CAS SO 100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 30: Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Implicit-Association Test, Gary Becker
27 Apr 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
SO100
Apr. 11th, 2018
Gender Stratification: The Workplace
- Why do men and women work in different fields?
- Why are there so few women at the top in business, science, politics, etc.?
occupational segregation:
- The sorting of people on the basis of some trait (e.g. gender) across and within jobs.
How to explain Occupational Segregation?
1. Ability (some version of biology)
o “the under-representation of women in tenured positions in science and
engineering at top universities and research institutions could be due to a
‘different availability of aptitude at the high end’…and less to patterns of
discrimination and socialization” -Larry Summers, 2005, Conference of
Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce
2. Preferences (economics)
o “Men and women have different a priori preferences for, respectively, high status
and competitive jobs, and flexible family-friendly jobs.” - Gary Becker, 1981
o Unequal constraints: women are expected to follow family responsibilities
o Culture: gender norms influence choices for jobs
o Cultural expectations shape our choices
3. Bias (psychology and sociology)
o The evidence for gender bias in evaluations of competence:
▪ Lab based social cognition experiments
• Ex. Implicit Association Test
▪ Discourses of evaluation and gendered language in assessment
▪ Experiments
• Ex. Resume Audit experiments
• Ex. Blind ratings experiments
o Students are biased in online course evaluations students
rated men significantly higher than women, regardless af
the instructor’s actual gender.
o Professors are biased in their emails to students white
males get a higher rate of response
o Blind orchestra auditions women are underrepresented
in orchestras; blind auditions (with a screen) increased the
probability that a woman would advance from preliminary
rounds by 50 percent.
o Cultural expectations filter how we see ourselves, each other, and our jobs as
appropriate or not
o Expectations of competence are at the core of our unequal status relations
▪ We enter most social context expecting that others believe that men are
generally more competent than women
4. Social Structures (sociology)
o Social structures that benefit men and inhibit women without directly meaning to
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