Twenty years of work by myself and Mary Ann Mason confirms Pollack’s worry that things don’t look good for women in science. The threshold problem is one Pollack discusses in only a sentence or two: the impact of children.

Motherhood is a much bigger hurdle to a career in science than Pollack acknowledges. Mary Ann Mason’s important work shows that only one-third of women who enter the tenure track without children ever have them — and the percentage of women in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) who do so is even smaller.

Pollack quotes one woman scientist discounting the impact of motherhood on the grounds that “being an academic provides a female scientist with more flexibility than most other professions.” But many women are abruptly pushed out of science careers the minute they have children. Young research scientists often are told by the principal investigators they work for that they will be fired unless they return to work within a few weeks after the birth of their children. Note that this is illegal. Title IX requires that universities that offer temporary disability leave to anyone on campus must offer maternity leave, on the same terms, to graduate students and post-docs, as explained in a forthcoming article in the NYU Review of Law and Social Change by Mary Ann Mason and Jaclyn Younger.

Another part of the motherhood problem is discrimination, pure and simple. Studies document that discrimination against mothers is often strong and remarkably open. Recently I completed a study including interviews of 60 women scientists of color. One recalled an incident in which a colleague was told to go home and have more babies. An Asian-American remarked, “If you had a full-blown career, that’s inconsistent with being a mother. I certainly feel that sentiment.” Said a third, “I feel like people think that Asian women, they are caring and then they will give up their professions for their children.”

Much of the gender bias, as Pollack recognizes, has nothing to do with motherhood. In the interviews, we described the four basic patterns of gender bias and asked whether they sounded familiar. “Every syllable,” responded one woman. Another, upon hearing the patterns described, burst into tears.

My study highlights the “slow drumbeat of being underappreciated, feeling uncomfortable and encountering roadblocks across the path to success,” to quote Meg Urry, the astrophysicist interviewed by Pollack. Striking, in particular, was the isolation. “This has been a very lonely life,” said one scientist. Another reported “feeling inadequate, some depression” because “you really don’t have the support you need.” The most striking story was of an Asian American whose department chair put up on the blackboard a diagram with three circles depicting the interrelations within the department. She was way out, isolated, on the extreme edge. “I said, ‘You know, if I was a little bit to the right, I’d be out of the department,’” she quipped. But, she admitted, “It gets to me. It’s hurtful.”

Those interviewed also recognized Prove-It-Again! bias, which requires women to provide more evidence of competence than men in order to be seen as equally competent. One scientist had her success in an experiment discounted by male colleagues who attributed her success to the fact she was using their protocol, a pattern known as attribution bias. Another, a Latina, recounted when audience members disrespectfully interrupted her while she was in the middle of a presentation, assuming she had made a mistake she had not made. A third reported a pattern called leniency bias: “You know that the rule only applies to the people it applies to,” observed one woman. “Generally speaking, women–and women of color–would be strictly held to rules and then some.”

These patterns stem from the automatic image of a scientist as a man, which means that women may be presumed incompetent. Women scientists get this from students, too. “I have always had the impression when I start a class, a course, it is always an uphill kind of battle. I get the impression that students don’t believe that I know what I’m supposed to know,” noted one black woman scientist.

Another pattern is The Tightrope women walk between being seen as too feminine (and not taken seriously), and too masculine (and disliked). “To get ahead here,” said a woman at MIT, “you have to be so aggressive. But if women are too aggressive they’re ostracized… and if they’re not aggressive enough they have to do twice the work.”

The most dramatic “too masculine” story came from a black scientist who received feedback that she was “unnecessarily brusque, undeferential” to her staff after she suffered a traumatic brain injury. The hospital staff told her “it was obvious that I needed to stay in rehabilitation longer until I started acting like a woman.” She recalled wryly, “This was in [in the South]. I don’t know how to be the southern belle. I’m from [a Northern city].” She had little choice but to play along. “I dropped my IQ by several points and started looking for little things to decorate myself with.”

