Читать книгу Inclusion, Inc. - Sara Sanford - Страница 22

In 2014, the United States Institute for Peace partnered with the Geena Davis Institute to release a study on gender in media. Part of the study involved observing people in large groups, and researchers witnessed a bizarre behavior: When women made up 17 percent of a group, men estimated that they actually made up 50 percent of the group. Once a crowd was 33 percent female, women were perceived as the majority.³ The study's participants, however, did not overestimate the presence of men in large groups.

When typically underrepresented individuals are in spaces where we're not used to seeing them, we tend to overestimate their presence. A female minority, for example, can seem like a female majority in a space that is typically male-dominated.

Most of us don't have to estimate the number of people in groups at work, but our perceptions of others' behaviors can be influenced by what we're used to seeing and have come to expect. For example, while women have been stereotyped as talking more than men, multiple studies have found that they spend less time than men talking in meetings. Their comments are shorter, and they are interrupted more often. One study found that women needed to make up 60 to 80 percent of a group before they used as much speaking time, collectively, as men in the conversation. Another now-classic study recorded university faculty meetings and found that, with one exception, the men at the meetings spoke more often, and without exception, spoke longer.⁴ The longest comment by a woman at all seven gatherings was shorter than the shortest comment by a man. In online discussions on professional topics, messages written by men have been found to be, on average, twice as long as those written by women.⁵

And despite this, our perceptions of women as “chatty” remain. As stated in a PBS summary of research on gender and language, “[In] seminars and debates, when women and men are deliberately given an equal amount of the highly valued talking time, there is often a perception that [women] are getting more than their fair share.”⁶

Because a gender-balanced workforce is a fairly new phenomenon, female voices can be heard as more present than they actually are. Even when we believe we're comparing the talking time of women to that of men, we're unconsciously comparing the talking time of women now to the talking time of women in the past.

Our perceptions of the ways people behave are built on a baseline of the ways we expect them to behave, and these differences impact how we treat people. Anything exceeding our expectations or past experiences feels extreme, and we push back against it. These unconscious expectations—the norms our amygdala clings to—sabotage one of the common approaches to DEI that has gained momentum over the last few years: leaning in.