Does achieving gender equality only benefit women? Are gender quotas thwarting meritocracy? Are women more risk averse than men? If you think you know the answers to these questions, then think again! Busted is an audio podcast series that busts prominent myths surrounding gender and the economy by teaming up with leading experts in the field. We uncover the origins of each myth and give you the tools to bust each myth yourself!
Busted is a GATE audio series production from the Institute for Gender and the Economy.
Welcome to Busted, a podcast by the Institute For Gender and the Economy, otherwise known as GATE. We team up with leading experts to bust prominent myths about gender and the economy and give you the tools you need to bust each myth yourself. I'm doctor Sonya Kang, Canada Research Chair in Identity, Diversity, and Inclusion at the University of Toronto, a new academic director of GATE. And my pronouns are she and her.
Speaker 2:And I'm Carmina Ravenara, senior research associate at GATE, and my pronouns are she and her.
Speaker 1:For our final episode this season, we're gonna be busting some myths about a hot topic, the gender pay gap. And we're just in time for International Equal Pay Day on September 18th. So we know that there are a bunch of different factors that contribute to the gender pay gap. And I think one of the biggest myths about it is that the gap is solely caused by women making less than men for doing the same job. We talked about this in our earlier episode on women and negotiation.
Speaker 2:Yep. So women very often do make less than men for doing the same job, but there are also other causes. For example, women are disproportionately doing lower paid work than men like the 5 c's, caring, catering, clerical work, cleaning, and cashiering. And they also do much more unpaid housework and domestic work than men and experience bias and discrimination at work if they become mothers.
Speaker 1:Right. So it's much more complicated than most people think. And get this stat. The UN estimates that if progress continues at the same slow pace it is now, it's gonna take 257 years to close the global gender pay gap. That's not even considering other types of inequalities, like how the pay gap between racialized women and white men is even larger than the one between white women and white men.
Speaker 1:So we need to think really hard about how we as a society can close these gaps more quickly, more efficiently, and more inclusively. So for all women, not just white women. Who are we gonna hear from this episode?
Speaker 2:We're going to hear from Gates founder, doctor Sarah Kaplan, who you might remember from our earlier episode on remote work. Sarah was recently a guest on Ontario's Pay Equity Commission podcast called Level the Paying Field. This podcast is a 6 part series hosted by Katie Ward, the commissioner and chief administrative officer of Ontario's Pay Equity Commission. Through interviews with experts, Katie discusses the invisible drivers of the gender wage gap and how we can confront them. In her episode with Sarah, they talk about how various inequalities that are hardwired into our labor market structures have given rise to the gender pay gap.
Speaker 2:And Sarah also talks about the myth of meritocracy and how it's used as an excuse for not making change. It's a really informative episode, so we want to share it with you today.
Speaker 1:Great. I can't wait to hear it. And if listeners wanna learn more about the pay gap, we encourage you to listen to all of the episodes of Level the Playing Field. There are 2 seasons currently available. You may also wanna check out the website payequity.gov.on.ca for even more insights.
Speaker 1:You can find the link in our show notes. Now let's get into this episode.
Speaker 3:Welcome to Level the Pain Fields season 2, a 6 part series that seeks to uncover the invisible drivers of the gender wage gap. My name is Katie Ward, and I'm commissioner and CAO of Ontario's Pay Equity Commission. Join me and my outstanding guests in exploring how women in the labor market still experience multiple biases and what can be done to confront and remedy them. Let's learn together what we can do to level the paying field. We are delighted to have doctor Sarah Kaplan as featured guest for today's episode.
Speaker 3:Doctor Kaplan is the director of the Institute For Gender and the Economy, distinguished professor of Gender and the Economy, professor of strategic management, and fellow of the Lee Chin Family Institute For Corporate Citizenship at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management. Sarah is also co author of many bestselling books, and she regularly advises corporations, governments, and agencies on policies related to board diversity, care work, employment, pay equity, gender based analysis, and other topics. Thank you for joining our series. And I guess I should say Doctor. Kaplan, not Sarah.
