It’s “Just” Not That Simple: Understanding Gendered Workplace Behavior
Last week Google and Apple alum Ellen Petry Leanse published a post explaining that women are damaging their own credibility by overusing the permission-seeking word “just.” Because Leanse’s post was admittedly anecdotal and not based on research, and given the linguistic nuances of the word “just,” which is very often not permission-seeking (as pointed out yesterday by Kieran Snyder, linguist and CEO of text analytics company Textio), it’s important not to exaggerate the implications of Leanse’s observation.
Still, her post reflects an interesting dynamic in the narratives we so often construct around patterns in women’s behavior. When we talk about gendered behaviors that undermine women’s careers, we often assume that these behaviors are the problem in and of themselves, rather than understanding them as symptoms of a much larger, deeper, and more complex problem. As a result, we offer solutions — negotiate more, stop apologizing so much, don’t say “just” — that at best are overly simplistic, and at worst can be counterproductive.
Patterns in the way men and women speak result from social cues we’ve been given over the course of our lives about how we should behave. From a young age, women are socialized not to promote our own interests, and to serve the needs of others. As we get enter the workplace, these expectations are very often perpetuated. For example, in a 2005 study researchers looked at the impact on men’s and women’s performance reviews when they engaged in altruistic workplace behavior to help a colleague (“helping behavior”). What they found is that when men engaged in helping behavior, they were rewarded for that behavior in their performance reviews. When women enaged in the same helping behavior, it didn’t affect their performance reviews at all. On the other hand, when women refused to help a colleague, their performance reviews suffered. When men refused, their reviews were unaffected. This study demonstrates that our gendered expectations about how people should behave lead us to hold the very same behavior to different standards, depending on whether it’s coming from a man or a woman.
If we were in a workplace where we observed women engaging in helping behavior far more than men, even to the detriment of their own careers, it might seem like the obvious solution would be to tell the women to stop being so altruistic, and to focus more on their own work. But if we thought about the root cause of the pattern, we would realize that the solution is not quite so simple. If women stop engaging in helping behavior, they may face a backlash and suffer other adverse career consequences as a result. A more effective intervention, then, would be to establish norms and structure around helping behavior to ensure that everyone participates, and to train managers on the unconscious biases that may lead them to expect different behavior and hold different standards for men and women.
A similar example is the much-discussed pattern of women not negotiating for their salary. The simple solution, and one many people rely on, is to tell women to negotiate. But the advice that women should simply ask for a raise ignores the reasons women aren’t doing that already. In a 2007 study, researchers found that men and women are less likely to want to hire and work with women who asked for raises. That is, when women ask for raises, they face a social cost that men don’t experience. This research suggests that when women don’t negotiate, it’s not because we don’t know how. It’s because we’re carefully navigating, even if subconsciously, the potential backlash we might face if we do. One potential solution? Make the world negotiable. That is, train managers on these dynamics and give them tools and support for ensuring equity. (Reddit recently tried a much more creative solution to this problem — eliminate all negotiation so everyone is on the same footing.)
If women do overuse the word “just,” and that’s still an “if”, we likely do so because we’ve been exposed to gendered expectations about our behavior and shown that there are negative consequences for not acting in line with these expectations. In telling women to simply behave differently, we ignore, and allow ourselves to avoid addressing, the underlying causes of these behaviors. Instead of simply telling women all the things we should be doing differently, let’s also work to change the biases and systems that lead us to adopt these patterns in the first place.