“[I]f you’re aggressive, then you’re definitely the B word,” remarked a woman in medicine. “I was never part of the in group,” said an Asian American. “I’m very candid and I do not hesitate to open my mouth, and that was probably not the submissive female [they were expecting] . . . . I immediately started, I guess, having the reputation of being a dragon lady.”

Women are expected to be feminine; for one thing, they’re expected to do the office housework. The most poignant story was of a black scientist whose mentors were “very adamant” that she didn’t “need to sit on every blasted committee.” So, in a meeting with the provost, she pointed out that whites as well as people of color could be tapped to serve on diversity committees. The provost responded by inviting her to serve on another diversity committee. “Of course I’m not going to say no to the provost,” she remarked. “This is the man who basically has my tenure in his hands.”

Asian-Americans described being treated as the “perpetual lab assistant” and Latinas described pressure to play the office housewife. One described herself as “the mother of our research group.” Another scientist found herself “asked to be kind of the mother of the group. I’m the one who has to make sure that everybody fills out their paperwork, and I’m the one who takes care of things, sets up the meetings and things like that. I mean, I play many roles that could be done by a competent administrative assistant if we happen to have had a competent administrative assistant, which we don’t. . . . It’s assumed that I’ll take care of it because nobody else will.” “[T]hese kind of administrative duties eat into my time,” noted another scientist.

Common in workplaces in which women are rare is the Tug of War pattern: women pitted against other women. Said one scientist, “I have been in an organization where there was room for one woman, but one woman decided that she was it and would simply sabotage her colleagues, which unfortunately included me.” Another noted, “I have seen females trying to be very accommodating and playing a certain role that made them more likable. I tended to be very professional, straightforward, and not stroking people’s egos or whatnot.” She recalled “woman wars” where someone strives to prove “she is better: she can give more, she can do more, and there were games played along those lines.” “That happened over and over again,” she said. A third described a monthly meeting in which the only other woman in her group “pretty much focuses attention on the men.” She added, “rarely she’ll look at me. I’m thinking she might be one of those type of women where, okay, there’s only room for one.” Studies document that when women experience discrimination early in their careers, many respond by distancing themselves from other women.

Woman-on-woman conflict also arises between scientists and support staff. “My stuff won’t get done first,” noted a scientist. “They say the bosses are too demanding,” said another, recalling a conversation with administrative assistants who worked with her. She said to them, “Well, the boss that you had before was equally demanding. The guy that you were working under was equally demanding.” The assistants’ reaction: “Yeah, but that’s different.” Mused another woman, “If a male boss asks, ‘Can you bring me a copy?’ they will, and if you ask the same thing, they will say, ‘Well, why am I going to bring you the copy?’” Race exacerbates the problem. “Here they have this Mexican woman telling them what to do,” remarked one scientist.

Pollack has opened up an important conversation. The take-away, as she realizes, is not just that we need to encourage young women to pursue undergraduate majors in science. The issue is not just why women don’t enter science. The number of women science PhDs has increased sharply. In fact, in the life sciences women earn over half of all PhDs.

Based on the results of my study, I’d say the issue also isn’t why more women scientists don’t stay. It’s why more don’t leave. Being a woman scientist may be thrilling intellectually, but the day to day grind sounds pretty darn grim. (For a suite of tools to keep women in STEM, see www.toolsforchangeinstem.org.)

The post Why Are There So Few Women in Science, Continued appeared first on New Girls' Network.

Accomplishments

None of my supervisors seem to pay attention to—or at least remember—my accomplishments. My male coworkers don’t seem to have this problem. But when I try to remind my colleagues, I just see all these “who do you think you are?” faces staring back at me. What can I do to get recognition without looking like a jerk?

Oh my! You’ve come head to head with Prove-It-Again! bias only to find the Tightrope nipping at your heels.

The key principle underlying Prove-It-Again! bias is that humans react to information that supports preexisting stereotypes and information that doesn’t differently.  Our implicit biases about men’s and women’s competence in the workplace and ultimately, their roles in society, dictate what information we retain and what we don’t.

