Show host Gene Tunny sits down with Professor Cordelia Fine to discuss her latest book, Patriarchy Inc. Professor Fine argues gender biases are embedded in jobs and organizational structures, affecting women’s career prospects. Topics include ‘greedy jobs,’ the undervaluation of feminized professions, the limits of diversity programs, and the role of evolutionary psychology in shaping gender assumptions. Whether you agree or disagree, this discussion offers a fresh perspective on gender in the modern economy.
If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions for Gene, please email him at contact@economicsexplored.com.
You can listen to the episode via the embedded player below or via podcasting apps including Apple Podcast and Spotify.
About this episode’s guest: Professor Cordelia Fine
Cordelia Fine is a Canadian-born British academic and writer. Her work analyses scientific and popular biological explanations of behavioural sex differences and workplace gender inequalities, explores the effects of gender-related attitudes and biases on judgements and decision-making, and contributes to debates about workplace gender equality. She is the author of three popular science books, published in 13 languages. Among other accolades, Testosterone Rex won the Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize. She is currently a professor in the History & Philosophy of Science in the School of Historical & Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne.
Timestamps for EP274
- Introduction (0:00)
- Cordelia Fine’s Background and Interests (2:44)
- Defining Patriarchy and Its Persistence (4:45)
- Gender Pay Gap and Job Selection (12:03)
- Impact of Gender Norms and Stigma (23:09)
- Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Programs (33:01)
- Market Thinking vs. Relations Thinking (40:07)
- Alternative Evolutionary Perspectives (1:05:11)
- Conclusion and Recommendations (1:14:11)
Takeaways
- The Gender Pay Gap Is Complex – It’s not just about discrimination; factors like ‘greedy jobs’ (roles demanding long, inflexible hours) and the devaluation of feminized jobs play a major role.
- Diversity Initiatives Have Limits – Many corporate DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) programs focus on ‘fixing’ women rather than addressing structural workplace issues.
- Workplace Norms Favor Men – High-status, high-paying jobs often assume an ‘ideal worker’ who can dedicate unlimited hours—an assumption that disadvantages women with caregiving roles.
- Traditional Economic Models Miss the Full Picture – Traditional market-based explanations of wage determination often overlook workplace hierarchies, organizational power dynamics, and societal gender norms.
- Evolutionary Psychology Oversimplifies Gender – Popular claims that men and women have biologically determined career preferences are challenged by alternative theories emphasizing cultural and social learning.
Links relevant to the conversation
Cordelia Fine’s website:
Patriarchy, Inc.:
https://www.amazon.com.au/Patriarchy-Inc-Wrong-Gender-Equality/dp/1838953345
Research showing increasing returns to overwork over time:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0003122414528936
The Gender Pay Debate: Understanding the Factors Behind the Gap w/ Dr Leonora Risse – EP230https://economicsexplored.com/2024/03/10/the-gender-pay-debate-understanding-the-factors-behind-the-gap-w-dr-leonora-risse-ep230/
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Transcript: Patriarchy Inc. – Gender and Workplace Dynamics w/ Cordelia Fine – EP274
N.B. This is a lightly edited version of a transcript originally created using the AI application otter.ai. It may not be 100 percent accurate, but should be pretty close. If you’d like to quote from it, please check the quoted segment in the recording.
Cordelia Fine 00:03
And so the idea here is that that kind of gender biases and other kinds of biases can become embedded in jobs themselves over time, in ways that are shaped by the demographics of who’s doing those jobs, you know. And that takes us back to this conversation about when, when jobs become feminized, they have a harder time making claims on these organizational resources.
