve the problem by fixing women. Indeed, over the past 30- odd years, organizations have used three approaches to rout gender discrimination, each one implying that women are somehow to blame because they “just don’t fit in.”

Tall People in a Short World

To describe the three approaches, we like to use a metaphor that replaces gender with height. Imagine, therefore, a world made by and for short people. In this world, everyone in power is under five-foot-five, and the most powerful are rarely taller than five-foot-three. Now imagine that after years of discrimination, tall people finally call for change—and short people agree that the current world is unfair and amends should be made. Short people first try to right things by teaching tall people to act like short people—to minimize their differences by stooping to fit in the doorways, for example, or by hunching over to fit in the small chairs in the conference room. Once tall people learn these behaviors, short people insist, they will fit right in.

Some short people take another approach to routing discrimination: they make their world more accommodating to tall people by fixing some of the structural barriers that get in their way. They build six-foot-high doors in the back of the building and purchase desks that don’t knock tall people’s knees. They even go so far as to create some less demanding career paths—tall-people tracks— for those who are unwilling or unable to put up with the many realities of the short world that just can’t be changed.

Other short people take a third approach: they celebrate the differences of their tall associates. Tall people stand out in a crowd, short people say, and they can reach things on high shelves. Let’s recognize the worth of those skills and put them to good use! And so the short people “create equity” by putting tall people in jobs where their height is an advantage, like working in a warehouse or designing brand extensions targeted to tall people. Those three approaches should sound familiar to anyone who has been involved in the many gender initiatives proliferating in the corporate world. Companies that take the first approach encourage women to assimilate —to adopt more masculine attributes and learn the “games their mothers never taught them.” Thus, HR departments train women in assertive leadership, decision making, and even golf. Male colleagues take women to their lunch clubs, coach them on speaking up more in meetings, and suggest they take “tough guy” assignments in factories or abroad.

Companies that take the second approach accommodate the unique needs and situations of women. Many offer formal mentoring programs to compensate for women’s exclusion from informal networks. Others add alternative career tracks or an extra year on the tenure clock to help women in their childbearing years. Still others offer extended maternity leave, flexible work arrangements, even rooms for nursing infants.

In the third approach, companies forgo assimilation and accommodation and instead emphasize the differences that women bring to the workplace. They institute sensitivity training to help male managers appreciate traditionally “feminine” activities or styles, such as listening and collaborating. And they eagerly put women’s assumed differences to work by channeling them into jobs where they market products to women or head up HR initiatives. All of these approaches have helped advance women’s equity in the corporate world. But by now they have gone about as far as they can. Why? Because they proffer solutions that deal with the symptoms of gender inequity rather than the sources of inequity itself. Take the first approach. While many female executives can now play golf and have used relationships formed on the fairways to move into positions of greater power, these new skills will never eradicate the deeply entrenched, systemic factors within corporations that hold many women back. The same is true of the second approach of accommodation through special policies and benefits. It gives women stilts to play on an uneven playing field, but it doesn’t flatten out the field itself. So, for example, mentoring programs may help women meet key people in a company’s hierarchy, but they don’t change the fact that informal networks, to which few women are privy, determine who really gets resources, information, and opportunities. Launching family-friendly programs doesn’t challenge the belief that balancing home and work is fundamentally a woman’s problem. And adding time to a tenure clock or providing alternative career tracks does little to change the expectation that truly committed employees put work first—they need no accommodation. The limits of the third approach are also clear. Telling people to “value differences” doesn’t mean they will. That is why so many women who are encouraged to use “feminine” skills and styles find their efforts valued only in the most marginal sense. For example, women are applauded for holding teams together and are even told, “we couldn’t have succeeded without you,” but when promotions and rewards are distributed, they are awarded to the “rugged individuals” who assertively promoted their own ideas or came up with a onetime technical fix. Ultimately, the celebration approach may actually channel women into dead-end jobs and reinforce unhelpful stereotypes.