As a result, men’s successes tend to be noticed and remembered, while women’s are more likely to be overlooked and soon forgotten. This happens because when people’s behavior conforms to our expectations, we tend to attribute it to a stable, internal trait that reflects a truth about who they really are, whereas we attribute behavior that violates our expectations to a fleeting external cause, like luck. Likewise, we are likely to ignore or quickly forget information that disconfirms our preexisting stereotypes, so information about men’s competence has more staying power than equivalent information about women’s competence.

By trying to set the record straight, you’ve triggered the Tightrope bias; by acting in a way that commands respect, you’re now being perceived as a social misfit.

Here’s how two savvy professional women counteracted Prove-It-Again! bias without triggering the Tightrope:

• “Your accomplishment does not exist if it is not documented. For example… I had a lunch today, we talked about XYZ and this is the outcome, this is the action point. So I document it. Or I have some clients that are going to come into town and so I called the assistant to see if we could set up a meeting when they’re in town next week.  That gets documented.”
• “When I went and talked to my division head, I would come with two big achievements and one request for help. You engage them in this activity of building a business, which is obviously good for you, but it’s also good for them. ‘This is how I looked at the problem.  This is how I am trying to fix the problem.  These are the results that are coming out of it. What else should I be doing?’”

By keeping their accomplishments fresh, these women didn’t have to rely on their colleagues’ fickle recollections. They also weren’t put in the uncomfortable situation of seeming like a jerk when jogging their colleagues’ memories. Say goodbye to proving it again!

Have a question of your own? Then Ask the New Girls!

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I often find that I suggest a good idea in a meeting and it is ignored or overshadowed by the rest of the conversation. Later, someone suggests my idea—or an idea very like mine—and that person ends up with the credit. What can I do to make my voice heard?

It sounds like you’ve had a run in with The Stolen Idea.

The Stolen Idea happens for two reasons: one, feminine women (or women pressured into femininity) may be less likely to state an idea in a way that commands people’s attention, making it easy to overlook. Stanford sociologist Cecilia Ridgeway studies this phenomena and found that women tend to use tentative, deferential speech forms, including verbal hedges and disclaimers (“I’m not sure if this is correct, but . . .”) and posing statements as questions (“Don’t you think . . . ?”). Women do this in mixed-sex groups, Ridgeway found, but not in women-only groups.

Two, since the traits consistent with leadership and idea generation are gendered masculine, it makes more cognitive “sense” for the man’s to assert a good idea than for a women, making it easier for others to pick up on.

Not getting credit for something you said may not feel like a big deal. But losing credit for a series of ideas over time, or one idea that turns out to have long term and positive impact for your company definitely is. So it’s important to learn how to slyly make sure that those within the meeting know it’s your idea, without triggering Tightrope bias for being too “pushy,” “assertive,” or “mean.”

Here are a few ways that savvy successful women have gotten credit where credit was due:

• “You said it so more eloquently than I, but that was exactly the point I was trying to raise.”
• “Interesting that you should say that. That’s exactly the point I was trying to make. “
• “I’m trying to understand. Are you disagreeing with me? I think that we’re making the same point. However, if you have a different point, I want to understand. I think we’re saying the same thing.”

Run into a stolen idea issue of your own? Then Ask the New Girls!

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Dear My “Not-Manager” is a Jerk,

This is a challenging dilemma especially since you are an intern and thus the lowest of the low. But do not despair!

I would suggest you might try a humorous approach first — make a little sign with a picture of headphones on it and beside it write in large letters, “SHHHHH … Headphones on and Working. DO NOT DISTURB.” Make a second sign that says, “WAVE at me … Headphones on while I take a break from work. FEEL FREE TO DISTURB.”  Try using both signs over the course of a day depending on what you are doing. Feel free to point to the “do not disturb” sign if someone interrupts you inappropriately.

If this does not work, try a direct approach with your “Not-Manager.” Go up to him and ask for 10 minutes of his time to speak to him about work. When you get his attention, tell him directly that your work requires you to wear headphones and that your own manager is totally cool with this and in fact sees it as an essential part of your job. State that you would appreciate him not commenting on this or interrupting you while you are doing your work. If you feel kindly towards him, you might say that perhaps he is not fully familiar with seeing headphones used in the workplace in this fashion and that you would be happy to explain how you use them in your work if that would be helpful.

