Gender issues

The following are transcript notes from my testimony on April 16, 2013 . Hello, I'm Jennifer Berdahl. I've been a professor at the Rotman School of Management since 2001. I have been studying sexual harassment for over 20 years. I have several research papers on the topic, I have developed a theoretical framework for understanding it, and I have two review chapters in major volumes on organizational behaviour and industrial organizational psychology.  My training is in social, organizational, industrial psychology from the University of Illinois, where I received my PhD. I have served as an expert witness on sexual harassment cases... I began studying sexual harassment in the early 1990s when it was still conceived largely as a problem of unwanted sexual behaviour and predation of men upon women in the workplace, and at the time this was on the heels of the Clarence Thomas Senate hearings and the Anita Hill controversy , when sexual harassment was largely conceived in this

The rush to claim women's superiority over men in the wake of the Sandberg Lean In movement is predictable, but alarming. In the past few days, headlines such as " Women make better corporate leaders than men ," " More women equal smarter grou ps ,"" Women may avoid business careers to maintain ethical integrity ," and articles heralding the superior performance of companies with more women on their boards  leave the reader to conclude that women are smarter, more socially intelligent, more ethical, and better leaders than men. When a reader is left without contextual explanations for these differences (or informed of the sizeable variation within each sex ), the most expedient conclusion the reader can make is to  essentialize these differences between women and men. Decades of research have documented how girls and boys are differently socialized to prepare them for the traditional gender roles of caregiver and breadwinner, respectively. Socializin

Another article  came out today highlighting Canada's lag in innovation. Canada received a "D" in innovation and ranked 13th out of 16 peer countries. Its neighbor to the south received an "A" and ranked 3rd. As an American ex-pat  who moved to Canada in my thirties, it's not a mystery to me why Canada lags behind in innovation. I can understand why it's a puzzle to outsiders and to Canadians who haven't spent years living in the U.S. They may ponder why a wealthy country with a relatively healthy and stable economy, abundant natural resources, affordable and good education, and the benefits of living next to a world economic power isn't more innovative. I would tell them: It's the culture . When we first moved to Canada from California in 2001, my husband (also an American) and I assumed it was going to be much like the U.S., only better, with fewer guns and universal healthcare. It didn't take long to notice just how big a cultural gap

Combined Faculty Counts at Top 5 Business Schools After attending a recent  conference at Harvard Business School and noting that most of the speakers were  blonde women , I decided to count business school faculty by sex and race to see what these distributions actually are.* Business Schools regularly track their faculty by sex, as required for rankings such as the Financial Times . But they may not track their faculty by race, and are especially unlikely to track their faculty by sex and race combined. The figure above shows the combined counts of Business Week's 2012 Top Five Business Schools : Chicago , Harvard , Wharton , Stanford , and Northwestern . Of over 1,200 faculty across these schools, a full 85 percent are white, and most of these white faculty (83%) are men. White men make up over 70% of business school faculty as a whole. White women constitute only 14% of business school faculty, non-white men make up 11%, and fewer than 4% of business school faculty are non-whi