Gender and Society

Welcome to the Gender & Society blog. G&S is a peer-reviewed journal, focused on the study of gender in society across global and
transnational spaces. It is the official journal of Sociologists for Women in Society. See our website for more information.

ARE WE LIVING IN AN ERA WITHOUT GENDER BIAS IN

STEM (SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, ENGINEERING, AND
MATHEMATICS)   HIRING?
Even though many organizations are striving toward equity in their hiring decisions, our recent research in Gender &
Society has clearly shown we are not yet living in an era free of gender bias in STEM hiring.

We studied bias in the employment criteria, uncouncoius prejudice in favor men usually in a way considered to be unfair
to women.

We asked STEM managers to tell us the most important hiring criteria. We then used that criteria in an experiment to
compare how managers evaluated male versus female candidates’ CVs. We created identical resume’s except for the
gender of the applicant. We also varied the STEM fields including biopharma and biorobotics. Every manager received
resume’s to evaluate: a woman’s biopharma resume and a man’s biorobotics resume or vice versa. Each resume
contained equivalent academic background and equivalent achievements with some interpersonal management and
experience included. We asked the managers to evaluate the candidates on a variety of criteria, including the candidates’
ability to work long hours, problem-solving ability, and their evaluation of the candidates hiring probability.

We expected that managers would not explicitly prefer men but instead would show their bias towards female candidates found by
emphasizing a criterion that women managers are less likely to succeed at. We guessed that the working 24/7 STEM norm
combined with the perception that women cannot work as long hours as men would  lead to men managers’ to favor men.
We also expected women managers to evaluate other criterion than long hours of work, because they would be more
aware that women may be less likely to be willing to work long hours. This would give women a fairer chance of
entering STEM. 

As expected, we found that “the ability to work long hours” was a more important criterion for men STEM managers
than for women managers for the hiring decisions of a female candidate. While for women managers, “the ability to
solve problems” was a more important criterion than men managers when considering a female candidate.

These findings demonstrate that men managers’ gender favoritism has shifted to an implicit bias with the subtle use of
hiring criteria to favor male applicants.

We wanted to find a way to fix this problem and so we completed another experiment where we added a personal note to
the CVs stating that the candidate hired a full-time nanny and she/he is committed to a career. This personal note reduced
the importance that men managers attributed to the “ability to work long hours” criterion in the hiring decision of a
female candidate, but elevated the importance women managers assigned to this criterion. As men are the dominant
decision-makers in STEM hiring, the personal note might be an effective strategy to reduce implicit gender bias.

We suggest that organizations might reduce implicit gender bias by supporting employees with extra pay to reimburse to
cover child care expenses, similar to travel expenses. Such support to both mothers and fathers will convey that the
women are not considered solely responsible for the children and the home. Another recommendation, more radical, is to
change the organizational culture that reinforces the belief that the ability to work 24/7 is needed to be an ideal worker.  

Until organizations directly address the existence of this type of implicit bias, we advise women to add a personal note to
their resume in which they explain their child care arrangement and assure the employer they are fully committed to their
careers. Of course, adding this personal note is not the best strategy for social change. What is far more important is
reducing implicit bias by showing employers who creates gender inequality. We mention women are in the trap? In an
ideal world – we would not offer suggestions for women on how to deal with the problem themselves but suggest that
organizations managed by men will deal with the root of the social problem, and change the organizational culture that
will help to recruit more women in the STEM fields.

Enav Friedmann is an assistant professor at the Guilford Glazer Faculty of Business and Management at Ben Gurion
University (BGU) in Israel, and the head of the BGU marketing lab.  She holds a Ph.D. in Business Administration from
BGU and was a visiting scholar at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, Italy. Her current research includes brand
preferences and purchasing choices, tailoring to heterogeneous consumer strata, specifically, gender-related marketing,
and social marketing.

Dorit Efrat-Treister is a Senior Lecturer at the Guilford Glazer Faculty of Business and Management, Ben-Gurion
University of the Negev. She received her PhD in Organizational Behavior at the Technion, Israel Institute of
Technology, and continued as a post-doctoral fellow at the Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia.

WALMART….EMPOWERING WOMEN?
By Eileen Otis

Walmart’s Women’s Empowerment Program was celebrated in the press as “tremendously consequential,” with the
potential to be “… the biggest feminist triumphs that private industry has ever spurred.” The program made headlines
across the mainstream press whilethe American Chamber of Commerce recognized it as the “Best Empowerment
Program.” The World Bank Group’s Gender Strategy platform upheld the program as a model for other corporations to
emulate.

Perhaps success was measured in the distance traveled from Walmart’s disempowerment of its women workers, who
protested the discrimination they faced from male managers by filing the largest class action lawsuit in history against
the firm. However, a closer look at the program reveals a set of actions that are at best insignificant to women working
for Walmart, at worst detrimental to women’s status in the workplace. It is an example of what we call a gender fix in
our recent article in Gender & Society. It uses women’s status as caregivers to repair corporate imagery. Walmart
outsources this work to women business owners in its supply chain.

