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Everyday racism at work: Hope for African American Women?
Black women are expected to behave like white men when they have reached a higher level of leadership. That is the conclusion of new research looking at black women leaders.
Traditionally, white men are expected to be assertive and even aggressive leaders, but black men and white women are often perceived negatively for those sorts of behaviors in the workplace. Researchers wondered about black women and what they found was that “one size does not fit all women” when it comes to leadership expectations.
This is a surprising and counter-intuitive finding–yet, there are familiar themes along the way. We know from earlier research that African American women are more likely to confront racist statements than are Asian American women. We also know that women leaders in general are penalized more severely if they make mistakes at work. That theme comes up in this research as well. So yes, it’s still hard to be a woman–but, in this research, once you arrive, you may sound more like Aretha Franklin than Tammy Wynette.
In the research, supervisors were presented in two modes: dominant or supportive/caring. The researchers showed both male and female supervisors and both white and black supervisors and asked the participants to rate the supervisory effectiveness.
Here’s what the researchers report:
White women were evaluated more negatively when they expressed dominance rather than caring support. However, black women did not get this same negative reaction.
Black men were penalized for expressing dominance but white men were not.
In short, black women were expected to behave more like white men when in a leadership role and (unlike white women and black men) were not punished for behaving dominantly in a leadership role. The researchers wonder why, then, are there not more black women in positions of leadership? They hypothesize that black women don’t look like the stereotype of ‘leader’ (e.g., for most people a ‘leader’ is a white male) and thus are punished more harshly for making mistakes since they don’t fit the ‘leader’ stereotype. The researchers presume it’s harder for a black female to rise to high levels of leadership due to heavy punishment for mistakes along the way. However, once she has arrived, the black female leader is given permission to act like a white male in leadership: dominant and assertive, even aggressive at times.
This research has relevance for both litigation advocacy and for law practice management as well as for women of color striving for leadership positions.
In witness preparation, a high ranking African American female can show dominance and assertiveness in her testimony without being punished for it by jurors. Remember though that a white female or African American male will be expected to express support and caring for subordinates while still expressing a belief that direct communication as to performance expectations is a must for effective management.
If this research is accurate, a senior African American female attorney can question on cross-exam as aggressively as a white male attorney. There is likely a fine line on this behavior though, as it is often expected that women will behave more sensitively to others.
In your law practice, ensure you are not censuring African American female attorneys more harshly for mistakes than you would censure a white male attorney. Make your performance standards measurable and concrete so they can be applied equally and with a minimum of bias.
Overall, this is intriguing research and the researchers plan to explore the realities for African American women struggling to climb corporate ladders. We’ll be watching for their future work.
Livingston, R., Rosette, A., & Washington, E. (2012). Can an Agentic Black Woman Get Ahead? The Impact of Race and Interpersonal Dominance on Perceptions of Female Leaders Psychological Science, 23 (4), 354-358 DOI: 10.1177/0956797611428079
Have you finally broken through the glass ceiling or unknowingly stepped onto a glass cliff?
Cue the music. Tammy Wynette just didn’t know the half of it. We’ve heard for years about the glass ceiling effect for women. The belief is that there is an invisible barrier (or glass ceiling) that exists just beneath the top of the corporate ladder and blocks successful women (or minorities) from achieving the highest rungs. More recent writers have referred to this as a ‘labyrinth’ since they believe there are multiple obstacles to women moving into top leadership positions.
Arguments regarding the existence or absence of the glass ceiling aside–when women are promoted there is evidence that it tends to be a precarious promotion with high potential for negative repercussions. Seriously? Seriously.
Researchers wanted to see if it were true that women were more likely to be appointed to leadership positions in companies in crisis rather than stable companies. They used similar candidates who varied in gender for a company finance director position and asked research participants which candidate they favored for a growing company (stable position); a winnable political seat (stable position) or a company in crisis (failure position); or an unwinnable political seat (failure position).
For stable situations (i.e., the growing company or the winnable political seat) the male and female candidates were equally favored. Participants seemed to look at the applicant credentials and chose men and women equally.
However, for failure situations (i.e., the company in crisis or the unwinnable political seat), the female candidate was much more likely to be chosen.
Why was this? Maybe women are seen as strong and terrific in crisis? Maybe women are seen as able to take control when a situation is in chaos and improve performance more effectively? Or that women have more skills to balance risk? The researchers were curious and as you may guess–”No, that isn’t it”.
Another study showed that companies in stable contexts were seen as needing leaders who were assertive, competitive, or other traits adjudged to be stereotypically masculine.
In contrast, companies in crisis contexts were seen as needing leaders who exhibited more stereotypically female characteristics: understanding, tact and creativity.
So that isn’t all bad. What happened next? The researchers wanted to see which female characteristics were seen as more well-suited for leadership in crisis.