If this talk brings about no change in his behavior, then speak to one of your own fantastic managers and ask him/her to intervene on your behalf with this fellow and in particular to get him to leave you alone while you are working.

Sincerely,

The New Girls

Work with a jerk? Then Ask The New Girls!

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 I always get passed over for promotions

It doesn’t seem to matter how hard I work or how competent I am; I always get passed over for promotions. My annual reviews confirm that I’m respected as a good worker, but that doesn’t seem to be enough and men who work half as hard get promoted instead.  I’m definitely suffering from Prove-It-Again! bias, but what can I do?

Do you know what the requirements are for promotion? If there are formal guidelines, it’s best to familiarize yourself with them. If these guidelines are more informal, is there a mentor or colleague you can reach out to for guidance? It may be that the expectations are not what you think they are, and you need to focus your attention more on showcasing your management skills or developing business.

Are the expectations unclear or, worse yet, inconsistently applied? If so, well, that’s trickier.

The first thing you can do is to keep real-time records of your achievements. Even if the requirements for promotion are intangible, you can still get a wholistic sense of what work is valued within your organization. Did you bring in business? Did you increase profits? Did you finish a goal in half the expected time? Did you turn around a failing project? Or pitch an idea that brought your organization recognition or business? Start a list (or folder, or spreadsheet) today and come up with a system that requires you to update regularly (reoccurring calendar alerts are great for this).

What do you do with this list? Use it at your next performance review or take it to your supervisor. Say, “These are my contributions over the last year. What else would I need to do or focus on in order to continue to grow within the organization?” Write down the answer you are given and use it as your own set of guidelines for advancement leading up to and during the next review or check-in meeting.

One of the best, but most difficult, ways to combat being undervalued in your organization is to build a valuable and unique specialty, to become the “go-to” person on a topic or series of topics.

Here’s the story of how one professional went about doing this:

“People would send e-mails asking, ‘Has anyone ever encountered this situation?’  If I had, I would answer the question, and if I hadn’t, but I found the question interesting, I might do a little bit of research and then answer the question. I decided, ‘All right, I am going to establish that I’m competent and that I’m reliable and that I’m smart.’  And so, by the end, I had established myself as the subject matter expert in a couple of obscure things, but they were obscure things that came up just often enough that people would be directing people to me.  ‘Oh, you want to talk to her.  She’s the one who knows about that.’  And so, people from all over the country would be e-mailing or calling, ‘Can you look at this for me?  Can you talk to a client for me?  Can you help?’ It turned the ‘I-live-to serve’ expectation of women on its head. Like, I’m going to be helpful, but I’m going to be helpful in a specific way that is lucrative to you at this particular moment and career enhancing for me because now this person in Sacramento knows who I am or this person in Chicago knows that I’m a go-to person.”

As this professional explains, building a specialty not only made her allies with anyone who requested help, but also increased her recognition within her organization and throughout her profession. She was associated with not only being a helpful colleague (which on its own can backfire for women gearing up for leadership positions) but also a colleague with expertise that others look up to.

The post What Works for Women at Work: Answers to Common Questions – Overlooked? appeared first on New Girls' Network.

Check out some pictures of the event below!

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It’s been a rough couple of weeks for women in STEM.

Most shockingly, Adria Richards, former developer evangelist at SendGrid, was fired after she publicly reported two men (one of whom was also fired) for making lewd jokes in earshot at a PyCon Conference. Richards has since received nasty messages for speaking out—including some that threatened her safety—in what is now referred to across the web as Donglegate (the jokes that began this incident were about dongles and forking; you get the idea).

Likewise, women game developers were shocked at an after party for a separate tech conference—this time the GDC in San Francisco—when they found that the party hosts had hired scantily clad women dancers to sashay on stage.

And that’s not all. Elise Andrew, a blogger in Canada who kept a low profile while running a very popular all-about-science Facebook page, promoted her new Twitter handle (which included her name and photo) to her Facebook fans. The response? Many were shocked that she was a woman. “Is this really 2013?” Andrews asked on Twitter.

