for themselves.18
Another study Linda conducted with Hannah Riley and Kathleen
McGinn in 2000 and 2001 extends this finding to negotiation behav-
ior.19 For this study, they recruited approximately 200 students from
universities in the Boston area to negotiate face-to-face over a single
issue. They assigned half the students to represent a fictional retail store
negotiating with a web-design company to create a web page for its
business. The rest of the students were told that they represented either
the owner of the web-design company itself or the undergraduate busi-
ness and information-systems student who would actually design the
page. The negotiation concerned the hourly wage the retail store would
pay for the web design. The goal was to observe the differences between
how men and women negotiated for another person (when they were
playing the owner of the web-design firm negotiating on behalf of the
student) compared to how they negotiated for themselves (when they
were playing the role of the student designer).
They found that women’s goals for the negotiation were 14 percent
higher when they were representing another person than when they
were representing themselves. Women also indicated that they would
make first offers that were 23 percent higher when they were represent-
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ing someone else than they would make when representing themselves.
The opposite was true for men—men set 10 percent higher goals for
themselves than for others.
Our female interview subjects repeatedly confirmed the truth of these
findings, telling us without prompting (we asked no direct question
about this issue) how much more comfortable they feel asking for things
on behalf of other people. Geri, the director of the day care center and
preschool, said she feels more successful in her professional life than in
her personal life, because in her professional capacity, “it’s more for a
cause and not for myself. . . . I’m not asking for myself.” Gillian, the
hospital rehabilitation counselor, said of her struggle to negotiate a good
new work contract for herself, “I am a fierce tigress for others and a
lamb for myself. To do that for myself is a foreign thing. I can do it for
my children, my patients, for others, but not for myself.”
Role Liberation
Women also find some freedom from gender-role constraints when the
professional roles in which they serve are themselves a source of power.
That is, they feel free to act assertively when their professional role, by
its very nature, requires such behavior. Elaine, the district court judge,
believes that female lawyers and judges, for example, can comfortably
exercise their authority in the courtroom because the highly structured
environment of the courtroom provides for what she calls “aggression
in role.” By this she means that when a woman performs one of the
necessary roles in a courtroom, such as prosecutor, defense attorney,
or judge, rather than being perceived as violating female gender norms,
she is seen as simply abiding by the requirements of her role. The court-
room, for women, said Elaine, “is structured and comfortable and there
are rules that you can follow.” But when a woman lawyer meets to
negotiate with opposing attorneys outside the courtroom, or a woman
judge must mediate such an encounter, her situation becomes much
harder. “You get into the back room with the other lawyer, and you
start talking about what your case deserves and what they want, and
you’re dealing with something without a safety net,” she said. Similarly,
For new judges, both male and female, the mediation is the most
difficult thing for you to do. It’s one thing to come into court with a
robe and a stature and to say, you know, ‘I rule this.’ That’s not easy
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to do at the beginning, but you get up and get the hang of it after a
while. But to go into the back room . . . a much more informal setting,
to mediate, when you have none of the accoutrements of power, is a
much more difficult kind of thing. . . . Power lines are not clear; the
rules are not clear.
Although Elaine acknowledges that this is difficult for everyone at
the outset, she believes that it’s harder for women than for men. Part of
the everyday gender role of being male, she said, involves the expecta-
tion that you will act aggressively and exercise personal power. “Young
male lawyers can pass, and they know they can,” she said, “in the sense
that . . . you can walk into a negotiation, you can assume that your
opponent will accord you a certain status. As a woman, I didn’t feel that
right out of the box at all.” Tellingly, despite her professional success,
Elaine still feels this lack of stature and authority outside the courtroom,
where she is not automatically perceived as entitled to exercise personal
power. “For something that’s personal . . . I do feel more naked. I don’t
have the stature to clothe me. . . . It’s almost as if the professional status is like a costume that you put on.”
