Tag Archive for: sexist woman

Are You a Sexist Woman at Work? Part Two

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Following on from last week’s column on how our brains assign positive and negative traits to men and women without asking us, we look at how we all hold bias ubiquitously.

Or in plain English, women can be as sexist and upholding of the patriarchy as men. How does this play out in the workplace? It appears in small and large ways in offices, hospitals, orchestras, schools and governments.

When some women work for female bosses, the experience can sometimes be perceived by them as less than optimal? Is the female boss truly awful as an individual ? Maybe or maybe not, as we can look to deep behavioral theory to explain why people act the way that they do. Social psychology theory by Lewin suggests that behavior is a function of a person’s personality activated by the environment that they are operating in. So, when you are working for a female boss who happens to be taking on traits that you do not expect her to (as a woman), you might consider that this boss might be beholden to the systemic forces that encourage behaviors that are activated in their personality. She might have consciously or unconsciously chosen that path as assimilation is what most career blogs and experts have spat at women for the last thirty years. Doesn’t make it right, but certainly explains things.

Or it could be you who has deep rooted issues about who the boss should be? You could be jarred as she isn’t meeting your stereotypical traits imagined for her as a female manager. This is only worsened by the gender segregation that is peddled falsely as brain science. Men are not from Mars, Women are not from Venus. Newsflash, we are all from Earth and we all need to do a better job on Earth at reducing bias that comes with instant thoughts of who the other person is. We all are socially conditioned to believe the differences between the sexes are the same for everyone and this discredits the real work of letting people speak and act as individuals at work while understanding that by virtue of having a social identity, has legacy trait and role assumptions in society and therefore at work too. Outwardly we see gender, ethnicity etc as a feature of the human in front of us but we have to stop that from being a definition of capability and capacity and actual experience.

Are you wrestling with challenges at work? Consider coaching with nicki@theglasshammer.com

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Are you a sexist woman at work? Part One

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Recent revelations about banks paying women less for the same job seemed to surprise everyone, yet nobody, given the recent wake up call that we aren’t as avant garde on equality as we once thought.

Let’s assume good intentions for now and review the brain science behind managers and leaders’ decisions to promote and pay men more than women for the same job.

How is this still all happening in 2018? Simply put, it is our brains fault and how we give the benefit of the doubt to certain people based on their social identity (sex, race, nationality, class etc) and the associative brain process kicks in. Basically, what we have seen before generates positive and negative stereotyping that we silently attribute without knowing the individual (if we let that happen).

The brain and the way it processes information actually puts association to things in the ‘collection’ stage of data which was not previously believed to be the case. Literally if you see (or moreover don’t realize you have just seen) four red cars go past and then a blue one, your brain is busy assigning category and value to observed data without your conscious knowledge or permission. Likewise, pattern breaking is hard for the brain regarding that a leader/techie/mechanic/astronaut looks like based on images it has seen before.

Many social psychologists, naming two here; Chris Argyris (and his ladder of inference which can be used today by you in meetings for better bias breaking) and Virginia Schein have been telling us for years that we think our way into biased decisions unconsciously is based on our own beliefs. Now, neuroscience concurs that our brains trick us into thinking some people belong in a job because of their category type and the implicit value assigned to it. Notice use the of word “belong” because deserving on actual present moment merit has nothing to do with past patterns of other people’s performance. The average brain in its categorization of things and does not even attempt to predict future shapes and sizes of anything, hence it was Steve Jobs and not just anyone who could think up the iPod by looking at the walkman. It does however work pretty hard to tell you what is unfamiliar to you as Dr Banaji and colleagues’ impressive body of work on cognition and unconscious bias work has shown around ethnicity and gender.

So, here is the bad news, even as a woman your brain exercises bias against other women. Your whole life you have lived in the operating system of the patriarchy with more boys and men in leading roles from the first book you read, first job worked at, to the movies you watch. Then there is the messaging you heard from your grandparents and everyone else around you and how you were supposed to be as a girl and then a “young lady” then a nice woman. If you broke from heteronormative cisgender or even ethnicity molds, you got to have a pejorative label. Sound familiar? You can be a nice or nasty women and that doesn’t even begin to address the intersectionality issues that create much worse dichotomies or lose-lose stereotypes for non majority grouped people.

There is good news and that is you can override your cognitive processes. Recently, 3 out of 10 school children when asked to draw a scientist drew a woman. That is the best ratio we have ever seen, but we have ways to go.

You can start to be conscious of your thoughts and feelings in crucial moments like hiring and challenge your own assumptions around the constructs and paradigms you are holding. Put them on the table, shed light on them and see if they serve you and your mission? If you espouse a goal or a way of being, what are you actually doing behaviorally and not doing to achieve that goal?

How do your thought patterns match up to the person who you say you are? How do your unconscious beliefs help or hinder you at work?

Book an exploratory session with Executive Coach and theglasshammer.com‘s founder Nicki Gilmour (nicki@theglasshammer.com) to figure out how to get what you want today!

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