Exploring the paper ‘Slaying the Seven-Headed Dragon: The Quest for Gender Change in Academia‘ – Brink, M.C.L. van den; Benschop, Y.W.M., 2012
Blog three of five, in a series by Dr Chrissi McCarthy.
Working in EDI just isn’t that easy. The people your work impacts are real, and if you get it wrong, the consequences can hit hard. I’ve certainly had my fair share of blunders, and then again, so has anyone who’s paying attention.
When we talk about the challenges of EDI, how it goes wrong, why resistance emerges, it’s not to scare you off. Instead, it’s to give you hope. There are reasons your work might not be having the impact you want, and those reasons are identifiable. People are complex, and we don’t have all the answers, but each insight helps narrow down the chances of success.
When it comes to EDI, research shows that some approaches work some of the time, in certain places. Research finds the two most consistent areas of work are context-driven strategies and genuine managerial buy-in. (Mor Barak et al., 2016; Van De Ven et al., 2008). Recognising when our work isn’t achieving its aims should be viewed as a crucial learning opportunity, not as a stand-alone failure.
So, give yourself grace and let the research help you.
Speaking of which, let’s get back to the paper of the month, Van den Brink and Benschop, 2012
Key theory in brief
We are delving deeper into (Van den Brink & Benschop, 2012) a paper that helps explain three crucial aspects,
- how cause is as important as the problem,
- how work can be misaligned
- how equality can be undermined by inequality.
Today, we are focusing on the second of these problems, how the work can be misaligned. You might recall Van den Brink and Benschop (2012) in their paper, “Slaying the Seven-Headed Dragon, ” which analysed 971 committee reports from seven Dutch universities and interviewed 64 committee chairs across medical sciences, humanities, and natural sciences. Sure enough, every department had a leaky pipeline of women rising to senior roles, but the reasons? Completely different. Today, we will focus on the findings in the medical sciences.
Key findings
Van den Brink and Benschop (2012) looked at the equality practices that had been put in place to overcome the problem of the leaky pipe syndrome. Let’s compare the root causes identified in the interviews with those of the committee chairs.
Medical sciences
Inequality mechanisms
- Masculine networks
- Committee members’ concern for women as mothers
- Women are not tough enough for the role – they need to be protected from failure
The equality practices put in place to overcome the leaky pipe syndrome were.
- Open recruitment process
- Accountability – a thin veil of accountability that hides real practice
- Coaching and mentoring – reinforcing the need to fix the women
Why didn’t the approaches overcome the leaky pipe syndrome?
The leaky pipeline still prevailed, with little change, despite the equality actions implemented before and during the promotional process. So why didn’t they work?
Open recruitment processes
Firstly, countering masculine networks with more open, accountable recruitment processes is a practical solution, but only if it’s done well.
In this case, the open recruitment process wasn’t truly open, as three-quarters of appointments were still recruited through closed processes.
To open up recruitment processes, you need to think a bit more about how people respond. Just because you change a policy doesn’t mean it will influence behaviour. Van den Brink and Benschop (2012) discuss this as the failure to tackle the inequality that underpins equality, akin to ignoring the broken structure and putting on a new roof, then wondering why the rain still comes in.
People tend to prefer candidates who are recommended or vouched for by others, and people like to vouch for people with whom they feel an affinity, you know, “a good guy”. Before we point fingers, we need to examine our behaviour here. Have I sought out recommendations from people I trust? Have I been unduly influenced by a recommendation? Have I recommended someone because I like them, not because I know them well enough about their skills? Of course, so will most of us reading this blog. That’s not because we are particularly terrible people, but because we like to trust others and help those in need.
I’m not suggesting we stop all recommendations; instead, we need to think more deeply about understanding where they’re helpful and where they’re not.
For example, on a personal note, men are more likely to be recommended without prompting. We tend not to think of recommending women, often because we assume they don’t want the extra responsibility, unless they explicitly ask us. So, perhaps aim to recommend women as often as you recommend men.
It’s not just the recommendations, but everything that comes with them, such as informing them who’s on the panel, what they respond well to, and which keynotes to hit. Every little helps.
So opening the door a crack doesn’t solve the problem; it just creates the illusion that the problem has been solved.
Coaching and mentoring
The second practice focused on coaching and mentoring women. Which I have no doubt was able to provide support and some assistance. However, it’s not solving the real problem, which is that decision-makers felt it was their job to protect the women from the very roles they are applying for, citing concerns about the roles as mothers or the job being too tough and needing to protect the women from failure or difficult environments.
This protective, or paternalistic behaviour is widespread, so much so that (Glick & Fiske, 1996) Coined the term benevolent inequality to describe it.
Case study: my lived experience
I can count at least four times that it happened to me in my career, each time the person doing it was open about it, and perhaps more disturbingly, rather pleased with themselves. They thought they were saving me. The most bizarre was my project manager, who wouldn’t let me work on groundworks packages because he was worried about how the men on site would treat me. It took a long time to convince him that
- My family were ground workers; I was fine.
- I had been in this exact role for more than three years, and I was fine.
- The ground workers knew my reports were the reason they would get paid, and I was fine.
The project manager’s behaviour and choices were a far bigger problem than my groundworkers would ever be. However, I’ve found that people don’t always appreciate it when they discover their good intentions weren’t helping.
Summary
Addressing inequality is not an easy fix, but it can become a lot easier if we gain a deeper understanding of the reasoning behind the challenges we face. That’s the job of research: to help us understand how to improve our practice.
In blog three, we will consider how the equality practices might have had a negative impact and start to think about how we create impactful solutions.
