Vivian GiangWho’s Better? Men or Women?
Posted March 12th, 2015 @ 8:24am
The answer: Men.
Who’s telling me this? Everyone.
If men aren’t better, then why is success based off of how a man would do it?
We give people money because they act (and look) like men.
We know “pattern recognition” exists because people have admitted to it. Venture capitalist John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers says he invests when founders share characteristics to established folks, like Jeff Bezos and Marc Andreessen. Basically, they’re “white, male nerds who’ve dropped out of Harvard or Stanford.” Y Combinator’s Paul Graham says he can be tricked into investing in anyone who looks like Mark Zuckerburg.
For the people who don’t fit this mold, attaining success is just that much harder. Sara Schaer, who started KangaDo in her 40s, tells me in an interview that “twentysomething-year-old men have a completely different style of pitching where they don’t necessarily know the answers to all the questions but they’re so brash about it, they’re extremely convincing."
So, if you don’t have that style of pitching, if you’re more risk-averse or admit when you don’t know the answer, you better start acting like a 20-something-year old man because people might think that you’re not.
We think the "ideal worker” is a man.
The perfect employee is someone intelligent, driven, completely loyal to your company, and have no personal life that will distract him from his job. That’s why men founders never get asked how they’re going to run a company and have kids. They don’t get asked how they balance their lives. It may be decades since the Mad Men era, but we’re still expecting our modern man to be sole breadwinners while their women stay home as primary caregivers.
Too bad “breadwinner moms” now make up 40% of American households.
We think men are more competent so women have to prove themselves.
A new study wanted to see if connections (university school ties) affect men and women differently in career success. The researchers looked at 1,815 Wall Street analysts and the 8,242 firms they covered between 1993 and 2009.
What did the find? That men are evaluated on potential and women on a proven track record. In short, men can get a lot further on promises whereas women get further by actually getting there.
We like “intelligent” men and “nice” women.
Students on the website Rate My Professor used words like “smart,” “idiot,” “interesting,” “boring,” “cool,” “creepy” to describe men and “sweet,” “shrill,” “warm,” “cold,” “beautiful,” “evil” to describe women. Basically, men are more often rated on an intelligence scale and women on a nurturing scale.
Judging men and women professors on these different scales can affect success like tenure and promotions.
We like men who self-promote; we punish women whether they do or don’t.
Case in point is Ellen Pao’s lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Among the charges the venture capital firm faces, one describes a common double-standard women are up against. In some performance reviews, Pao is criticized for not speaking up enough and described as being “passive, reticent, waiting for orders in her relationships with C.E.O.s.” In other reviews, she’s accused of speaking up too much and being too demanding.
When it comes to speaking up for themselves, negotiating, and taking credit, women are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Various studies have shown that women who ask for a raise are seen as demanding — and other people (both men and women) are less likely to want to work with them.
I’m offering a pretty simple solution to all of this: Stop telling women to act like men. Stop telling us to be aggressive like men or lead like men or manspread like men. Sure, a blatant patriarchal work culture might no longer be accepted, but the micro-inequities are still there and while they’re subtle, they happen often enough that the bias message is loud and clear.
