Women's Inter-Cultural Exchange

I was pleased to share information from recent Catalyst studies on women in the workplace at the October 26^th, 2011 WIE conference.

One barrier that exists to career advancement for women is stereotyping. We know from our research that gender stereotyping exists among senior managers. Stereotypes create predicaments for women leaders, leading to diminished interpersonal power. Generally, there is a “Think leader, think male” stereotype. Effective leaders are described with stereotypically “masculine” attributes such as an authoritative style and skill in problem solving. Beyond the “think leader, think male” stereotype, there are further stereotypical “double binds” that women face. These “double binds” include Polarized Perceptions, in which women often are, unfairly, viewed as too soft for a leader or too tough for a woman; High Competence Threshold, which hold that women leaders face higher standards than men leaders such that women leaders have to “prove” that they can lead as well as manage stereotypical perceptions; and Competent, but Disliked in which women are perceived as competent or likeable, but rarely both.

I also shared recent research that we have done at Catalyst on Women of Color—African-American, Hispanic, and Asian women in the U.S. In our recent Professional Services series, in which we looked at women of color in the fields of law, accounting, and financial services, we noted that women of color were low on satisfaction with their managers.  For example, they were less likely than white women to perceive managers willing to help them understand organizational politics.

Because the manager is a gate keeper to advancement opportunities, we decided to do a deep dive and study the interactions between women of color and white male managers. We found that as compared with white women, women of color were low on “disclosure” trust, a type of trust that occurs when direct reports communicate sensitive or personal information with a manager. It involves some risk, including, for example, a direct report’s willingness to admit to shortcomings or to share honest feelings and frustrations about work. Acts of disclosure pave the way to finding solutions to work-related issues, and thus can improve quality of work and organizational productivity. Disclosure in a relationship builds over time and is two-way.

We found that more comfortable women of color feel disclosing to their managers, the more likely they are to be satisfied with career advancement and intent to stay with the organization. We also found that over half the white male managers in the study misread diverse women’s assessment of their working relationships. In particular, a white male manager is likely to over-estimate his diverse woman direct report’s level of disclosure trust, much more so than in his relationships with white women direct reports.

Our most important advice to individual women of color is to avoid letting “guardedness” derail development of relationships. Facing double standards and others’ stereotypically low expectations of them in the work environment can lead diverse women to distrust others and to be extremely guarded about showing any vulnerabilities or “chinks in the armor.” As one African-American woman stated in a focus group, “Don’t let them see you sweat…And I don’t sweat.” However, one of the biggest mistakes a diverse woman can make is being overly guarded and withdrawing from attempting to develop relationships, given the importance of such relationships to job satisfaction and career success.

More information on these studies can be found at www.catalyst.org.