Bloodless Coup

Why "Critical Mass" Matters

The argument that a "critical mass" of any population is necessary before adequate representation can occur is often found in discussions of electoral politics (some examples from my area of the world). Pandagon has a discussion of this article, about women at MIT who worked together to publicize and address the systematic discrimination they faced.

Sneaking around the nation's most prestigious institute of science in 1994, 15 women went office to office comparing how much space MIT awarded women with what men of equal status got. It was less by about half.

Salaries were less, too. As was the research money given to women. And the numbers of women on committees that made decisions about hiring and funding.

There were no women department heads and never had been. And while MIT lavished raises on men who got job offers elsewhere, it simply let the women leave. They might have been expected to leave, anyway, since MIT had made most of them so miserable.

MIT responded well, unlike many institutions, by recognizing the problem, and taking steps to address it. However nothing would ever have happened without the efforts of the women, but also the effect of having enough of them there to talk to each other:

It's all because three unhappy women professors happened to compare notes one day.

Without the critical mass, it's all to easy to think "it's something about me," but with the similarity of stories, these women pieced together the idea that it was about something else (emphasis mine):

The story of how these women got MIT to recognize and acknowledge bias offers a portrait of how discrimination works, often so subtly that many women themselves don't believe it exists.

''I have always believed that contemporary gender discrimination within universities is part reality and part perception,'' MIT president Charles M. Vest wrote in a letter prefacing the report. ''True, but I now understand that reality is by far the greater part of the balance.''

It might have been easy in 1995 to dismiss the numbers as a reflection of the national picture. A full academic generation into the women's movement, only 26 percent of tenured faculty nationwide were women, compared with 18 percent in 1975. It's not that women aren't entering academia; in 1995, 43 percent of faculty in tenure-track positions nationwide were women, according to the American Association of University Professors. The problem has been especially pronounced at elite universities.

Because the numbers were so small, a woman who suspected discrimination might as easily conclude that she was the victim of circumstances particular to her case.

There is a glaring example cited in the article, about a woman who developed a course, and then a man who had been added to team teach it with her was given the task of making it into a CD-Rom, solo, and she was told her course had been discontinued. However Amanda latches onto a more general problem, one that is applicable outside academia.

This article by Shankar Vedantam about the pay gap between men and women and the role of sexism is really interesting. It's been well understood for a long time now that one reason that men get paid more than women is that men haggle over salaries more often. Vedantam trots out the usual evidence for this: Male doctoral students are more aggressive about asking for teaching assignments than female doctoral students, in experiments where subjects are given money to perform tasks men will ask for more than women more often, men are far more willing than women to haggle over salaries when they're hired or ask for promotions.

...

But Linda C. Babcock and Hannah Riley Bowles addressed what's always bothered me about the parameters of the debate-what if, instead of saying that men are more aggressive, we rephrased the assertion to be, "Women are more docile by training." It doesn't initially seem like a big change, but if you refocus the question on what training women receive to be more docile, then you've repositioned the debate on actual discrimination that causes the pay gap. Women are more docile than men, because they've been trained to be more docile. And the way we are trained to be more docile is by having our attempts to ask for more smacked down while men's attempts to ask for more are rewarded, aka discrimination. Therefore, women’s lack of aggression stems from a realistic assessment of the likelihood that asserting themselves will work, as is men's.

Which is to say, if when asking the same question, women mostly hear no and men mostly hear yes, men will keep asking and women will start giving up and find better uses of their time than constant rejection.

This point resonates with me, as someone who almost never haggled, and on those rare instances of trying, got a pretty quick and definitive "no." I think back to when I was getting my PhD, and the kinds of things my advisor talked to me about. Negotiating salary was never one of them. The extent of his haggling advice was "ask for the best computer they will give you" so you can crunch lots of data. Not, "ask for more money so you will have a higher base salary" or "tell them 'no' if they decide to assign you a big class," or "insist on field research leave, and money for it." And like the article points out, I originally didn't consider gender as a factor in my reticence, and in my (so-called) willingness to "take 'no' for an answer." I thought perhaps it could be class, having come from a background where people had bosses, and bosses held the power of decision.

The good news, hopefully, is that some institutions like MIT are recognizing the problem, and taking steps to address it. As the critical mass shifts, there are more advisors who are teaching their female students how to play the game. However, the larger context still presents a problem, across job types (emphasis mine):

None of this is to say there’s anything wrong with teaching young girls to be more assertive—aka, concentrating on overcoming the sexist desire to slap down girls who assert themselves and treat girls more like boys. If people become more used to assertive women, then it might help erode the nasty retaliation against women who have the nerve to feel entitled to the same treatment men get. But we have to be realistic. The assumption that a woman who manages to keep her aggression levels in business as high as a man’s will go as far as him is simply wrong. There’s a realistic chance that such a woman will actually do less well than someone who keeps her head down, works hard, and takes her small raises and promotions with a smile while her male colleagues with equal or less talent blaze past her.

So what do we do? It seems like an impossible conundrum—if women are assertive, they don’t move forward but if they can’t use the same tools as men, they also won’t move forward.

...

One woman who says, “Hey, this is sexist!” will be written off as sour grapes. But if women as a class come forward together against the problem, it’s much harder to ignore.

All of a sudden, I'm hungry for an omelette.

Posted by binky at July 30, 2007 10:43 AM | TrackBack | Posted to Economics | Gender and Politics