Unintentional gender discrimination by good people

This exact issue has been noted at scale by researchers. It is a reflection of societal beliefs about gender roles, and it is unfortunately very difficult to rid yourself of this sort of subconscious bias, because it's been inculcated into you from a very young age. Women are not "supposed" to be assertive, and it trips your sensors as "inappropriate" behavior. Women have had pretty much the same experience, which is why they don't seem to be any better at avoiding it.

It's worth injecting at this point that women are not only well aware of their supposed role, but also constantly have to negotiate potential backlash when stepping out of bounds, such as following the simplistic advice to "be more assertive" during salary negotiations:

I've worked IT in academia and in the business world and you face the same thing everywhere. Help the people on your team solve a problem they were having trouble with by pointing them in the right directions and you're not managing them, you're "mothering" them. Stand your ground in a discussion or tell someone who is yelling at you to stop in a very sharp tone of voice and you're being "emotional" or "bossy." And I hear "Oh, I forgot you were a girl" several times a week. Go to HR about it and you get "Oh you know how it is."

Yeah, I do. It's fucking maddening.

Never mind trying to talk to a vendor or a person in another department about a technical issue on the phone. I get treated like a twelve year old moron playing with daddy's computer until I have to firmly explain that no, I actually know more than they do so just DO THE THING I AM ASKING THEM TO DO. Oh that solved the problem? Who would have fucking thought.

I think it's interesting that the managers making these evaluations would almost certainly strongly deny that they are sexist. And to some degree, using the old definitions, that would be true. I doubt very much that the managers are overtly mysoginist or that they possess a belief that women are inferior. Although culture has changed sufficiently in recent decades that outright sexism is much much rarer than it used to be, gender bias is pernicious and in the modern world of work it manifests in much subtler but still powerful ways.

I was recently thinking about the metastasis of bias at work in terms of race, rather than gender. For example, I've heard managers talking about minority employees as being "oversenstive" and about feeling that management has to "walk on eggshells" around certain minority employees. There's also a widespread perception that African Americans, particularly African American women, are far more likely to file an employment discrimination lawsuit. I've even heard managers referring to certain employees (invariably minority employees) as "lawsuit magnets", and I've seen some managers chose not to hire minority applicants for that reason. These attitudes are definitely a form of bias, but the managers involved are highly unlikely to harbor animosity towards minorities as a group or to feel that minorities are racially inferior. Racism, as declined by the old standards has markedly declined, but racial bias continues in different forms.

I think this "attitudinal" form of bias applies both to race and gender in the modern workplace.

Also, to reinforce the odd but true observation that some of the worst practitioners of gender bias are other women, in the practice of law I've seen a TON of gender bias between women. Female attorneys and female secretaries have a hard time working together. I've had female secretaries on several occasions tell me that they hate working for female attorneys, considering the female attorneys to be abrasive and demanding; and I've had female attorneys tell me that their female secretaries tend to show a lot of resistance to taking direction from a woman. This came up recently in my office as a female attorney and I were asked to switch secretaries (mine is female, hers is male) and the female attorney vetoed the switch. She outright told me "I don't like working with female secretaries; they complain too much." However, she considers herself a vigorous feminist and if anyone had the temerity to generalize about her in that way, she'd get medieval on their ass. So there you go.

Well, and so I mentioned a few posts ago that women in macho fields have to out-macho the men? The attorney probably faces pressure to behave that way; the secretary probably doesn't. That could be a source of friction.

I think it is true that female attorneys do have to out-macho the men in many cases, but it's also true that female secretaries are far less tolerant of macho behavior from female attorneys than from male attorneys. There's definitely gender bias flowing both ways between the two groups of women. Sadly, both groups are discriminating against each other due to the one characteristic which they share: gender.

The Glass Ceiling is everywhere, and calling a woman "bossy" or "bitchy" rather than "driving" or "gets things done" is the least of it. I saw it for my mother when I was growing up, and for my wife now as well. It seems clearly better than it was 20 years ago, and you can avoid the worst of it by switching jobs til you find a place where the effect isn't entrenched.

I would bet that those involved don't realize they're doing it, but they're simply oblivious. It seems especially rife amongst incompetent managers who don't have a solid grasp of what those under them do; I'd guess their latent gender bias is a bigger factor when they don't see what else to go on.

Here seems as good as any place: does anyone know of any simple group exercises that look at of illustrate gender bias (like that dumb riddle?). I may have to provide some training on bias and critical thinking at work.