Walmart’s Empowerment Program sourced 20 billion dollars of products from women-owned businesses and recruited
owners to testify to their empowerment by Walmart. We analyzed these testimonials, which were captured on video, and
the materials on the Empowerment website hosting them. The site features slogans like, “Empowering women is the
right and the smart thing to do “and “When women succeed everyone succeeds.” We find three themes in these
testimonials: they celebrate women’s “rags to riches” stories of economic mobility, depict their relations with Walmart
agents as harmonious, and represent women’s authority as caring and selfless. Walmart uses these themes to characterize
its supply chain as feminist, deflecting a barrage of public criticism targeting Walmart for low wages paid to retail
workers, for destroying family-owned retailers, and for squeezing suppliers who in turn squeeze workers. This
empowerment campaign was a reaction to the bad press about Walmart that existed even before Walmart faced the class
action lawsuit. Although the class action suit was not successful, the case caused reputational damage to a firm whose
primary market constituency is women. Walmart’s empowerment program launched three months later, created a
counternarrative to re-shape public perception of the firm.

The campaign uses the success of a few women business owners in Walmart’s supply chain as evidence that Walmart
empowers women overall. This gender fix reflects a pattern in which firms use women as moral ambassadors to restore
their brand virtue after inflicting social harm (towards women, workers, the environment, etc.).

But the gender fix tells us little about why firms select particular empowerment programs to repair their reputations. We
argue Walmart’s gender fix strategy is based on its position in the global economy, specifically its power over am
international chain of 6,000 suppliers. Walmart outsources the labor of representing “empowerment” to women who
occupy a strategic structural position in their supply chain.

Walmart uses idealizations of gender and femininity to obscure class interests that otherwise divide women. In the videos
and throughout its empowerment website, Walmart emphasizes the ways in which the women business owners exude
norms of femininity, like empathy, care, nurture, and mothering ethics. This stereotype of female selflessness generates
lofty expectations of care that burdens women by reinforcing a norm that they behave differently than men in the
capitalist firm. This campaign is potentially exploitative as perpetuating feminine stereotypes raises the bar for women’s
selfless labor. Meanwhile, how women business owners behave similarly to men is overlooked. In the end, Walmart’s
control over the business owners its supply chain is turned from a reputational liability into a virtue, as women speak to
the ways Walmart has supported their firms.

Like many corporate campaigns, the Women’s Empowerment campaign ran its course and was replaced with issues
more relevant to today’s news cycle. Walmart has moved on to address racial equity with its public relation campaigns.
In the wake of protests against police killings of Black men, the firm pledged $100 million to build a racial equity center,
in what might be called a “race fix.” Walmart employs more Black Americans than any other company and these
workers face exploitative conditions similar to other workers, compounded by race discrimination. We eagerly await
studies of such corporate “race fixes.”

Eileen Otis is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Northeastern University. She is the author of the award-winning book Markets
and Bodies: Women, Service Work, and the Making of Inequality in China. Her research has been published in the American
Sociological Review, Politics and Society, and The American Behavioral Scientist, among other journals. She is currently working
on a book about Walmart retail labor in China.

IT’S NOT ONLY ABOUT THE VEIL: GENDER BELIEFS IN SIX

MUSLIM-MAJORITY   COUNTRIES
By Maria Charles, Roger Friedland, Janet Afary, and Rujun Yang

Western depictions of gender relations in Muslim-majority societies reflect two widespread assumptions, shared even by
many academics. The first assumption is that the Muslim world is uniformly gender-traditional, meaning that opinions
on gender issues are presumed not to vary much within or across Middle Eastern, North African, and South Asian
(MENASA) societies. A second, related, assumption is that gender ideology is a single dimension, meaning that if you
know someone’s position on one issue, such as women’s veiling, you can easily predict their position on other issues,
such as men’s control over their wives’ employment. This leads to the presumption that Muslim-majority societies are
uniformly traditional about gender politics.

In our recent Gender & Society article, we test these ideas using data from a new Facebook survey of more than 6,000
Muslim men and women in six MENASA societies: Algeria, Egypt, Pakistan, Tunisia, Turkey, and Palestine. We didn’t
only look at gender issues typically covered in Western surveys (e.g., household divisions of labor and women’s rights in
education, employment, and politics), but instead explored two principles central to gender relations in Muslim-majority
countries. The first gender principle we analyzed was women’s chastity. This is highly salient in societies where social
control of women’s bodies can be a symbolic marker of Muslim cultural authenticity and where perceived impurity can
be subject to severe social sanctions. The second gender principle we analyzed was marital patriarchy. This reflects
issues of men’s primacy within marriage, specifically beliefs about the unequal status and rights of husbands and wives.
We measure chastity beliefs using survey questions on whether women should wear the hijab, and whether women
should be virgins at marriage. We measure marital patriarchy beliefs using questions on men’s rights to control their
wives’ employment, and to resort to physical violence against their wives after exhausting “other methods of
persuasion.”

