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And men being judged as more deserving of reward.
This third chapter in my list of reasons why women in the workplace are struggling to create equity explores a 2015 paper from Devon Proudfoot, Aaron C. Kay, and Christy Z. Koval in which they ran five experiments to test whether men are perceived as more creative than women, including one which tested whether men’s additional perceived creativity would result in greater “deservingness” of a reward.
Their hypothesis was that:
the propensity to think creatively tends to be associated with independence and self-direction—qualities generally ascribed to men—so that men are often perceived to be more creative than women.
That hypothesis was based on the gendered way we think of male and female “traits along the dimension of agency-communality.”
Agency, which is seen as masculine, refers to self-directed behavior and is associated with traits such as adventurousness and self-reliance; communality, which is seen as feminine, refers to concern for others and is associated with traits such as social sensitivity and cooperativeness.
The male-coded behaviours correlate with the general public’s understanding of “outside the box creativity”, leading to men being seen as more creative than women when engaging in the same activities, even when controlled for perceived competence.
The five studies found that:
- Men were perceived as better at “outside the box” creativity, which is “more strongly associated with stereotypically masculine characteristics (e.g., daring and self-reliance) than with stereotypically feminine characteristics (e.g., cooperativeness and supportiveness.”
- Men were “ascribed more creativity than a woman when they produce identical output” within the context of a male-coded profession (architecture), but not within a female-coded profession (fashion design). Female architects were judged to be less creative than female fashion designers; there was no difference for men. So not only are women judged as less creative than men within male-coded environments, women in male-coded environments are judged as less creative than women in female-coded environments.
- “Men’s ideas are evaluated as more ingenious than women’s ideas”. Talks by men about tech, entertainment, business, science and global issues were all evaluated as more creative. There was no statistically significant difference for talks about design, again pointing to the idea (which was not tested) that the gender-coding of the environment matters.
- “Female executives are stereotyped as less innovative than their male counterparts when evaluated by their supervisors”, but execs’ direct reports did not rate men and women differently. Poor ratings from supervisors are “explained by perceived, rather than actual, differences in the targets’ creative thinking”.
- Men are perceived as more creative when their behaviour is “construed as risky (i.e., when he acted in a stereotypically masculine way)”, but women engaging in the same behaviour are not seen as more creative. Behaving in a riskier way also increased men’s “reward deservingness” compared to women.
In actual fact, “men, in general, do not outperform women in creativity”, yet are persistently seen as more creative and as more deserving of rewards for their behaviours.
These results have obvious implications for women in the workplace, as the authors say:
In suggesting that women are less likely than men to have their creative thinking recognized, our research not only points to a unique reason why women may be passed over for corporate leadership positions, but also suggests why women remain largely absent from elite circles within creative industries, such as film and advertising, and creative professions, such as architecture. Our research may also help explain the dearth of women reaching the upper echelons of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields—and in particular, the technology sector, which is projected to become an increasingly large part of the U.S. labor market.
But this also puts women into a double-bind.
In my experience, the majority of people trying to fix gender inequality in the workplace are women. We’ve seen that simple interventions such as women’s networks and employee resource groups have not really helped, so we are going to need to bring much more creativity to the table.
However, if we, as women, are being judged as less creative and less deserving of reward then it’s no distance at all to us and our gender equality projects being judged less deserving of support, our ideas less deserving of attention, and our requests less deserving of action. Which means that the problem of women being given less credit and fewer resources is being tackled by the very people who are given less credit and fewer resources.
And, indeed we see this play out in other related areas: Research by Rosa has found that just 1.8 percent of UK grant funding went to organisations in the “women and girls sector”, and female founders get just 2.8 percent of VC funding.
So not only are women in the workplace being disadvantaged by this bias, but the women trying to fix the disadvantage faced by women in the workplace are being disadvantaged. We are hit by a double whammy.
Which is why I believe that the report I’m currently working on is so important, and why I need your help to find more sponsors. We need to develop an understanding of the practical barriers faced by people (yes, mostly women) trying to enact gender equality policies in business and academia before we can come up with some solutions. But to do that, I need to find another two or three sponsors. If your company would be interested, please email me!
Reference
Proudfoot, D., Kay, A. C., & Koval, C. Z. (2015). A gender bias in the attribution of creativity: Archival and experimental evidence for the perceived association between masculinity and creative thinking. Psychological science, 26(11), 1751-1761.