Naomi Ellemers: Reluctant Allies - Why Minority Success Maintains Bias and How Organizations Can Interrupt This

The following are my notes from Naomi Ellemers' presentation today in the Bias Interrupters Working Group at the University of California Santa Barbara California. It was exciting to meet her in person after admiring and using her work on social identity for years.

Benefits of Diversity

The benefits of diversity are now well documented. For example, Peterson Institute and Ernst & Young studied 21,980 publicly traded companies in 91 countries and found the presence of women in corporate leadership increases profitability of a company. Richard Freeman and Wei Huang found that more ethnically diverse research teams of scientists attracted more citations to their publications. Londa Schiebinger at Stanford, a historian of science, looks at "gendered innovations" and finds that disciplines where women enter see that the questions women ask are different, the methodologies they use are different, the discipline starts seeing more innovative questions, methods, and discoveries.

In short, research shows that diversity improves innovation, creativity, impact, and performance.

Being Different is Difficult

Being different leads to increased scrutiny. Angela Merkel was shown in European newspapers to always wear the same outfit, just different colors. There was a whole page about her outfits and what she was wearing, without anything about her policies or actions as a leader. There is an overemphasis on women's looks (e.g., Hillary Clinton and others).

The everyday sexism project collects people's experiences of everyday sexism, and many examples are provided on the webpage about women's experiences at work and comments about their careers. Apple and Facebook offered to pay the expenses for freezing women's eggs so they could focus on their careers and get promoted before having children. LeanIn.org and McKinsey & Co found that the career satisfaction of women and men was similar until they reached senior levels, where women's satisfaction declined and men's increased.

Striving for Success in Outgroup Settings

How diversity "works": Work team diversity --> demographic diversity (gender, race, age) --> functional differences (approach, expertise, priorities) --> enhanced team performance.

...but when minority (ingroup) members are expected to adapt to the majority (outgroup) members' ways of doing things, and people are expected to work in the same way, you don't reap the benefits of diversity. The benefits of diversity are from functional differences.

Socialization pressures --> adapt to majority or leave organization --> lose the benefits of diversity.

If minority (ingroup) members want to be successful they must adapt to majority (outgroup) norms. Yet by doing so they get negative feedback from other ingroup members who think they're betraying their heritage and the ingroup. Not only do they lose support from their own ingroup, they don't have the secure support of the outgroup. This leaves them very vulnerable. It also leads to a focus on self, not their group, to have to show that they’re different from the rest of their group, that the stereotype of their group doesn’t apply to them.

The strategy: To push yourself up by pushing your group down. This is a robust phenomenon -- this is not due to the individuals but to the situations they are in. So...what’s the added value of diversity? “Some of [the women] resembled in their behavior and qualities very much the men who already there, including their shortcomings.”

Inequality Remains

When one's own outcomes are positive, then the current procedures seem more legitimate and group disadvantage is not acknowledged. When discrimination seems incidental, protest is considered inappropriate, and those who object are disliked – “it's only this one case, don’t make a fuss.” Having a few minority representatives succeed makes people think the system is fair and that other cases are incidental.

Women and minorities become reluctant allies to other ingroup members, object to affirmative action, refuse to be a role model, and often junior people reject them as role models because they’re not seen as very nice. “Queen Bee” and other such terminology emerges to describe these people and it becomes tempting to think of this as a “woman’s problem" -- a matter for women, or underrepresentated minority group members -- to work out among themselves.

Women Who Become Managers or Make it to Senior Levels in their Organizations

Support for other women. In a recent study, female managers were less willing than female subordinates were to support women who prioritized family over career, but the opposite effect for "successful" women: female managers were more willing than female subordinates were to support "successful" women. Thus it is not the case that female managers are just against women in general (Faniko, Ellemers & Derks, EJSP, in press). Female managers are willing to support other women, but only “successful” ones.

Career orientation and masculinity. Another study showed that senior women resemble men (both senior and junior) in career orientation and masculinity, but that junior women are lower in career orientation and masculinity than senior women and men. Women in managerial (v. subordinate) positions had to undergo personal sacrifices for career success and distancing the self from their ingroup, enhancing masculinity and career commitment (Faniko, Ellemers & Derks, submitted).

Organizational support. When it comes to organizational support, senior women experienced significantly less support than senior men, subordinate men, and subordinate women.

Context matters

Having to make personal sacrifices, experiencing a lack of organizational support, being underrepresented, and being subjected to biased treatment leads women and minorities to distance themselves from their ingroups while trying to fit in with the outgroup's (majority) norms. This, in turn, leads to the perpetuation of inequality and disadvantage for women and minorities and the loss of the benefits of diversity.

The good news is this can be prevented because it is the context that creates this. Context matters. Reaping the benefits of diversity require that differences are valued. While the presence of successful individuals does not solve the problem of collective disadvantage, supportive contexts can reduce the personal and social sacrifices faced by women and minorities, prevent distancing the self from the ingroup, and improve inclusion, equality, and the positive outcomes of diversity.

Discussion

Me: How to get around valuing differences without reifying those differences?

Naomi: That is tricky, the differences cannot be linked to the groups per se.

Me: Perhaps it will require dominant group members to adapt characteristics and behaviors associated with underrepresented groups to get those characteristics and behaviors to be valued.

Kyle Lewis: Is this a generational effect? Women in my generation, for example, may have had to assimilate and act like men, but women in younger generations do not?

Naomi: The "Queen Bee" phenomenon is not a generational effect, it is a context effect. Twenty years of her research shows the same pattern across generations.

Monica Biernat: Women don’t want to appear self-interested by “favoring” women – this too could encourage them to be harsher on other women.

Naomi: Low identified women [i.e., women who distance themselves from other women, who do not consider being a "woman" to be an important part of their identity] who are treated as representatives of their gender group are the worst (to other women).

Joan Williams: If a man says something nasty about a woman “he must be biased,” if a woman says something nasty about a woman “she cannot be biased,” best person to take down another woman. What’s the fix? Get more women, create a more inclusive climate?

Naomi: It seems that enforcing numbers through quotas is the only way to get out of this situation. Also, if people are not forced to make personal sacrifices, if women are supported equally to men, they should not feel the need to distance themselves from other women.

Louise Roth: Places where they have implemented quotas it has actually worked; if it’s voluntary the default position is to do nothing.

Naomi: Research has also shown that quotas enhance the quality of people on a board. When there is no quota, mediocre men get on, but the quality of board members is enhanced for both men and women when there is a quota. Turn off email at 5pm; more work-life balance; men and women who were being facilitated to do work and family were happier, healthier, more productive.

??: In Scandinavia benefit if only both people take leave (shared).

Naomi: Not good to focus on the issue of women having children. It doesn’t help explain minorities, women without kids, women with older kids, who are also held back. Confuses discussion, always a stereotype – when we talk about women’s careers, the discussion always goes to family, but after you correct for all these behaviors still have a career penalty to women beyond family.