Gene Tunny 00:34
Welcome to the economics explored podcast, a frank and fearless exploration of important economic issues. I’m your host Gene Tunny. I’m a professional economist and former Australian Treasury official. The aim of this show is to help you better understand the big economic issues affecting all our lives. We do this by considering the theory evidence and by hearing a wide range of views. I’m delighted that you can join me for this episode. Please check out the show notes for relevant information. Now on to the show. Hello and welcome to this episode. In this episode, I’m speaking with Professor Cordelia fine, a distinguished academic and author known for her research on gender psychology and workplace dynamics. She’s professor in the history and philosophy of science at the University of Melbourne, and she’s written several acclaimed books, including testosterone Rex, which won the Royal Society insight investment science book prize. Our conversation explores key economic and social questions surrounding gender in the workplace, how much of the gender pay gap can be attributed to personal choice versus structural factors. To what extent do economic models accurately reflect Workplace Realities, and how effective are corporate diversity initiatives? I’m particularly interested in hearing cordelia’s perspectives on these issues, given her interdisciplinary approach, drawing on psychology, sociology and economics, whether or not you agree with her conclusions, this discussion offers valuable insights into ongoing debates about gender and the economy. Please let me know what you think about what either Cordelia or I have to say in this episode, you can send an email to me at contact@economicsexplored.com a special thanks to Lumo coffee for sponsoring this episode. This top quality organic coffee from the highlands of Peru is packed with healthy antioxidants, economics explored. Listeners can enjoy a 10% discount. Details are in the show notes. Now let’s jump into the episode. Cordelia, fine. Welcome to the program. Thank you very much for having me. It’s a pleasure. Cordelia, you’ve written a very interesting, provocative for economists, I think in some instances, book, patriarchy, Inc. So I’m keen to talk to you about that just before we get into it. Could you give us a sense of, how did you get interested in these issues in the first place? Please?
Cordelia Fine 03:05
Yeah, that’s a good question. So I’ve been, I actually started my life, you know, interested in questions of moral psychology and moral philosophy, and I plunged into the area of sex differences and gender issues, sort of around 2008 or so. And then I spent quite a lot of my time interested in questions about why men and women are different, and how those kinds of explanations help us make sense of social structure. And I’ve long been interested in, of course, there are lots of really important issues to do with that, such as, you know, violence and so on. But I’ve always been interested in structure in terms of organizations and who does what kind of work, and you know, what they what they get into in return. And from about 2010 or so, I was working at the Melbourne Business School, and that’s where I encountered the sort of, sort of two components of my interests came together in some sense. So on the one hand, I was much more integrated in a business community that had a growing interest in gender diversity as it was being referred to, and at the same time, I was encountering more people from a discipline that I hadn’t had much interaction with, namely, economics. And economists were getting interested in gender differences and and sort of the contribution of biological or even evolutionary factors in kind of core concepts for economics, like risk taking and competition. So my previous work has sort of examined that from, you know, really unpacking the science, exploring the science of that and in patriarchy, Inc, I kind of brought that together with what I was also seeing, which was the sort of rise of the business. Case for gender diversity, so, but perhaps we can talk a little bit more about that later.
