Welcome to this engaging Q&A feature with Dr. Jennifer Glass, a leading voice in sociology and a renowned expert on work-family dynamics and gender equality in the workforce. Dr. Glass holds the prestigious Centennial Commission Professorship of Liberal Arts in the Department of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, where she also serves as a Research Associate at the Population Research Center.
With over 60 influential publications and a research portfolio backed by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, she has become a key figure in exploring the intersection of work, family, and gender. Her expertise spans a wide array of critical topics, including gender disparities in the STEM workforce, the economic challenges faced by working mothers, and the impact of religious conservatism on women’s economic progress.
Dr. Glass has been recognized with numerous accolades, such as the Jessie Bernard Award and the Harriet Presser Award, and has held leadership roles within the American Sociological Association. In this interview, she offers valuable insights into the complexities of cognitive biases in the workplace and how organizations can address them to foster a more inclusive environment. Dive into her perspectives and advice for HR leaders navigating the evolving landscape of work and family.
This interview has been transcribed and edited for clarity.
Can you share insights from your research into why STEM labor forces have been slow to gender-integrate, despite efforts from educational institutions and industry leaders?
Part of the problem is that, in the past, these have been heavily masculinized fields, and that means we’re not starting from a situation in which we have maybe 25 percent of the labor force already consisting of women, or 40 percent consisting of women and people of color.
This is like the last great bastion of a relatively protected labor force.
STEM jobs require advanced degrees and a high level of skill, and they pay a lot of money. For that reason, a lot of organizational theorists talk about opportunity hoarding—that people are going to be much more resistant to change when the stakes are very high. The STEM labor force is one of those pieces where the stakes are very high, where innovation is highly prized, and there’s a very rapid flow of new products and services.
Shifting Demographics and Emerging Challenges
Now one of the reasons that you can’t really ignore women and people of color within the STEM sector is that the pool that has been traditionally used to fill STEM jobs is shrinking. It’s a sector that’s expanding, the traditional labor pool is shrinking, and college attendance is way up among women, and it’s down among men.
There’s just a demographic reality here where it’s going to be increasingly difficult to find workers. If you’re going to stick to the same restricted pool, and it’s basically been adult white men and some Asians that have been allowed in, but particularly Asians from China and Japan—not Asians from Southeast Asia, for example, and so you have to look at that type of constraint.
There are people in the sector whose concerns are not at all about the integration of women into their sector or welcoming people of color. Yet, they’re going to be forced to do this because of the declining representation of their traditional hires in reference.
Their first angle has been to go abroad and to pressure the government for H-1B visas, but those are problematic as well. They tie you to a particular employer, employees don’t necessarily like them, and there’s a lot of hostility to immigration right now in the United States. So, there’s been pushback.
This is an industry that has been reluctant to integrate, so we see a very high rate of women attrition in particular, but also men, into sectors that appreciate their STEM skills and are going to treat them more fairly. Unfortunately, the STEM sector has been slow, in part because people can take their STEM skills elsewhere and make more money, or at least the same amount of money for women.
Pipeline Progress but Reward Gaps Persist
We used to talk about how the pipeline of women was just too thin or the pipeline of people of color was too thin, and that’s really not the case anymore, because we do see a lot of STEM education going on. We see very high rates of enrollment, for example, in biology and chemistry among women and people of color. There are pieces of STEM that are over 50 percent women already. Those are not the parts of STEM that have the highest reward structures.
We’ve seen a lot of integration in the biological sciences, so we know that it can be done. However, we also know that it’s being done in sectors that are somewhat less competitive, and the reward structure is not as great. You can be a postdoc in biology for your entire life and never ascend into a Principal Investigator position.
For example, the fields where it’s really tough are physics and computer science. These are the really high stakes, high motivation, high innovation sectors, and they’re the ones that I think treat women and people of color the most poorly. We have to somewhat divide up the sectors and view this problem from a slightly different position.
There’s been some success in STEM, and then there’s been some places where we’re very slow, and I think those dynamics that I was talking about tend to occur in the most math-intensive and in the most highly innovative reward structures.
