Should Men Lean In To The Debate?

Robert Waring navigates the conversation on gender.

Lean in? Opt-out? Man up? Dial down? Are you keeping pace with the latest debates on gender in the workplace? Robert Waring, Staff Attorney at East Bay Children’s Law Offices in Oakland, California, and author of Upside Down: The Paradoxes of Gender in the Twenty-first Century, cuts through the buzzwords and zeroes in on what's important in today's guest post.

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The past nine months have seen huge growth in the number of voices in the national debate about expanding opportunities for women. It’s a challenge for MARC members to keep up with the differing views about how best to expand opportunities for women, in order to effect “real change” (as opposed to something inauthentic). A brief recap may help you find your place in the discussion. Even if you’ve been following the conversation very closely, there are some links here to essays that may surprise you.

In June, Professor Anne Marie Slaughter’s article, Why Women Still Can’t Have It All, started a dialog, with some lining up in support of Slaughter’s arguments that workplace policies need to change, and others complaining that Slaughter’s “whining” was limiting women’s aspirations. Because of her disagreement with parts of a TED talk Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg gave in 2010, several prominent commentators suggested that the two meetand work together, but it was not to be.

Traditional and social media lit up again when new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer announced she was taking only a two-week maternity leave, and denounced feminism. Most commentators did not know what to do with this information, and so cheered her on, while at the same time complaining that she risked imposing her choice on many less powerful mothers.

In September, Hanna Rosin’s book, The End of Men, ignited a firestorm, by promoting the idea that the gender wars were over and women had won. Some agreed that men should be worried. Critics complained she had her facts wrong, and risked killing the motivation behind the women’s movement. Others accused feminists of reflexively rejecting her message.

Relative calm ensued for a few months until CEO Marissa Mayer was savaged for ending telecommuting at Yahoo. Critics pointed out that Mayer had resources for being a working mother that few others could claim. But soon, Slaughter defended Mayer - as did others.

During the same week, COO Sheryl Sandberg’s soon to be released book Lean In was attacked and defended, with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd one of the snarkiest prosecutors. Some of Sandberg’s supportersattacked Slaughter, despite Slaughter’s efforts to distance herself from Sandberg’s critics. One feminist, attacked by others for criticizing Sandberg, decried what she called “feminist on feminist hate.” Criticize her campaign as a clever ploy to remake feminism into a corporate tool if you must, but Sandberg is the only high level corporateleader willing to proclaim she is a feminist. A measure of her notoriety is that although @sherylsandberg has tweeted only 17 times, she has over 62,000 followers.

Some critics complained that “Sandberg is behaving too much like a man, and speaking too much for other women who do the same thing.” A supporter responded that “@sherylsandberg's detractors are male in their complaints” because of their “zero-sum” thinking that only one idea or movement can prevail. If nothing else, the exchange illustrated the hazards of being male in this debate.

So what are men to make of all this conflict? One could ignore it and wait to see if a winner is declared 1, 3 or 20 years hence. But a wiser strategy is to pay close attention. The ground has been shifting, and could portend larger quakes to come. For example, Pay Pal, Tesla and Space X founder Elon Musk created the wrong kind of buzz at SXSW - that perhaps he could have gotten away with a year ago - when he said he does not spend much time with his five children.

If you want to take sides in the debate, here’s a short guide that might prove useful. If you are a dedicated feminist, and describe yourself as such when discussing gender issues, your choices in this debate may seem clear. You can criticize Mayer and Rosin, perhaps Mayer more so if you are passionate about workplace flexibility. You may at the same time complain about the pushback towards Sandberg, if you nuance it well. But if you reject feminism or agree, as Rosin wrote, that feminism is dead (citing as authority Mayer’s rejection of feminism), then Mayer and Rosin may be your patron saints.

If you don’t see women and workplace issues through the lens of feminism, the next question is whether you see problems in expanding women’s opportunities more in terms of individual initiative on the one hand, or systemic obstacles on the other. If it is the former, you’ll want to lean in to Sandberg, and perhaps object to Slaughter for questioning women’s ability to “have it all.” If it’s the latter, you may praise Slaughter and complain about Sandberg’s failure to embrace specific proposals for systemic change. You might earn extra points if you can navigate the contrasts and argue that there is room for them all be right.

