One’s Feminine Side Can Still Hurt One’s Career [Robert Lasater]

A few months ago, Kimberly Wiefling wrote about the advantages a woman’s feminine side can bring to the workplace. Unfortunately a recent study shows those same characteristics can hurt a woman starting her career.

Before proceeding, some background is helpful. When someone receives a PhD in the sciences or mathematics, a typical next step is to take a post-doctorate, a one or two year assignment, a chance to continue research and get work published. Often one takes two or three of these temporary positions before starting a (presumably) more permanent position in the academy or industry. And key to this process are the letters of recommendation, from one’s PhD advisor or post-doctorate supervisor, or other professional mentors.

Recently Professors Randi Martin and Michelle Hebl of my alma mater, Rice University, reviewed several hundred of these letters of recommendation, written for both men and women candidates. They found the ones for men typically described the candidate using terms such as “confident”, “aggressive” and “daring”, while the letters for women uses terms such as “affectionate”, “nurturing” and “tactful” – the kinds of qualities Kimberly point out add value in the engineering workplace.

And when they took their collection of letters, took out names and personal pronouns (“he”, “she”, etc.), and then asked other faculty members to evaluate the (now anonymous) candidates, those written for men got significantly better rankings than the ones written for women. The candidates described as “confident”, “aggressive” and “daring” were more likely to be hired than those described as “affectionate”, “nurturing” and “tactful”. This despite the fact they had taken out all references to gender, and had insured the candidates described with feminine qualities had as much professional success - papers published, lead author, recognition and awards – as those described with masculine qualities.

It is unfortunate that the quick lesson from this work is likely to be to suppress terms like affectionate, nurturing and tactful, even though such people – men and women both – help make the workplace a less contentious and more productive place. But women too can be confident, aggressive and daring, and mentors do need to look for these qualities in the women they are guiding and advising.

I just want to add that in the sciences and mathematics, the most important qualities one looks for are originality and – yes it is masculine – daring. They describe Richard Feynman – and Barbara McClintock, who eventually won the Nobel Prize for her work in genetics. Oh, and persistence. It took 30 years for the scientific community to recognize the importance of McClintock’s work.

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Robert Lasater maintains this blog for the Engineering Leadership Special Interest Group of the SD Forum.