We Women DO Compete!

Well, there is never a dull moment in gender research! Just a few weeks ago I was telling you about some research on men, women and competition and here’s some more which may well support or contradict that – depends on your viewpoint.

Harvard Gender Research

Research from 3 Harvard professors seems to indicate that it’s not so much that women aren’t competitive but that we don’t like competing against men.

In their forthcoming paper, The Untold Story of Gender and Incentives, Harvard Professors Kathleen L. McGinn and Iris Bohnet, along with HBS doctoral student Pinar Fletcher, examine how men and women respond when they cooperate or compete in pairs on maths and verbal tasks.

Women DO Compete

“Women are competitive, but not in particular work environments or groups,” says McGinn, the Cahners-Rabb Professor and chair of the Doctoral Programs at Harvard Business School.

She and Bohnet, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School who serves as director of its Women and Public Policy Programme, have studied gender gaps and inequality in the workplace. Their research addresses questions about why women are paid less, have trouble being promoted in certain work environments, and hold a tiny percentage of top corporate management positions.

They teamed with Fletcher, to answer questions on gender, competition, and cooperation that have not been addressed in previous research: Do men and women react differently to diverse sorts of pay schemes? Do gender stereotypes about a task influence competitive and cooperative behaviour among men and women? How does the gender composition of groups affect competition and cooperation among individuals?

Their Experiments

Fletcher and McGinn conducted experiments with 236 men and women in April and May of 2011, using cooperative and competitive scenarios in which participants performed both a verbal and a math test at Harvard Business School’s Computer Lab for Experimental Research.

Each participant was given a pseudonym, with women receiving obviously female aliases (like Jennifer) and men obviously male names (like John). Then participants were paired with another participant—male against male, male against female, and female against female. Participants never knew the actual identities of their opponents, but they were given the pseudonym assigned to their opponent.

Competition between the participants was induced through a “winner-takes-all” payment scheme: only the participant with the higher score would receive a payment for each correct answer.

Cooperation was induced with a different payment scheme: the researchers would add up the number of correct answers each pair produced and split the payment equally between the two participants.

Interestingly, the researchers didn’t find a significant difference in performance between the cooperative and the competitive payment schemes for either men or women. “This is in contrast to previous studies,” says Fletcher. Prior research had found that men exerted extra effort and performed better than women when they were in a competitive situation, whereas women exerted similar amounts of effort whether or not they were competing.

“There’s a strongly held assumption that men are competitive and women aren’t, and our results show otherwise.”
Fletcher says that homophily—our tendency to associate and form relationships with those who are similar to us—might lead individuals to feel more comfortable and perform better on same-gender teams, whether cooperative or competitive.

Does Money Make a Difference?

Why the different results? Perhaps it came down to money. In previous studies participants were offered a higher pay rate per correct answer in the competitive scenario, so it’s possible that men respond more to higher pay rates than do women. Societal pressures might also hold women back from responding to higher pay as aggressively as men.

McGinn says their results suggest that gender effects around competition are contextual and that the results depend on the sorts of tasks men and women are asked to complete and the gender of those with whom they are interacting.

“There’s a strongly held assumption that men are competitive and women aren’t, and our results show otherwise,” she says. “Men and women work together differently when they’re dependent [on each other] versus independent and when they work on stereotypically male or female tasks.”

The researchers are undertaking further work. However, says McGinn, the preliminary research already tells the team something quite significant: “Organizations need to think about the ‘genderness’ of their tasks and the composition of their groups.”

Many thanks to Womaneer for bringing this piece of research to my attention, and to Kim Girard of the Harvard Business School newsletter.

When Did You Last Put a Toe in the Water?

No, I don’t mean a trip to your local swimming pool, or quick paddle on the beach!

I mean, when did you last try something new? When did you last challenge yourself and get your feet wet?

Are you playing too safe?

When did you last do something that really made the hairs on your neck stand up?  When did you last take a risk, push yourself a bit further than you really feel comfortable with?

It’s only by pushing ourselves from time to time that we develop and grow and learn. Next time an opportunity comes up if you feel yourself instinctively saying “no”, experiment and say YES!

You might find you quite like getting your feet wet again!

You Are Wonderful!

Repeat after me, out loud “I am wonderful!”

No, not me, you. You are truly amazing.

I work with women most of my working life. And I can bear out the research and statistics about women – women undersell themselves. It’s rare for me to begin work with a woman who truly knows her value.