Speaker 3:Sorry for the informality there.
Speaker 4:Oh, well, you can call me Sarah, and I'm so delighted to be here.
Speaker 3:Thank you very much. So we know because we work in this space that from the start, the labor market has been gender biased, meaning it never really started off even for men and women. And at the start of the industrial revolution, you know, only certain women, primarily unmarried women could enter the labor market and they could only do certain jobs according to, you know, men who drafted legislation and labor policy. So what impacts, you know, if you think you can go back in time or or a picture of modern day, you know, has this clustering had on modern labor market dynamics, the way that we've systemically put women and men into different roles.
Speaker 4:Well, it's true. I love that you've gone back in history, to point out that these are structures that have existed for long periods of time. Often people think that, you know, all of the inequalities that we observe are because of, quote, people's choices. And what you're pointing out is that, no. Those choices are structured by historical trends, by assumptions that people have.
Speaker 4:I mean, even as recently as the 19 seventies, many job ads in newspapers were jobs they had 2 different categories, jobs for men and jobs for women. So we we have had this assumption that, you know, men and women are somehow suited for different kinds of jobs, and that does lead even today with all of the, efforts that we've made towards, creating equity in the economy. It leads today, even today, to people being clustered into different jobs within an organization, different categories of jobs, or different industries, or different jobs across the economy. And that is leading to a lot of the inequality that we observe in terms of earnings and ability to retire and not be in poverty later in life. So, I I love that you're highlighting that these are sort of structural and historical dynamics that lead to some of the outcomes that we observe today.
Speaker 3:Thank you for for stating that. I think, you know, you made I love the way you framed it as well by saying that the dominant narrative is choice. Oh, well, individuals choose this path for themselves, or women choose this path for themselves. But, we know that that's not true, that there's a structured gendered even, you know, we've looked at from play, up to choosing professions that there's there's a gendered structure to that. You've probably heard that this conversation around the 5 c's.
Speaker 3:For people who don't know what that means, it's caring, cashiering, cleaning, catering, and clerical work. These are the type of, the 5 C's where women have historically been clustered or it's been labeled or stereotyped as women's work. But, you know, there's research now showing that women are moving into historically male dominated or structured is probably a better word, sectors like STEM and finance. And there's an argument now and maybe you've heard this as well, maybe kinda downplaying why we're having this conversation, but saying that, you know, gender doesn't really play a dominant role in the labor market anymore because we see women moving into men's spaces. And we've moved to meritocracy.
Speaker 3:And I know you've done a lot of work about meritocracy. So I'd love to hear your perspective and what you've learned about gender dynamics and labor market and meritocracies.
Speaker 4:Well, there's a lot of wonderful questions embedded in, the, that description that you just offered. And it is true, I hear probably every day as you do, people saying, why are we still talking about gender? Look at women can do anything that men can do. Let's stop talking about it. It's boring to talk about it and the problem's already been solved.
Speaker 4:But if the problem had already been solved, we wouldn't see that only, 5% of the CEOs of leading companies are women. We wouldn't see the perpetual gender wage gap. We wouldn't see the fact that women are performing much more of the care work at home, whether it's children or elder care. They're performing much more of that than men are. So if we've solved the problem, then in theory, we wouldn't be seeing all of these other indicators of inequality.
Speaker 4:And I should point out that these indicators of inequality, once you take into account race, indigeneity, ethnicity, disability, and immigrant status, those all get multiplied. So I wanna point out that we we should really be thinking of this in an intersectional way. Where it comes into this conversation of meritocracy is that the way that people often explain those differences that I was just describing, lack of women in leadership, differences in in in pay, is they say, well, it's a meritocracy. If women were qualified to be CEOs, we would have more women CEOs. If women were and therefore, any inequalities we observe is because of, quote, lower quality, for women Yeah.