There are tons of innovations in biology, but the reward structures are a little bit different. You don’t get rewarded until you really ascend to the very top. We’re seeing some change in that because of biotech, but not a lot.
Culture Clash in Male-Dominated Spaces
They did create this somewhat “bro culture” atmosphere that can be alienating to people who don’t fit in there. I don’t want to be in a workplace where everybody stops so that they can go and drink at 5 pm. That is not something that is going to appeal to me as a parent.
When you put structures in place that make certain people feel comfortable and point out the differentness of others, you’re basically saying, “Well, we want you here, but not really. We want you here, but we’re not going to make you comfortable.”
Pretty soon, we are going to see that virtually all the majors in certain fields in STEM are going to be women. That is where it’s moving to in the social sciences. At some point, we either must reverse those gender dynamics, or the dynamics within firms just have to catch up. Unfortunately, a lot of them are led by leadership that supports “bro culture.” Some of them are conservative; they don’t really like hiring immigrants.
As long as you have these obstacles to a real culture of acceptance of diversity, then you’re going to continue to see people who try to stick their toe in the water, and then say, “No, this is not for me. I’m going to take my sophisticated computer skills, and I’m going to go work for a bank, or a law firm, or an all-female startup,” or something like that. That’s kind of where we see the trajectories moving.
Building Inclusive Futures in STEM
I do have hope for the future. There are ways that we could change our pedagogy at the college level to somewhat prepare people of color and women for what they’re going to face and give them some more information. I also think we could prepare people more in the sense that we could have more gender-integrated and culturally-integrated activities in STEM education. I think that’s predominantly where we need to go right now.
We have all these affinity groups where women engineers go to be women engineers and isolate themselves from everybody else which might make them feel really good and help them persist in the field, but it doesn’t teach men how to work in teams with women, and that’s where the education needs to be.
It’s not, “How can we make people feel good when they’re being alienated in a firm?”
It’s how to stop alienation to begin with.
What structural or cultural factors prevent women from rising to leadership positions, even in organizations that claim to support gender diversity? Is this a case of the “motherhood penalty,” or are there more factors at play?
I definitely think there is a motherhood penalty that most jobs, especially at high levels of leadership, all of a sudden expect you to work maybe 50 or 60 hours a week, and that’s just unreasonable.
When we create leadership positions that are simply impossible to do while having any life outside of work, then we’re, by definition, excluding all involved parents.
Now, I don’t want to say that there are more involved women than there are involved men, but we all know that women bear the brunt of the unasked-for responsibility for children. It’s not necessarily they chose to do this, but they’re more likely to end up with responsibility for kids than men are.
We have inherited this kind of workaholic culture in which devotion to the firm is seen as the prerequisite for being a leader. As you know, they don’t do that in Europe and other countries. They expect good leaders to actually have lives outside the firm because then they’re better leaders.
If you’ve isolated yourself from everybody else’s life and everybody else’s concerns, how can you really position yourself in the marketplace? If you haven’t lived the life that the majority of your workers have lived, you can’t really lead them. You don’t really know much about what pressures are on them, and I do think that this is something the US created by having lax labor laws around work hours.
Biases Hold Back Leadership Potential
I also think that there are other structures in play that have nothing to do with kids. There are also these cognitive biases that really affect how managers and supervisors see their female employees.
I always go back to my friend Emilio Castilla at MIT, who was trying to look at how managers turn evaluations into rewards. Everybody gets evaluated at work. That’s not the issue. We’ve tried really hard to get these non-biased evaluation systems where we eradicate gender and racial bias, and how we see and observe the things that people are doing at work.
Some organizations have been very successful at this. Others have not even tried, so they haven’t really conquered that problem.
But many of them have.
Emilio went back and said, “What happens when you see an evaluation?”
How does that get translated into rewards, such as a pay increase or a promotion?
Reimagining Evaluations for Fairer Outcomes
What he showed is that women could get and did get equivalent ratings from their managers and supervisors.
