Gender Schemas

Speech to Women @ UoN, Newcastle University, 16 May 2007

By Kellie Tranter

Thank you for your kind invitation to speak at your meeting.

I understand that Women @ UoN is a professional development program for female staff of the University. It is part of the University's wider Women's Leadership Development Initiative, a strategy aimed at establishing support systems to help women achieve promotion and prepare for leadership roles. Something that I am very pleased to hear about.

But I was disappointed to see a 2007 report released by the Australian National University that confirms that Australia is going backwards in gender equity, that the pay gap between men and women has widened and that there has been a dismantling of women's policy machinery and the silencing of the women's NGO sector.

It's no surprise that the report concludes that neither major political party is much committed to reversing these negative trends. The question is why? Are women too busy to put themselves on the political agenda? Are women really supporting one another? Is it because women haven't taken the time to understand the problem, to appreciate its implications and to develop a unified strategic plan?

Some time ago I prepared a paper called Womenomics: A Fairer Future. In it I pointed out that in Australia, although legislation like the Equal Employment Opportunity (Commonwealth Authorities) Act has been in place for almost 20 years and the Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Act has been in place for 7 years, and even though we have -- or had --bureaucratic bodies like the Commonwealth and NSW Office for Women, the Federal Government's Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency (EOWA) and the Commonwealth Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, the outcome of many gender based surveys (including the last biennial survey conducted by EOWA) indicates that this country is just not achieving greater equality between the sexes.

In the paper I focussed on the need to maintain continuity of income for women to be financially self-sufficient, but I didn't feel as though I was addressing the deeper issues which prevent women en masse from reaching leadership levels. My psychology studies had introduced me to the concept of schematic processing, and when I came across American writings on gender schemas they confirmed many of my suspicions about why Australia's current practices and policies aren't working, and won't work until gender schemas are addressed.

So why do women experience lack of achievement in situations where nothing seems to be wrong?

Virginia Valian raised this question in 1998 in her book Why So Slow?: The Advancement of Women.

Valian explored the long term consequences of small differences in the evaluation and treatment of men and women. She called this the Accumulation of Advantage. She said:

Like interest on capital, advantages accrue, and, like interest on debt, disadvantages also accumulate. Very small differences in treatment can, as they pile up, result in large disparities in salary, promotion, and prestige. It is unfair to neglect even minor instances of group based bias, because they add up to major inequalities.

She gives the example of a business meeting to illustrate the Accumulation of Advantage or Disadvantage, which ever happens to be the case, and it takes place during every meeting each of you attend. Things like remarks that are ignored and contributions that are labelled as low in value lead to a person being listened to less in the future, and the person loses a little more standing with each negative experience.

I certainly agree with Valian's view that 'successful people seem to recognise that one component of professional advancement is the ability to parlay small gains into bigger ones. Success comes from creating and consolidating small gains. The aim is to have your remarks discussed.'

It should therefore be the aim of all women to accumulate advantage at each meeting. Don't be ignored. Always be the first or second person to ask a question. Always have questions prepared --written down, if necessary --and make your point quickly.

Getting Over The Disadvantage Women Begin With

Women don't yet walk into a room with the same status as an equivalent man. So a women who aspires to success should be concerned about being ignored, should strategically place herself in the seats next to the decision makers at meetings, and should speak out more in public and professional settings (or in otherwords, spruik).

Valian is correct when she says 'saying nothing exacts its own toll, for no one acquires prestige through silence and when weighing up the accumulation of disadvantage women risk less disadvantage overall by remaining silent'. I do believe that proper planning before meetings minimises the risk of accumulating disadvantage, and that planning properly will soon break programmed silence.

How do we convince ourselves that our judgments really are prone to error?

Valian notes that we all want to believe we are unbiased, but she also observes that the schema a person has about gender differences spills over into their judgments.

She goes on to say, 'the implications for judgments of professional competence are clear. Employers faced with a man and a woman matched on the qualities relevant to success in a particular field may believe they are judging the candidates objectively. Yet, if their schemas represent men as more capable than women, they are likely to overestimate the male's qualifications and underestimate the female's.'

A second problem with trying to ensure fair evaluations, she says, is that 'people find creative ways to justify their perceptions.'

She goes on to give this clever -- and fortuitously relevant -- example to demonstrate gender schemas at work:

'...consider the story of a university department. During the past ten years fifteen men and three women were added to their faculty. When he is queried about the ratio, the chair of the department explains that his only interest is to hire the best, most able, people in order to build the strongest possible department. He makes it clear to search committees that quality is the only issue, and informs them of his views of the candidates. He is sincere in his belief that he is gender-blind and confident of his ability to judge others' competence. And, since the people he chooses are able, he has no reason to doubt his judgment or leadership.

For the chair to see that the facts call for more self-doubt, he needs an education in social cognition and gender. He needs, first, to learn that people are likely to misperceive men and women in professional settings, to overrate the former and underrate the latter.

Second, the chair needs to understand how errors of evaluation mount up over time and affect the career trajectories of young professionals and PhDs. Data suggesting that women must meet higher standards than men to gain promotion, partnership, or tenure demonstrate the detrimental consequences of the accumulation of disadvantage, showing for example, that only a few years after earning their degrees, young men's and women's achievements can affect their actual performance, as well as their aspirations.

He needs, in short, to see that his confidence is misplaced, that it is the product of ignorance. He believes that he is different, but that is what everyone thinks --just as we all think we are above average. Even those who are actively concerned about gender equality are affected by gender schemas.

