We must ask ‘why’ to analyze gender inequity

Reams of research suggest that gender and race do matter in the American workplace, far more than we realize and far more than they should. The data points below, culled from a variety of academic studies (sources available upon request), don’t explain why, but do illustrate how gender matters in the workplaces to which Lab students are headed.   

Only 5 percent of S&P 500 companies are led by female CEOs, and only 4 percent of Hollywood’s films are directed by women.

A McKinsey study finds that males tend to be promoted based on potential, but females tend to be promoted based on previously delivered results, i.e. by “proving” themselves.      

Women are less likely to achieve tenure and full professorships than men, and far less likely to be appointed as department chairs and deans.

World-wide, women earn just 77 percent of what men earn.

Whose fault is this? Research indicates both male and female employees, both consciously and not, perpetuate gender bias against women in the workplace, thus compounding the difficulties women face in trying to achieve parity in pay, power, promotions and respect.

Female-on-female workplace bullying, aka the mean-girl phenomenon, is well-documented and, ironically, particularly pernicious in the “helping professions” like nursing and teaching. As one observer recently noted, “men eat their weak, but women eat their strong.” Employees of both genders are more likely to describe male leaders as “bosses” and female leaders as “bossy” (or worse).

Research on academia finds that students give much higher ratings to online professors with male names; and faculty and graduate students give higher ratings to papers, including identical abstracts, submitted under male names. They also ascribe to those papers greater “scientific quality.”

To this alarming data, I’d like to add five observations of my own, stated in the form of questions, because questions are what historians “do.”

1. Why do numerous religious traditions across world cultures continue to claim that women are incapable of occupying the highest positions of spiritual authority?

2. Why, for millennia, have so many culturally diverse societies shared such similarly malicious assumptions about the nature of women?

3. Why are Egyptian divorce rates highest in families where the men are avid soccer fans?

4. Why do the majority of American women in two-career marriages work a “second shift,” i.e. shoulder the majority of household labor — cooking, cleaning, and child

rearing?

5. Why does “looks like a supermodel” seem to be an almost non-negotiable job requirement for female newscasters at Fox and many other television networks.

I constantly remind my students that “geography is destiny,” but the data above suggests that, in more ways than we care to admit at this point in history, gender is destiny too (as are race, and gender preference). To me, the real purpose of Women’s History Month, and Black History Month, is to help us exorcise the culturally constructed demons that prevent us from acknowledging the work and wisdom of people who don’t look and think like we do. Geography may be destiny, but gender and race shouldn’t be.