Men and Women at Work

Generally speaking, the Harvard Business Review publishes articles that are sane and sensible. Exceptionally, then, it has published a screed that tries to explain why companies do not have a proportional number of more women executives.

Being as the authors have already been indoctrinated in woke opinions, they conclude that the problem is bigotry. By their metrics women and men do the same work. And yet, men get promoted more often.

Of course, they skew the statistics to produce the conclusion that they believed from the onset. And besides, the issue should be framed in terms of what produces better leadership and more profitability, more effective and efficient corporate management.

The authors do not care about any of the above, because all they care about is showing that women do not get ahead because the world is bigoted against them.

So, the authors lay out their bias from the onset:

Gender equality remains frustratingly elusive. Women are underrepresented in the C-suite, receive lower salaries, and are less likely to receive a critical first promotion to manager than men. Numerous causes have been suggested, but one argument that persists points to differences in men and women’s behavior.

The authors collected data showing how often women communicated with senior management, for example. This is of some limited value, largely because it does not examine the content of the communication. Just because you talk more or because you have equal access to upper management, does not mean that you are contributing anything more. You might just be flapping your lips:

Women had the same number of contacts as men, they spent as much time with senior leadership, and they allocated their time similarly to men in the same role. We couldn’t see the types of projects they were working on, but we found that men and women had indistinguishable work patterns in the amount of time they spent online, in concentrated work, and in face-to-face conversation. And in performance evaluations men and women received statistically identical scores. This held true for women at each level of seniority. Yet women weren’t advancing and men were.

Dare I mention that nothing about this study evaluates the quality and effectiveness of communications. The authors might have noted that if women have full access to senior management and are afforded the same number of assignments, perhaps they do not do as well at it. The authors fail to consider this possibility.

We found that the amount of direct interaction with management was identical between genders and that women were just as central as men in the workplace’s social network. The metric we used for this is called weighted centrality. Centrality can be thought of, at a simple level, as how close someone is to decisions being made, other employees, and the other “power connectors,” or individuals with a high number of contacts. Weighted centrality takes into account how much time employees spent talking to different people, which we used as a proxy for how strong the relationship is.

And then the authors conclude that the only possible reason for women not having achieved proportional representation is: bigotry.

Gender inequality is due to bias, not differences in behavior.

Since they do not consider the quality of the interventions or the quality of the work product, all they have shown is that women have an equal opportunity to impress others with their skills. And this does not lead to more promotions.

Anyone with the least number of little gray cells might consider that women are less invested in their jobs because they are more invested in child rearing and homemaking. The authors consider this possibility. They draw a typically mindless conclusion:

At this company, women tend to leave the workforce in the middle of their seniority, after having been at the company for four to 10 years. This timing presents another possible hypothesis: Perhaps women decide to leave the workplace for other reasons, such as wanting to raise a family. Our data can’t determine whether this is true or not, but we don’t think this changes the argument for reducing bias.

This is frankly idiotic. The authors do not seem to understand that the roles of husband and wife, of father and mother are different. Obviously, the more we insist that people use the squishy term, partner, the easier it is to get confused and to consider that men and women should have exactly the same functions within the home and within a marriage.

If men and women are equal stakeholders in a family, they should presumably be leaving the workforce at the same rate. But this isn’t happening. According to McKinsey and LeanIn.org’s 2017 gender report, women with a partner are 5.5 times more likely than their male counterparts to do all or most of the housework. However, women are not advancing, while men are. Previous research has also shown that men are perceived as more responsible when they have children, while women are seen as being less committed to work.

This represents a conceptual failure at the highest level. For failing to understand a woman’s role within the home, the authors arrive at a specious conclusion, one that they had decided upon before they even began their study.

Nothing about this should be mysterious. None of it bespeaks bigotry, except in the sense that it fails to acknowledge the choices that women make when they bear the primary responsibility for making homes and for raising children. Refusing to accept the difference between men and women produces a poor study, one that people will no doubt refer to in pretending that America’s corporations are hotbeds of sexist bigotry.