Jobbing Between Two Lives

cadWhen the Greek goddess Hera wanted to know who enjoys sex more, men or women, she had the good sense to ask Tiresias, who had lived as both. (She did not, however, have the good sense to accept Tiresias’s answer).

When sociologist Kristen Schilt wanted to know why men and women succeed differently in the workplace, she had the good sense to ask workers who have lived as both. I’ve read only a fraction of Schilt’s book, but I learned a little about it from Jessica Nordell’s thoughtful writeup in the New Republic. The upshot seems to be that when women become men, they feel that they’re taken more seriously, whereas when men become women, they feel the opposite.

As Nordell points out, this really is a cool idea because a change in gender doesn’t change your skills or education, so when we track people’s experiences before and after their crossings, we’re holding a lot of relevant variables constant.

On the other hand, as Nordell also points out, there’s at least one important variable that’s not being held constant, and that’s testosterone level. When you go from female to male, you acquire a lot of testosterone; when you go from male to female you give up a lot. That opens up a lot of possibilities. Maybe testosterone makes you more effective at work, which leads to better treatment. Or maybe the treatment doesn’t change at all, but your testosterone level leads you to perceive it differently. (Likewise, of course, for a variety of other hormones.)

In academics, for example — as, I suspect, in a lot of other fields as well — a big part of the job consists of standing up to people (colleagues, seminar participants, journal editors) who are eager to explain, in vivid detail, everything that’s wrong with your work. Some people are energized by abusive critiques, while others are discouraged by them. I wouldn’t be entirely surprised to learn that men and women are disproportionately distributed across those categories. And if that’s true, I wouldn’t be entirely surprised to learn that hormones have something to do with it.

Moreover, I don’t think we can expect Schilt’s methods to tell the whole story about wage differences, partly because the whole story almost surely involves childbearing, and most of these gender switches take place after the prime childbearing years.

So I’m pretty skeptical about what we can learn from this sort of anecdotal evidence. On the other hand, I think it would be foolish to ignore it completely. Schilt’s subjects, after all, do have a kind of front-line experience that nobody else has. I hope and expect that she’ll get a better hearing than Hera gave Tiresias.

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26 Responses to “Jobbing Between Two Lives”


  1. 1 1 Advo

    Testosterone increases aggressiveness and confidence. If you act confidently/dominant, you get better treatment.
    I think this perception of dominance is also what cause the height/income correlation.

    (Body height has a substantial influence on income – 789 dollars/inch p.a.)

    http://edition.cnn.com/2007/US/Careers/02/02/cb.tall.people/

    An interesting but totally unrelated factoid about testosterone in men is that low testosterone (below approx. 300 ng/dl) can cause drastic declines in mental performance (on the order of -30 IQ points). The effects on work performance, particularly in a new setting, are substantial. This probably goes some way towards explaining why it’s so difficult for men in their 50s to find a new job, as quite a few of them are affected by this.

  2. 2 2 Bennett Haselton

    The write-up doesn’t mention one thing: transmen and transwomen *look* quite different from their biologically-born counterparts, which may affect discrimination.

    Women sometimes get taken less seriously because of their gender, but they also get a certain amount of free help from men who think they’re attractive. I tend to think transwomen are less attractive than biologically-born women, and if lots of other men think the same thing, then transwomen are going to get less of the free-help benefits. Meanwhile, they’re probably going to face more prejudicial discrimination, because the kind of people who don’t take women seriously, are even less likely to take transwomen seriously (if they can tell that they’re trans).

  3. 3 3 Harold

    Some of the information suggests otherwise -““I used to be considered aggressive,” said one subject. “Now I’m considered ‘take charge.’ ”

    If that is typical, then aggressive behaviour from women is seen negatively, whereas similar behaviour from men is viewed positively. Advo says if you act confidently/dominant you get treated better. This experience suggest that is more true for men.

    “But while bias has been experimentally demonstrated, it’s hard to study in the real world”
    Since these findings support experimental data, it seems to be difficult to avoid the obvious conclusion: women are treated differently in the workplace which means that it is generally more difficult for them to advance even with the same competence as men.

    Of course this is not the whole story since childbearing plays a part, and there are likely to be different competencies as well.

    Women usually choose to take on more of the caring role, or perhaps it is fairer to say that men will not take on this role. Far more women take time off after birth to look after young children. We as a society need someone to do this or we will not have children. As it stands, women are required to bear most of the cost career-wise. If women also start refusing to take on this role in favor of career, this will result in more women choosing not to have children, or fewer children, and we risk falling populations. Children are an externality that is not being paid for, and women are bearing the costs as well as the children.

