Women aren't intrinsically better than men, they're just held to higher standards

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 groups,""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. Socializing boys and girls for these roles is increasingly anachronistic, with 28% of women now out-earning their working husbands and more men staying at home to caregive, but the habits of culture die hard. Girls are taught to be nice, to consider how their actions affect others, to be accommodating and democratic in decision-making, and to avoid direct confrontation, aggression, and being "bossy." Society tolerates a lot more bad behavior from boys, who are even rewarded and admired for being aggressive, acting independently rather than in cooperation with or out of concern for others, and who get respected (at least among peers) for breaking the rules.

As grown ups, men and women carry these habits and expectations into the workplace. Men and women who deviate from gender stereotypical behavior face a variety of negative social sanctions (as some of my own research has documented). The autocratic male boss might be tolerated but the autocratic female boss is not; the unethical man who gets caught might be pitied for having succumbed to his nature and temptation, but the unethical woman is likely to be vilified, hated, and scorned. We are all more likely to notice, and to find intolerable, unethical, incompetent, and unilateral decision-making by women than by men. In short, women are held to higher standards than men are for ethical, social, and leaderly conduct.

It is therefore not surprising that research picks up on such differences between men and women and the downstream consequences of this behavior for the performance of groups or companies that differ in the numbers of men and women running them.

Rather than stopping there and concluding that women alone should run the world, however, let us keep in mind three important facts to help us use this information to make a better world for all:

1. There are far greater within-sex differences than between-sex differences. That is, the range of desirable behavior within women as a group (let's say it ranges from 0 to 10) is much larger than the gap between the average woman and the average man (which, on a scale from 0 to 10, might be .3). If you were selecting 1,000 employees at once and wanted to make sure they were, on average, pretty ethical, and you had just read that women are more ethical than men, then maybe hiring 1,000 women instead of 1,000 men would make sense. Of course, even in this scenario, treating applicants as individuals and using more direct measures of ethicality, such as a score on an ethicality questionnaire, would be much more optimizing. If you were selecting only a handful of employees, or one employee, at a time, however, using sex as a proxy for ethicality would not hold up. At low numbers, population averages cannot be used to predict individual characteristics. Let's say you had eight applicants, four male and four female. Unbeknownst to you, the four women had ethics scores of 3, 5, and 6 and the four men had scores of 4, 5, and 8. In this scenario, you'd end up with a less ethical employee if you used sex as a proxy for ethicality, even if the newspaper had just told you that women were more ethical than men. Again, better to evaluate applicants as individuals and use more direct indicators of ethicality.

2. Men and women behave similarly in strong situations, and more sex-stereotypically in weak ones. This is the social psychologist's way of saying: When the forces on behavior are strong, such as when there are strong incentives for everyone to behave one way or another, then men and women tend to behave the same way. When the forces on behavior are weak, so that how to behave is ambiguous, or the incentive system is unclear or weak, this lack of an explicit code of conduct gets filled in with an implicit code of conduct, such as gendered expectations for behavior, and men and women behave more stereotypically. A company with strong and clear incentives for being ethical will produce similarly and highly ethical men and women. A company with a strong culture of autocratic leadership and bullying subordinates will tend to produce similarly autocratic men and women leaders who are bullies; a company with a weak culture and a variety of leadership styles will tend to produce leaders with more sex-stereotypical styles of leadership; and a company with a strong culture of democratic and participatory leadership will tend to produce similarly democratic and participatory men and women leaders.

3. Raising the standards for men to those women are currently held to will encourage men to display similarly desirable behaviors. I'd personally vote for raising the standards for men to women's rather than lowering the standards for women to men's, but in either case, making these standards similar will also make men's and women's behavior more similar. As social and economic forces move us away from siphoning women into caregiving roles and men into breadwinning ones, and the amount of caregiving and breadwinning an individual does depends less and less on their biological sex, the socialization of boys and girls can be expected to become more similar. Why not start now? Why wait for the slow delay of cultural evolution to take place? If we actively intervene in our sex-stereotypical habits and expectations, and start to hold males and females to similarly high standards of social and ethical conduct, as well as ambition and assertiveness, we'll become an active part of a societal lean in for a better world.

I'm all for increasing the number of women in leadership. An ideal world would be one in which individuals end up doing what calls them and what they're good at; one in which we do not socialize these callings and encourage these abilities based on sex. Only then will we live in a truly meritocratic and free system. Pointing out the qualities that women currently tend to bring, on average, to the table, is likely to help the cause of increasing their numbers at the table. Essentializing these qualities, however, will unwittingly contribute to keeping men and women in separate, and unequal, spheres.