The gender and workplace debates have been challenging for me, in part because my background in legislative advocacy steers me towards policy solutions. But many people focus instead on the impact of gender on individuals and on how to create change on an individual level. One thing I've learned from observing and participating in this discussion is that some of the resulting acrimony stems from the difficulty the policy and individual initiative camps can have in understanding one another. By analogy, it's not unlike the fights liberals and conservatives have over government versus individual responsiblity - conflicts political psychologist Jonathan Haidt (author of The Righteous Mind) asserts stem from differences in core beliefs about the nature of society. If someone like Haidt were to turn their attention to studying how the opinions of the various camps within feminism were shaped by their core beliefs, we might all better understand each other.

-Originally published by MARC (Men Advocating Real Change) on April 5, 2013.

The Flat Decade

Another in a series of paradoxes:
Decades ago, in principal at least, we committed to equal pay for women for equal work and equal representation in leadership positions. But U.S. women’s progress toward equality so far in the new century can be called the flat decade. It’s as if feminism hit a societal glass ceiling.

The average gender pay gap for workers without a four-year college degree has slightly narrowed since the mid-1990s, in part due to effects of the Great Recession that began in 2007 described below. Surprisingly, the gap has widened for those with degrees. For example, a study of doctors’ salaries in New York State in first jobs after residency eliminated the effects of inflation, hours worked, practice settings, and specialty choices. It found a $3,600 annual gap between men and women in 1999, but a much larger gap of $16,819 in 2008.

Although the aggregate effect of these opposite trends narrowed the average gender pay gap across all occupations by a few percentage points in the first decade of the new century, the median annual gender pay gap for full time workers reduced by less than one percentage point, despite much greater progress in earlier decades. The median is the income of that man or woman whose income is greater than the lowest half of those workers in his or her respective gender, and also less than the higher half. (Given that a relatively small number of those at the top of the income ladder earn very high wages, the average income is higher than the median.) One explanation for the stagnation in the median gap is that even though women made up fifty percent of the total workforce in 2010, they remained stuck at sixty percent of those in low wage jobs.

One might see some progress in the fact that while women lost the most jobs in the recession of 2001, men held more than three-quarters of the jobs lost during the Great Recession. But a New York Times’ analysis gave feminists little cause for comfort. First, it said the Great Recession hit male dominated industries such as finance and construction the hardest. The Times’ second explanation went straight to the heart of the earnings paradox: because of the wage disparity between men and women, women were in greater demand in the Great Recession because they are willing to work for less than similarly qualified men. Public sector layoffs caused by the recession subsequently increased women’s overall unemployment even as private sector jobs began to recover, because women hold a large majority of public sector jobs. In addition, opposite trends in unemployment rates by gender combined with public sector pay cuts and freezes exacerbated the wage gap rather than narrowed it.


In 2010, a General Accountability Office study examining the most recent data found that between 2000 and 2007 the percentage of women managers grew by only one percent. And growth at the top was flat in the first decade of the new century. In 2002, fewer than sixteen percent of corporate officers in Fortune 500 companies were women, and women held just ten percent of the positions with direct responsibility for profit and loss. In 2008, it was the same.

Although there was some progress in the number of women on boards of directors in the first half of the decade, there was nearly none in the last half. As of 2006, women remained less than fifteen percent of the board directors for Fortune 500 companies. Nearly half of these companies had just one woman or no women on their boards. Stung by criticism for their lack of diversity, by 2008 only thirteen percent of Fortune 500 companies had no women on their boards. But the overall percentage of women on boards barely changed, so this was not progress but rather merely reshuffling the deck. The total number of board positions decreased slightly during this period, which means that for every company that added a woman, another with at least two on its board dropped one. By 2010, women broad members still were less than sixteen percent of the total.

It’s probably not a coincidence that law firm management shows similar percentages. A survey in 1999 found that only sixteen percent of the equity partners in the one hundred largest American law firms were women. Another survey in 2009 found the equity partner percentage had not changed.