  4. 4 4 Andy

    I am not too sure how much you can say about gender and success from how these subjects say they feel, to me career success surely isn’t measured in how I get along with other people at work (although it probably plays a role in it). Wouldn’t it be better to measure something like pay increase or rate of promotion before and after?

  5. 5 5 Steve Landsburg

    Andy:

    Wouldn’t it be better to measure something like pay increase or rate of promotion before and after?

    That depends on what question you’re trying to answer. If you want to know whether sex affects wages, this is a great strategy (and somebody ought to do it). If you already believe that sex affects wages and you want to understand the details of why and how, then these subjective reports might be the best you can do.

  6. 6 6 iceman
  7. 7 7 darf ferrara

    FWIW, MacArthur award winning neuroendocrinologist Robert Sapolsky has called testosterone “totally overrated” as an explanation for many behaviours attributed to it. You’d have to listen to his lectures (available on itunesu) to get a more nuanced view of what that means, but he did convince me to look skeptically at explanations derived from “the testosterone did it”.

  8. 8 8 Ken

    Harold,

    aggressive behaviour from women is seen negatively

    Your quote does not reveal how other people view aggressive behavior, rather it reveals how men and women perceive the same thing differently. During the whole “bossy” thing, it was noted that boys were called bossy just as often as girls. Boys didn’t care about being called bossy. Girls did. In other words, given the same exact choice with the same exact consequences, men and women systematically make different choices because … wait for it … men and women are different.

    Don’t confuse your perception of reality with reality itself.

  9. 9 9 Johnson85

    It seems unlikely this will be very helpful information. I’m guessing the women turned men were much more passable than the men turned women.

    And for those subjects equally passable (or not), I’m guessing the study would be more helpful in showing different hostilities towards women turned men versus men turned women than it would be to show different attitudes towards men versus women in the work place.

  10. 10 10 Harold

    #8 Ken. You are right that the report of how other people respond to certain behaviours is second hand, but it is reports from the same person. It could be due to changes in that individual, or it could be due to others treating them differently. Some of the other instances are less subjective, such as the person whose work was considered much better than his sister’s who used to work there -his sister of course being himself as a woman. It is possible that his work improved when he changed gender, or it is possible that his work was only seen as better. When you put it together with experimental studies and some things that are obvious – such as the number of times teh appearance and wardrobe of women politicians are mentioned in the media compared to male politicians – it seems to be seeking out an unlikely conclusion that men and women are treated the same for the same things.

    I am not sure what data you refer to about the bossy thing. I can find several examples of people doing google or google trend searches, which is not very useful. A slightly more sophisticated attempt by a linguist showed females were twice as likely to be called bossy *in print*. http://linguisticpulse.com/2014/03/10/some-data-to-support-the-gendered-nature-of-bossy/

    This supports the bossy campaign. However, what is written does not necessarily reflect actual use among children, parents and teachers. I would be interested to see the research on which you base your claim that boys were called bossy as much as girls.

  11. 11 11 Harold

    #6. Iceman
    They say that the gap could be not bias, but because women are judged on exactly the same standards as men. But what if those standards are sexist?
    “At successful firms, wages rise steeply and schedules are demanding. Future bosses are expected to have worked in several departments and countries. Professional service firms have an up-or-out system, which rewards the most dedicated with lucrative partnerships. The reason for the income gap may thus be the opposite of prejudice. It is that women are judged by exactly the same standards as men.”

    We could say “at successful firms future bosses are expected to have a penis. The reason for the income gap is the opposite of prejudice – women are judged by exactly the same standards as men.”

    Unless you can prove that these expectations are actually necessary for success, not merely selected as those that men are good at, you cannot rule out prejudice.

    Fatherhood does not have the same costs for men, it is noted. If these firms want to have a supply of future bosses they will need children, and maybe the men will have to start paying some of these costs.

  12. 12 12 iceman

    Harold — You’re trying too hard. It would seem a fair reading that “exactly the same standards” is intended as “not sexist”, since sexism is defined as a view of inferiority i.e. different expectations. And standards like hours worked and career interruptions seem more related to actual productivity than the number of appendages. You may still wish to engineer a more ‘equitable’ distribution of parenting roles (i.e. overriding the decisions couples are free to make already); just be sure as a good economist to factor in the non-pecuniary costs of missing those golden moments. Empty promises that people can ‘have it all’ do not seem terribly compassionate.