In another field altogether, Heather, the pastor, told a story about
negotiating with her city’s high school administration because she felt
that her foster daughter, a troubled teenager, had been unfairly sus-
pended. First Heather and her husband spoke informally to the high
school administrator, with little success. Then they formally appealed
the suspension. This required meeting with the high school principal,
the administrator, and the two teachers involved. Wanting to make the
strongest possible case for her foster daughter, Heather bought herself
a pastoral collar of the type used by Protestant ministers and wore it
with a dark suit to the meeting. At one point, the principal said to
her, “Well, now, Heather, your concerns . . .” and Heather immediately
interrupted him. “You may address me as Reverend Kirk-Davidoff,” she
said. Her clear feeling, she explained, was that her point of view and
her personal power would be greater if she were perceived to be acting
not just as a woman and a parent but within her role as a pastor (hence
her use of the collar and her professional title)—a role that by its very
nature involves advocating for the welfare of others.
A study by the linguist Elizabeth Kuhn sheds revealing light on the
ways in which women use their roles to exercise power almost by proxy.
Kuhn’s study looked at how college professors establish their authority
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in class. At the beginning of a semester, she found, male professors
tended to make direct statements that unequivocally asserted their per-
sonal authority, such as “I have two midterms and a final, and I added
this first midterm rather early to get you going on the reading.” The
male professors conveyed that they were in charge and felt comfortable
giving directions to their students—and expected them to respond and
obey. Female professors, in
contrast, used much more indirect speech
patterns such as “There are two papers . . . . Um, there is going to be a
midterm and a final. Okay?”20 Rather than asserting their authority, the
women let their role and the situation—this is a class, and a class im-
plies a certain structure of obligations on its participants—impose re-
quirements on the students.
Changing the Context
It’s essential to remember, however, that the restraints placed on
women are “socially constructed.” They aren’t physical principles like
the law of gravity or mathematical principles like the laws of addition
and subtraction, which can’t be altered. They are products of our cul-
ture and our ideas about the roles that men and women should play.
They can be loosened and changed completely if we want them to change.
Not only can ideas about what is right and wrong or appropriate or
inappropriate be changed, the ways in which people behave can be
changed as well. This is because one of the most widespread findings
in psychology is called the “fundamental attribution error.”21 The funda-
mental attribution error describes the almost universal human tendency
to believe that people’s behavior is produced by innate and stable per-
sonality characteristics. Research has conclusively demonstrated, how-
ever, that this is not the case. People’s behavior and their beliefs often
change radically when their circumstances change.
Under terrible conditions, people will do things they never thought
they could do (such as eating human flesh to survive). Under conditions
in which the rules of their culture have changed, making behavior per-
missible that was previously deemed criminal or antisocial, once peace-
able and ordinary-seeming people will commit terrible atrocities (such
as murdering their neighbors during the war in Bosnia or persecuting
and mass-slaughtering Jews under the Third Reich). People also do re-
markable positive things under certain circumstances. The Austrian in-
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dustrialist Oskar Schindler failed to achieve much professional success
before World War II and accomplished very little afterwards. He was a
poor businessman, a womanizer, and, according to his wife, lazy and
self-indulgent. In a 1973 interview, she said that he’d “done nothing
astounding before the war, and had been unexceptional since.” Yet dur-
ing the war he mustered the courage and resourcefulness to save the
lives of 1,100 Jews who would otherwise have been murdered by the
Nazis. He did this at considerable personal risk and expense, putting
his own life in danger and leaving himself, at the end of the war, penni-
less. Why? His wife says it was because he was fortunate “during that
short fierce era” to be surrounded by people “who summoned forth his
deeper talents.”22 Schindler had the capacity for heroic behavior, for
behavior far more admirable than the spendthrift and irresponsible be-
havior that characterized much of his life, but it took the right circum-
stances, the right context, to bring out those qualities in him.
As Schindler’s story shows, people’s behavior depends to an enor-
mous extent on their environment—not just the environment in which
they were raised but the social context in which they live and work
every day. And this context can be changed.
Looking through Female Eyes
It’s not hard to understand how individual women will benefit from
cultural changes that make it easier for them to pursue their professional
ambitions as far as they can go. We’ve also talked about the damage we
do to ourselves as a society by treating half of our population differently
and undervaluing their contributions to our shared future. But there’s
another reason why it’s important to make sure that women have the
same access as men to leadership roles in our society: Because when
women take on those roles, they often bring a fresh approach to situa-
tions that have persisted for years. From their particular vantage as
women, they question received wisdom, look at familiar ideas from new
angles, and sometimes ask if there’s not a better way to do things.