On a scale of 1-10, if they were, for example, all 8s or something like that.
But when the 8 was a man, he was much more likely to get a raise or a promotion than if the 8 was a woman.
The problem was in turning the evaluations into actual organizational rewards. This is frequently a problem for people of color and for women—they’re seen as very good workers, but they’re not imagined as leaders in the next phase. They’re not imagined as worthy of more money than they’re making right now. These are the cognitive biases that we see throughout life. They become ingrained in our thinking. It’s these deep-rooted cognitive biases about what race and gender actually mean.
“She’s a great performer at her current stage, but I can’t imagine her being promoted and being a leader at the next stage. Whereas I can see that in a young man or even a middle-aged man. I can see them in that next stage. But I can’t see that woman. I don’t have that visual image, so I can’t see that Hispanic man or that black man in that next stage with even more authority and decision-making over the organization.” I think that’s where the problem lies.
Tackling Biases in Leadership Perception
If you can at least get rid of the cognitive bias and evaluation you’ve conquered problem number one, but you haven’t eliminated the issue. The other part of the issue is imagining these people as having more authority and more autonomy.
It sometimes requires more effort to display interest and enthusiasm about moving forward, but if you display too much interest or enthusiasm as a person of color or as a woman, then it’s like you’re being uppity and weird.
It’s like a no-win situation where the natural attributes that people see when they look at your face are held against you rather than seeing you as, “Oh, you fit this next phase. You fit the CEO role. You fit the VP of Development.”
In your view, is it important to begin efforts to combat cognitive biases before individuals enter the workforce, such as through university programs?
Yes, which is why I’m so big on this kind of training aspect where you integrate all of your training opportunities so that people can see and appreciate the talents and gifts that everybody brings to the table right from the get-go.
I’m a big fan of what’s called “second looks,” and it’s going to be interesting to see what we are able and allowed to do now that so many DEI initiatives are being crashed and burned.
But one of the things that’s great about research like Professor Castillo’s is that it does provide a remedy. Everyone who gets an 8 should be looked at. Maybe they should be looked at without their gender on their profile. Here’s candidate A. Here’s candidate B. Maybe there are five or six people who are all at the same level, and we can look at the initial raise given to these people and ask why one person’s getting more. Those second looks are really important to uncover these kinds of biases, and so my hope is that organizations would build that into their own introspection and self-analysis. Not just “What are the performance evaluations and how are we analyzing performance?” but “What do we do with those performance evaluations? How are they translated into our reward structure?”
The University Example
I work at a university where we have a lot of teaching awards, and it is very opaque how people get a teaching award. It turns out it doesn’t have very much to do with actually looking at the content of courses and evaluations that people get. You wait until somebody nominates you.
Well, that’s a crazy system, so I’m criticizing my own university because all universities do the same thing, but everyone who gets really great evaluations should be flagged as well.
But that’s not what they do.
They wait until you have a colleague who says, “Oh, this person is so great. I should nominate them for an award.”
It means you have to be connected enough to have a colleague who will nominate you, write you a great letter, and put in all these materials, and that colleague has to be someone who’s well respected by the judging committee.
All of a sudden, you’re introducing all these other characters whose cognitive biases can filter in, whereas if you just said, “Hey, we should look at everybody who doesn’t give all As but has great scores on their student evaluations. We should look at them and decide if any of these people deserve teaching work.”
But that’s not how we do it. We work through all these social channels that provide avenues for all these biases to come in.
So, I do think that Castillo is giving us a sense of what we could do about the problem.
Looking Ahead: Preparing for Workplace Change
In this insightful Q&A with Dr. Glass, we explore the complexities of cognitive biases and their impact on the workplace, offering practical strategies for HR leaders aiming to create more inclusive environments. But that’s not all—stay tuned for Part 2, where Dr. Glass dives into how HR can navigate the challenges of return-to-office (RTO) mandates while ensuring equitable decisions for working parents. Additionally, she highlights key emerging issues in work-family dynamics and gender stratification that HR professionals should be aware of as they plan for the future. Don’t miss these essential insights!