Speaker 4:Or other historically, excluded groups. But that simply can't be the case, and there's just been so much research that has demonstrated that that it that the meritocracy actually doesn't operate right now. So there's been studies for when it comes to entrepreneurs, where they've basically had the exact same pitch for the exact same startup being pitched to investors. Only some were narrated with a female voice and some were narrated with a male voice. And somehow, the one narrated with a male voice is seen as twice as investable by investors.
Speaker 3:Wow.
Speaker 4:We've seen, you know, people presented with the exact same resume, only one has Julie at the top and one has James at the top of the resume. The qualifications are identical. James is seen as being twice as hireable as Julie. So we know from study after study after study that the meritocracy is not operating because women and other excluded groups are actually not being included, not getting promoted, not getting hired, even when they have equal qualifications. And so what we actually have right now is an affirmative action system, and it's an affirmative action system for people who have historically been, in privileged positions, mainly straight white men.
Speaker 4:And yet they don't wanna believe that they have had any unequal opportunities to advance. They wanna believe it's their own hard work because, in fact, people who are in senior roles have worked extremely hard. But what they are not taking into account is the fact that other people are also working extremely hard, but have all those barriers in front of them that don't allow them to get the same opportunities for accomplishment. And so this idea, which is used over and over I'm doing an analysis of the comply or explain regulation for women on boards that the Ontario Securities Commission has in place. And the explanations are all, well, we don't have more women because we believe in a meritocracy.
Speaker 4:And though it's a convenient excuse, I would say, but it doesn't actually represent what's going on in the economy today.
Speaker 3:I I love that you're tackling this because I don't think there's a lot in this space, because as you said, it is a convenient excuse and it's hard if you don't have the data or research to confront it. Right. You've seen it over and over again. I think your most recent publication is the corporation 360 or the 360 corporation. I I haven't read the title, but I've read about the title and is I'm very curious to know, in that book, do you tackle this conversation and offer advice to leaders who want to address this challenge?
Speaker 3:Or if it's not covered in that book, how would you how would you explain or suggest to leadership to overcome this sort of convenient excuse of meritocracy? Well,
Speaker 4:so my book, The 3 60 Corporation, is really about all of the stakeholders that surround corporations, hence the 360 degrees that surround companies and how that's becoming an increasingly important imperative for corporate leaders and boards to deal with all of the stakeholders. Of course, one important set of stakeholders are, you know, half the population, women. Sure. They're, you know, potential employees, potential customers, and things like that. And what I tackle there and I think is another hot hot topic like meritocracy, is this issue of the business case and how Great.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So how, you know, many corporate leaders will insist on, oh, well, if we're gonna invest in diversity, I wanna see the business case. I wanna be see the business case for having more diversity on my board or having more diversity you know, women or other underrepresented groups, is kind of offensive on a certain level. Right? You're basically saying, you will only include me if it actually improves your profitability, but not even if it's just the same.
Speaker 4:And so you're setting this much higher bar for people who have historically been included as opposed to saying, look, we it's just the right thing to do. So one, it can be very alienating and othering for the people you are ostensibly trying to help. But the second thing is research is beginning to suggest, and even research that I'm doing literally right now as we speak, that the business case isn't even that motivating for people. Like, if you actually wanna drive change, the social justice case, the moral case is more likely to move the needle in terms of action than the business case. And yet everyone thinks, oh, we have to make the business case to motivate it, but it's actually getting in the way of making progress.
Speaker 4:And I'm not saying there isn't a business case. I think being more inclusive means you're gonna get better innovations. Sure. You're gonna serve your your communities better. You're gonna have less group think and leadership conversations.
Speaker 4:There's a million ways that there is a business case. But I think starting with the business case and saying it has to drive profits means that you're not actually gonna push as hard as you need to push in order to make the kinds of transformational changes you need to make if you're gonna be more inclusive. And so I do tackle that that question of the of how the business case is actually probably getting in the way of us making progress.
Speaker 3:I'm so glad I asked you about about the book, and you were able to bring that up. We struggle with that as well when we talk about closing the gender wage gap. There's a moral imperative. There's a social imperative. There's a social justice imperative.
