Curioso artigo da HBR sobre os livros de Stieg Larsoon e a análise sobre causas de brecha entre gêneros. Mesmo em sociedades onde a brecha é muito baixa, ela continua lá. Mas, a provocação que o artigo faz é que é possível ser sexista ao tratar da brecha e assim, contribuir para que ela nunca seja tapada.
Será?
Pode ser que o exemplo trazido no artigo seja furado. Mas, existe rebate de indicadores. Entendê-los é uma tarefa complexa, mas necessária. Indicadores começam a influenciar a maneira das pessoas analisarem uma situaçao, expressarem opiniões e, por fim, os próprios indicadores.
Não são só as pesquisas que influeciam as próprias pesquisas. A visão (como definimos e medimos) da realidade influencia a forma como reagimos a esta. Isolando o rebate será possível perceber discrepância e o momento quando indicadores os indicadores ficam obsoletos.
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Women and the Swedish Mystery
Men and women of the world, grab the Swedish "Girl" trilogy! That is, if you are not among the millions who have already read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. Stieg Larsson's gripping mystery series provides fictional food for thought about the possibilities for closing the gender gap in business and society.
The trilogy takes for granted the ability of women to do anything they wish. After all, Sweden is among the Nordic countries with the smallest gender gap in the world, according to World Economic Forum (WEF) studies. Women appear in the three novels as lawyers, police, government officials, IT geniuses, media executives, and business CEOs. They out-smart adversaries and defeat much larger men in hand-to-hand combat. And just in case you missed this latter physical strength point, the third book drives it home with an intermezzo series providing a history of women warriors.
At the same time, the "Girl" series points to some painful limitations. It argues that women can be readily victimized just because they are women, starting with violations against Larsson's frustrating anti-hero heroine, Lisbeth Salander. Sometimes the victimization is casual, perpetrated by malicious men who justify it by demonizing their female victims. In other cases, it takes an organized form such as prostitution or sex trafficking, as Nicholas Kristof noted in his New York Times column about a message he hopes readers take from the novels. The very fact of being female seems to invite attacks, Larsson indicates, regardless of the woman's competence or status. And being young as well as female can de facto mean deserving to be victimized.
If this work of fiction rings true, it means that authorities can believe the worst about women — for example, in the case of rape, that she "asked for it." This echoes the Presumption of Guilt that Harvard Law School Professor Charles Ogletree argues against in his decidedly non-fiction book by that title about the treatment of African-Americans. Ogletree describes in depth the arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in 2009 after a white policeman apparently refused to believe that a break-in was merely an attempt to get into his own home after returning from a trip without his keys. Then Ogletree offers numerous other compelling examples of distinguished professionals of color, including lawyers and judges, being falsely suspected of crimes. He recounts the widespread phenomena of blacks being stopped by police for what turns out to be merely DWB — "driving while black." Success by itself does not remove false assumptions, whether about race or gender.
To be aware of both sides of the gender situation does not mean making gender the first or only thing one talks about. Nor does it mean having to lead with one's gender (or color) first. At the 2010 WEF meeting in Davos, Switzerland, a European business school dean decried the fact that women CEOs did not show up for sessions on women, as though they did not want to be identified with their gender. I disagreed with him, arguing that it is unfair to expect any one aspect of a person to dominate her or his identity, or to make that the basis for determining how to use one's time. I similarly disagreed with a black intellectual who complained at a recent forum that President Obama is not black enough, because he does not talk about his race — a complaint Gwen Ifill also reports and refutes in her insightful book, The Breakthrough: Race and Politics in the Age of Obama. Obama is a President who happens to be black, not a black President, just as Arianna Huffington is a successful media company founder who happens to be female.
But like it or not, there are those moments when one aspect of a person seems to blot out all the accomplishments and transcend all the credentials. That is why those people from groups that are "different" from what Traditional Establishments view as the mainstream model must always be aware of carrying an extra burden of proving themselves — or proving they did not intend to be a victim of abuse. They should be presumed innocent, not presumed guilty. The real Swedish mystery is why this situation still persists in the twenty-first century in sophisticated societies, and what enlightened people (of any gender or color) can do about it.