The principles of marital patriarchy and women’s chastity differ in their explicit endorsement of gender inequality.
Whereas men’s rights to beat their wives and control their wives’ employment rests upon an undeniable gender hierarchy
within marriage, norms of feminine modesty may be more plausibly interpreted through a “different but equal” lens,
legitimized by beliefs about men’s and women’s innately different bodies and sexual essences—for example, men’s
natural sexual aggression. This distinction is important, we argue, because forms of gender inequality that openly violate
liberal egalitarian ideals are often met with significant opposition, whereas inequalities based on perceived natural
gender difference (“gender essentialism”) may exist quite comfortably alongside liberal ideals.

Two main questions motivate our study. First, how do beliefs about marital patriarchy and women’s chastity vary across
and within MENASA societies? And second, do these gender principles vary independently of one another – in
particular, are beliefs about marital patriarchy and women’s chastity influenced in different ways by respondents’
religious beliefs and gender status? When considering religiosity, we include two different aspects: piety and
absolutism. Piety refers to a rigorous adherence to religious practice and beliefs, and absolutism refers to belief in the
complete moral authority of the Quran, and the enforcement of its prescriptions and proscriptions through national laws.

With respect to the first question about the variability of attitudes, we find a strong heterogeneity in gender beliefs that is
difficult to reconcile with Western depictions of a monolithic Islamic patriarchy. Within countries, gender attitudes differ
between women and men and among people with different religious beliefs. Across countries, agreement with marital
patriarchy and women’s chastity varies strongly as well.

With respect to the second question, we find that support for women’s chastity is much more broad-based than support
for marital patriarchy in all six societies. Indeed, survey results show that most MENASA men do not support husbands’
rights to be violent towards their wives – even in countries with the highest levels of religious absolutism and the
strongest support for women’s chastity. This finding calls to mind the “different but equal” gender regimes found in the
West, where inequalities grounded in blatant male primacy are perceived to be less legitimate than those attributed to
essential differences between (fundamentally equal) men and women. Although social desirability bias is always a
concern with culturally sensitive topics, we worry less about such bias because we are analyzing an anonymous online
survey. Because views on domestic violence are not typically interrogated in Western surveys, we cannot say how
attitudes of MENASA men compare to those of their North American and European counterparts.

Three distinct gender cultures appear to varying extents in the six MENASA countries. Gender reformists question both
marital patriarchy and chastity norms and make up the largest group of respondents in Turkey. Gender-traditionalists
endorse both women’s chastity and marital patriarchy. They are the largest group in Algeria, Egypt, and Pakistan. We
also find a group of people who reject marital patriarchy but adhere to norms of gendered chastity. We call them the
chastity group, and they are the largest group in Tunisia and among Palestinians.

The different overall approval levels we find for the two gender principles depends partly on stronger support for
women’s chastity than marital patriarchy among women and among liberal Muslims. While women’s and men’s relative
acceptance of bridal virginity norms and head covering norms depends on the local meanings and histories of these
practices, we find a strong gender divide in attitudes toward an explicit marital hierarchy that places women below their
husbands within marriage. Religious beliefs also show uneven effects on the two gender principles. Muslim piety is
associated with support for women’s chastity but not for patriarchal control within marriage. Islamic absolutismis
associated with stronger support for both principles.

Compulsory veiling, an explicitly hierarchical form of state patriarchy that is not directly measured in our survey, has
indeed elicited fierce resistance in some contexts, including in Iran (not part of our study) at the time of this writing. But
our findings suggest that the symbolic meanings and practical implications of veiling and other gendered modesty
practices are complicated and contextually contingent. It is the forms of patriarchal oppression that are most overtly
hierarchical that Muslim women appear to oppose most uniformly – and that are more likely to catalyze successful
movements for change.

Maria Charles is Professor of Sociology at the University of California–Santa Barbara, where she is also Area Director
for Sex and Gender Research at the Broom Demography Center, and faculty affiliate of the Feminist Studies
Department. Her research explores how gender-related beliefs, inequalities, and processes vary across national
societies and demographic groups.
Roger Friedland is Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies and Sociology at the University of California–Santa
Barbara. His research explores the relation between gender, sexual practices, Islamic piety, and Islamism in Muslim
majority countries and to various forms of religiosity among university students in the United States. Friedland also
seeks to develop an institutional logics approach which draws on a non-theistic religious understanding of the non-
phenomenal grounding of institutional practice.

Janet Afary holds the Mellichamp Chair in Global Religion & Modernity at the University of California–Santa Barbara,
where she is a Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the Iranian Studies Initiative. Her research explores
courtship, sex and marriage in the Muslim world, and history and politics of gender and sexuality in the Middle East.