Speaker 3:There's a business case imperative. And it feels heartless sometimes just to talk about the business case, but we change our messaging to our audience. But we've also heard that research as well that talks about the demoralizing element of just chalking it down to a business case.
Speaker 4:Right. And if you can't find the business case somehow, then then all of these people don't merit to be included.
Speaker 3:No. Exactly. Exactly. So it's it's really great. That's wonderful.
Speaker 3:I'm looking forward to diving into the book and hearing more what you have to say about it. I know another big piece of research and, I guess, knowledge creation that gender in the economy and under your leadership has done is developing really a robust curriculum on gender analytics. Can you tell us, you know, for for the listeners who aren't aware, like, what gender analytics is and how the public and private sector can use gender analytics to uncover and address biases in labor markets or biases within their organizations?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So, basically, I I as over the last 6 or 7 years that I have been running the Institute For Gender and the Economy, I have had just so many conversations as you probably have as have had as well that have made me feel like we are just not making as much progress on achieving equity, equality in our society as we should be. And one of the reasons I think is because we focus so much on the talent management side of the equation without also looking at the ways that inclusive insights can actually change if we're public in the public sector, change the policies and programs that we offer. If we're in the private sector, the products and services, that we develop. And there's so many so much evidence that products and services and programs are not actually leading to equal outcomes.
Speaker 4:And so you I mean, look at car safety. Women are 74% more likely to be injured in a car accident because car safety has been designed with men's bodies in mind. Yes. You know, so that that's just like an example. Or you look at financial services where the products and the ways that the products are sold are really done in a way that are not including women in the financial conversation.
Speaker 4:And that's why so many women change financial advisers when their spouse dies, and banks are losing out on on those opportunities. So there's lots of ways that you can think about how you might be able to design your products and services more inclusively. And so gender analytics is really about doing intersectional, gender based analysis on your markets and on your products and on your programs to make sure that they, are as inclusive as as possible. And my view, going back to how does it relate to talent management, is that if you set an imperative that you want your products and services and programs and policies to be inclusive, it will then force you to have a a a diverse talent pool in your organization. Because you cannot do a good job in creating inclusive product services policies unless you have an inclusive team actually doing it.
Speaker 4:And so, you you know, the a the human resources teams have, you know, probably feel like they've been shoving diversity down the throats of their managers for years years years, even though it's the right thing to do. What I'm saying is, no. Let's get the managers interested in creating inclusive products, policies, and services, and then they're gonna be running to the HR team to say, please give me more diverse talent. So I'm trying to reverse the arrow so that we see that the diverse talent is not it is, you know, the equitable and right thing to do, but it's also gonna lead to better outcomes for your organization in terms of creating more inclusive offerings. And so kind of trying to flip the script so that we're not only pushing on the talent side of the equation, but we're also pushing on the how we're serving our customers or communities or constituencies part of the equation.
Speaker 4:And so we've developed a course on that. We've had a conference on that topic. There's a lot. If anyone wants to know more, genderanalytics.org to find out more. But we're really trying to push that narrative because we think it's gonna really help, improve how organizations are serving our society.
Speaker 3:We will link to that, resource in our show notes, but I I I appreciate the way that you are linking it to what services are provided and how which I think kind of circles back to the first comment we made on choice. The choice of a car that a woman makes, for instance, if she's purchasing a vehicle is going to be influenced about by the design. If it's designed for a male body, it's going to be difficult to find a car that works for that. And I know, you know, putting this in tangible examples that I think leaders can think about, especially policymakers. I know the federal government is big on gender based analysis, and a lot of municipalities started bringing gender based analysis into city planning and urban design to think about, you know, what if we had sidewalks wide enough for 2 strollers to pass or a stroller and a wheelchair?
Speaker 3:Like, these these questions that we've just never asked because it's been designed for able-bodied, males. So I think it's wonderful, the curriculum my team attended and took home, took back to the office and probably home, so many great resources. So so thank you. We will we will link to it. Great.