My fellow sysadmin is female, has 15+ years of experience in IT, and I personally feel and have said that her absence for any extended length of time is more detrimental to our organization than any other single person in our department (including me). Point is, she knows her shit forwards and backwards, and if she's telling you to do something it's from experience, not a 'hit and hope' option. So, when I've seen this more than I really should have, it is fucking maddening. from my male perspective as well. When I have to restate the exact phrasing, but because it's coming from me you actually do it as opposed to when she said it, you've just denigrated someone who knows more about this stuff than I do. Both of us just shake our head when it happens; I don't know what goes though her head but I want to break my foot off in someone's ass when it does.

As I read all of this it occurs to me that my allowing, even for a short bit, this kind of bias to slip by in our people meeting is even more inexcusable/maddening in that I had just spent, in the last month, an hour with a lady I promoted to a new position we created and what we were discussing was her interfacing with various customers who have an obvious bias against women in her type of role. People like plant managers who are "good ole boys" who aren't used to having a female come in to analyze their processes and provide feedback on how to increase their yields. She's mature and experienced enough to know the bias is real and something she has to figure out how to deal with in order to be effective in her job.

What is actually very cool is how, once she gets over the barrier, so many of these guys come to really appreciate her. Because she is VERY good at her job, which helps them make more money. But I - and my managers - all understand and appreciate what she has to go through. But shame on me that I can be regularly coaching her and providing an ear to her on bias issues and then fall into it in a people review session. :(

Really shoots a hole in the old "oh, men are just more aggressive negotiators" argument about the pay gap, doesn't it?

Recognizing and rectifying something so deeply ingrained can be really hard. I'm no expert but maybe don't beat yourself up about it and be happy that you noticed it and can address it.

I wouldn't feel too bad about it. Words are slippery and subtle things, and if that's the worst discrimination you've got your environment is better than average. After all, you did recognize it, and everyone was apparently able to see it once pointed out.

Speaking of bias, this one is not gender bias, but in all of the companies for which I have worked, both huge global and smaller, I have noticed a bias wrt Asians in the labs. Most places will have a fork in the career road if you're a scientist, at which point you can decide whether to go up the management ladder or stay on the science ladder. There is always an assumption that someone who is Asian, especially if they have an accent, will automatically prefer to stay on the technical ladder vs. the management ladder. And in the companies for which I have worked, relative to the number of Asians in the company they have always been extremely underrepresented in the management ranks.

Thanks. And I'm no angel, and FAR from the perfect manager and leader. But once you reach a certain level - in my case, I'm chief technical officer, so everything and everyone on the technical side in the entire company, in every location, reports up to me (albeit through managers that report to me in most cases) and therefore I am accountable. So I sometimes wonder how many times I've inadvertently hosed over someone. I also worry for my two daughters and the world they are now working in. (Because both of them are as hardheaded as their Daddy, which in my case has resulted in my moving up the ranks to very high levels, and in their case could end up holding them down! :( )

Wouldn't this be an awesome world if you got called "bossy" and they got called "highly motivated"?

I look back at the start of my career, and I am thankful that I had patient bosses who looked through my arrogance and immaturity and saw something worth nurturing. Frankly, if I had worked for different people I may well have had a much less successful career. I was pushy to the point of being self-righteous, and it took me a long time to realize and understand that being right is not the same as being effective. Sigh. (I'm still arrogant and self righteous, I just reserve that behavior for web forums and keep it out of my real life. ;) )

You can try looking at some implicit association tests (IATs) - there are some here that look at gender: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/

Another common way of trying to show gender bias is to put two candidates forward who, outside of gender, are identical. Here's one recent example. Not sure if that would work for you though.

Bril, I will check those out, thanks!

I probably shouldn't have let this one go earlier. I would say that in a situation when women "self-select" themselves out of top positions, for whichever reasons, the onus should really be on the employers to figure out why that is and rectify it - if, say, an employer makes life impossible for a person who gets pregnant or becomes a primary caregiver, it doesn't really matter whether women to a greater extent chose not to apply than if they quit due to work making it impossible for them to balance their lives after them getting pregnant; it's discrimination either way. It might not be intentional nor directed at women specifically, but just as a height requirement of 170 cm will disqualify both men and women, the effects of it will be overwhelmingly discriminatory against women and should be handled as such. Of course, in addition there is the problem of discrimination not based on expectations of children or family or supposed dedication to the workplace, and women still end up disadvantaged and with a wage gap, but I think it's worth to mention the other kind as well.
Now, an argument can be made that it's not up to a specific workplace to make it possible to balance work and home life, but it's called "structural discrimination" for a reason and it permeates most of society, and we need to attack that problem from all possible angles, whether making caregiving and domestic work in the home more equitable, changing expectations regarding caring for children and family in society as a whole, lessen the push for men to martyr themselves in the workplace, and demanding more of employers in that field in general, because it's not only discriminatory, but also detrimental for the growth of a society to distribute the burden of raising a new generation so unequally.