Ending the Beauty Bias

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In the mirrorBy Tina Vasquez (Los Angeles)

In the past, studies have revealed that those with more symmetrical faces are perceived to be more attractive and those considered beautiful or handsome are seen as intelligent and good. Those of course, are just general perceptions, but what happens when your physical appearance actually influences how competent others believe you to be at your job?

A recent controversial study paid for by Procter & Gamble (a manufacturer of popular makeup brands, a fact that should not be overlooked) revealed that wearing makeup increases people’s perceptions of a woman’s likability, her competence, and her trustworthiness.

The study featured 25 female subjects, aged 20 to 50, who were white, African-American, and Hispanic. Each was photographed barefaced and in three looks that researchers called natural, professional, and glamorous. One hundred forty-nine adults (including 61 men) judged the pictures for enough time to make a snap judgment. An additional 119 adults (including 30 men) were given unlimited time to look at the same faces. The participants judged women made up in varying “intensities of luminance contrast,” which means how much their eyes and lips stood out compared to their skin. The results revealed that participants viewed those wearing makeup as more competent than barefaced women, whether they had a quick glance or a longer inspection.

It seems our youth and beauty obsessed culture has reached an all-time low if judgments about attractiveness are spilling over into judgments about competence. But according to Marjorie Jolles, assistant professor of Roosevelt University’s Women’s and Gender Studies Program, this has always been the case.

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Three Boardroom Challenges—And How to Overcome Them

iStock_000018386003XSmallBy Robin Madell (San Francisco)

When we hear about women in the boardroom, it is often about their absence rather than their presence. The research firm Catalyst finds that only 15.7 percent of board directors are female in the United States—a number that has remained largely stagnant for the last five years. Creditsafe reports that women hold only a quarter of director seats in the United Kingdom.

Why is this? Because women have difficulty getting on a board despite their qualifications, says Beth Stewart, Managing Director of Trewstar Corporate Board Services, a source firm whose mission is to source and place qualified women on boards. Through her experience, Stewart has seen that it is easy for even the most well-intentioned board directors to proceed with business as usual.

“There are lots of qualified men who are easy for search firms or fellow board members to find,” Stewart says. “So why make the effort, rock the boat, take the risk, or ask for a favor to get a woman on a board?” She notes that most board search firms are paid to find board members, but not specifically female board members. “The search firms have many interlocking relationships—for example, if they take a CEO from Company X for Board Y, they will expect to get other recruiting business from Company X .”

With challenges like these to even getting a board seat, we hear little about the specific obstacles that women face who have defied the odds and made it to the boardroom. But once there, there are still more hurdles to contend with. According to a range of workplace and governance experts, as well as experienced board members, here are a few insights on how to clear them.

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Negotiation November: Negotiate – For Yourself, Your Family, Your Teammates

Business woman with spectacles while at workBy Tina Vasquez (Los Angeles)

According to Matt Wallaert of GetRaised, a site created to help women plan for and request a salary increase, one of the biggest obstacles women encounter when asking for a raise is just that, working up the nerve to actually ask.

“Confidence is a big issue, but it’s not the only one,” Wallaert said.

“We need women to perceive asking for a raise as less threatening. Many women have an easier time doing it when you explain that when they get a raise, it helps others: their kids, their family, and blazing that trail will also be good for other women. We need to remove the inhibiting pressures. When women go into a negotiation with facts and concrete information that will help their employer see their value, it takes away the fear associated with the response.”

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Is Self Regulation Effective for Achieving Gender Balance?

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Smiling female professional with teamBy Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

Public interest in the topic of women in leadership has increased significantly in the past year in Europe – thanks, in part, to the UK’s Lord Davies report published in February, as well as EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding’s Women on Boards challenge issued in March.

Reding urged publicly listed companies to make a commitment to increase the representation of women on corporate boards to 30% by 2015 and 40% by 2020. She said, “For the next 12 months, I want to give self-regulation a last chance. I would like companies to be creative so that regulators do not have to become creative.”