Speaker 3:I wanna ask you a, a kind of broader based question just to kind of to close us out here. But I know that you've argued in the past that companies should treat gender equality as an innovation challenge. And I loved that when I was reading about that. So I'd love to hear tell me a bit more about what you mean by treating, you know, gender inequality as an innovation challenge, and how how can that approach actually help close gender gaps?
Speaker 4:Well, you know, there is a saying that if you keep trying to do the same thing over and over and you keep expecting different results, then, you know, that's not gonna be an effective way to operate. And what I feel like we have been doing when we talk about trying to achieve equality and more inclusion for women is the same thing. We've been doing the same thing for the last 2 decades. Oh, let's do diversity training and, you know, other things like that. And, you know, there hasn't been nearly as much progress as everyone had hoped.
Speaker 4:Certainly, you know, after coming out of the women's liberation movement, you know, we had a lot of progress in the seventies eighties, and it's kind of plateaued since the nineties. And and that's been a long time that we've been stuck in kind of the same place. And then I thought about the fact that so many organizations pride themselves in their abilities to innovate and create new products and services, new programs, be the creativity. But for some reason, none of that innovative talent or innovative ideas are being applied to how to think about equality in organizations. And if we really thought about it as an innovation challenge, maybe we would design our work processes differently.
Speaker 4:Maybe we would, you know, we have this huge opportunity with, you know, post COVID, whether we're going back to work, hybrid work and all of that. We could use this as a fantastic innovation opportunity in how we how we actually work. We could be innovating in, how we think about job design. There's just a 1000000 ways that we could be innovating that we we seem to not put that on the table as a possibility. And so when I argue that we should treat gender equality as an innovation challenge, I mean both the things that we were just talking about in gender analytics, which is think about all the ways that you can innovate in your products and services and programs and policies, but also how can you innovate in the ways that you're trying to achieve that inside organizations and unleash the same innovative talent you do you unleash for designing new products Right.
Speaker 4:To designing new ways of working that could be more inclusive for everyone. And by the way, that will not just benefit women. We know that there's many, many men who are actually straight jacketed by expectations of masculinity
Speaker 3:Oh, absolutely.
Speaker 4:To behave in a particular way, to be the ideal worker. And if we innovated in the ways that we work, we could be more inclusive for everyone. And so that's what I'm talking about is we just need to bring our innovative and creative talent to this problem rather than thinking that if we just do one more diversity training, we're somehow gonna magically fix the problem.
Speaker 3:I I love that you brought that dimension of men into it because we spend so much time in this space talking about women and gender equality. It's always to women. And we we leave out what you just said, which is that the male identity or the male structures are just as constructed as female. Right? Like, the labor market is is structured in a way that men are also pigeonholed in certain ideas of how they have to perform in that space.
Speaker 3:So I think that's a, you know, that's for the next piece. So I think we need to get into as well to also recognize that this is empowering everybody, and that there's men in the labor market that are also feeling pressure and inequalities just because of the structural issues. Doctor. Caplan, it is always so interesting connecting with you and learning from your team and your insights. So thank you so much for being a part of Level the Paying Field.
Speaker 4:Oh, it's my pleasure. Thanks so much.
Speaker 3:This conversation is part of a series produced by the Pay Equity Commission of Ontario to examine economics, equity, women work and money. Episodes can be found on www.levelthepayingfield. Ca, on the YouTube channel of Ontario Pay Equity Office, and wherever you download your podcasts. Please share this episode on your social platforms so we can elevate the equity conversation.
Speaker 1:Thanks to the government of Ontario's Pay Equity Office for this episode of Level the Paying Field. Busted is written and produced by Carmina Ravenara and me, Sonya Kang, and edited by Ian Gormley. This is also our last episode of season 2. We can't thank you enough for listening. If you wanna hear more from Gate, tune in to our other podcasts by searching Institute For Gender and the Economy wherever you find your podcasts.
Speaker 2:You can also subscribe to GATE's newsletter at gendereconomy. Org to keep up to date with new and innovative research on inequality and the economy. And to make sure to stay tuned for season 3 of busted. Until next time, happy myth busting.