Google was recently caught in a firestorm after a male engineer James Damore issued a memo entitled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber”, which discussed gender bias and diversity in the technology industry. The memo cited the biological differences between men and women to explain the gender gap in Silicon Valley.
There are some reasonable ideas that could be debated, like how women experience anxiety more than men and thus want less stressful jobs. The Anxiety and Depression Association says that “women are twice as likely to have an anxiety disorder than men”, in part due to hormonal differences. But the one part of the memo that is grating is how women naturally have more “extraversion expressed as gregariousness rather than assertiveness” and “higher agreeableness.”
No. Women are not inherently less assertive than men; we are socially conditioned to be so.
Many in society see women less positively if they are assertive. In a study done by Fortune Magazine’s Kieran Snyder, women were criticized more on abrasiveness and were “told to pipe down.” Critiques about tone and personality were present in at least 75 percent of the performance reviews for women, but only 2.4 percent for men.
As The Muse explains in a Forbes article, women who are equally as passionate as men tend to be labeled as “bitchy” and “emotional”. When women hear that, The Muse explains, “what we’re really being told is, ‘I’m feeling threatened.'” This conditions female workers to prioritize a harmonious environment rather than to stick up for themselves during salary negotiations and conferences.
This is not to say that there are no benefits to being an assertive woman. A study by The European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology (EJWOP) showed that assertive workers receive higher compensation than the nice ones within their respective gender.
However, assertiveness often does not always pay off. Dr. Renee De Reuver, author of the EJWOP study, explained that “dominant women were still found to earn less than even the most agreeable men” in an interview with Vice. And even when women do ask for raises, employers refuse to give them, according to Vice.
With the perpetuated stigma against strong women and how assertiveness still has not ended the gender pay gap, we can say a woman’s demeanor at work is determined by more than just biology. As De Reuver said, “Gender stereotypes are persistent and difficult to change. Some people still cling to the idea that some qualities are exclusively male and exclusively female.”
