And all this adds up to more than just words — it has powerful real-life implications. The topic of gender bias becomes even more convoluted when you consider race. For Williams — and many others — her anger on the court was about far more than the game of tennis. In the corporate world, a series of scandals at Facebook has led to COO Sheryl Sandberg being heavily condemned as a villain-like character in the media, while chairman Mark Zuckerberg has come off as the flawed yet forgivable tech whizz.
The contrasting response to Sandberg and Zuckerberg is just one example of the different expectations on women in power versus men. In some ways, you might say there has been a significant increase back from , when women were at about 13 percent. Fleming : Well, two percent was the most popular answer and they pretty much nailed it. Again, there has actually been huge progress mathematically on that. When I first started teaching this, it was one percent.
On the board seat side, the answer is about 19 percent. Fleming : There are many complicated reasons. There is a very complicated set of dynamics that are going on culturally and socially that are at play. The one thing that I really want to focus on today in particular is gender bias and stereotyping.
Gender beliefs, probably more than most people realize, are incredibly powerful in shaping our culture, in shaping the business world, in shaping our behavior and the way that we go about our daily lives.
Part of the reason for that is that gender is the dominant basis for categorization, across virtually all social contexts. The next one could be race, it could be class, it could be age, and so on.
But gender wins pretty much across the board in every culture. Another thing that is very important for people to understand is that when you bring up the word stereotyping, and you start talking about bigotry, you get people very concerned and feeling defensive. Most of this is unconscious. Stereotyping is a type of cognitive shortcut. So we use those cognitive shortcuts in order to guide our behavior. The downside of stereotypes is that all of those associations that we make, while they might be right and they might be useful, they might also be wrong.
So if you walk into a meeting assessing a woman, you might immediately associate feminine characteristics as being more communal and less aggressive. Wofford : So even though these things sort of spring into mind subconsciously, they can still affect how you respond to a given situation? Fleming : Right. Wofford : Here come some more: controlling, nurturing, bitchy, soft, timid, communicative, sweet, nice, intelligent, weak, sensitive. I can see some more are continuing to roll in, but what you see is that many of the stereotypes fall into what we call communal characteristics.
And then you see that people list all of these negative words that are applied to women when they violate that communal stereotype. Fleming : For males, it would be an asset. Those prescriptive stereotypes are what give rise to the comments we saw in the chat box. Controlling, too assertive, pushy, those kinds of things. When it comes to stereotypes about leaders, they tend to fall into the masculine category.
Numerous studies across many different countries, different age groups, etc. Women who have a strong sense of self-worth and personal power are often direct about who they are.
She knows exactly who she is and what she brings to the table. According to common opinion among us, more so the latter. We Explore. Tracy Ann.
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