Here are a few examples. Until recently, researchers believed that
everyone responded in the same way to stress. The presence of danger,
they thought, triggered a physiological reaction that motivated a person
to either fight the source of danger or flee. This was dubbed the “fight
or flight” response, and for years scientists assumed that it was essential
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to our survival as a species. No one thought to question this view when
only men ran their own labs and dictated research directions and strate-
gies. But once women began directing their own research, two female
scientists, Shelley Taylor and Laura Klein, noticed that their female and
male colleagues behaved differently in challenging situations: “There
was this joke that when the women who worked in the lab were
stressed, they came in, cleaned the lab, had coffee and bonded. . . .
When the men were stressed, they holed up somewhere on their own.”23
When Taylor and Klein realized that the vast majority (a full 90 percent)
of all stress research had looked exclusively at males, they decided to
investigate whether or not females actually respond to stress in the same
ways that men do.
do experience the “fight or flight” response when they’re threatened,
differences in women’s bodies mute the impact of that response. Here’s
what happens: In situations of extreme stress, the hormone oxytocin
is released into the bloodstreams of both men and women. Oxytocin
produces a calming effect and promotes caretaking and social-bonding
behaviors—but testosterone reduces the effects of oxytocin. Since men
have large quantities of testosterone in their systems (especially when
stressed), the release of oxytocin into their systems has little impact
on their “fight or flight” response. Women have much lower levels of
testosterone than men do and much higher levels of estrogen, which
magnifies the effects of oxytocin. As a result, in women the release of
oxytocin into their bloodstreams can block the “fight or flight” response
and prompt them instead to reach out for social support. This finding
led Taylor and Klein to dub the female version of the stress response
“tend and befriend.”24
Researchers have only begun to explore the full implications of this
difference between men and women. The “tend and befriend” response
may help explain why women outlive men, for example, because the
calming effect of oxytocin may “reduce women’s vulnerability to a broad
array of stress-related disorders” such as heart disease, substance abuse,
violence, suicide, and stress-related accidents and injuries.25 Research
has also shown that physical contact such as hugging releases oxyto-
cin—meaning that women’s impulse to look for social supp
ort when
they’re under stress may be a very healthy adaptive strategy. This is
more than merely interesting. It also suggests ways in which a lot of
isolated men who “hole up” when things get tough might try to change
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how they respond to stress—improving their health and maybe even
helping them live longer.
Discoveries about the life-threatening risks of hormone replacement
therapy, one of the most widely prescribed treatment programs in
America, provide another vivid illustration of what can happen when
women gain better access to positions of power. When Dr. Bernadine
Healey was appointed head of the National Institutes of Health by Presi-
dent George H. W. Bush in 1991, women were routinely excluded from
clinical studies of diseases that afflict both men and women. The think-
ing among researchers was that women’s responses often differed from
men’s, clouding their results and confusing them. It didn’t occur to
them that they should be studying the different ways in which women’s
bodies responded to disease or to disease therapy. They wanted to con-
trol their lab results, and including women made that more difficult. In
addition, at the time many devastating health problems that afflict
women alone had not been systematically studied, and numerous rou-
tine treatments for women’s health problems had never been submitted
to rigorous clinical trials. No one really knew whether many of these
treatments were indeed beneficial rather than ineffective or—worse
yet—damaging. Dr. Healey, approaching the condition of our national
health from a woman’s perspective, found herself questioning these
practices. And with no logical or persuasive answers forthcoming, she
asked for some changes.
Against strong opposition from the medical research establishment,
Dr. Healey created the Women’s Health Initiative to study “the causes,
prevention, and treatment of diseases that affect women.”26 Not only
must women now be included in any American research that studies
conditions affecting both men and women, but within a decade of estab-
lishing the Women’s Health Initiative, the N.I.H. announced that a cer-
tain type of hormone replacement therapy, which had become a com-
monplace treatment for menopausal women, increases a woman’s risk