The STEM fields are notoriously chilly for women. A new study by Corinne A. Moss-Racusin and colleagues found that science faculty rated men applying for a lab manager position as more hireable and competent than women with the exact same qualifications. A 2008 study by the Center for Work-Life Policy found that while 41% of highly qualified scientist, engineers, and technologists are women, 52% of these women quit their jobs around their mid-to-late thirties. The authors cite hostile workplace culture (like some of the recent incidents described above), long hours, and low expectations of career advancement as the main reasons for female attrition.

A third study from 2011 suggests that the exclusion of women in STEM may start even earlier. The study, by Danielle Gaucher, Justin Friesen and Aaron C. Kay, found that advertisements for male-dominated jobs—like many of those in STEM—contained a greater amount of masculine words (like dominate and competitive) than female-dominated positions. Women, after reading advertisements for male-dominated roles, were more likely than men to feel that they would not belong in these positions and found them less appealing. This pattern is perfectly illustrated by the posters that were at one time tacked up around Stanford University’s campus: “Want to bro down and crush some code? Klout is hiring.”

This chilly climate for women is an open secret. Said Etsy CTO Kellan Elliott-McCrea, “there’s a decent chance, based on their experience in industry, that your workplace is going to suck” for women, making it hard to recruit women and increase diversity. Rather than focusing on recruiting senior women, who continued to flock to more gender-balanced tech departments, Etsy, in partnership with 37Signals and Yammer, paid for junior women to attend a three-month training program in New York City. As a result, Etsy has increased the number of women engineers by 500%. They now make up 20% of their department.

Etsy’s strategy addresses a key issue: the problem of reaching critical mass, so that a few women don’t feel out of place in a sea of men. To quote Jocelyn Goldfein, director of engineering at Facebook: “The reason there aren’t more women computer scientists is because there aren’t more women computer scientists.”

Women in STEM sometimes feel they stick out like a sore thumb, but that’s not the only problem. Recently, Joan’s project interviewed 60 women of color in these fields, describing the four basic patterns of gender bias and asking, “Any of that sound familiar?”

It did. All 60 scientists reported at least one of these patterns. One scientist explained her experience with the Prove-It-Again! pattern, which occurs when women have to provide more evidence of competence than men in order to be seen as equally competent. She recalled that, back when she was a student working in a group, her contributions fell on deaf ears. “And it wasn’t until the professor came around and said, ‘Are you guys listening to what [she] is saying?’ where it hit home to me that, you know, it didn’t matter what I was saying. But, it was just the fact that it was coming from my mouth.”

Several women in Silicon Valley reported that women get “the job but not the title,” and that they’re told over and over again that they are “not ready” for promotion—even, in one instance, where the woman in question had actually been doing the job in question.

Another STEM academic found that even students questioned her competence. “I have always had the impression when I start a class, a course, it is always an uphill kind of battle. I get the impression that students don’t believe that I know what I’m supposed to know.”

One scientist felt that even hard data—in the form of student evaluations— that proved her competence was brushed aside. “Even when I get really good evaluations, then the next thing that follows is ‘Well, you’re an easy grader, and so that must be why,’” she said.

And this was only one of the four patterns of bias. Joan’s impression by the time she finished the interviews: what’s amazing is not that there are so few women in science, but that there are any. What recent events and the 60 interviews show is that the STEM fields are filled with both overtly hostile and subtly discouraging hurdles that keep women down and ultimately push them out.

We keep hearing that STEM fields hold the jobs of the future; let’s give women a chance to “lean in” to them.

The post Is It Too Cold To Lean In? Women In STEM appeared first on New Girls' Network.

Joan once wrote that the way for women to gain equality was to die childless at thirty, based on data that young women without kids earn almost as much as men. Turns out even that won’t guarantee equality.

A new report released last week by the American Association of University Women (AAUW) finds that the average female college graduate working full-time makes nearly $8,000 less than her male counterpart–only one year after graduation.

This is an astounding figure. One would assume that the income gap between the men and women studied in this report–recent college graduates just barely out of school–would be miniscule. These men and women have a great deal in common. They are unlikely to be married, have relatively little work experience, and typically have no caregiving responsibilities. As workers, they seem relatively equal–and yet they aren’t being paid equally.

