So in my last post I complained about the bad insubstantial coverage of gender fairness in the workplace. Just a few hours after I posted I heard a story on NPR about a study showing that not only do women negotiate less for their salaries but they recieve greater social punishment when they do negotiate. This story, also found here is exactly the sort of substantive information that I wanted to see. It reviews a study showing that women incur a greater social cost by asking for higher pay than men do. It appears that men are substantially less put off by men asking for a higher salary than they are for women doing so while women are put off by both.

Since this is such a long post I’ll offer my thoughts on this study and the broader question of gender equity after the break.

Given that the experiments tried the experiment both with video taped interviews as well as identical paper applications with different attached genders these results seem pretty solid. In particular it is unlikely the effect is merely the result of greater male comfort with asking. However, it is still not totally clear what the results show. Is it really the case that women are just screwed in terms of negotiating higher pay or does it only show that these methods of negotiating don’t work for women, e.g., women might be more succesful using non-explicit bargaining tactics while men might be better off openly asking. Either way though it makes it pretty clear that men and women aren’t treated the same even when they are negotiating exactly the same¹.

The normal response to this is to say ‘that’s horrible’ and demand that something be done to make sure people in hiring don’t impose such a bias. That’s what the interviewer on NPR suggested but the researcher interviewed replied that she wasn’t so optimistic since she thought the research showed that this differential treatment wasn’t the result of some surface bias or individual prejudice but reflected deep seated facts about social organization. I think this is right on the money, our society (and I can’t think of any that don’t) views male and female aggression/combativeness very differently and sets cultural norms that require us to treat female and male assertiveness differently. It’s absurd to think that you can fix the unconscious bias in how we view women on the job without fundamentally changing the way society views male and female assertiveness.

It’s easy to say that we should change society to make it more equal but everyone, even the most hardcore feminists, reinforces different norms for male and female assertiveness every day. Just observe any group of friends, especially feisty highschool or college kids, and you will notice that the men are expected to step up and actively defend themselves from verbal attacks and direct challenges to their status while not only are women not expected to actively attack/counterattack but it is considered rude to openly attack women the way men attack each other. Just watch a mixed gender group of college kids debate some political point. The guys will call each other’s positions stupid and very aggressively attack each other but when a woman jumps into the debate their tone immediately becomes more respectful and less aggressive.

Unfortunately, being less combative or aggressive towards a group goes hand in hand with viewing them as non-aggressive themselves². As I’ve said before you can’t possibly hope to have combative conduct by women parsed the same way as combative conduct by men if men are supposed to pull their punches with women. I very much like the idea that women should be (verbally) treated no more delicately than a man but every time I try treating my friends’ girlfriends anywhere close to the way I (or my other friends) would treat my friends’ boyfriends everyone gets really upset. Both my personal experience and the study I linked both suggest that women dislike having things demanded of them or being subject to other aggressive behavior more than men do from other men. I don’t know why this is true (nature, nurture, both?) but until at least the people suggesting we change society start behaving like it’s acceptable to rag on them or their girlfriend/mother/female friend this fix is going nowhere.

This may be my favorite example but it’s not an isolated case. As the researcher on NPR was saying we have very deeply rooted (but subtle) notions about the different social roles of men and women which society might not be able to eliminate even if it wanted to³. Once we grant this point the whole notion of gender equity in the workplace becomes hopelessly confused. While we know that social pressures bias women away from asking for raises we also know that social pressure in grade school encourages girls toward academic performance much more strongly than boys. Do we have to factor that in to determine what is a fair recompense? What if we discover tomorrow that the same social biases keeping women from getting pay raises also protects them from job loss (supervisors fell worse about letting them go)? Do we have to keep some sort of tally as to which sex received the overall benefit? How would that be measured? Given that the sexes seem to place different weights on job security, work/life balance and career advancement overall pay can’t possibly be the right answer but if you start including factors like dating life and lifespan it just gets ridiculous.

The more I think about this the more I’m convinced that the notion of gender equity just doesn’t make sense. Sure we can identify some discriminatory practices that are obviously out of bounds but the idea that there is a totally equal and fair way to treat men and women fundamentally presupposes a framework that regards gender as unimportant for most social norms and interactions. Even without the issue of biological differences once you grant that an individuals sex subtly permeates almost all interactions they have and affects what social norms apply to them it no longer makes sense to talk about fairness. Fairness only really makes sense when talking about similarly situated individuals and if men and women are pervasively (if minorly) treated differently by society they can only be roughly similarly situated.

This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t consider changing society or employment law to address the more subtle forms of differential treatment but only that we need to break out of the fairness paradigm and start using a net benefits paradigm. When we are talking about the sort of clear cut anti-woman bias that sometimes still occurs it’s clear that stopping that behavior is in the public interest. However, when we are talking about the practice of men being less aggressive/combative toward women then they are to each other it’s no longer so clear even if it results in statistically lower salaries for women. But if people want to change this rule I have no objections