The deadline for companies in the EU to set self-regulatory gender initiatives is International Women’s Day next year (March 8, 2012). As the deadline rapidly approaches with few companies making real progress, some countries (such as the UK and Germany) have stepped up their efforts to encourage boardroom gender diversity progress.

Public interest may be driving momentum when it comes to government intervention on the issue of boardroom gender diversity. But without real consequences for a failure to make progress, are these new rules anything more than a masquerade?

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Willing to Take the Risk

ArmiMatienzoContributed by Armi Matienzo

Men have dominated the day trading profession for years, but even as the number of women traders has steadily increased, the gender inequality is still very apparent in today’s trading and investing world.

My colleague Lauren Snedeker and I are the only female members of TradeGuider Systems International, a computer software company that provides analysis tools and methodology education for day traders. Our goal is to see if we can quickly learn how to day trade and get more women motivated to begin day trading by documenting our own learning process and thoughts in our blog.

Our idea was provoked by the content in TradeGuider’s customer database – recently I wanted to get an understanding of the company’s client base. It turned out that 97% of them were men.

I wanted to get a feel for why women would be put off by day trading. Lots of money can be made in this profession and I didn’t understand why it is always portrayed as such a male dominated world. After doing a little research, I found that many studies have shown that due to women’s psychological structure, we are sometimes turned off by the known risk factor involved. But since we are more cautious, that, in fact, makes us better at trading.

On average, men are three times more likely than women to risk losing all of their savings when investing or trading, according to a survey from National Savings, the birthplace of E-mini trading.

Also, according to a study conducted by the University of California of 35,000 brokerage accounts, on average, women make 1.5% higher returns than men and single women make 2.2% more than their single male counterparts.

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How to Manage Young Professional Women: 5 Tips for Female Supervisors

By Julia Moon (New York City)

In the last few years, a significant portion of the 70 million Generation Y individuals has entered the workforce – and studies show that this new generation of employees is unique: Gen Y are both high-maintenance, but also high-performance.

Gen Y employees are known to be excellent team-players, multitaskers, and innovators. However, they are also known to be fickle, demanding, and selfish when unmotivated in a job. That is why the manager’s role in the workplace has ever increasing importance on the Millenials’ retention and performance. Here are five things you can do as a female manager to get your junior employee to perform at her best.

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New Report Sheds Light on Canada’s Glass Ceiling

iStock_000012303174XSmallBy Tina Vasquez (Los Angeles)

A new report from the Conference Board of Canada, an independent non-profit applied research organization, has found that the percentage of Canadian women in senior management positions has changed very little and that men are two to three times as likely to hold a senior executive position. Ruth Wright, the Conference Board of Canada’s associate director of leadership and human resources research, oversaw the report Women in Senior Management: Where Are They? And, she said, many were shocked by its findings.

The few women who rise to senior levels often attract substantial media attention, which may give readers the false impression that barriers to women’s advancement are a thing of the past.

“People were very surprised by the findings. I think many assumed that there would have been significant shifts since our original study, Closing the Gap, 14 years ago. This is an example of why this type of research is so important – it starts the conversation that gets people wondering what the problem is and hopefully, this leads to enlightened management,” Wright said.

The Conference Board of Canada based its findings on data spanning two decades, from 1987 to 2009, which revealed that the presence of Canadian women in senior management positions flatlined during that time, despite a major bump in the number of women in the workforce. As of 2009, 48 percent of Canada’s workforce is comprised of women, yet only 0.32 percent (26,000 of more than 8 million working women) held senior management positions. While the absolute number of women in senior management rose from less than 15,000 in 1987, females are still significantly underrepresented at the senior executive level compared to males.

The report found similar results at the middle-management levels – which includes directors and managers – that frequently provide the feeder pool for future executives. Men have consistently been 1.5 times more likely than women to hold middle management positions over the past 22 years. In 2009, 911,000 men were working in middle management positions (over 10 percent of all men employed), compared to 543,000 women (7 percent of all women employed).

