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I find most 'Mars/Venus' takes on gender relations about as illuminating as a beer commercial. By the time one is done with a typical book on what motivates female romantic attachments (baubles and abs, apparently), one could be forgiven for concluding that the only people dumber than women are the men that try to woo them.
While most of this pop-gender literature focuses on dating and relationships, its views can bubble over into the professional and political spheres as well. Studies on political ambition in women have routinely shown that women are 'punished' for appearing to be overly agentic, strident and ambitious...and women are also punished for appearing to be overly squishy and communal. Note the word 'appearing.' A key issue in stigma and stereotyping is the role of perception on the part of the more powerful group or party-the managers, hiring agents, admissions directors, board members and voters who have the power to advance or halt the progression of a career. And the lower you are on the social hierarchy the more likely you are to be subject to reductive opinions-or at least to be negatively affected by them.
For instance, women struggling to gain promotions and approval from male bosses or coworkers, particularly those trying to succeed in male-dominated fields, contend with the assumption that they're high on competence but low on warmth (an issue which clearly played out in the Hillary Clinton campaign), while secretaries and stay-at-home moms are presumed to be high on warmth but low on competence. I should note that the four months I have spent "just staying home" with my son have been infinitely harder than anything else I've done. Life with a newborn is a 140 hour a week job, and that's if you're lucky on the sleep front!
Working mothers are hit with a double whammy. While men with children have been shown to benefit from their parental status, working mothers find themselves suspect for their ambition at the same time that they are presumed less competent. We've all heard the statistic that women make eighty cents to a man's dollar. Childrearing issues aside, recent studies have also shown that both women and men react more negatively to the woman when a male/female pair read an identical script negotiating for a higher salary. The woman might get the raise, but a general malaise or resentment lingers which can have long term consequences for her career.
While we laypeople tend not to think explicitly in terms of the competence and warmth continuum, social psychologist Susan Fiske has argued that these two fundamental dimensions characterize all interpersonal perceptions and interactions. Most people, for better or for worse, are dichotomizing, categorizing machines; we make instantaneous, value-laden judgments based upon our own point of view (one reason that diversity and workplace protections are so important), leapfrogging from continuum to category as we size others up, ignoring the fact that most men and women overlap significantly.
Fiske revisited the issue in a recent paper titled "Venus and Mars or Down to Earth: Stereotypes and Realities of Gender Differences." She analyzed some of the ways that value-laden inferences affect gender research in the field of social psychology. It turns out that even the trained professionals are susceptible to making value-laden categorical judgments and labels. For instance, Fiske notes that men are considered to be field independent, while women are seen as field dependent-that is, overly influenced by their immediate circumstances/situation. Fiske wonders why men aren't seen as field insensitive and women field sensitive? At the risk of sounding like a Mars/Venus book, I'm sure any woman who has had one of those laborious discussions with their spouse over a comment or action that seemed field insensitive might agree.
So what's a girl to do? How can women navigate between these twin stereotypes of the warm incompetent and the competent cold bitch? While I'd like to think that I'm high on competence and warmth, as your typical 'nice girl' I've endured any number of reductive and paternalizing attitudes about my agency and intellect over the years. Now that I'm a new mother, I imagine that I have not seen the last of these issues. Perhaps we can look to our political counterparts for guidance. Ironically, some of the most successful women on the political stage at the moment are those who use the podium as a bully-pulpit, telling their male political opponents to 'man up' one moment, and preaching conservative family values for other women the next. I'm not suggesting we all go rogue - bringing up the latest moose hunt at your next interview might be a little transparent. But just knowing about these social dimensions might help: it may be as simple as trying to anticipate whether warmth or competence is more likely to be at issue in any given context and playing up that angle.
It's a matter of basic self-preservation as money lost in initial rounds of negotiation can snowball through the years as subsequent salaries and raises will be lower. Most middle-class women have years of financial investment and loans in their studies to recoup, and our financial contribution is usually a requirement in the household, making the matter a family issue not just a women's issue (in addition to the needs of single women and mothers). A study by Mary Wade on women and self-advocacy notes that women are not socially punished when negotiating on another's behalf; attempting to frame the promotion, raise, or hire as something that will benefit the company or superiors rather than herself could help even if it's a depressing card to have to play. Hopefully, we'll reach the day soon where a woman looking after her basic professional and personal self-interest in the work place won't be punished.