A follow-up study showed that the stereotypically female characteristics identified as better for a company in crisis [i.e., understanding, tact and creativity] were seen as more well-suited to soaking up criticism or enduring negative conditions. In other words, women were thought to be more able to ‘take’ blame and hostility for longer periods of time than were men.
Further, (this might be thought of as pouring salt in the wound) when the crisis situation had the full support of senior leadership, there was no preference for women to take on the role.
In other words, the researchers opine, women are preferred in leadership situations where it is not only risky but also very precarious. The researchers suggest that organizations rethink the “think crisis-think female” tendency and instead focus on how leaders ‘should be’ for the specific situation at hand.
As a female attorney or an attorney taking on a high profile female leader as a client, awareness of these tendencies (to “think male for manager” positions and “think female for crisis” leadership positions) can aid you in making good choices about cases, organizational assignments, and case selection.
When anyone is hired into a high-risk position, the stress is higher, the prospects for success are lower, and the potential for being blamed for a negative outcome are greater. A successful work environment needs to keep this in mind when they do hiring. Right or wrong, having a major failure attached to your name usually impairs your future prospects. If women are not to be disproportionately blamed [and unfairly blamed] for these high-risk failures, there will have to be a greater appreciation for context.
We hope awareness of this phenomena will help you understand ‘failure’ a little differently and take steps to protect yourself when you choose to step out onto the ‘glass cliff’.
Ryan MK, Haslam SA, Hersby MD, & Bongiorno R (2011). Think crisis-think female: the glass cliff and contextual variation in the think manager-think male stereotype. The Journal of Applied Psychology, 96 (3), 470-84 PMID: 21171729
Bitterness, broken hearts, bigots and butchery
Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman. (Wait! Is that Tammy Wynette I hear?) In our efforts to keep you abreast of the challenges experienced by your female jurors, colleagues, friends, family and clients–here is the latest installment of our intermittent posting on how it can be hard to be a woman.
We read about honor killings of women and female genital mutilations and are grateful that sort of thing doesn’t happen here. Except it does. This reality is disturbing but what about a wide scale sterilization program [from the North Carolina Eugenics Board] targeting “women, young girls and blacks”?
“For the past eight years, North Carolina lawmakers have been working to find a way to compensate those involuntarily sterilized in the state between 1929 and 1974. During that time period, 7,600 people were sterilized in North Carolina. Of those who were sterilized, 85 percent of the victims were female and 40 percent were non-white.”
And we wonder why women are more subject to broken hearts. Thankfully, even though serious, a broken heart probably won’t kill you. Only about 1% of those with “broken heart syndrome” actually die of the cardiac condition.
Speaking of broken hearts, when friends betray us, girls are not the paragons of virtue we’ve been made out to be by past research. Instead, girls are just as likely as boys to say they would seek revenge, verbally attack the friend and threaten to end the friendship. And when betrayed, girls report feeling more anger and sadness than do boys. In fact, they were more likely to believe the betrayal meant their friend did not care about them or was trying to control them. Researchers suggest interventions might focus on ways to help girls cope more effectively when disappointed.
At least there is blogging. A safe and rewarding activity for sure. You can be taken seriously by expressing yourself online. That would feel good. Except when it doesn’t. Concurring Opinions blog writes about bigotry against women online and ends up having the dynamic discussed played out in the comments section. This post is followed up on by another Concurring Opinions blogger with a commenter providing a link to this article on sexist abuse online.
So, as we peer out over the far edge of 2011, have we come a long way, baby? In some ways, yes. In others, it’s disturbing and depressing. As you listen to women recount their experiences of gender-based discrimination, don’t summarily dismiss them. Listen instead for threads of continuity and check out the recent Twitter trending topic: #mencallmethings.
Sensitize yourself to the realities of how hard it can be to be a woman–still. You’ll be a better friend, sibling, spouse, colleague and a better trial lawyer.
We made the ABA Blawg 100 list for the second year! Please take a minute to vote for us HERE under the Trial Practice category.
Macevoy JP, & Asher SR (2011). When Friends Disappoint: Boys’ and Girls’ Responses to Transgressions of Friendship Expectations. Child Development PMID: 22103441
The more feminine you appear, the more children you will want
Or as blogger Scicurious puts it: “it must be science”. Yes. Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman. And this time, we turn to the science bloggers for a reaction to some new research. The article abstract begins with this sentence: “Previous studies have shown that women with higher maternal tendencies are shorter and have lower testosterone levels than those with lower maternal tendencies.” This is a cue for the attentive reader that these writers are evolutionary psychologists.
What these researchers did was track levels of estrogen in women for four weeks after asking them how many children they wanted. And they found that women who had a desire for a greater number of children had both higher levels of estrogen and higher ratings of facial femininity. [They present photos that are judged ‘high maternal’ faces and ‘low maternal’ faces.] So. If you look more feminine facially—it only follows that you will want more children. Or does it?
