she got the job.
Why This Difference in Perceptions?
As we’ve already shown, women’s continuing lack of political and eco-
nomic power ensures that much of the control over their lives does in
fact remain in other hands. This basic reality of life—the unequal bal-
ance of power between men and women—determines adult perceptions
about who is in control and influences the developing beliefs of chil-
dren. Keen observers, children study the different ways in which men
and women act, the different roles they play in society, and the different
preferences and abilities they display. A central part of their develop-
ment involves arranging this information into an organized understand-
ing of what constitutes maleness and femaleness—a mental catalogue
of the physical attributes, tastes, interests, abilities, and modes of behav-
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ior that characterize the different sexes. Psychologists call this under-
standing a “gender schema.”11
Research has shown that children begin formulating their gender
schemas at a very young age.12 By around the age of two, children can
distinguish the gender of adults. They also learn early that boys and
girls play with different types of toys, play in different ways, and wear
different clothing. Children learn that adult men and women hold dif-
ferent types of jobs and learn to categorize the “gender” of household
objects (such as ironing boards and tool boxes). By the age of six, psy-
chologists believe, “children are experts at gender schemas,”13 able to
recognize and understand the multiple gender cues all around them.
Observing that much of the world is controlled by men, children
incorporate this information into their gender schemas and conclude
that this is not merely the way things are, but the way things should
be. Often, despite parents’ best efforts to the contrary, the patterns of
family life bolster this point of view. At the dinner table, men often
remain seated and women serve, suggesting that men are the “bosses”
and women are the “workers” in the household—men are in control
and women do their bidding. When both parents are in the car, men
drive more than women, suggesting that men control the family’s move-
ments and safety. Men rarely change their names at marriage but many
women do, and children are usually given the father’s rather than the
mother’s surname, indicating that men determine a family’s name and
by extension its collective identity.
Even families that consciously strive for gender equality can send
unintended messages to their children about control issues. Linda, for
example, has always made considerably more money than her husband,
who is a university administrator. Nevertheless, when the two of them
went out together, or when they went out as a family with their young
daughter, Linda rarely carried cash and deferred to her husband to pay
for whatever they needed. Once, when their daughter was three, Linda
stopped in a drugstore for something and the child saw a stuffed animal
she wanted. “Do you have enough money to buy that for me, Mommy?”
she asked. “Do girls have money, or is it just boys that have money?”
Linda was horrified. Their family habits had unwittingly communicated
to their daughter that men control money, not women. She and her
husband now make sure that their daughter sees Linda paying for things
frequently; they also bought their daughter a piggy bank so that she can
have money of her own.
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Similarly, in Sara’s household, her husband was the person who usu-
ally fixed things when they broke—screen doors, electronic equipment,
toilets, toys. He’d recharge exhausted batteries, replace light bulbs when
they burned out, and pound down nails that popped up through the
floorboards of their front porch. Although Sara is perfectly capable of
doing most of these things, her husband enjoyed taking care of them
and she got into the habit of leaving them to him. Then, when their
older son was four, he broke a toy when his father wasn’t around. Sara
told him to bring it to her and she’d see what she could do. “No,” said
her son. “Daddy will fix it. Daddy knows how to fix things.” Sara real-
ized that she and her husband had been teaching their son lessons about
the limits of female competence. They had also been teaching him that
men can control the physical world and the proper functioning of
objects in ways that women cannot. (Sara now fixes toys, recharges
batteries, and changes a lot more light bulbs.)
Incorporating lessons like these into their gender schemas, children
adapt their behavior accordingly. Boys develop a belief that they are or
should be in control and act on this understanding, seeking out ways
to get the things they want and assert their needs. Girls learn that they
will not control their own lives and learn not to behave as if they do.
