Healthy Entitlement: The Key to Gender Equity in the Workplace
This post contains edited excerpts from COMPOSURE: The Art of Executive Presence, available now wherever books are sold. Order your copy today!
Imagine you’re asked to take part in a study for a small cash prize. The requirements are simple: you’re given five minutes to solve a set of 20 anagrams.
After those five minutes, you’re asked to fill out a 10-item self-esteem questionnaire. Then you’re asked to estimate the number of anagrams you solved correctly as compared with others in the study. And finally, you’re asked to pay yourself the amount of money (from $0 to $2.50) you honestly think you deserve for your performance of the task.
A typical anagram in the study looks like this:
I N T H K
[ Solution: THINK ]
That one is straightforward enough, right? Unfortunately, what you don’t know is that most of the anagrams aren't nearly as simple as the one above – 15 of the 20 in the set are extremely difficult. They look like something closer to this:
L I T L C A M E
[ Solution: METALLIC ]
So after likely struggling mightily through the anagrams, the study invites you to ask yourself: “How did I do?” What the researchers found is that how you estimate your performance and what you decide to pay yourself actually have a lot to do with your gender.
So we're left wondering… How did the participants decide what to pay themselves, and was the criteria different for the women than for the men?
The Results
In the study, conducted by researchers Brett W. Pelham and John J. Hetts, participants solved an average of 3.24 anagrams, with women solving slightly more than men. In the self-assessment of performance, both men and women believed they performed worse than their peers.
But here’s the catch: the women paid themselves just half of what the men did – an average of just under $1.00 for the women as compared to almost $2.00 for the men.
Pelham and Hetts found that the women’s self-pay was based on how they perceived their own performance.
The better women felt they performed, the more they paid themselves. But perceived performance did not predict what the men paid themselves.
Instead, it was their feelings of self-esteem that had the biggest impact; men who scored higher in self-esteem after taking the test paid themselves significantly more for their work. This finding has significant implications for how we think about gender equality in pay and advancement.
When I shared these results with one of my clients, the CEO of a 150-employee technology startup in San Francisco, he stared at me in disbelief. How could these women pay themselves so differently from the men? And what can he, a CEO committed to creating gender equity in his company, actually do in light of this finding?
The Entitlement Gap
Self-pay is a measure of what people believe they deserve for their work. In other words, it’s what people feel entitled to. And what we’re entitled to is dictated by societal norms. Viewed through this lens, the anagram study is essentially a lesson on entitlement’s impact on self-pay.
In our culture, entitlement has a negative connotation, but we haven’t always felt this way. In the 1960s, the word “entitlement” became associated with government benefits such as Medicaid and food stamps, which effectively shifted our society’s sentiments, associations, and definitions of the concept, relating entitlement to a handout. Prior to these programs, entitlement simply meant to have a rightful claim to a possession, privilege, designation, or mode of treatment.
In our work, we support the notion of “healthy” entitlement. Studies like the one above demonstrate that women suffer from a depressed sense of entitlement as compared to men. Elevating entitlement to a healthy level for both genders would go far to improve gender equity in the workplace.
The anagram study measures what each individual perceives as their rightful claim to compensation. What it found was that societal norms create a clear distinction between genders on the basis of a “rightful claim.” The men based their rightful claim on their feelings of self-esteem, whereas the women based their rightful claim on their perceived performance.
The men in the study felt an elevated sense of entitlement by virtue of their gender and stature in society. So of course they felt rightfully deserving to pay themselves more. The women, on the other hand, felt a depressed sense of entitlement, based on their perceived performance, which resulted in paying themselves less.
Entitlement Impacts Advancement
According to an oft-cited Hewlett Packard internal report, men apply for a job when they meet 60% of the qualifications, but women apply only if they meet 100%. Men thus feel more entitled than women to pursue advancement or promotion, even when they feel (or even if they are) less qualified.
Women’s depressed sense of entitlement is rooted in the idea that they have been socialized to base their entitlement to advance on past performance, whereas men tend not to believe this about themselves at all. For most men, the past is the past. It’s all about the future. Can I do this job? I think so. Therefore, I will.
But here’s the big catch for women. When it comes down to it, it’s impossible to feel qualified to meet a position’s requirements based on past performance, given that advancement itself requires new skills and responsibilities.
So how do you know if you’re good at something new if you’ve never done it? These feelings of entitlement to promotion help provide context for why we see so few women, and so many men, in positions of power. To achieve gender equity in promotion and advancement, we need to find ways to elevate women to healthy levels of entitlement, similar to those of their male peers.
But how do we achieve this?
The same concept of transparency used to close the gender pay gap could also be applied to closing the advancement gap. A recent study conducted by PayScale found that (in most industries) when people agree or strongly agree that their organization is transparent in how pay is determined, then the gender pay gap closes at all levels. To put it another way, when compensation is openly discussed in a company, everyone can achieve equal pay for equal work, regardless of gender.
What this idea boils down to is rather simple: When men and women ask themselves, “What do I deserve?” based on the experiences of how they’re treated in society, their answers are quite different from each other. Unless there’s transparency in the process, it’s highly unlikely that women will tell themselves they deserve a pay bump or a promotion.
You may also like: How to Make Meetings Safe for Impostors ➞
Transparency in this case might call for opening a dialogue between men and women to help women understand how men assess their readiness for promotion and advancement. In this way, men become agents of external validation for pay equity and advancement for women, as well as for individuals in underrepresented groups.
We might also call upon men to advocate for high-performing female colleagues when they’re ready to step up in their careers. When men tell others that a woman should be promoted, they send a strong signal to everyone (and most importantly, the woman) that she is ready to move up, even if she doesn’t feel entitled to the promotion.
I have personally benefited from several instances of these very circumstances in my own professional life. When I look back on my career, I advanced most when my male colleagues advocated for me, especially when I didn’t feel qualified. By offering me their unconditional support, these men helped give me permission to learn on the job and ditch the notion that I had to meet 100 percent of the job qualifications before taking on more responsibility. They also had me advocate for the compensation I deserved — which was often much more than I expected.
When we open the dialogue, increase transparency, and destigmatize the concept of healthy entitlement, we invite everyone to participate in the process of helping women overcome the societal norms that stand in the way of achieving their highest potential. In doing so, we offer a proactive way to change the criteria by which women judge their own deservedness.
This is well worth the effort, because when we elevate women to a healthy sense of entitlement, we level the playing field.
Kate Purmal is a former CEO and Technology Executive, Board Director, Business Advisor and Executive Coach. She is also a Senior Industry Research Fellow at Georgetown University McDonough School of Business and a lecturer at University of Michigan Ross School of Business. She is the author of two books: COMPOSURE: The Art of Executive Presence and THE MOONSHOT EFFECT: Disrupting Business as Usual.
