Women self-promote way less than men. But why?

Fresh out of a doctorate program, Jane is a proud graduate in the life sciences faculty, joining the ranks of many other women on stage. In this era, the gender gap in science is increasingly narrow and Jane is proud to be part of the pool of female researchers closing this gap.

She dreamed of this moment—the future of experiments and lab research is finally here and perhaps, she could spearhead an experiment with her own research team.

Unfortunately, the statistics are against Jane, as only one in four female researchers get a full professorship in a research university.

If Jane is expecting a more competitive salary after the doctorate, that will happen—only if you don’t compare it to men, as empirical evidence showed that there are significant differences.

Women also typically receive less credit for citations and funding, as a 2018 study shows.

Research has even suggested that women, in general, receive less recognition than men, even if the achievements are equivalent.

The big question is this: why?

With more scientific publications published each day, the number of life science articles published per year has reached a staggering one million threshold—it comes with poverty of attention.

Also Read: Asia Pacific markets see a significant jump in women entrepreneurs: Mastercard study

To make sure scientists allocate time to read their articles, authors have to self-promote through different avenues, be it through social media or presentations. This way, grants, and salaries are much easier to obtain; such resources are typically scarce in the research world.

With resources being so scarce, statistics are showing that women have an even smaller chance of obtaining any of them, relative to men.

Fortunately, there is a core reason, as Marc J. Lerchenmueller and his co-authors Olav Sorenson and Anupam B. Jena discovered in their study: women used positive words to describe their work less frequently than men.

Self-promotion gap amongst academics

Researchers often use positive words in their abstracts and subtitles in an attempt to get the eyeball of a gleaning scientist. Words like “novel”, “unique” and “excellent” are part of the norm. There are times where you can get phrases like “promising result” and “groundbreaking research”.

The study discovered that articles written by female junior researchers and female principal investigators were 21 per cent less likely to use positive terms.

In fact, their research is more likely to be framed as it is: no additional self-promotion and nothing exaggerated. Though both men and women use such words throughout history, women were shown to be using them much infrequently.

The consequences were severe for women: authors that did not self-promote received less attention, especially when they were published in the more prominent journals.

Hence, the gender gap appears—in fact, the study suggested that women gained confidence as they rose to senior ranks, which thus caused the gender disparity to disappear at the most senior levels.

Self-promotion gap at work

Some may argue that the aforementioned study only describes a unique situation: it pertains to the life sciences sector, and particularly on female researchers and scientists.

To extrapolate and have it represent the self-promotion gap in other careers would be too much of a stretch—unless you are referring to a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research, which found that women also constantly self-promote less at work.

Also Read: Women in tech: A global evaluation

The statistic corroborates with Lerchenmueller’s study; men rated their performance 33 per cent higher than women who performed at equivalent levels.

In the study, 1500 Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) workers answered 20 analytical questions on mathematics and science. They were asked to predict how many questions they got correct (to measure their confidence) and asked four subjective questions that typically appear in a performance review (to measure how much they self-promote). The study found:

• When women were told that their answer to a self-promotion question will be communicated to an employer for them to determine whether to hire and how much to pay, women self-promoted less.
• If there was no financial incentive to the self-promotion question, men and women both decreased their self-promotion levels equally—thus the gender gap still persists.
• When told that there might be a chance employers would learn about their true performance in addition to their self-promotion, women still self-promoted less.
• When told about the average level of self-promotion of others, women still did the same.

The persistent gap indicated that women self-promoted less systematically. In every situation, women would generally self-promote less as compared to equally-performing men.

The question rises up again: why?

One of the biggest speculation would be that women, due to a culmination of different reasons, choose to stay out of the center stage.

Yet, it can be difficult to ascribe this gender gap to a core reason—rather than doing so, leaders need to start shaping the workplace environment and employee experience so that women can self-promote without repercussions.

One of the biggest reason that has been suggested is that women suffer from more potential backlash, which can deter them from self-promoting.

There are well-documented cases and studies of women being viewed as “bossy” and “loud” even though they are self-promoting at the same level as their male counterparts.

Self-promotion is a necessity at work as leaders are not always able to know about everyone’s work performance, as accurately as possible.

As such, there are times where employees would have to specifically bring achievements up in order to remind the leader that they did perform well, which can bring recognition and at times monetary benefits.

Unfortunately, gender bias can lead to people believing that women who self-promote are overconfident.

You need to address this elephant in the room. You would have to self-reflect: do they have that gender bias in them? Once there is self-awareness, the problem can be systematically dealt with:

• Treat women and men equally. If they are self-promoting, then it is the performance that matters. For instance, someone staying past office hours to complete the project, instead of whether it was a female or male doing it.
• Understand that not due to that existing bias, some women may take a more passive role. It’s time to throw away your previous assumptions about the characteristics and personalities of your employees. Observe keenly for actual work performance, rather than listen to someone’s self-promotion.
• Look at actual work performance. Ask the employees about their contributions, specifically those who self-promote less.
• Evaluate based on data. Numbers will never fail you. When the performance of the work can be measured against a numerical benchmark, it is easy to evaluate their work performance. For instance, if your goal for the blog post was to reach 50,000 pageviews, that can form a minimum goal.
• Create an environment of psychological safety. Women—and all employees—can give feedback about their work performance without worrying that it might change their superior’s perception of them. For example, if they were to struggle at understanding something, they can ask for help without fearing that it will impact their overall work performance.

Instead of changing the way women work, it is much better to redesign the workplace. When you use a subjective view (i.e. “do I think that this employee is performing well the past month?”), you are much more prone to cognitive biases.

Also Read: Women in tech and a competitive advantage

By restricting yourself to being objective before using your intuition and sense, you can evaluate work performance more accurately.

The problem is that there is still a culture of self-advocation. Employees still have to tell others that they are doing a good job in order to get noticed.

Which begs the question: what are the leaders doing for the employees?

Though it is understandable that leaders cannot observe everything at once, there must still be an effort made to truly understand the level of contribution, by each employee.

Hence, you can create benchmarks, minimum targets, and objectives to help measure actual work performance. You can also give regular feedback to individual employees, which can help reinforce the message that you know what good work they have been doing. It also helps to add some rewards to it.

Through such an approach, every employee can benefit as you reshape the workplace culture. Since employees know that their superiors will notice if they work hard and are rewarded for it, employees will be substantially more diligent, which creates a win-win situation for everyone.

–

This article first appeared on Human+Business.

Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing contributions from the community. Become a thought leader in the community and share your opinions or ideas and earn a byline by submitting a post.

Join our e27 Telegram group, or like the e27 Facebook page.

Image credit: CoWomen