Anne Golden, The Conference Board of Canada’s president and chief executive officer, pointed out that between 1987 and 2009, the proportion of women in middle management rose by about 4 percent. “At that rate, it will take approximately 151 years before the proportion of men and women at the management level is equal,” Golden wrote on the Board’s site.

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UK and Norway Show Why Quotas are Necessary for Achieving Gender Parity on Boards

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iStock_000007749988XSmallBy Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

Depending on whom you ask, the UK’s recent foray into the issue of gender equality on boards has produced big results – or results that are not big enough.

According to the Guardian, in the past six months since the Lord Davies Report was released, FTSE 100 boards have appointed 18 women (or 31% of the total appointments since February 24). Eighteen women might not seem like a lot, but this is more than double the number of women appointed in years past. But is it enough?

Meanwhile, it seems that Norway isn’t satisfied with the results of its current gender quota law, which mandates that 40 percent of board seats at every publicly traded company be held by women. Boards have upheld the law since 2008, when it went into full effect.

Now the progressive Nordic country is eying private companies’ boards as well. It seems that without compulsory quotas, firms by and large don’t elect to promote large numbers of women on their own.

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Catch 22: Challenging Masculine Leader Stereotypes

iStock_000016414572XSmallBy Tina Vasquez (Los Angeles)

According to a recent Northwestern University report entitled Are Leader Stereotypes Masculine?, the characteristics that people commonly ascribe to women, men, and leaders contribute to the challenges that women face in obtaining leadership roles and performing well in them.

The study also found that women are viewed as less qualified in most leadership roles and when women adopt culturally masculine behaviors often required by these roles, such as being assertive or aggressive, they are viewed as inappropriate or presumptuous. Alice Eagly, professor of psychology at Northwestern and co-author of the study calls this ‘the double bind.’

“Masculine qualities are seen as more crucial to leadership, so women are thought to be less qualified than men. We call this the double bind because when women have these ‘masculine’ characteristics and behave in ways that are competitive and ambitious, it’s not seen as a good thing,” Eagly said.

“This is because women are thought of as ‘nice’; they must be nice even when they become leaders, which leads people to question whether or not they’re cut out for the role. If they’re not nice; however, people wonder what’s wrong with them. Men don’t have this problem because they’re never expected to be nice.”

How do we get out of this Catch-22? Eagly provided some suggestions.

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Working Mothers: Role Models to the Next Generation

iStock_000003367609XSmallBy Cleo Thompson (London), founder of The Gender Blog

Alex Crawford, whose coverage of the capture of Tripoli for UK news channel Sky News made recent headlines, has declared that it’s “offensive and sexist” to ask how she raises her four children and adds that she objects to the way in which female war correspondents are asked if they can juggle motherhood and frontline journalism when their male counterparts do not face similar questions. Speaking to the Edinburgh International Television Festival via satellite link from Libya, Crawford added that she thinks that “as a woman, you bring a different view to the whole thing … a woman who’s been through the same experiences, even if it’s giving birth, that gives you an empathy.”

Crawford would therefore doubtless be pleased to read some recently published research from the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, which suggests that children whose mothers work outside the home are no more likely to have behavioural or emotional problems at age 5 than kids whose mums stayed at home.
“We don’t see detrimental effects on children’s behaviour with maternal employment,” says study researcher Anne McMunn, PhD, a senior research fellow at University College, London.

Living with two working parents seems to be best for kids, and this effect was apparent even after researchers took into account the mothers’ education level and household income.

Girls may even fare worse if their mothers stay at home. Girls whose mums weren’t working at all in the first five years of their life were twice as likely to have behavioural problems at age 5, the study showed.

“Working mothers should not feel guilty that this will have any impact on the social, emotional, or behavioural development of their children and if anything, they may be doing a service in terms of increased income and some positive effect for girls,” McMunn says.

The new study analysed data on parental employment when children were infants, 3 years old, and 5 years old. The researchers compared this information with social and emotional behaviour at age 3 and 5 to see if the mothers’ work status had an effect on risk for problems later on.

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