Guess it’s not the end of men after all. Two champions of this perspective, Hanna Rosin (author of The End of Men) and Liza Mundy (author of The Richer Sex), frequently cite the statistic that women are better educated, or more likely to be educated, than men. The logic, we assume, goes something like this: educational attainment is predictor of wealth, and if we have more educated women than we have men, we therefore have more rich women than we do men. Et voilà! The end of men, the rise of women! Gender inequality for all!

This logic rests on the assumption that the value of a degree is the same no matter who holds it. But that assumption is false from the instant of graduation on. And the pay gap doesn’t disappear with time; it gets bigger for the women you would think would be most advantaged by their educations: Harvard graduates. Economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, who studied Harvard alumni, found a $72,500 gender gap in median income between all men and women, and a $75,000 difference in median income between men and women who worked full-time full-year. Even after controlling for educational performance, occupation, and time out of work, “a residual gap of substantial magnitude remains.”

So it’s not the end of men. In fact, what we have on our hand is not so much a story about gender as it is a story about class.

We’ve always had economic inequality in the United States, but what we’ve seen recently is that the rich are getting richer as the poor are growing poorer. As this inequality increases, the middle class–particularly the men–are slipping into the kinds of problems that used to be the province of the poor.

At the lower tiers of the economic distribution, women are faring better than they were in the past, while men are doing worse and worse. This is in large part due to the fact that working class men have been most negatively affected by the changes in the economy. Their jobs, mainly in manufacturing, have disappeared, while fields populated by working-class women, like health care, are booming. But the pink-collar jobs typically held by women tend to offer low pay and little advancement. That’s why household incomes for the bottom 80% of Americans have seen little increase in take-home pay since the late 1970s.

Working class men may be embattled but elite men are doing just peachy. They still control both the government and the economy: they hold 82.8% of the seats in congress, and run 96.2% of Fortune 500 companies. This is not evidence of the rise of women. It’s evidence that elite men maintain a vice grip on the way we live today, while non-elite men, and middle class families, fall further and further behind.

So here’s our take. If the key to the illusive “American Dream” is a college education, so long as a college diploma is worth more in a young man’s hand, gender equality remains beyond our reach–and no amount of happy-talk will change that.

The post Dying Childless at Thirty? Won’t Help appeared first on New Girls' Network.

“Binders full of women.” We all know what Mitt Romney meant during last night’s presidential debate when he discussed his “effort” to recruit more women during his tenure as Governor of Massachusetts. But what he said spread like wildfire across the internetand produced some amusing results.

Our personal favorites? A picture of young Patrick Swayze with the caption “Nobody puts Baby in a binder.” And a glum-looking Big Bird holding a binder labeled “Women” on a Sesame Street stoop.

We are happy that the topic of women at work was introduced during last night’s debate, which was notably moderated by the first woman in 20 years.

But we are not happy that Mitt Romney took credit for the hard work of MassGAP–a bi-partisan coalition committed to increasing the number of women leaders within the Massachusetts government–which is the group actually responsible for the infamous “binders.” According to astudy the group co-authored with the University of Massachusetts’ Center for Women in Politics & Public Policy, 42% percent of the new gubernatorial appointments made by Governor Romney between 2002 and 2004 were women. This was not because Governor Romney looked around and asked, “Where are the women?” : this was because an organization dedicated to women’s advancement took an active role in recruiting qualified women candidates prior to and following the results of the 2002 gubernatorial election.

Despite MassGAP’s successes in the first years of the Romney administration, the percentage of new female appointees later fell to about 25%; Romney ended his tenure as governor with fewer women in senior-level positions than when he started. Of this, the report co-authored by MassGAP advised, “Continued efforts should be made to monitor administrations throughout the full course of a governor’s term.” This does not sound like a leader committed to appointing binders upon binders of women.

