Powerful people

The American Society of Magazine Editors, or ASME, released its award nominees this week: The group nominated all men in five of the award categories. Given the prestige of an ASME award, the uncomfortable absence of women garnering top spots has reminded me of some of the challenges facing our generation of high-achieving Duke students.

The disparity at the top is clear. Of all the Fortune 500 CEOs in 2011, a meager 2.4 percent were women. About 2 percent of self-made billionaires are women. In the nonprofit sector, where a staggering 73 percent of employees are women, men still hold a majority of top leadership positions. I don’t even need a calculator for the percentage of U.S. presidents or vice presidents that have been women. Lack of access to education, which is often associated with inflexible power structures, does not seem to be the problem here. On the whole, women are now earning more bachelor and graduate degrees than men. Indeed, some private liberal arts institutions have preferential admission policies for men to increase their proportion of male students.

Discussions about the causes of top-level gender disparity have been exhaustive. Most of these causes, however, are “systemic” or “cultural,” which means that their solutions are often impalpable and difficult to approach directly. Examples of these systemic causes are first, a lack of female mentors and second, workplace sexism. Within the latter exist both overt sexism, such as sexual harassment, and concealed sexism. A controlled experiment published in the American Economic Review found that having orchestra auditions behind a screen to mask identity was beneficial for female musicians, as compared to having their identity revealed. Examples of cultural causes include narrow definitions of women and expectations of work-life balance.

It makes sense that these systemic and cultural factors cause many of the gendered disparities in highly competitive environments, but only focusing on the long-term goal of redefining culture is unsatisfying. There has to be more that can be done to address top-level gender disparities. More importantly, there has to be a way to instill urgency into the pursuit of opportunity—we shouldn’t have to wait for entire gender schemas to shift before our generation can attain more equitable distributions at the top. We have to send a message that the current disparities between men and women are on their way out.

One of the problems that we can begin to address is the portrayal of successful women as exceptions to the norm. Our rhetoric surrounding gender and achievement uses gender modifiers much more for women than for men. For instance, words like leader, powerful, or author are often combined with “women” or “female”—women leaders, powerful women and female authors. Though the intention seems celebratory, this rhetoric fosters the perception that these individuals are not representative of women in general.

Achieving new norms starts with simply changing the conversation. “Powerful women” becomes “women are powerful.” After all, not many would deny that women are very powerful people. We can thwart the current perception that the majority of women aren’t leaders. It’s time to replace any rhetoric that is doubtful of the scope of women to lead.

What about how these conversations affect us at Duke? We have a plethora of great classes, student groups and other initiatives that work towards a vision of gender equality. The content is appropriate, but certain names strike me as restrictive stereotyping. Course titles, such as “Women as Leaders,” should be updated to reflect the diversity of such a theme. That is one small step towards internalizing equitable gender norms.

Empowerment is a fine line. All minority struggles are connected by this theme. Inequality and injustice are the paramount concerns, but an additional battle exists. There is a history of devaluing the competence of those with less power—those in the minority group. Based on the stark percentages, women at the top are certainly a minority group. In addition to the large struggle of breaking glass ceilings, there is a smaller struggle to not devalue women, or anyone else, in the process.