Over a week ago, I attended a talk by Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), and listened to advice she gave on female leadership.\u00a0 In response to a question on how to achieve greater parity for women in leadership positions, Senator Murkowski (off-the-record) expressed how frustrating it is that women feel the need to check-off every qualification box on a resume prior to applying for a position, whereas men appear to not, and statistically apply more often than women for positions, even with only a third of the specified \u201cboxes\u201d checked off. \u00a0Internalizing this idea of self-imposed barriers, I kept thinking about the implications of gender on access to opportunity throughout this past week.\u00a0 Yesterday, when I went to a Women\u2019s Congressional Staff Association networking conference, I further discussed this idea with respect to women\u2019s fear of negotiating title changes and salaries, as well as aptitude for job-seeking.\u00a0 This week\u2019s post is dedicated to how implicit leadership prototypes affect staffers\u2019 perceptions and career ambitions, both in general terms and from my personal experiences.<\/p>\n
As I noted in my prior post, I am the only female intern in this summer\u2019s cohort, which is unusual, especially given that I work within a female, Democrat Member\u2019s office, and that the Staff Assistant (my supervisor), the Chief of Staff, and the Legislative Director are all women.\u00a0 With that said, it has been an interesting experience for me, as due to my experience from last year, my coworkers have looked to me to answer questions on our responsibilities, instead asking our supervisor a hundred different questions. \u00a0Our supervisor is also very new to the office, which further complicates the dynamic, and has made me feel a bit awkward in these situations, since I worry about feeling like a \u2018bossy woman,\u2019 or as though I am taking over my supervisor\u2019s role.<\/p>\n
To give context and examples to how I\u2019ve reflected on gender prototypes, last Thursday, my coworkers and I watched the floor\u2019s live-streamed session as the House debated an exciting, contested bill.\u00a0 During the floor debate, we would discuss each Members\u2019 different arguments and their perceived effectiveness.\u00a0 At one point, a Member yielded time for Speaker Pelosi to address the bill.\u00a0 However, as we watched Speaker Pelosi, my coworker\u2019s first remarks were not\u00a0<\/em>about the content of her speech, but rather what she was wearing.\u00a0 They cracked jokes on how she looked like a \u201chighlighter,\u201d and how ridiculous her outfit was.\u00a0Regardless of whether I agreed that her bright-neon dress reminded me of a highlighter, I wondered why they hadn\u2019t talked about the content of her words, like we had for the previous speakers.\u00a0 Finally, after they went on for a minute or so, I remarked (that regardless of one\u2019s personal political affiliation) how troublesome it was when during the first debate of the 2016 election, that the New York Times\u2019 front-page article talked about the \u2018importance\u2019 Hillary Clinton\u2019s blue pantsuit, instead of what happened during the debate.<\/p>\n Once I spoke up, my coworkers froze, and one coworker proceeded to pull up pictures of outfits he \u2018liked\u2019\u00a0<\/em>from Speaker Pelosi.\u00a0 Another justified that he judges what everyone wears, since his family worked in the fashion industry; another agreed that he judges what everyone wears, including an \u2018ugly tie\u2019 that a different Member wore (yet never vocalized this opinion when that Member was on screen).\u00a0 I have never called anyone out on \u2018gender biases\u2019 before; while I felt as though I was acting overly defensive, I thought to myself that if I had stayed quiet, I would be contributing to the larger implicit bias at hand. \u00a0Later that day, the work pace died down, and my coworkers engaged in a conversation on the finance industry. \u00a0After one coworker went on a monologue about the comradery of the \u201cbrotherhood\u201d in the industry, a male Legislative Assistant who sits next to me (and who had been my boss last year) looked at me, then looked up and said \u201cthat\u2019s sexist.\u201d\u00a0 Again, my coworkers froze.<\/p>\n These examples from my coworkers\u2019 conversations help to contribute to a larger conversation on what happens when there is an incongruity between a leader and an implicit leader prototype.\u00a0 Forsyth and Nye (2008) express how leader prototypes, while contingent on the context of the industry and culture, generally favor decisive, authoritative leaders.\u00a0 Yet generally speaking, gender stereotypes infiltrate perceptions of leaders, viewing women as socially sensitive and deferential, and men as decisive and authoritative.\u00a0 In the first example, Nancy Pelosi appears to be an implicit incongruity by nature of being a woman, which makes people more attentive to if she defies the status quo in any capacity, as opposed to if it were a male Speaker. \u00a0The other examples (from my position as the ‘experienced’ intern and the “brotherhood” conversation) illustrate congruity with the general leader prototype as biased by gender, and further perpetuate how gender implicitly and inequitably affects perceived opportunity and ability to lead.<\/p>\n Briefly reflecting on the conference I went to yesterday, the conversations on women\u2019s hesitation for negotiation or for a job opening also represent the influence of implicit leadership theories.\u00a0 For example, asking for a raise is seen as an assertive, goal-oriented, and dominant behavior, which correlates more with \u2018masculine\u2019 qualities than it does with \u2018feminine\u2019 ones.\u00a0 Women\u2019s drawbacks or hesitations to ask for promotions or raises serve as potentially mismatched ILT\u2019s, biased by stereotypes on the way women assert themselves in the workplace.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Over a week ago, I attended a talk by Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), and listened to advice she gave on<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4398,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_layout":"default_layout","footnotes":""},"categories":[76624],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3364","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-theories-into-action"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/jepsoninternship2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3364","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/jepsoninternship2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/jepsoninternship2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/jepsoninternship2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4398"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/jepsoninternship2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3364"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/jepsoninternship2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3364\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/jepsoninternship2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/jepsoninternship2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/jepsoninternship2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}