If God is calling women to lead, what’s holding them back? Susan Harris Howell has spent her academic life investigating this question and the answer that she’s come to is gendered socialization. That is, society has preconceived ideas about what toys, jobs, behaviors, and clothes fit which gender. The result has been that, societally, men are more likely to lead because society has socialized them to be leaders. To get a better idea of this, I had a conversation with Dr. Howell.
The Conversation
This transcript may be lightly edited for clarity and content.
Josh Olds: The big term to make sure that everybody understands is “gendered socialization.” Half the book is dedicated to explaining what that means, what that looks like in childhood, adolescence, adulthood—there’s a chapter for each of them. So to make sure everyone is clear, what does that term mean?
Susan Harris Howell: Gendered socialization can mean a lot of things. It can mean anything that is as overt as our parents, or teachers or the media telling us, “You’re a boy, you’re a man, you need to be doing these things, or you shouldn’t be doing those things.” Or because you’re a woman or girl, you should or shouldn’t be doing a variety of things. But it also can be things that are very subtle, and this is really what my book focuses on. Because we’re typically aware of those overt ways. But I look at very subtle gendered socialization. Like, for instance, the way our language very often will use the word he or him when referring to people whose gender is not known. That would be a very subtle way that we might be communicating to girls and women that they’re second class, that they’re not the main attraction, that this is a man’s world, and that we’re just here on the sidelines. So my book looks at gendered socialization as anything that happens, that tends to channel us in a certain way, simply because we’re a boy or a girl, a man or a woman.
Josh Olds: What sort of inequalities do we find coming out of gendered socialization?
Susan Harris Howell: Well, for one thing, the mindset that it creates in men and women and boys and girls, and then later men and women. For instance, one of the lines of research that I talked about in the book is some research that shows parents and teachers are more likely to believe that if a boy does really well, say on a math or a science test—something that is very often stereotypically seen as a boy thing—whenever he does really well, they’re more likely to tell him, “Wow, you’re really smart.” And then if their daughter does well, on one of those math or science tests—something that is stereotypically thought of as a guy thing—they’re more likely to tell her, “Wow, you really worked hard.” And while both of those are compliments, and both are probably true, most of the time, usually, if we do well, on any kind of a test, it’s partly because we’re smart, and partly because we’ve worked hard, but the fact that they give different messages to boys and girls is very telling.
Because if you tell someone that they did well because they’re smart, what that communicate is that they’re doing well is part of who there is part of their essence, part of who they are. And then it’s very likely to be repeated. Because if you’re smart today, you’re likely going to be smart, tomorrow, next week, and next month, and so on. But when we tell a little girl that she did well, because she tried hard, it communicates to her, that it’s not so much who she is. But what she did in this one situation. And so it communicates to her that the next time. For instance, if she doesn’t have as much time to study, or if the subject is just a lot harder, that her inborn intelligence, the essence of who she is, might not be enough to get her through.
So for instance,