3 Hard Truths About Gender Inequality In America
America has achieved some important gender equality milestones in recent years, not least of which was the election of its first female vice president. But there’s still work to be done. Here are three studies that illuminate how gender disparities continue to propagate through the fabric of American society.
#1: Firms are penalized for creating gender-diverse boards
In theory, a company should be intrinsically motivated to create a gender-diverse board of directors.
In practice, it’s a different story.
A recent study published in the journal Organizational Science found that firms pay a steep price for their efforts to increase board diversity.
“Drawing on 14 years’ worth of panel data on public U.S. firms, we showed that firms with gender-diverse boards suffer market penalties,” state Isabelle Solal and Kasia Snellman, the lead authors of the research. “First, we found that as firms increased the number of female directors on their boards, they experienced a decrease in market value. We further found that firms that had made clear commitments to diversity initiatives across the organization suffered a greater decline in firm value when they increased female representation on their boards.”
The scientists estimate that each additional increase in boardroom gender diversity is associated with a 2.3% loss in market value. This could easily mean hundreds of millions in lost market capitalization.
Why? One possible explanation has to do with the way the market perceives a firm’s interest in promoting diversity in the boardroom.
“The level of female representation on a firm’s board may send a negative signal to the market regarding a firm’s commitment to shareholder value maximization if it is perceived as being motivated by a desire for diversity,” say the researchers.
A cynical reading of these results might lead some to believe that increasing board diversity produces a real decline in a firm’s value, perhaps because gender diversity weakens a board’s decision-making ability or because less competent boards are those that vote in favor of gender diversity.
Neither of these explanations seems likely to the researchers. For one, they note that increasing board gender diversity has not been shown to correlate with any real decrease in company performance, nor has research found any evidence of an association between board diversity and firm profitability.
Instead, the authors believe it is a consequence of the fading, but still relevant, stereotype that females are less competent in business than males.
#2: Female athletes face an uphill battle
There are some sports where men have a clear advantage over women. New research published in the Journal of Sports Economics shows that horse racing isn’t one of them.
Yet women still face significant challenges to get the “mounts” they deserve, according to the scientists who conducted the research, led by Alexander Binder of Pittsburgh State University.
To arrive at this conclusion, the scientists gathered data from over 120,000 Thoroughbred horse races from 2016 to 2018. Of the more than 2,000 jockeys included in their data, only 12 percent were female.
Not only were female jockeys underrepresented at an aggregate level, they were further marginalized when looking at the number of races they participated in. Only six percent of all rides featured a female jockey and, at the highest levels of Thoroughbred racing, female jockeys rode horses only about three percent of the time.
While this finding would make sense if there were actual performance differences between men and women, the researchers found no evidence of an advantage for either gender.
“Selecting a jockey to ride in most types and classes of horse racing, including the highest paying stakes races where discrimination has the largest monetary impact, solely on the basis of gender is not justified by the results,” conclude the researchers.
#3: Women in medicine are less likely to be followed on Twitter
A recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found a trail of evidence to suggest that gender disparities in medical research are alive and well on Twitter.
The researchers, led by Dr. Jane Zhu of the Oregon Health and Science University, found that female medical researchers averaged about 570 followers on Twitter while male medical researchers had about twice that number. The researchers also reported that tweets written by women garnered fewer likes and retweets than male-generated tweets. To be exact, females averaged approximately 316 likes and 207 retweets per year while males averaged 578 likes and 400 retweets per year.
The study was not entirely devoid of bright spots, however.
“Similar rates of Twitter use between genders suggest that social media offers women opportunities for engagement, perhaps with fewer barriers than may be present in day-to-day academic interactions,” state the researchers.
Moreover, the researchers found that the gender gap in Twitter influence was smaller among junior researchers. This raises the possibility that the problem might be getting better over time.
However, the conclusion that social networks are unintentionally reinforcing gender stereotypes cannot be overlooked. The authors write, “Some have hoped that social media would help level the playing field in academic medicine by giving women an accessible and equitable platform on which to present themselves. However, our findings — that women’s voices on Twitter appeared to be less influential and have less reach than men’s — suggest that these forums may do little to improve gender parity and may instead reinforce disparities.”