Gene Tunny 05:05
Yes, yes. So what do you mean by patriarchy? Inc, to start off with, please. Cordelia,
Cordelia Fine 05:13
yeah. So it’s such a fun way to start interview, isn’t it talking about patriarchy? So there are lots of different meanings, or people can mean different things when they say patriarchy. When I say patriarchy, I’m just referring to this quite simple idea that men as a group have higher status and more power than women as a group. Social Scientists often refer to that instead with the term gender hierarchy. And so that’s what I mean by patriarchy. And by patriarchy, Inc, I’m referring to the many social processes that are operating in post industrial countries that help maintain this gender hierarchy by shaping women and men into different roles in the division of labor and shaping what they get in return. So to put it even more simply, patriarchy, Inc, is referring to the gender dynamics that the gender dynamics of who does what and who gets what in countries like Australia, UK, US and so on. Can
Gene Tunny 06:14
I ask? I mean, I understand, I think I understand the concept of patriarchy, and clearly in I mean, decades ago, I think you’d have to say we were clearly a patriarchy. There’s no doubt about that. But things have changed over the last 50 years. And I mean, we’ve had sex discrimination act, we’ve had a female prime minister, we’ve had various female CEOs, and the mean female representation on boards is, I think it’s increasing, but at least it is over the long term. What what remains of the patriarchy? Can you please give us a sense of that? Cordelia,
Cordelia Fine 06:57
yeah, of course. So society, yes, it has been changing. It has been changing for a long time, and it’s had sort of very rapid changes, really. Perhaps, one might say, in the last century or so, although many would argue, depending which country you’re looking at, things have have stalled a bit. But, and I think it’s also important to say that, perhaps more than ever, men’s circumstances vary widely. So there’s lots of variation among men, as there is among women, with with education level and race being particularly important factors in circumstances. But overall, when it comes to the division of labor, we still have men holding more leadership positions. They’re more likely to work in well paid industries. They earn, earn higher wages, they have greater earnings, they hold more wealth, they enjoy more leisure, and they’re treated more with more respect in workplaces. It’s not all good news for men. I mean, if you look at a workplace fatalities, for example, which is a very important outcome you have, 95% of those are are men. But I think in terms of looking at who holds the sort of high status positions in society and who has most, most power over resources, I think it’s hard to make the case that we’re in a kind of gender flat arrangement or a matriarchy. So if you know, if you look at the ASX, 300 recent stats show that 91% of CEOs of men, 86% of the chairs of ASX. 300 boards are men in 2021 men were holding three quarters of C suite and senior senior leadership roles in financial services in Australia and even political representation, where I think there’s a kind of much still disputed, but a sort of stronger philosophical view that our political representation, in order to have legitimacy, needs to somehow reflect the community that it’s serving demographically in certain ways. I mean, yes, we’ve had a female prime minister, but it’s one, was it 31 you know, there is really good equality across both chambers and senior executive service roles in government, administration and so on. But that’s that hasn’t come about organically. I don’t think there’s been a lot of work to make that happen. And if we look across state premiers and chief ministers, we’re still seeing majority majority men. So So that’s in terms of the leadership, and in terms of, you know, we all know. We hear every year about the gender pay gap, we hear less about the gender wealth gap, which is probably more significant for economic well being and well being more generally. It’s quite hard to get data on that, but the studies that have been done show that there’s a sort of universal gender gap in wealth across across OECD countries, for instance. And then you know who has respect in workplaces? So, you know, there are, you know, some men can be targets of sexual harassment, but women are more likely to be targeted for sexual harassment than men. So I’d certainly take the point that things, things have changed a lot and often for the better. But you know, these stats are the stats that don’t think they’re really too much up for dispute. I think what what gets interesting? And I don’t spend a lot of time in the book talking about these statistics, because they are so familiar to many people. I think what gets interesting is the question of why we see these patterns, and what if anything we should do about them. So those are the, those are the, really the questions that I’m targeting in the in the book, and trying to challenge one point of view that says, Actually, we don’t really have a problem anymore, and another point of view that says, Oh, we do have a problem, but here’s how we’re going to here’s how we’re going to fix it. So kind of the patriarchy in account is trying to offer a sort of different account of what the problem is and what we need to do about it. Yep,
Gene Tunny 11:10
yep. Now, did you mention that the Senior Executive Service of public of the public service is that reasonably equal? Is it, is that, I’m just trying to remember what you said about that, is that is diversity or gender representation, or there’s less of a patriarchy there, or there’s more balance there. Is that, right? And that’s been the you think that’s, that’s the result of specific policies, is it?
