Winter 2023 Stories

By Laura L. Ellingson

Patrick A. Donohoe, S.J. Professor
Department of Communication

In a world post #MeToo, most people would like to believe that sexual harassment and gender discrimination are relics of the past. We hope that universities, businesses, and other organizations have eradicated inequities based on gender bias, including sexism’s intersections with racism, ableism, heteronormativity, and other structural oppressions.

I teach courses on gender, sexuality, and communication at SCU, having earned a graduate certificate in women’s studies along with my Ph.D. in communication. And over and over again, I am asked by students, faculty, parents, and even strangers at parties—how can sexism still be affecting the workplace in 2023? Didn’t Title IX and civil rights legislation take care of that? What about #MeToo and Time’s Up? And can’t any gender disparities be explained by the larger percentage of men applying for venture capital funding?

The brief answer to all these questions is that workplace gender bias persists and is even expanding in some ways, despite efforts to eliminate bias and promote equity. In this essay, I look at the persistence of workplace gender bias and inequities in the context of the Catholic intellectual tradition (CIT) by focusing on venture capital funding for startups. I draw on cutting-edge research on venture capital (VC) funding conducted by my colleague, Maya Ackerman, assistant professor of engineering at SCU and an entrepreneur/startup co-founder, to illustrate the tenacity of sexism in sustaining economic injustice. I briefly summarize Ackerman’s research, explain how implicit gender bias plays out in everyday communication in workplaces, and highlight a couple of innovative strategies for recognizing and valuing the complementarity of gendered perspectives in organizations.

Ackerman, along with leadership expert Bonita Banducci, a business consultant and longtime lecturer who teaches gender and engineering at SCU, and I were featured recently in an event sponsored by SCU’s Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship. Together with Executive Director Brigit Helms, we unpacked gender bias in Funding Women Entrepreneurs: From Bias to Bonus.¹ Promoting awareness of insidious ways in which sexism and its intersecting oppressions persist is a critical step.

Ackerman, Banducci, and I are committed to the mission of our Jesuit institution to promote social justice through our teaching and research. At the intersection of theology, politics, and economics, CIT highlights the dignity of workers and the welfare of communities, reflecting a focus on human rights commensurate with the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.² Attending to the intersection of racism with sexism is a critical point of connection between Jesuit and feminist theologies in promoting social and economic justice.³ Moreover, acknowledging ways in which globalization, corporate colonialization of developing nations, and exploitative practices construct global migration and employment trends is vital to understanding⁴ economic injustice within any country or region. CIT embodies “a radically inclusive” approach to economic justice, which promotes the dismantling of structural inequities such as sexism and racism that limit opportunities for fair economic participation.⁵

Unfortunately, Pope Francis’ teachings continue to reinforce traditional gender roles within families, and “by tightly intertwining femininity and care work, rather than highlighting this work as part of the domestic vocation of every person, the papal approach risks complicity in the very problems— the disvaluing of women’s contributions, and the socioeconomic exploitation of the work of the home—it seeks to ameliorate.”⁶ Firmly entrenched within heteronormative frameworks for making and sustaining families, Pope Francis recently publicly derided couples who choose not to have children, saying that such a choice “diminishes us, takes away our humanity.”⁷ Given that the majority of childcare and housekeeping continues to be done by women in heterosexual relationships—a disparity vastly⁸ exacerbated by the global COVID-19 pandemic — the Pope’s zeal for children-rearing places a disparate demand on women’s bodies, minds, and career aspirations, including people who do not identify as women but are able to sustain pregnancy, such as some transgender and nonbinary people. The disproportionate burden he reinforces only worsens women’s inequality at home and work.

Domestic labor and power disparities, and the traditional gender roles that they promote, underlie persistent gender disparities in workplaces. Ackerman’s research revealed some painful, persistent truths about gender and VC firms.⁹ Venture capital is necessary for successful startups, and yet funding of women-led startups decreased from a mere 2.7% in 2019 to 1.8% in 2020. Moreover, her analyses of over 48,000 companies on Crunchbase reveal:

The presence of a female founder on the team actually increases the amount of funds raised, but only when the company is led by a male CEO. On the other hand, companies led by female CEOs consistently raise substantially less funds than firms led by male CEOs. Silicon Valley was one of few geographies identified where the presence of a non-CEO female founder correlates with lower funding outcomes than male-only teams, suggesting a higher than usual gender bias in the San Francisco Bay Area.¹⁰

This evidence establishes beyond a doubt that bias persists and cannot be explained away as coincidental, nor the result of women being less competent. In fact, Ackerman and her team found that being male is the most important factor that predicts fundraising success, beating out such competency factors as having attended a top university and the number of prior exits by founders.

As a communication scholar, my contribution to this critical conversation on gender and economic justice centers on explaining how gender disparities are enacted through everyday communication practices in workplaces, including VC firms. First, I will cover a few principles of communication, then turn to gendered styles of communication.

