In the Office, Nice Girls Finish Last

By Tana Ganeva, AlterNet. Posted December 13, 2008.

This double-standard is not lost on women who perceive, in the behavior of co-workers and supervisors, that being aggressive does not pan out for them in the same way that it does for men.  

In a series of experiments, Harvard psychologist Hannah Bowles (with Linda Babcock and Lei Lai) asked participants to evaluate potential job candidates based on a script that had them either aggressively push for more money or accept the initial salary offer. Not surprisingly, Bowles found that evaluators were more likely to want to hire aggressive men than aggressive women. But her results also showed that women who had previously been evaluators in the experiment were far less likely than men to negotiate when they switched roles, suggesting that their experience in the experiment affected their future behavior.  

"I was frustrated with the implications of, ‘Wow, women need more confidence, women need to negotiate more like men,' " says Bowles. "I think it's pretty clear that part of women's hesitance is reasonable in that they're correctly reading society's perceptions of women who try to negotiate."  

And it’s not only women who suffer in a corporate culture that privileges aggressive self-promotion over talent and hard work. Firms also lose out in myriad ways when skilled, hard-working women don't get ahead. Mary Boughton, senior director of Catalyst Western Region (a nonprofit devoted to expanding opportunities for women in business), points out: "The ability to recruit/advance a diverse workforce is crucial because diversity leads to agility, open-mindedness and a willingness to change and overcome bias."  

One possible advantage of diversity in the workplace, of course, is that if more women held leadership positions, corporate work culture could become more sensitive to the particular problems women face as they attempt to scale the career ladder.  

And that's not only good for women, but for companies, too, since organizations that lack the mechanisms to notice and reward hard work may end up filling their leadership ranks with underqualified individuals (Michael "heck of a  job" Brown, anyone?) After all, is rewarding self-promotion over quality work really the best way to discover and cultivate talent -- male or female? If an employee spends more time bragging about his or her accomplishments than actually accomplishing things, it's easy to see how the company suffers.

"Is pushiness your criteria for excellent worker? Well, maybe in some organizational contexts it is, but for most there's a broader array of talents that you want to be promoting," says Bowles. "You can have someone who really serves the organization and the people that work for them. So, does your system advance people who are 'other-oriented' as well as people who are 'self-oriented?' "

Babcock concludes that the modern workplace is hardly a magical meritocracy where the best workers soar to the highest positions. 

"We really think and want to believe that the workplace is fair, and if you just work hard and do a good job that it will be rewarded. And I wish that were true -- that the world we lived in were like that."

See more stories tagged with: gender, women, workplace, education, sexism, hillary clinton, gender equity, equality, ambition, self-promotion, self-interest, double standards, promotions, career advancement, meritocracy, shannon goodson, linda babcock, peter glick, hannah bowles, lei lai

Tana Ganeva is an editorial assistant at AlterNet.

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