If Janet Yellen can't finish a sentence, what chance do the rest of us have?
Women report significantly lower levels of wellbeing in the workplace than men. This is at least in part due to the greater burden of care responsibilities borne by women. But does the workplace experience itself worsen women’s wellbeing? Indeed, women report experiencing more gender-based hurdles and lower wellbeing tied to perceived discrimination in the workplace than comparable groups of men. But maybe that’s largely a question of perceptions. After all, as my colleague David Evans has explained, data on subjective wellbeing and perceptions are notoriously difficult to compare across individuals. (Of course, even perceived discrimination can lead to women holding back potentially valuable contributions—as research co-authored by my former colleague Ranil Dissanayake has shown.)
So, do women really still face openly discriminatory practices in the workplace? To what extent? And, if yes, then surely this only still happens in economics seminars, but no longer in boardrooms, C-suites, and the hallowed halls of power.
Well, a paper by Bisbee, Fraccaroli, and Kern forthcoming in the Journal of Politics quantifies one woman’s experience with what they characterize as “hostile sexism” in the workplace.* That woman happens to be Dr. Janet Yellen, the experience studied happens to be her tenure as chair of the US Federal Reserve. The work environment happens to be the United States Congress.
In the study, the authors analyze the transcripts of congressional hearings to find that legislators interrupted Dr. Yellen more often and used “more aggressive language” with her than the very same legislators did when interacting with male Fed chairs (over the period in question, the other Fed chairs were Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, and Jerome Powell). This isn’t a partisan pattern—legislators on both sides of the aisle treated Dr. Yellen with more aggression than they did her male predecessors and successor. Male legislators weren’t alone in exhibiting such behavior—female legislators, too, interrupted Dr. Yellen more often and more aggressively than the three men.
As an aside, research (also linked above), by Pascaline Dupas and co-authors, shows that women economists receive a similar treatment at the hands of their peers when they give a seminar: they are interrupted more frequently and the questions are more likely to use aggressive and condescending language. Dr. Yellen, of course, was an economics professor before becoming Fed chair. Presumably, her years of experience in giving professional seminars trained her in adeptly handling other hecklers. She has since returned to academia—perhaps with even sharper interruption-handling skills than ever before.
Bisbee, Fraccaroli, and Kern also find that having a daughter reduces “hostility toward Yellen”— which I find even sadder than the headline finding because everyone should be expected to show up to work in a professional way, regardless of their household composition. And one can’t exactly mandate having daughters as a policy to improve hostile work environments.
I lead a research project on women in IFI leadership at CGD. In the course of this work, I’ve learned through many hours of conversation with women IFI staff and women economists more broadly (and even the odd psychologist, MD, private sector consultant, and other professional) that some themes are quite common in women’s experiences across workspaces. These include being interrupted, needing their points to be “manslated”—that is, needing a male colleague to repeat what a woman has said for it to be heard and acknowledged by the meeting chair and others—and being spoken to more aggressively.
Indeed, Dupas et al.’s research on economics seminars completely resonated with my own experiences as a woman economist, particularly earlier in my career. There was, in fact, a stage in my career when I would be reduced to anxious tears before a seminar—and, after a particularly stressful presentation, sobs of relief at “not having embarrassed myself or my co-authors” in how I handled questions. In retrospect, *I* was never the one who ought to have worried about embarrassing myself. This is not easy to share so publicly; I do so anyway because I know I’m not alone in these experiences—and to illustrate the human cost behind these quantifications of workplace hostility and discrimination.
Distressingly, I have also found in the course of my work on our women in leadership program that the typical first response by women sensing hostile sexism at work is to dismiss that sense as an overreaction or to assume that the aggression was a response to their (the woman’s) ineffective communication. Even in the most egregious instances, it can be difficult to accept that a colleague is treating you more dismissively or aggressively than another colleague simply because you’re a woman. So, often, we discount our experiences, even in our internal dialogue with ourselves.
The research by Bisbee, Fraccaroli, and Kern, and by Dupas and her co-authors, is important in part because it validates women’s experiences. It teaches us that, at least sometimes, it is not about us; it’s about them. The more evident these patterns become, the more we can stop internalizing them, stop trying to solve problems that don’t exist, and start moving towards truly inclusive work environments—which, beyond all higher-order philosophical reasons, also makes basic economic sense for employers. Employees who feel respected and valued tend to be more engaged and willing to perform to their greatest potential.
*With apologies to “Worms,” in my opinion, Bisbee, Fraccaroli, and Kern’s paper now takes the award for the best research paper title: “Yellin’ at Yellen.”