Men over play, women under play

Research after research shows that generally women hold back at interview or in games, competitions etc from blowing their own trumpets. Men do the reverse. Good for the men I say but it does mean that skills gaps between men and women can become totally skewed. Men can look disproportionately ‘better’ than women.

And it also means that if we continually undersell ourselves we will begin to lose confidence in ourselves and a vicious circle ensues.

A Wonderful Exercise!

So do this exercise now. List a minimum of 30, yes THIRTY, really positive things about yourself.  They can be qualifications if you like, but think broadly across all spectra of wonderfulness.

Like personality traits, for example. Are you a good friend? Explore that a bit further. Why are you a good friend? What do you do that makes you a good friend? Are you loyal? A good listener perhaps? From that one trait you may extract 3 or more positive things about yourself.

Don’t take too long. Just get them down.

Now look down your list. You have these qualities. You may not be conscious of them across all areas of your life, you may not even have developed them as much as you wish, but you have them. You have masses of qualities and positive traits to develop and work with and be wonderful with. You can transfer those qualities across your life so your resilience in dealing with a personal issues can help you cope with a change at work.

Don’t undersell yourself and don’t underestimate the confidence boost you can get by focussing your energy on your positive qualities. Remember, you are wonderful.

Photo Credit: Katagaci

Advice? It’s a Gift!

We all get offered unasked for advice from time to time. Does your heart sink as you hear the fateful words “If I were you I’d …?

Yes, mine does too.

But not all advice is useless even when unwanted. The trouble is if we haven’t asked for it we tend to automatically stop listening to it and thereby possible missing an absolute gem!

So here’s a tip. The next time someone proffers you some advice, think of it as a gift from your favourite Auntie.

In your mind’s eye see them giving you an unexpected gift. Stop, smile and listen. Once unwrapped it may be something so tasteless that you’ll be offering it to the nearest charity shop as soon as you possibly can. But they have given you a gift and as you’re a polite woman you’ll say thanks so very much and not hurt their feelings by dashing it to the ground.

You may not want to give it pride of place on your mantle piece but it might make it to the spare bedroom. And one day, as things change, maybe it will just look good in a more prominent place! You’ll never know if you don’t unwrap it!

What’s the best piece of advice anyone has ever given you?

Photo Credit: Marija Jura

Are You The Boss You’d Like?

Well, are you?

If you were your own boss (and maybe you are, as I am) would people be queuing up to get in your team based on how you treat yourself?

Try honestly answering the following questions:

Do you treat yourself well? By which I mean do you look after yourself when working?

Do you take regular breaks? Grab some fresh air at least once a day?

Do you have a proper lunch break away from your desk/workplace at least three times a week?

Do you regularly praise yourself for a job well done?

Do you celebrate your successes?

Do you invest in yourself, take advantage of training on offer?

I hope you can answer yes to a good few of those. if not, time to give yourself an appraisal! Got to dash. the sun is shining and I’m going into the garden for 15 minutes!

Please share your ‘look after yourself’ tips!

Photo Credit: Arte Ram

More Women Please!

I’m listening to a debate on the radio (BBC Woman’s Hour) and one of our female MPs has just said we need both women and men in government and we need positive discrimination to achieve it.

The debate has gone on in the usual way with opponents saying positive discriminating for one sector means discriminating against another and it means they would just be token women in posts.  The best person should get the job.

The Best Person for the Job is Male?

Of course, the best person should get the job. But my counter argument would be that women have not had a say in determining what is ‘the best person’ and by and large standards that are applied are those which suit males better than women. And until women are given an equal chance that will not change.

The evidence is that when BOTH women and men are involved on an equal footing the bottom line goes up (see Why Women Mean Business). It’s not about being anti men, or pro women. It’s about having a society which values all its members and values what they bring to the party! And because the rules were only set by one half of the population we haven’t yet achieved that. If the situations had been reversed and women ruled the world I’m sure we would have ended up with a similar issue.

And we’ve changed attitudes in the past by changing the rules. Let’s face it, if we hadn’t  we still wouldn’t have universal suffrage and B&B establishments would still be allowed to have signs up saying ‘No Irish and No Blacks’, which they did in my lifetime.

Truly.

Also in my lifetime women could lose their jobs by marrying, didn’t get maternity leave, were marked differently at 11 plus because girls passed more often than boys so they had a higher pass mark to achieve, had to pay tax according to their husband’s income and couldn’t sign financial agreements on their own.

Legislation changed that.

By the way, I’m not 300 years old. I’m 55.

Photo Credit: Annika Banfield