    I agree with #9 that while a clever idea, the subjects of this study may not be representative of the genpop for many reasons.

  13. 13 13 Ken Arromdee

    Another possibility is that statistically, women are more likely to be bad at some particular thing. So if all you know is that someone is a woman, your estimate of their ability is legitimately lower than if all you know is that they are a man. A person who changes sex has transitioned from being a non-outlier man to an outlier woman. Because she is an outlier, the fact that the assumption is incorrect for her in particular does not mean that it is incorrect for women in general.

  14. 14 14 D

    Women, far more than men, acquire status via physical beauty.

    Let’s make the wild assumption that men who change to women aren’t paragons of beauty. One could even assume they not only aren’t beautiful but are in fact “off” looking, ugly. We would expect a significant decline in status due to this fact alone.

  15. 15 15 Harold

    Iceman: I am not trying too hard, you are not trying hard enough. “since sexism is defined as a view of inferiority i.e. different expectations.” By this definition requiring a penis is not sexist. You say this way of working “seems” more related to productivity, but that is because we are so ingrained with the current system. We do not know. Lots of people find it seems more effective to not take proper breaks, yet research shows it not to be the case. It seems likely that offering bonuses will produce better results, yet this turns out not to be the case for some types of work. Lots and lots of things that seem to be a good guide to productivity turn out not to be, especially if we look long term. “Burn out” is very damaging to productivity, yet a more gentle work pattern is seen as bad for productivity.

    D acknowledges the sexism inherent in the system (Come and see the sexism inherent in the system! To paraphrase Dennis). Women acquire status through beauty. Beauty is not particularly relevant to most work, yet a woman’s status is judged by her appearance. If that is not pretty much the definition of sexism, it gets pretty close.

  16. 16 16 nobody.really

    (Come and see the sexism inherent in the system! To paraphrase Dennis).

    Wow – I can see a mash-up of Dennis and Stan/Loretta: “I’ve transitioned! My concerns are redressed! I’m being re-dressed!”

  17. 17 17 iceman

    15 – yes a physical attribute like bench pressing 200 lbs (or the one you keep referring to) for a prof services job would be ridiculous (which is why no one would do something so thinly veiled). But on a semantic note it seems the sexism is not in the particular standard itself but the attempt to provide cover for an underlying bias of inferiority (on a relevant dimension). A willingness to work long hours and travel is categorically different, at least on the first order. Of course you may believe people who run firms and hire have misguided notions of productivity but that would be a different issue. And at any rate taking the position that any criterion is motivated by sexism unless proven otherwise would not be a fair or persuasive argument.

    BTW in the spirit of “we do not know”, I also think you’re leaping to over-generalization of the female beauty example – even there, on one hand it could be justifiably linked to likely job performance in some areas like sales (“is that fair?”), while I would also suggest it could actually be a detriment in other types of jobs, say if associated with a view / stigma (whatever the best word) that “all else equal” someone within a particular group who is blessed with looks (and/or clearly devotes more time and energy to their physical appearance) will tend to be less endowed in some other area like intelligence (and vice-versa). Note that this is different from making a general characterization of an entire group.

  18. 18 18 Ken Arromdee

    Another possibility is that a woman is judged based on beauty, but this is non-sexist because men are judged based on their beauty as well. I’m sure we both know that attractiveness produces the halo effect and that this is so for both men and women. We also know more about specific physical characteristics–tall men do better, for instance.

    In this case, someone who transitions from male to female would go from average beauty for their sex to below-average beauty for their sex, and would therefore do worse, without women in general doing worse than men in general and without women being judged by appearance to a greater degree than men.

  19. 19 19 Joe Greene

    It seems as if swapping genders wouldn’t really tell us much about the difference between how an man is treated versus a woman, but more how a man (or woman) is treated when compared to a transwoman (or transman), unless of course they’re able to perfectly pass as members of the opposite gender.

  20. 20 20 Harold

    A few comments based on reading around a bit. It has ended up longer than I first thought.

