There are some things you think you know, but never dare to say. Until a very clever scientist says it for you.
First, there was the idea that the Large Hadron Collider experiment might not go off with an instant bang. And now news has emerged this week from the laboratories of the University of Florida that men who have sexist attitudes get paid more.
Every time you think the world has moved forward, it is information such as this that makes you lie down in the fetal position, clutch your favorite Kelly Clarkson CD and sob a little.
The scientists running this experiment, Timothy Judge and Beth Livingston, believe they accounted for every possible skewing variable before they reached this manically depressing conclusion.
Their study lasted 26 years and embroiled 12,686 guinea pigs--some of whom appeared to be sexist (guinea) pigs. Well-off, sexist (guinea) pigs.
On average, men who favor traditional gender roles make $8,500 a year than those with more gender-balanced views.
Female readers should clutch their mallets very gingerly when they hear that the situation is reversed for them, but with very different proportions. As Bernie Ecclestone, the head of Formula One racing, once said: "I've got one of these wonderful ideas that women should all be dressed in white like all the other domestic appliances." With that in mind...the researchers found that women who don't believe in traditional roles earn only an average $1,500 a year more than their white-dressing counterparts.
When women and men are working in an egalitarian environment, the researchers found, there appears to be little difference between their salaries. But in organizations with more traditional attitudes, the pay discrepancy between men and women might remind some of The Shining.
"These results cannot be explained by the fact that, in traditional couples, women are less likely to work outside the home," Judge said in a statement. "Though this plays some role in our findings, our results suggest that even if you control for time worked and labor force participation, traditional women are paid less than traditional men for comparable work."
The researchers are keen to see if this is merely a Mammonist American phenomenon. They cite European research that suggests the most traditional female workforce can be found in the same place as some of the world's finest beer, the Czech Republic. While a country with beer of a lesser reputation, Norway, appears to have found a way to create something of a financial balance between the sexes.
However, the researchers' final conclusion is an interesting and, for some, no doubt, a wishful and wistful one.
"Our results have a certain normative assumption," they write, "that earning money is a social 'good'. (....) it is important to recognize that in industrialized nations such as the United States, the correlation between income and happiness is relatively modest."
This skirts with dangerous proximity to a suggestion that women (and gender-enlightened men) shouldn't worry, as money isn't everything. Indeed it isn't. But does it have to be said, or even thought, that if a woman is doing the same job as a man she should be paid the same number of dollars?
There are indications that, when it comes to the tech world, women with a traditional view of gender relations might have a greater chance of "success."
The Harvard Business Review concluded that women get sick of tech companies not necessarily because of some clear imbalance in pay, but because of the delightfully-termed "antigens." These antigens seem to contribute greatly to the fact that 52 percent of women drop completely out of the science, engineering, and technology business in their 30s.
"We found that 63 percent of women in science, engineering and technology have experienced sexual harassment. That's a really high figure. They talk about demeaning and condescending attitudes, lots of off-color jokes, sexual innuendo, arrogance; colleagues, particularly in the tech culture, who genuinely think women don't have what it takes--who see them as genetically inferior," said the researchers.
One wonders what the very largely male bunch of tech CEOs is doing about this parlous situation. Because if one looks at the whole picture painted by the Harvard and Florida research, some troubling questions arise.
Should one conclude that if you're a woman you're more likely to survive (and, perhaps, even "thrive") in a tech company if you can deal with being treated in a sexist manner? And do we also conclude that those women who tolerate sexist behavior do so because it actually corresponds with their world view in some way, even though they might be paid significantly less than male counterparts?
Or do we need some more research? Which tech CEO will sponsor it?
I am philosophical today. Would you take a slow walk with me and listen to a story that may not have an ending?
I was in my favorite sushi restaurant the other night when Dan, a man in a Tommy Bahama shirt, leaned over to me and, through thickly alcoholic breath, said: "There are more banks going down. Mark my words."
Normally, a Tommy Bahama shirt signifies "my brain is dead and my eyes have turned to disco balls." However, Dan is, I know, a retired accountant. The very finest, wiliest, (relatively) honest kind.
With his words still nuzzling my ears, I got home and picked up a book I was reading called Ahead of the Curve. I reached a chapter in which the author was interviewing at Google.
(Credit:
CC Esparta)
The author, Philip Delves Broughton, is a former New York and Paris bureau chief of the highly conservative Daily Telegraph newspaper, who suddenly decided to enter the Harvard MBA program because he felt he needed to learn about the realities of business.
One of the the realities, for him, was that Google, which originally was interested in employing him in the marketing department for its Book Search, ended up interviewing him 14 times.
In the end, Broughton was interviewed by people at Google's New York office who made it clear that the company was now wondering whether he could do hard-core sales.
After this interview, Broughton knew that his corporate daze was complete: "I decided I was going to quit before I was pushed (...) They told me they were sorry and that I could always come back. But I wanted the company expunged from my life. I wanted to scrub away the mask I had worn for them all these months. I uninstalled all the Google features on my computer and made Yahoo my default search engine."
Perhaps Broughton was just unsuited for the unsuited, but corporate, life at Google.
However, if you wander along to his conclusions about the direction of corporate life in general, you too might pause to put a word into the search box on your browser. The word might be "soul."
"HBS does not need to promise to 'educate leaders who make a difference in the world,'" writes Broughton. "It suggests that business, with its priorities and decision-making approach, has a right to impose its will on the world. But business needs to relearn its limits, and if the Harvard Business School let some air out of its own balloon, business would listen."
Broughton has a solution as simple as your IT guy has when your computer crashes and you have no idea how to fix it: "HBS need only promise to educate students in the processes and management of business. It would be a noble and accommodating goal and would dilute the perception of the school and its graduates as a megalomaniacal, self-sustaining elite."
Could anyone in the tech world be accused of wanting to create a "megalomaniacal, self-sustaining elite"? I will keep my subjective objectivity to myself on that question. But Broughton's strangely sobering book ends with the story of HBS's perhaps most famous student.
No, not Jeffrey Skilling of Enron. A chap called Robert McNamara.
McNamara was the U.S. Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War. According to the journalist David Halberstam, McNamara had no trust for anyone "who did not speak his language of statistics and hard data."
Naturally, South Vietnamese officers would think of a number between 30 and 4,000 and declare it hard data--a small subterfuge that led McNamara to disbelieve anything real people such as his own country's soldiers told him when they returned from the battlefields. And, well, if you've watched the documentary The Fog Of War, things didn't really end all that well.
Perhaps Dan, Ahead of the Curve, and the discomforting Wall Street events of this week have made me wonder more than usual if there really is safety in numbers, even binary ones.
Oh, what am I worried about?
Harvard Business School bears no comparison to the tech world. No one goes into the tech business just to worship the numbers and make money without any thought as to what kind of world they're ushering in, do they?
Let's ignore Broughton's slightly portentous final question about his alma mater: "Has society allotted too much authority to a single, narcissistic class of spreadsheet makers and PowerPoint presenters?"
Thank you for walking with me. Do you fancy some sushi? Dan might be here again tonight. He might have other shirts.
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