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This week’s paper is a really nice follow-on from last week’s look at how the composition of scientific evaluation committees affects how well (or not) women are treated and how men become more biased against female candidates when even a single woman is present as a peer.
It was pointed out in the comments on Substack that the effect size is small. Which it is. And this week’s paper shows that small effects can still have big impacts.
Insidious Nonetheless: How Small Effects and Hierarchical Norms Create and Maintain Gender Disparities in Organizations by Yuhao Du, Jessica Nordell, and Kenneth Joseph (2022) is a really fascinating look at the cumulative impact of different types of bias on women’s careers.
The team looked at six discriminatory behaviours and modelled their impact on women’s careers to see whether a glass ceiling effect — the “well-established phenomenon in which women and people of color are consistently blocked from reaching the uppermost levels of the corporate hierarchy” — would emerge.
Their model simulated access to projects and responses to performance in order to create a “perceived promotability” score which would control whether that individual would get promoted or not. The model began with perfect equality and was run repeatedly to see what the cumulative impact of these mechanisms might be.
The inputs are based on six biases, all of which have “significant empirical support”:
- Women’s errors and failures on projects are penalized more than men’s.
- Women’s successes on projects are valued less than men’s.
- Women are penalized for exhibiting nonaltruistic behavior.
- Women receive fewer opportunities for growth [including] fewer assignments that allow them to develop new skills [and] less access to challenging assignments.
- Women receive more blame when a mixed-gender team fails.
- Women receive less credit in mixed-gender teams.
Each of these “six mechanisms vary in their effects”, and so are weighted differently based on the magnitude of their impact and the frequency of their occurrence.
The team found that “most significant impacts come from mechanisms that are small but frequently applied” and that the glass ceiling was an emergent property of these mechanisms.
In other words, sexism isn’t one big, dramatic moment of discrimination, it’s the accumulation of lots and lots of small, biased behaviours.
What I also found interesting was that, when all the biases were applied, the model showed a clustering of women in the lowest levels of the company (see fig 1).
This reflects what we often see in real gender pay gap data where women are clustered in the lowest pay bands because they just aren’t getting promotions. To me, this provides validation that the model Du et al have created actually does reflect what is happening inside real world companies.
The team also tested “a quota-based intervention” which forced the model to promote more women to meet targets at each level of the company. They found that gender disparities returned if the interventions were displaced by the previous gender-biased norms, “even with quota levels as high as 70 percent”.
Whilst quotas may be effective in the short term, in the long term cultural change is needed to maintain gender equality.
This paper shows that the glass ceiling is created by the cumulative impact of small biased behaviours which limit women’s ability to gain promotion. This does make dismantling the glass ceiling a much harder job, because large, simple interventions won’t cut the mustard. Instead, a variety of interventions that tackle the small, insidious biases need to be tried.
At a very basic level, we need to:
- Ensure women aren’t punished more for errors and failures than men.
- Value women’s contributions as much as men’s.
- Accept women’s nonaltruistic behaviour as much as men’s is.
- Ensure women get the same opportunities for growth and the same access to challenging assignments and skill development.
- Not blame women more when a mixed-gender team fails.
- Credit women fairly when a mixed-gender team succeeds.
The question is, how do we effectively do that?
Reference
Du, Y., Nordell, J., & Joseph, K. (2022). Insidious nonetheless: how small effects and hierarchical norms create and maintain gender disparities in organizations. Socius, 8, 23780231221117888.
You may remember that Stan Rooney has been campaigning to raise money for a statue of Ada Lovelace to be erected in Hinckley, Leicestershire. Hinckley is just five miles away from Lovelace’s now-demolished childhood home of Kirkby Mallory Hall, and it is known that she loved visiting the town.
Thanks to Kate Whyles for letting me know that one of Nottingham’s trams, 
