Good afternoon and thank you.
I'd like to begin my remarks by emphasizing that there is a substantial amount of evidence showing that women who are interested in business are equally ambitious as their male counterparts and equally likely to desire advancement to top leadership positions, but several elements limit women's career progress compared to their male counterparts of equal ability and motivation. I will speak about two of the most important factors: first, unconscious automatic biases against women in leadership; and second, rigid systems of career progression.
Unconscious and unintended automatic biases are pervasive in social life. With computer-based tools, psychologists have documented that people respond quickly when asked to pair women with family and men with career. When asked to pair women with career and men with family, people are substantially slower. These response latencies demonstrate that in the structure of our cognition we show an automatic bias linking men with career and women with family, regardless of our intentions. This test has been run on tens of thousands of people, and the result is highly robust. One of the impacts on women’s careers is that people are more likely to associate men with success and women with failure in a leadership position.
In addition, people react in biased ways to women during negotiations. A review of 272 independent studies showed that both women and men are more likely to cooperate with a man than with a woman in negotiations. The impact is that women receive poorer material outcomes from negotiations than men do. Furthermore, women suffer social consequences when they negotiate. People rate them as less nice, more demanding, and are less likely to want to work for women leaders who negotiate. Men do not suffer these social penalties.
Beyond automatic gender biases, rigid systems of career progression limit women’s opportunities to lead. While the data suggest that the glass ceiling is cracking, there is evidence of a more damaging mid-level bottleneck in career progress. The mid-level bottleneck occurs for highly qualified, university-educated professionals who have moved past the entry level. At this critical stage, women are significantly less likely to be promoted than men. This career stage occurs when people are in their thirties and many have young children in the home. While some Canadian organizations—