Communication includes both verbal communication (that is, language) and nonverbal communication, which is everything else that constitutes the messages we send and receive, including communication cues that people often take for granted. Nonverbal cues include tone, pitch, and rate of speech; gestures, posture, and body movements; facial expressions; appearance, including body size and shape, height, hair, and skin color; clothing, jewelry, and accessories; grooming (hair style, makeup, facial hair removal); and personal belongings such as briefcases, smart phones, laptops, and pens.¹¹ Moreover, research indicates that at least 65% of meaning in verbal interactions derives from nonverbal cues.

All communication has two levels: content and relationship. The content level consists of explicit information or ideas. The relationship level indicates the standing of the relationship between speakers. That is, it is impossible to communicate with another person without implicitly communicating about your own identity and how your role(s) relate(s) to the other person’s identity and roles, and this is accomplished primarily through nonverbal cues. So, if a supervisor asks her employee—“Can you please assemble the team in the conference room?”— her smile, easy tone of voice, and eye contact communicate respect and collegiality, while the request also functions as an implicit order, indicating a substantial power differential.

People are socialized into communication norms for their culture, including gender, which are traditionally thought of as masculine or feminine styles. This binary is a false one, as all people enact masculine and feminine nonverbal cues, displaying some degree of androgynous communication. It is more accurate to think of masculine and feminine styles as existing along a continuum. Masculine communication styles maintain status, assert power, compete, and foster independence, while feminine styles emphasize relationships and connection.¹² Women, more than men, use a greater variety of facial expressions, are more likely to smile at others, express affiliative and appeasing styles, provide active listening cues such as nodding and making affirmative sounds (mmmhmm, uh huh), speak more softly, use tentative speech cues such as hedging or adding tag questions at the end of sentences, use fluid gestures, and endeavor to take up less space. Men, more than women, use fewer facial expressions, listen without displaying active listening cues, take up more space with their bodies, and use assertive and aggressive communication styles, such as interrupting others, changing the conversational topic, and speaking loudly and firmly. Cross-cultural research demonstrates that gendered communication styles are not innate but are learned through social interaction.¹³ These expectations for communication persist and form the basis of gender stereotypes.

Because masculine communication norms constitute the norms for workplace communication, women face a catch-22, or double bind, between femininity and competence.¹⁴ That is, they need to communicate in feminine ways to be found likable and approachable by others, yet those displays of femininity often cause them to be viewed as professionally incompetent. Yet when women adopt masculine communication styles to enhance their perceived competence, they tend to be judged as aggressive, unlikable, and not collegial.

Extensive research documents this double-bind dynamic in the hypermasculine VC culture, in which implicit and explicit sexism abounds and largely goes unchallenged.¹⁵ Scant representation of women C-suite positions—for example, 8.8% of CEOs in Fortune 500 companies are women—means fewer role models and mentors who can show other women how to manage this tension and embody powerful leadership roles successfully.¹⁶ Moreover, workplace gender bias is worse for women of color and women with disabilities.¹⁷ Because gender bias remains largely unconscious, it is incredibly difficult to remedy, even when organizations provide relevant training.¹⁸

Research makes clear that sexism is enacted through spoken and mediated speech (e.g., email) and a host of gendered nonverbal communication cues during workplace interactions. Gendered expectations are normative and thus invisible. If a small set of communication behaviors promoted gender bias, we potentially could isolate and change them. However, gender norms are deeply entrenched in all communication norms.

So, what to do? I offer two ideas for next steps.

We can teach organizations about the benefits of fostering ways of thinking and communicating that are traditionally associated with femininity and are often misinterpreted as incompetence. Lecturer Bonita Banducci teaches and does training for organizations on how to think of gender (and other marginalized identities) not as biases but as bonuses. That is, she highlights the relational competencies that have been invisible, unarticulated, undervalued, and associated with feminine communication styles, including the ways in which systems thinking (as contrasted with individualistic reasoning) helps organizations succeed. Banducci complements the masculine “firefighter” who jumps in to solve problems in a crisis with the feminine “fire preventer” who heads off crises with high-context thinking and communicating. Fire prevention is far less dramatic and thus less likely to be noticed and rewarded; moreover, such efforts may be seen as troublemaking because more complex solutions can take more time and cross onto other people’s turf. Banducci also teaches that playing “devil’s advocate” when considering a colleague’s idea—a decidedly masculine practice of pointing out all the arguments against a proposal—can be complemented by playing “angel’s advocate”—a relational approach to engaging with colleagues that may yield even better results. Reframing undervalued feminine communication strategies as relational and systems competencies may enable organizations to recognize their value and reward them.

Second, we can simply heighten awareness of gendered communication styles, without trying to change them. Helping people to make sense of others’ patterns of communicating—which are not just gendered, but vary according to race, age cohort, religion, and a host of other factors—can be a powerful tool for motivating people to be more curious about and open to others’ communication styles and perspectives.

Gendered economic injustice is too complex a problem to be easily solved. Yet communication will necessarily be part of any efforts for positive change, so appreciating gendered communication differences can be a vital step toward greater equity.