Workshop details
Aims
The aim of this workshop is to identify the obstacles to the achievement of gender balance of office holders and candidates. and brainstorm ways of overcoming those obstacles. It is not to suggest there is any simple quick fix that will instantly solve this problem.
This workshop is not primarily about other targets of discrimination, but many of the factors that will be discussed apply to these as well.
Many people get defensive when issues of discrimination get raised. They think they are being accused of discriminating against women or indigenous people.
In this workshop I will be helping you understand the more subtle forms of discrimination against women that are both harder to see and harder to do something about than active and deliberate forms of discrimination.
Obstacles
Social norms
Despite changes to social norms towards more equality between men and women in the last 30 years there are still many norms, internalized by both men and women, that create obstacles to women’s participation in politics.
The most obvious of these is the fact that women still generally have the major responsibility for children and often carry a larger burden in terms of other household responsibilities. (Responsibility for aging parents may be as much of an issue as responsibility for children.)
Some of that differential responsibility is unavoidable – men can help when women are pregnant, but it is women who carry the physical burden of pregnancy and lactation. Breast feeding not only means the mother has to be available when the baby is hungry, it also means that as the source of food the mother also becomes a greater source of reassurance to the baby when it is distressed.
It is because of basic physiological differences such as these that the liberal feminist solution of treating everyone the same is not enough for achieving equity.
We will be looking at other more subtle forms of normative discrimination in more detail in this workshop.
Organisational structures
Structural discrimination results when rules or principles for selection of candidates or office bearers look fair but create unanticipated obstacles to some categories of people.
The Labor Party provides a really clear example of the workings of structural discrimination. In the past the Labor Party has drawn most of its candidates from the union movement. Because the union movement is heavily male dominated the majority of people who could be considered for positions were also male.
A less obvious example comes from a policy being considered when I was the convenor of the NTEU team on enterprise bargaining at USQ. The policy concerned entitlements to academic development leave (ADL). Before staff were entitled to ADL they had to meet a service requirement. The university recognized continuous service at other universities or at USQ in other positions as meeting that service requirement. I argued that this discriminated against women because they were much more likely to have had interruptions to their employment history because of taking breaks for having children.
The same argument applied in reverse when considering productivity for promotion purposes. I argued that periods where women had been on leave for family purposes should not be included. Senior men are also inclined to write off the research capacity or potential of staff who do not produce research outcomes within a few years of appointment. I argued that women (and less often men) who had met their teaching obligations but done little research due to family obligations should be given the opportunity to demonstrate research potential once those obligations have passed.
We need to examine our selection practices to see whether we have inadvertently adopted rules or principles that create greater opportunities for some groups rather than others.
Conversational style
Conversational norms provide rules for turn taking. Hierarchical norms of turn taking (the boss, or father decides who gets to speak) disadvantages those groups such as women who are not well represented in senior positions.
Non-hierarchical norms that are non-discriminatory when everyone uses the same norm can result in discrimination when different groups of people participating in a meeting operate on the basis of different norms for turn taking.
Research has found differences between (anglo) women and men in their conversational styles that work fairly in single sex groups but disadvantage women in mixed sex group.
The normative rule in all male groups seems to be that whichever man is speaking continues doing so until he is interrupted.
The normative rule in all female groups seems to be that the woman talking stops and leaves a space of silence to create an opportunity for other women to have a say without having to interrupt.
While these are generalizations, the operational rule for individuals in same sex groups seems to be:
a man has to talk over the top of whoever is speaking to get a turn
a woman waits till no one is talking to take a turn.
Just as scissors wins against paper, male norm wins against female norm.
I realised the impact of this on mixed sex groups when I first read about it 20 years ago and told my then partner about it. A situation he described illustrates how gendered following of different rules produces unintended outcomes.
He described a situation at a party where he had been talking to a woman and getting more and more desperate and keeping talking despite having run out of things to say while wishing she would interrupt him so he could stop talking crap and she could take a turn. I could just imagine the woman standing there, rolling her eyes more or less obviously and wishing this bozo would shut up so she could take a turn.
Unless men start waiting and leaving silences in conversations so women can have a turn women have to force themselves to interrupt, no matter how uncomfortable it makes them feel, in order to participate in mixed sex politics.
This is made even harder for women to do when, as seems to happen more often to women than to men, women who interrupt are told they are speaking out of turn. I can see two possible explanations for this:
women are not supposed to speak or have a turn in mixed sex groups so that whatever they do they will be speaking out of turn (if they wait for a break they won’t get a turn)
there are further subtleties to the male interruption norm that men get taught and women don’t, so that men interrupt when it is appropriate and women are more likely than men to interrupt when it is not.
While people like Dale Spender argue that the norm for women is silence, I don’t think that is the whole story, and that the second explanation is also operating.
It is also true that the male norm favours dominance, and that men are having a metaphorical battle over who gets to speak to establish who is dominant.
Other cultures have different norms about conversational turn taking. We need to identify other norms and check our processes to see if our meeting norms are inadvertently favouring the dominant white anglo culture over other groups.
