Trade-offs, competition, choices, excellence and unintended consequences

From The Plight of the Alpha Female by Kay S. Hymowitz.

Hymowitz can be rather incendiary sometimes but like other excellent writers, she always comes back to the numbers. What do the numbers tell us? You always have the usual caveats around what is measured and how it is interpreted but far better to start with something that is measured than something that is guessed.

In this instance, Hymowitz examines the numbers behind gender, roles, choice, and achievement.

How big is the gender gap at the top? Very big. Only 4 percent of CEOs at Fortune 500 companies are women, as are 9 percent of chief financial officers. Women occupy a mere 16 percent of board seats at Fortune 500 companies. The research and advocacy group Catalyst has collected other relevant numbers: just 20 percent of law-school deans, 23 percent of federal judges, and 27 percent of state judges are women. In medical schools, 13 percent of deans and department chairs and 19 percent of full professors are women. Less than a quarter of university and college presidents are female. Women hold 90 seats out of 535 in the U.S. House of Representatives and 17 out of 100 in the Senate. Slaughter notes that many of the women in high-level government jobs she encountered during her State Department stint are leaving; men will succeed almost all of them.

One of the assertions that frequently comes up in the field of books and literature is the accusation that women are discriminated against in the awards that they receive. After the last go around on one of the listservs, I looked at the data and if I recall correctly, found that indeed women did tend to win only about 25-35% of the literary awards. Where the analysis hit something of a brick wall was in terms of determining how many women were in a position to win, i.e. how many women writers were there. If women are only 25-35% of writers, then there clearly is little evidence of discrimination if they then only win 25-35% of the prizes.

What Hymowitz' collection of numbers above indicates is consistent with what I found regarding prizes - they go to those that spend the greatest amount of time (both volume and duration) towards achieving the top role. Hymowitz's numbers indicate that women reach the top ranks of the various fields at rates of 4 - 27%, with a modal percentage across various fields of 17%.

I had a post back in June, Only 20% of the top linked articles were by women, which explored this topic from a mathematical perspective. Since the choice of which articles to link would seem to be entirely free from discrimination issues, why would there be such a large imbalance. Hymowitz's numbers are entirely consistent with the hypothesis that disparate imbalances in achievement are entirely a function of the volume and duration of hours necessary to achieve excellence in a field and that choices about family structure and roles within the family are the primary determinants of who is willing and able to make the investments necessary to achieve excellence. I have a related post, not so much about gender as about excellence and productivity, How do you balance rewards between current productivity and anticipated future productivity?

Where this is leading me is the speculation that, if free choices of individuals and families are responsible for disparate impact rather than discrimination and bias, then perhaps we are focused on the wrong problem. Perhaps we have reached the point of declining returns by investing effort in removing ever smaller vestiges of discrimination. Perhaps the focus should instead be on a different problem - are there ways to ensure that women are able to generate a higher level of return (of productivity) on their skills and experiences, in the context of lower worked hours and lesser work continuity. There are not obvious answers but I bet that is a more rewarding problem on which to focus.

One further observation from Hymowitz:

Unintended consequences happen in America as well. One study of 70 top law firms by The Lawyer found that the most competitive, least family-friendly, “super-elite” firms had more female equity partners than did firms with heavily used family-friendly policies. “The results seem counterintuitive,” one commentator on the study wrote. “Who would guess that women would fare better on the equity barometer at firms where the odds of making partner are ridiculously slim for everyone? By the same token, wouldn’t you expect that at the less competitive, two-tier firms (especially those with well-established part-time or flexible policies), there’d be women equity partners popping out at every corner?”

This is very close to the point Sowell was making in post I had, Moderation in principle is always a vice. Sowell is criticizing affirmative action because of the negative consequences of academic mismatch and pointing out that left to competition based on objective standards, the outcomes will be better and fairer for everyone.