This “learning,” a response to strong social pressures, is often sub-
conscious.14
Children learn about control issues in other ways as well. Research
has shown that many parents encourage boys to be more independent
than girls, for example.15 One study even found that parents perceive
their boy and girl babies differently in the hospital (within the first 24
hours of their birth) even though research can discover no differences
in objective measures. Both parents tend to see boy babies as more alert,
stronger, and more coordinated than girls, whom they perceive to be
smaller and more fragile.16 A child who is perceived to be stronger
would also presumably seem more capable, whereas a child who is
perceived to be more fragile would seem more in need of care and
therefore more dependent. One of the ways in which parents transmit
these skewed perceptions is through the types of chores they assign to
their male and female children. In an extensive summary of research
on children’s household chores, the developmental psychologist
Jacqueline Goodnow observed that boys are typically given more inde-
pendent tasks, such as work that must be done on their own outdoors
(mowing the lawn, shoveling snow) while girls tend to be assigned in-
door tasks that must be supervised and therefore controlled by others
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C H A P T E R 1
(helping to prepare food, caring for younger children).17 Believing that
girls are more vulnerable than boys, many parents are more protective
of their daughters as well, controlling their movements and restricting
their activities, but allowing their sons more freedom. Some psycholo-
gists speculate that it may also be easier for mothers to help their sons
separate from them, forge their own identities, and become indepen-
dent during adolescence, but harder for them to let their daughters go.18
These types of behavior teach boys that they can and should take con-
trol of their lives; girls become accustomed to having their fate directed
by others.
The journalist Peggy Orenstein, in her book Schoolgirls: Young
Women, Self-Esteem, and the Confidence Gap, describes observing a sixth-grade classroom in which the teacher asked her students to think about
how their lives would be different if they’d been born the opposite gen-
der. With a lot of giggling, the students compiled two lists. Items on
the boys’ list included: “I’d have to help my mom cook”; “I’d have to
stand around at recess instead of getting to play basketball”; “I’d worry
about getting pregnant.” Examples from the girls’ list included: “I could
stay out later”; “I’d get to play more sports”; “I wouldn’t care how I look
or if my clothes matched.” As Orenstein observes, “Almost all of the
boys’ observations about gender swapping involve disparaging ‘have
to’s,’ whereas the girls seem wistful with longing. By sixth grade, it is
clear that both girls and boys have learned to equate maleness with
opportunity and femininity with constraint.”19
We heard many stories of how parents communicate this difference
to their children. Martha, the career counselor, described a conversation
she had with her husband about “how his father had taken the boys
out and . . . taught them how to tip—basically, taught them how to slip
the maıˆtre d’ money for good tables or give some money to the guys
who’d had a comparable experience, she said, in which a parent or
other authority figure took her out and showed her, as Martha put it,
“how to circumvent the system” to get what she wanted. Where Mar-
tha’s husband and his brothers were taught that they could change
many situations to suit their needs, girls are taught a different lesson,
she believes: “I think we teach little girls to be deeply invested exteri-
orly—that everybody’s a stakeholder, that everybody gets to have an
opinion about them. . . . I think we raise men to let go of that, and . . .
be much more inwardly functioned—‘What do you think? Be a man
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about it.’ . . . We still, in some ways—in many ways—train women to
be that to whom things are provided.”
Learning very early that “everybody gets to have an opinion about
them,” girls learn to abide by this external social authority, which de-
crees not only what is permissible behavior for them, but what is not.
(We look at the ways in which women can be punished for defying this
authority in chapter 4.) They may also learn that this external authority
will control decisions about their worth or value—and that these are
decisions they must accept rather than question or try to change.
Ellen, the senior partner at a law firm, remembers:
The very first job I had, I think, was baby-sitting. I was in maybe the
sixth or seventh grade. The people who I was going to be baby-sitting
for asked me how much money I wanted for baby-sitting and I had
no idea so I got off the phone and asked my mother what I should
be paid. She said, “Tell them to pay you whatever they are comfort-
able with.” I think I got 35 cents an hour. That was my first lesson in
salary negotiation.
In this brief transaction, Ellen learned that it was not appropriate for
her to consider what she wanted or needed, and it was not okay for her
to ask for what she felt her time and work were worth. She learned instead
that she should accept what she was given and be happy with that.