As a good scholar, he should entertain the possibility that his judgments are skewed and consider what steps he can take to make them more accurate.

There is nothing like observing yourself in the act of an inaccurate or partial perception to engender humility about your freedom from gender schemas and to help you change your perceptions.'

Neutralising Gender Schemas Begins At Home

Consider the gender behaviour you observed as a child, and what your children see now.

What tasks do they regularly see you perform at home? What tasks do they see your partner perform on a regular basis? What TV programmes do you let them watch, and what characteristics would they be likely to see about gender? What gender language do you use? Do you speak of people, or do you emphasise gender? Do both you and your partner work full time? If not, why not.

I raise this point because I, like Valian, think that children observe unequal divisions of labour between men and women --both at home and in the wider world -- and they notice that adults treat girls and boys differently. Like adults, children search for explanations of the differences they observe, aided by what they learn implicitly, and sometimes by what they are explicitly taught. Children learn very early that they are not simply children, they are boys and girls, and almost inevitably they come to associate gender with roles.

Why Do We Speak of Gender?

When we speak of gender we are highlighting our psychological and social conceptions of what it means to be a man or women. "Gender Schemas" refers to our intuitive hypotheses about the behaviour, traits, and preferences of men and women and boys and girls. Correspondingly, the term "gender roles" refers to expectations, to our ideas about how men and women are expected to behave.

In order to avoid succumbing to this conditioned mode of thinking Valian suggests that we 'look at our cognition --how we interpret information, store it in our memory, reason with it, and draw inferences from it.'

Why Is Self-Perception Important?

Valian points out that everyone experiences successes and failures and must then explain to themselves just why they succeeded or failed. The unfortunate fact is that women tend to take the blame for their failures, but not credit for their successes. Women also tend to see luck as more important for both their successes and their failures than men do. Women don't reliably profit from their competence, strategic analysis, and effort to the same extent that men do. These are important aspects of self perception that we must overcome: no successful woman can really succeed without the ability firstly to see realistically what she does, and secondly to see with objective accuracy what are the outcomes and consequences of what she does. We need to take ownership of our hard work and of the results of our efforts.

What Are The Remedies?

Would you believe me if I said you could achieve real equality at Newcastle University? Perhaps within the space of a couple of years? That you could create a model for equality which would be sought after by other universities? Well, you may be forgiven for being sceptical but the reality is that it is possible. But it requires coordination, focus and dedication.

The first and most important action is to recognise the fundamental need to change gender schemas. The importance of that cannot be overstated. In seeking to redress gender imbalance by taking positive steps to lay down egalitarian norms without addressing gender schemas, our society is confronting and dealing with the characteristics or consequences of the real problem rather than its cause; they are treating the symptoms rather than the disease.

In order to change gender schemas we need first to recognise them. And the place we must start is within ourselves, by drilling down through our perceptions of the division of tasks between male and female, down through our more fundamental preconceptions of the roles of males and females, and down to the basic foundations of our own schematic processing. It is only by understanding the nuts and bolts of our own schemas that we can contain their inappropriate influences in the way we perceive the world and the people with whom we live in it; if we are able to do that then we will be able to recognise how schemas influence the words and actions of others; if we can do that then we can expose those schemas to scrutiny in the cold hard light of day, and if we do that the schemas that discriminate on the basis of gender will crumble.

Recommendations

As female members of the University you have the capacity of objective observation, the skills of logical analysis and emotional intelligence, and the ability to determine relevance and understand cause and effect. You are well-equipped to tackle the issue in yourselves and to lead by example in tackling the problem more generally. Apart from self-analysis and the self-directed behaviour modification I have described, some steps that might be taken include:

Training staff about the effect of conversational styles and gender schemas, and how to combat their effects.
Studying how gender schemas develop, how they work, how they are maintained, and how they influence aspirations and expectations.
Devising procedures and programs to neutralise gender schemas.
Training individual women about the need to implement their own strategies for the Accumulation of Advantage. The ideal way of doing that requires both a subjective and an objective analysis of each individual's behaviour. We all need to be open to constructive criticism because how we see ourselves may be inconsistent with how others perceive us.
Remember that actors don't play themselves when they audition. In the same way, we must be flexible: there may be times when you need to play your role a little differently in order to accommodate gender schemas.
Never accept an apology for any deliberately inappropriate comment or action. Of itself a single comment or action may seem harmless, but each single instance accumulates over days, months and years to eventually form layers of entrenched gender disadvantage. Those layers become widely socially held views about women and are very difficult to peel back. Failing to respond appropriately to what may be downplayed as a trivial or harmless comment is a bit like saying, "Well, one single car doesn't really contribute much to smog or congestion, so why worry about it?", when we all know that it is the sum of the contributions of each single car that is the problem!
Understanding that people tend to engage in intimidation or bullying or other overbearing behaviour to mask their own incompetence. Capable, intelligent people of both sexes are sufficiently self-assured not to need to behave in that way. You can remove the effectiveness of intimidation or bullying by pointing out to the person, preferably by making their behaviour explicit in front of an audience, exactly what the person is doing.
Be alert for labels applied to a person in a derogatory fashion like "feminist, radical, greenie, lefty" etc. They are conveniently used by people who wish to avoid answering a question or avoid logical discussion or argument.
Never apologise when it isn't warranted. In particular, don't open with an apology when you make a comment or at the commencement of a speech: if you need to apologise for it, you shouldn't be saying it!

Please remember that life is far too short for indifference. Thank you.

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