Cordelia Fine 11:37
Yeah. So, for example, positions on Australian Government boards and Deputy Chair positions on on boards are, you know, pretty, pretty gender balanced. I have to say gender representation in politics isn’t, isn’t my, isn’t my area of expertise. So, you know, there’ll be other people who could talk, talk a lot more about about that. Yeah,
Gene Tunny 11:59
gotcha now, when it comes to the if we talk about gender pay gap and the types of roles that women are disproportionately employed in because that, you know, that’s part of that story. And then there’s the story about greedy jobs, so to speak, to what extent is it due to women and men selecting jobs that they’re they would prefer to do. To what extent is it any remaining gender norms or or biases? To what extent is it still? Is there still some discrimination or that should be outlawed? How do we unpack that I’ve chatted with? I mean, I know you’ve listened to the conversation I had with Leonora, and I think there’s a legitimate, you know, this is a really important empirical question. What are your thoughts on the relative contributions of all of these factors? Cordelia,
Cordelia Fine 12:57
I think it’s very difficult, slash impossible, to separate them out in a way. So I say that knowing that you know, if you come at this from a sort of traditional economic perspective, you can look at the gender pay gap, and you can, you can decompose it into different contributory factors, and there’s even been work this is based on the US gender pay gap. I don’t know if the same has been done here in Australia, but sort of actually even identifying the the contribution of the gender gap in overwork to the overall gender gap. So you have a premium for overwork. More men than women are likely to overwork, and that that makes a sort of certain contribution to the to the gender pay gap, and I don’t remember the exact number, but it was, it was actually counteracting the gains that women had got from their educational progress. So, you know, women have been getting more and more college degrees relative to men and overall, and that kind of benefit, in terms of their wages, had been sort of canceled out right by by this premium on on overwork. So certainly you can, you know, use those kinds of economic methods to sort of allocate a percentage of the gender pay gap to something like greedy jobs and the difference between men and women and men in doing that, but, but I think you know, when you come at this from other disciplinary perspectives, it becomes much more complicated. So if you think about greedy jobs themselves, you know a sociologist or a psychologist would say that there’s something inherently gendered about greedy jobs, because if you are in a greedy job, that job is assuming the kind of ideal worker who can work very long hours and be constantly available, and that assumes that there is someone at home providing this flow of family work that will keep things going and. And you know, that’s a very gendered that’s a very gendered division. I think it’s also worth pointing out that having a premium for overwork isn’t a kind of inevitable natural law of the market. So the same analysis that I referred to showed that it’s only relatively recently that there’s been a premium for overwork, and they attribute that to sort of changing economic structures, you know, the sort of increasing polarization into good, but very greedy jobs versus sort of bad, precarious, precarious jobs. So, you know, in but in the past, there wasn’t that premium for for overwork. You know, above and upon beyond that you’re simply, simply working more hours. I think there’s also an assumption that that there’s a kind of exponential increase in productivity when you’re working longer hours. That might be the case in some occupations, but sometimes it might be more assumed than empirically proven. And there’s lots of, you know, interesting discussion and debate about the link between long hours, working hours, and productivity. And of course, they’re people who say we’re actually much more productive, particularly in these kind of knowledge industries, when we do have time to rest and take a break and be a bit more creative. And I think, you know, sometimes organizations haven’t been very imaginative about how they might make jobs a bit less greedy, and the implications that might have for gender representation. And I know the economist Claudia golden, you know, has, has, has made this point herself. But just to, just to give an example, there was a really interesting series of interviews with Norwegian women and men who were working in male dominated areas of finance, so sort of asset management, markets, investment banking, corporate banking, and within large corporates. So obviously there’s a sort of gender gap in who’s working in these kinds of in these kinds of areas, and that helps to contribute to the gender pay gap, because these tend to be, you know, very well paid occupations. Now in Norway, they’ve made quite a lot of progress in terms of men taking parental leave, but there’s still a kind of gap in that men, even in these Scandinavian countries, they tend to be taking leave at times when it’s convenient for the organization, rather than when it’s most needed at home, so they’ll take it on Fridays or in summer