Research in organizational behavior sheds a bright light on the im-
pact this type of experience can have on women. In a study involving
salary negotiations for a job (with experienced recruiters playing the
employers and business students playing the job candidates), professor
of management Lisa Barron carried out detailed post-negotiation inter-
views with the participants to understand their thinking. She found two
distinct groups in terms of how the participants thought their “worth”
should be determined. The first group assumed that they determined
their own worth and that it was up to them to make sure the company
paid them what they were worth. The second group felt that their worth
was determined by what the company would pay them. In a striking
disparity, 85 percent of the male participants but only 17 percent of
the women in the study fell into the first group. In direct contrast, only
15 percent of the men but 83 percent of the women fell into the second
group, the group that believed their worth was determined by others.20
Clearly, the perspective held by most of the men reveals their confi-
dence in their own talents as well as their strong belief that it is their
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responsibility to make sure that they get what they deserve (they believe
that they can exert some control over what they are paid). The perspec-
tive held by most of the women reveals their expectation that others
will decide what they are worth and determine what they are offered
(they assume they have no control over what they are paid). The impli-
cations for asking for what you want are obvious. If a woman believes
that forces outside herself will decide what to give her based on her
performance and value, the possibility that she can ask may not even
occur to her.
Christine, a 30-year-old investment banker from Columbus, Ohio,
noticed after six months at her first job that she was doing very well,
therefore surprised a few months later when the man was promoted
before she was. Mystified, she asked her supervisor why someone whose
performance was inferior had been promoted sooner. The answer
taught her what she felt was a crucial lesson: The man had spoken up
and asked for the promotion, while she had waited for her good work
to be noticed and rewarded. Even though by all objective criteria she
probably deserved the promotion more (and would do better work for
the company in the higher-level job), he was promoted because he
asked—and she wasn’t because she didn’t ask. Her expectation, she
reported, was, “I’m doing my job, I’m working hard, so they should
recognize that and move me along.” Because she assumed that only her
supervisors could exercise control over the progress of her career, she
failed to realize that an opportunity for constructive action was passing
her by.
Liz, 45, a senior analyst at an influential government agency, had
always been one of the hardest-working people in her department. For
several years, she had been producing high-visibility work and powerful
policy makers frequently asked for her by name to brief them. Nonethe-
less, she found herself waiting and waiting for a promotion she believed
she deserved, but never asked for. Eventually, she grew tired of waiting
and put out feelers for another job. She was quickly offered a position
in which she would net $10,000 more per year than she was currently
grossing. Before
she quit, she mentioned the situation to her father. He
insisted that she tell her current boss about the other offer first. Her
boss immediately gave her the promotion she had wanted and a sub-
stantial raise. Liz’s mistake had been in believing that a promotion was
something her boss controlled and would give her as soon as he decided
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she’d earned it—not something over which she could exert any influ-
ence. She didn’t understand that what she wanted was something for
which she could ask.
Why Can’t Life Be a Meritocracy?
Research suggests that Christine and Liz are not alone. The linguist
Deborah Tannen, in her book Talking from 9 to 5: Women and Men in
the Workplace: Language, Sex, and Power, has shown that women are
much more likely than men to think that simply working hard and
doing a good job will earn them success and advancement.21 This, too,
relates to women’s perception that external forces control their lives.
They expect that these forces will hand out rewards and opportunities
in a reasonable way and that it’s reasonable for hard work and good
work to be recognized. They expect life to be fair, and they often don’t
realize that it’s up to them to make sure that it is. Of course, the belief
that merit will be rewarded is fundamental to the American Dream—
in this country if we’re talented and work hard, we believe that recogni-
tion and rewards will follow. Although both men and women are raised
with this idea, evidence suggests that women hold tighter to the convic-
tion that hard work alone is—or should be—sufficient.
Even enormously accomplished and successful women often retain
a strong wish for the rewards of their success to be dispensed by others.
Louise, 37, a high-ranking power company executive, routinely negoti-
ates deals worth millions of dollars. But when it comes to her own
compensation, she would rather be given what she deserves and spared
the necessity of asking for it. In a well-managed company, she believes,
senior management should recognize everyone’s individual contribu-
tions and give them what they’re worth. “They ought to just deal with
those inequities,” she said. “And it shouldn’t be always on the employee
to ask.”
And even though Christine learned early that she needs to promote