Because of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin’s historic bids in the Presidential race, and Nancy Pelosi’s ascendency to Speaker of the House, some believe that women made significant gains in elective politics in twenty-first century America. But the sad truth is that women’s hold on political power in the U.S. seems by some measures to no longer be increasing and may even be declining. The percentage of women in elected statewide offices in 2008 shrunk to its lowest level since 1994, at twenty-three percent. It fell half a percent lower still in 2010. In 2008, women were mayors in only eleven of the one hundred largest American cities, a drop of four percentage points from just a few years before. The percentage of women mayors in American cities of at least 30,000 persons was less than sixteen percent in 2008, down five percentage points from 1999. Female representation in state legislatures basically flatlined at twenty-three percent starting in 1999.

In 1997, the U.S. ranked forty-first internationally for female representation in national legislatures. By 2008, the U.S. had fallen to seventieth. At this rate, the U.S. could be at the bottom of the rankings in just two decades.

It’s ironic that in the fourth decade of the modern women’s movement many indicators of women’s participation in government and business are flat, and some are negative. Building on prior efforts, nearly all these indicators should at this point be climbing. But they’re not. A decade from now, will we be looking back at another ten years of zero or minimal growth? Without determined national effort, it’s a distinct possibility.

Modernity increases gender differences.

Another in a series of paradoxes:
As gendered cultural influences lessen, innate differences between men and women influence personality to a greater extent, concludes a 2008 global study spanning fifty-five cultures. It confirms previous findings based on multiple studies that gender differences in personality are smallest in the most traditional cultures and greatest in those that are the most modern, affluent and progressive.

These conclusions are "counterintuitive" to the socialization (blank slate) theory of gender differences long favored by most feminists, which has presumed that boys and girls enter the world with similar cognitive and behavioral tendencies and that subsequent personality differences are attributable to the rigid gender roles found in most cultures. The concerns of those who predicted that equal rights for women would homogenize the genders now seem unfounded.

The 2008 study and its forebears are not arguing that personality differences between men and women are only caused by genes. The current scientific consensus is that nature and nurture have roughly equal influences on the behavioral tendencies that define personality. The 2008 study also does not contend that efforts to achieve equality alone create greater personality differences, but that prosperity also plays a huge role. Fortunately, we live in a world in which progressive societies prosper and prosperous societies – excepting a few oil rich nations – are progressive.

Another bombshell contained in the 2008 study: modern cultures are mostly changing and benefiting men’s personalities, not women’s. One theory offered to explain this finding is that industrialization has increased the relative power of men and acted to enhance male personality traits – in part because the benefits of industrialization do not flow as much to women, who are more restrained by the responsibilities of child rearing.

The authors’ alternative explanation is that the struggle just to survive in non-industrialized societies suppresses gender differences in personality. Where advances in civilization have made life easier, innately influenced male personality traits such as assertiveness, dominance, risk taking and affinity for innovation have flourished. It has been well documented that as progressive governments have broadened opportunities, environmental effects matter less in success and inherited traits matter more. An analogous physical phenomenon is the greater differences in height between men and women in more affluent cultures due to better nutrition and medical care. (But progress is not uniformly advantageous for men. Gender differences in blood pressure, non-existent is some agrarian economies, are highest where modernity has liberated men’s personalities to focus on career competition.)

The rise of more egalitarian societies and the decline of institutional and cultural barriers to opportunity are forces that should eventually equalize the relative opportunity each gender has for power and wealth. But the resulting changes in men’s personalities are creating new advantages for them that seem to be acting as a counterweight to the societal forces of equalization. To cite another of the authors’ analogies, in spite of laws equalizing opportunities in competitive track and field in the U.S., a far greater percentage of men cluster at the top – have times close to the best runners of their gender – than is the case for women. Men seem to respond to greater opportunity by becoming more competitive, and the result is greater clustering at the top. As Harvard Law Professor Lani Guinier said, "it is not enough to just add women and stir." We have to do more to help women be more effective in creating social change.