15th April 2021. Women | Nature

Women’s workplace double bind; Meddling with nature

Welcome to Just Two Things, which I try to publish daily, five days a week. Some links may also appear on my blog from time to time. Links to the main articles are in cross-heads as well as the story.

#1: Women’s workplace double bind

It turns out, not to my surprise, that there’s no good way for women to ask for a salary increase, at least according to research blogged about by the Harvard Business School.

Julian Zlatev and his co-researchers, Jennifer Dannals of Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business, and Nir Halevy and Margaret Neale, both of Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business collected data from classroom exercises—2,500 of them, from across the world, and they suggest that women are in a double bind in negotiations. In the research some participants were given alternatives (for example another job offer) which gave them a stronger negotiating position. These women ended up with worse outcomes in their negotiations.

“If you’re not assertive enough, you don’t get your desired outcome, and if you are assertive, you risk getting this backlash,” Zlatev says… [W]omen who felt empowered at the negotiation table were more likely to reach worse deals or no deal at all. The results held regardless of their negotiation partners’ gender (my emphasis).

Before you ask: they think the classroom setting may have weakened this effect, and that it would be stronger in an actual workplace setting.

And it gets worse: the more powerful the woman, the stronger this backlash effect is, “likely based on ingrained stereotypes and subconscious notions about how women “should” act.” The researchers think that this is yet another reason why women are under-represented in senior management, despite the well-known business benefits of having more women in senior roles. This research maybe sheds more light on Pinterest’s recent travails.

So if patriarchy has such powerful embedded effects, what can be done about it? The researchers effectively recommend using rules-based systems to de-personalise the situation:

Companies (should) consider making certain elements of a compensation package non-negotiable… Seemingly lending support to this approach, past studies have found that situational ambiguity in a negotiation exacerbates the gender gap, and that decreasing that ambiguity helps to close it. “By allowing for negotiation, but putting some guardrails on that negotiation,” Zlatev says, “I think that would be one way to try to close the gender gap.

Well, maybe. I’m struck by the deep, visceral level that this whole process works at, and rules might help. But it’s also curious. In a world where all the rhetoric is about networks and horizontal organizations, etc, the rule-based approach is something that Weber would have recognised in his advocacy of the benefits of bureaucracy—some of which were designed to de-personalise the way that organisations behaved.

#2: Meddling with nature

(Cane toad: Image; By Benjamint444 - GFDL 1.2, via Wikipedia)

The 99% Invisible podcast has an interview with the writer Elizabeth Kolbert on her new book, which is about humankind’s history of messing up nature and then fixing it. As we know: what can possibly go wrong.

The story starts with Chicago, which polluted its river hopelessly with human waste and the offcuts from its slaughteryards, then realised it was polluting Lake Michigan, which was its main source of drinking water.

So it reversed the river so all of this pollution flowed into the Mississippi instead—which meant that the Great Lakes were at risk of being invaded by ((the very aggressive) Asian carp. The solution to this, eventually, was to build an electric barrier across the river to prevent the carp reaching the Lakes.

Or, in the 1930s, cane toads were exported to various sugar-cane growing regions to kill off beetles which had been damaging sugar cane growing regions. In Australia, they have become a nationwide pest, to the point where trying to kill them is all but a patriotic duty. One of the problems with cane toads is that they are poisonous, so they kill potential predators as well.

In Australia, scientists are now experimenting with gene-editing as a solution, using CRISPR technology.

As the geographic scale of these problems escalated, presenter Roman Mars finally got to geo-engineering, which might be our next frontier in the fight against climate change. Carbon capture and storage seems relatively unproblematic, if the technology works at scale and the carbon gets fixed in storage.

But some of the other options, up to and including seeding the atmosphere to repel some of the sun’s rays, seem more problematic, especially when it comes both to the governance of the decision and the possible unplanned consequences.

At the same time, there are also benign effects of meddling with nature. It’s too easy just to point to the mistakes. The fact that America has any chestnut trees is down to scientists developing a blight resistant strain. Dogs are the result of thousands of years of breeding. We’ve been messing with plants ever since we invented agriculture. In the US, it is also impossible to avoid GM foodstuffs.

All the same, it’s also possible to think that the stakes are suddenly a bit higher. Both geo-engineering and molecular engineering mean that the costs of mistakes could be a lot higher.

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