    Apparently “Economists generally attribute about 40% of the pay gap to discrimination – making about 60% explained by differences between workers or their jobs.”

    http://social.dol.gov/blog/myth-busting-the-pay-gap/

    The link included in this article doesn’t work for me, so can’t see where that figure comes from, or why this is the only subject about which economists generally agree. Wiki makes the same claim, but cites the article to which I linked as the source. I can find sources that say 41% of the wage gap is unexplained by other factors such as job choice, experience, race, education etc. These authors point out that unexplained is not the same as definitely being discrimination, but I have a nasty suspicion that this is where the 40% due to discrimination claim comes from. The authors also point out that “including controls for occupation, industry and union status may be questionable to the extent that they may be influenced by discrimination.” For example, why industries favored by women pay less in the first place as well as why women choose these jobs.
    https://web.stanford.edu/group/scspi/_media/pdf/key_issues/gender_research.pdf

    Nonetheless, it seems clear that discrimination does occur. A study of newly qualified doctors revealed a gender gap which is difficult to explain except by discrimination. These were start of career jobs and apparently identical.

    http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/30/2/193.abstract

    Holding orchestra auditions behind a screen substantially increased the chances of women proceeding past the initial stages, and contributed to a rise in female orchestra participation from 55 to 25%.

    Becker’s discrimination model (The Economics of Discrimination 1957) suggests that the market will eradicate “taste based” discrimination through competition. Assuming that is that productivity is not endogenous (e.g. poor schooling for blacks, girls put off sciences), technology factors are not endogenous (e.g. firefighting equipment designed for men), or productivity is not dependent on the discriminating factor (e.g. customer discrimination).

    So using the orchestra example to illustrate these. Perhaps the selectors know the audience prefers male musicians – which would be customer discrimination. This could persist and not be competed away. Or girls do not bother with music school because they will not get a job in an orchestra – in this case productivity is linked to the discriminating factor – girls are on average worse players than men. Possibly there is bias among the selectors – maybe unconsciously. The market should slowly eradicate this latter factor, as non biased selectors end up with better performers. However, we could speed this up by regulating that auditions had to be blind. I do not think there is anything in the models that says how long it will take to reach equilibrium. If we did not regulate, we know that we end up with lower productivity until equilibrium is reached. If we regulate, we can establish equilibrium at once. If there were in fact no discrimination, what have we lost? The price of a curtain. If there was discrimination we gain better orchestras straight away.

  21. 21 21 Harold

    That should be 5% to 25%

  22. 22 22 D
  23. 23 23 iceman

    I’m still waiting for what would be a potentially more revealing study: comparing men to infertile women (especially if/where employers could be made aware of that circumstance). Could certainly help us do better than simply attribute “unexplained” to “discrimination” (I agree that is an unsettling ‘methodology’).

    Otherwise Harold it seems to me looking at start of career jobs is the thorniest of all – it may seem unfair but also inherently rational for an employer to consider the probability of an employee taking one or more leaves of absence and often indefinite postponement of their career. Also the orchestra example doesn’t seem terribly representative of the many jobs that are invisible to the end purchaser. And not controlling for occupation seems like a real rats’ nest.

  24. 24 24 Harold

    It is all a rats nest. If you control for occupation you do not detect discrimination in pay rates for different occupations. Care workers are paid less than road diggers (perhaps). The marginal product is pretty difficult to determine, so the difference in pay between the two occupations may be due to discrimination. Unions have been guilty of promoting such discrimination.

    D. Interesting link. Number 6 is pertinent here – even on a jobs site, numbers of interviews for men was almost unrelated to attractiveness, but women got more interviews the more attractive they were. This applied whether it was a man or a woman interviewing.

  25. 25 25 iceman

    “the difference in pay between the two occupations may be due to discrimination”

    Cross-industry is truly a statistical nightmare, and maybe an intellectual cul de sac. First we need to account not just for relative MPs but other factors like risk and physical toll. From there one would expect excess compensation to induce people of both genders to at least apply for those jobs, so the light still seems so much better there. Then get into “cultural factors” versus inherent preferences. And restricting labor supply in certain industries would seem to make it harder to underpay the workers (or we’re talking about some seriously pervasive, even coordinated discrimination – which of course we can’t measure). I’d think in this day unions are looking for new members wherever they can find them, and hard-pressed to treat them differently once they’re in.

  26. 26 26 Noah Carl

    Whilst men and women have approximately the same mean IQ, men have greater variance, which means there are more men with very high IQs than women. So conditional on looking at a profession that recruits from above the population mean (e.g., academia), men will have a higher mean IQ than women. See ‘Population sex differences in IQ at age 11: the Scottish mental survey 1932’, as well as numerous other papers, for evidence of higher male variance in IQ.

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