What Romney did last night was a very public example of “The Stolen Idea,” a phenomenon women regularly face at work. Here’s how it usually happens on the ground: A woman mentions a potential solution to a problem in a meeting, perhaps timidly so as not to seem overly aggressive, and her idea is largely ignored. Minutes later, a male colleague pipes up and slightly rephrases the woman’s idea to the group; the group is impressed with the idea, and agrees to implement it. The man is commended for his problem-solving skills and creativity.

The women Joan interviewed for The New Girls’ Network–a project that seeks to combine social science and the savvy of successful women to uncover individual strategies for navigating gender bias at work–often recount these stories. She has binders full of them. One “stolen idea” may not seem like something to make a big deal over, particularly in an environment where women face social costs for being seen as anything other than a good team player. But over time, these “stolen ideas” can add up; the women doing the good work–but not getting credit for it–may be seen as lacking initiative or leadership skills and those perceptions will undoubtedly linger as they seek to move up the ladder.

One woman Joan interviewed described her experience with “The Stolen Idea” as “offering up a thought, an idea, and having someone speak over it. Typically, in my experience, it tends to be a male who will speak over the point… Someone may bring up the same issue later in the conversation and restate precisely (or close enough) what you offered up to the audience, without attribution or acknowledgement.”

How do these women deal? One woman uses this phrase to subtlety turn the table: “Interesting that you should say that. That’s exactly the point I was trying to make.”

With the presidential election only weeks away, MassGAP set the record straight. It was a smart move for them and an important move for our country. But on the ground in day-to-day professional interactions, claiming credit is risky for women in workplaces still designed for and dominated by men.

“The Stolen Idea” got its fifteen minutes of fame during last night’s presidential debate. Let us give credit where credit is due now, and take a good hard look at what both candidates can offer women who work in the future.

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Here’s what I know about the Glorious Revolution: It happened in England. Probably in the 17^th century, although I’m not totally sure about that. Some king got overthrown by some other king. There were Catholics involved. Chances are good, though, that that’s all the guys who raised their hands know about the Glorious Revolution, too, with one or two possible exceptions.

So why did they raise their hands when I didn’t?

Studies have shown that men are more likely than women to project confidence when they’re uncertain, and that women are particularly hesitant when they’re being asked a question regarding a traditionally male domain.  That the law is a traditionally male domain is hard to forget in a Constitutional Law class. After all, it’s not until the Nineteenth Amendment that we even get the right to vote, and from the establishment of the Supreme Court in 1787, it’s another 194 years before we get a decision with any input from a woman. The Declaration of Independence, which we read for the first day of class, assures us that “all men are created equal.” At the time it was written, most people really believed women aren’t.

But that’s ancient history, right? My law school class is somewhere around 50% women. So why don’t us ladies, then, just get over it and speak up? Unfortunately, when you look at the cognitive biases behind gender stereotypes – as I’ve been doing for the last year – women’s caution comes to seem like a survival mechanism, not a weakness.

While men are more likely to be judged on their potential in professional settings, women are more likely to be judged by their achievements. In a related pattern, men’s mistakes are overlooked and soon forgotten while women’s mistakes are noticed and remembered. It’s actually riskier for a woman to project confidence than for a man – her credentials and claims to competence are more precarious, and her mistakes are more likely to be interpreted as a sign of fundamental failing.

Social psychology and cognitive bias play out on a large scale. My Constitutional Law professor didn’t follow up on his survey by calling on one of the raised hands to describe. If he had, and a woman had raised her hand and given a wrong answer, would she be known forever as that girl who got the Glorious Revolution confused with the Hundred Years’ War? Probably not, which is why it’s easy to dismiss these patterns.

But the demographics my female classmates and I face after graduation, while also on a large scale, will play out in very personal ways. We will enter law firms near parity with our male peers, but by the equity partner they will outnumber us 85 men to every 15 women. (By the time we’re all at this level, these proportions could have changed, but they’ve been static for about 20 years.)

We’re all here, men and women alike, because we believe in our own futures. But the science of cognitive bias indicates that the problems we wish we’d overcome are still shaping our lives in ways that are hard to see. It’s important for us all to understand that, lest women internalize the effects of bias as personal failings or men take their confidence to be earned rather than granted.

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