2:1 rule
Research in schools showed that boys got more attention and more opportunity to speak. While she was teaching Dale Spender tried to remove this imbalance. She describes the point she reached when she thought she was giving the girls too much time, and the boys were starting to complain that they thought she was giving the girls too much time too.
In order to provide some objective measure of what she had achieved, Dale taped her classes. What she found was that when she felt like she was favouring girls, and when the boys started to complain, she was only giving the girls 30% of her time.
The importance of this story is twofold:
it shows how our socialisation filters our perceptions, so that we literally can’t see discrimination even when objective measurement shows it is there. Dale is a feminist but her perception deceived her. We need to measure outcomes, not just rely on subjective assessment of fairness.
It establishes what I am calling the 2:1 rule
a) If women get more than 1/3 of the time to speak it is seen as too much
b) If more than 1/3 of the content is about women it is seen as too much
c) If women hold more than 1/3 of positions (unless it is for ‘women’s work’) it is too much
Consider the current proportion of female representation in all aspects of the organisation:
Does it conform to the 2:1 rule?
What is the proportion of male to female in this workshop (if it is seen as ‘women’s business’ then the proportions will be reversed or worse).
Unless we do better than 30% representation for women we are simply following this rule.
The 2:1 rule combined with the ‘wait for a gap’ rule give women less ‘air time’ in meetings and forums. This gives women fewer public opportunities to demonstrate their competence.
Selection on ‘merit’ depends on public recognition of capacity and competence. Unless we go out of our way to provide women with these opportunities, and actively work to counteract the impact of these norms, men will be favoured by selection on ‘merit’.
Confidence
Research has shown that men systematically overestimate their capacities and that women systematically underestimate theirs.
On average, men also seem to underestimate risks, and women to be more risk averse.
These differences are a major factor in the greater incidence of car and other accidents and deaths to young men as opposed to young women. Young men think they are better drivers (or whatever) than they are, and underestimate the risks of an accident.
It also means men put themselves forward for positions because they think they are better qualified or more capable than they are (and they are more confident of winning), while women hold back because they are less likely to think they can do the job and less confident of winning.
If we continue to rely on volunteers we will continue to have a deficit of women in positions of responsibility and status.
We need to seek out, train, and talk competent women into standing for positions.
Given women’s other responsibilities we may need to offer women more support than we have been doing (on average women get paid less than men and are less likely to be able to afford to carry the financial cost associated with many of our office holder positions themselves.)
Evaluation
Research shows that not only do men overestimate their own performance, and women underestimate theirs, but that both men and women when evaluating an identical piece of work when attributed to a man judge it better than when it is attributed to a woman.
We need objective and transparent criteria for judging performance as people’s subjective judgements are skewed.
These biases also operate within our personal interactions. Divergent normative expectations about appropriate male and female behaviour result in our interpreting the a performance from a man as desirably ‘assertive’ while the same sort of performance from a woman is more likely to be interpreted as undesirably ‘aggressive’.
If women don’t speak up they are not noticed, but if they do they face disapproval. In neither case are they seen as suitable for positions.
We also need to be careful that any ‘objective’ criteria we adopt do not result in hidden systemic or structural bias.
Feedback
A professional netball coach discovered that he had to change his training style when he moved from coaching a men’s netball team to coaching a women’s netball team.
When men did badly he harangued them and told them how badly they were doing and that they needed to work harder and lift their game. He found the criticism motivated men and provided a needed reality check to compensate for male overconfidence.
The same coaching technique applied to his women’s team resulted in demoralisation and despair. It was not motivational. He discovered that women needed to be encouraged and reassured that they were good enough. The women were already only too well aware of their faults and failings and needed to be told what they had done well to have the motivation to continue.
Treating men and women the same does not improve representation of women. If we are to get more talented women involved we need to do things differently. Women need to be persuaded to stand. It won’t work if we just stand back and wait for them to come forward. Fair selection processes aren’t enough.
In the workshop, participants are given opportunities to relate these points to their own experience and observations. The participants should brainstorm for strategies to try to address some of these obstacles.
Participant activity
In order to have workshop participants have both intellectual and emotional understanding of the impact of these factors (ie I want you to understand what it feels like) I adopt a practice that feminists in the 70s used, but that has mostly fallen by the wayside since.
I give every woman present two tokens while every man gets one. Participants are told that each time they speak they will need to deposit a token. When they have run out they can’t talk until everyone has used their tokens. This reverses the 2:1 rule for women’s speaking time.
Outcomes of the workshop
Some men report getting angry and frustrated at not being able to participate when they want to. The emotions participants experience help them understand the point of the workshop and the experience of women.
Testimonial
Mr Dierk von Behrens, Retired (education officer SA Museum, Lecturer on Australia in Germany, Research Officer Committee on Overseas Professional Qualifications for Aust Govt NY, Exec Officer Aust Population & Immigration Council), who has taught affirmative action workshops himself, described my affirmative action workshop as ‘one of the most effective workshops I had ever attended’.