And the science bloggers pounced! What about context? What about both context and variation? Thank you science bloggers. While evolutionary studies are often interesting and often can be amusing, they almost always fail to take context and variation into account.
Like attorneys (and sometimes consultants) who opine that “women are better for the plaintiff” or “gay black men are more likable”, we need to open our thoughts and consider variation and context—what we call “case facts” and the role that attitudes, values, beliefs, and cultural context play in the individual and collective reactions to our case narrative. Don’t take the shortcut of judging by appearance:
“That woman is a career woman who will value accomplishment over family and that woman is a woman who wants children—I can see it in their faces.”
Because you will be wrong as often as you are right. Both women in general, and your client deserve better.
Law Smith MJ, Deady DK, Moore FR, Jones BC, Cornwell RE, Stirrat M, Lawson JF, Feinberg DR, & Perrett DI (2011). Maternal tendencies in women are associated with estrogen levels and facial femininity. Hormones and behavior PMID: 21983237
Want to be exploited, harassed and poor? Take your new husband’s last name!
I tried to convince my headstrong niece otherwise but she persisted. She didn’t think keeping her last name mattered. As a member of the generation that pioneered the acceptability for women to keep their own last name after marriage, I was sure it did. Now I know I was right. And now she will know that “sometimes it’s hard to be a woman”.
Those of you who are familiar with our blog entries in this category may want to get a nice strong drink. Just keep it away from your keyboard.
Take his last name and lose $500K in income
I bet that got your attention! Published in 2010, European researchers found women who took their partner’s name or even a hyphenated name (!) were judged as “more caring, more dependent, less intelligent, more emotional, less competent, and less ambitious than a woman who kept her own name”.
And how were the woman who kept their own names judged? They were described as “less caring, more independent, more ambitious, more intelligent and more competent”.
And here’s where it gets even worse: a woman who took her partner’s name “was less likely to be hired for a job and her monthly salary was estimated lower” (over the equivalent of $500K in a work life).
So when you are warm but incompetent what happens to you?
Okay, so we hear from the European research that if you take your new spouse’s last name, you are seen as warmer but less competent than those women who keep their own birth surname. How about some American research—say, from Harvard?
Amy Cuddy is a social psychologist and business professor at Harvard. [Her online biography does not indicate whether she is married or if she took her spouse’s last name.] Her research in this area (published in Harvard Magazine) focuses on how we judge and treat others according to some basic parameters: warm vs. cold and competent vs. incompetent.
It’s sort of scary stuff and well worth a read. Hint: if you are cold and competent, you are more likely to be targeted for genocide and/or resented (as in, not liked—which is a startlingly mild justification for genocide).
In short, what her research says is that when we see someone cold but competent (as in the woman who keeps her own surname) we feel envy.
We judge someone who appears warm but incompetent (the woman who changes her surname) as pitiful.
Cuddy says we value competence over warmth and would rather have people respect us than like us. Plus, we tend to see warmth and competence as not compatible. You can be one or the other, but not both.
“The more competent you are, the less nice you must be. And vice versa: Someone who comes across as really nice must not be too smart.” This pattern is the opposite of the halo effect: a plus on one dimension demands a minus on the other. The unconscious logic might be: If she were really competent, she wouldn’t need to be so nice; and conversely, the highly competent person doesn’t have to be nice—and may even have reached the top by stepping on others.
I don’t like that conclusion. It makes me want to study the research and pick holes in the hypothesis. And I’ve seen evidence over and over that jurors favor experts who are obviously knowledgeable but who are also warm and engaging. For example, they are shocked that a great doctor can still have a good bedside manner. Overall, there is an assumption that people who are outstanding in their field have lousy social skills, and only care about themselves and their own views. There is a big world out there for people who can be smart and nice at the same time.
The long and short of all this negativity is simple: we base our judgments on stereotypes, not on fact-based perceptions of the individual we observe. We know jurors often judge women lawyers harshly. We know that sometimes women are viewed as attempting to use sexuality to their advantage. And that women in non-traditional careers can be seen as competent as long as they are absolutely perfect in every way!
These are all decisions and judgments based on stereotypes. The point is that, although they are often inaccurate, they are very, very real. [Stereotypes are not about fairness or accuracy.] And as a woman—litigator or otherwise—you do well to be cognizant of the very real impact these random biases will have.
If you read us and find us useful, helpful, entertaining, or in any way enlightening–please consider nominating us for this year’s Blawg 100 listings. You brought us into the Blawg 100 for 2010–how about helping in 2011? Nominate us for the ABA Blawg 100 here.
Noordewier, M., Horen, F., Ruys, K., & Stapel, D. (2010). What’s in a Name? 361.708 Euros: The Effects of Marital Name Change. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 32 (1), 17-25 DOI: 10.1080/01973530903539812
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