holidays and so on. And so what they found was that the men who are even men who are fathers, were taking leave in ways that meant that they could kind of cling on to the clients that they had, that that they needed for their career success, and in order to get these these large bonuses, whereas for women, when they became parents, they took parental leave in the kind of more so to speak, disruptive ways. And if they took, you know, too long a leave, they would lose their clients to someone else, and that they would rarely get them back. And the researchers were talking actually to a Norwegian financial professional about this. And you know, he made the point that, you know, we don’t need to have people sort of owning clients necessarily. They he suggested maybe there could be a more collectivist approach to clients own ownership. So he said, and I quote him here, there should be a structure where the bank owns the client and not me. Therefore, if I’m away from my desk or get run over by a bus, it doesn’t really matter, because the client will be taken care of by the company. In addition, if anyone is on parental leave, it makes no difference, because everyone knows all the clients, and there’s a common pot, so everyone is equally happy. So you know, we can have arguments about, you know, how practical that would be how the clients would feel, and so on. But you know, it, he’s pointing out that there’s a norm, there’s an assumption about how it works between the professionals and the clients, and it’s a way that disadvantages people who, you know, aren’t, you know, endlessly committed workers who will never step a step, you know, step off the treadmill at any time at all, or even, you know, get unwell, for example, or have a aging parent. And it doesn’t necessarily, necessarily have to have to be that way. So, you know, there’s a whole lot of things to be unpacked behind the contribution of greedy jobs to the gender pay gap. And just to add one sort of last point to this, there was a really interesting, very deep analysis of bonuses in French banking firms by a French sociologist. And this was, sort of, he was looking at the data. He was, you know, doing an ethnographic study. It was a whole bunch of different methods. And one of his conclusions was that when you’re trying to explain the bonuses that bankers are getting, which could be extremely large, you can’t explain them simply in terms of the sort of normal explanations of productivity, supply and demand, etc. And he said one of the explanations was that these bankers would sort of exert this de facto ownership over particular. To their clients, and then they would use that as leverage in their kind of endless negotiations and politicking. So I think that this is just the greedy jobs example. Tells us like there’s so much behind you know, you can, you can allocate a percentage of the gender pay gap to gender gap and greedy, greedy jobs, but there’s so much more to unpack behind that that’s mixing together a whole lot, a lot of different assumptions and and phenomena and different and different factors. So yeah,
Gene Tunny 20:34
and what was that? You mentioned a study. I hadn’t been aware of that study. There’s a study that shows that the rewards, or the return on overwork, or the the returns to greedy jobs, they’ve increased over time. Do you recall the details of that study? I can put a link in the show notes. I’ll look, I’ll go back to your book and try and find it, but if you know it off the top of your head, I’d be interested in learning more about it. Um,
Cordelia Fine 21:03
I’m gonna, I’m gonna get the name wrong. I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna attempt to find it. But I can say I’m not sure it was in the book, but I can certainly send it to you, and if I remember correctly, it was maybe around the 1980s that this difference started to emerge. And one thing they found was that there wasn’t gender bias in who was getting the premium on overwork. So women who were overworking were not kind of being under rewarded relative to men. The gap came from women just being less likely to overwork in that way, which they defined as 50 hours or more per week,
Gene Tunny 21:36
right? Yeah. And so this, I mean, this could be for any number of reasons. There’s the reasons yet the the greedy jobs model assumes that there’s somebody at the at home, or, you know, it’s more, I think I had this conversation with Leonora. I mean, it’s not going to apply in every every family better or partnership, but it’s more likely that the the man will be the one doing the greedy job than the than the woman, the woman would be at home and looking after children. So yeah, that’s absolutely right.
Cordelia Fine 22:12
And I think that comes down to, you know, we often talk about, you know, the choices that women are making, but you know, we also have to ask questions, and I do ask questions in the book about what what men’s preferences are, and it’s, it’s not like men have full control over how long hours they’re going to work. You know, if you’re in a very competitive, high turn corporate environment, and you’re the main breadwinner, because that’s the decision that’s been made. Well, you might not feel that you have you might be working many more hours than you would actually prefer to. And this is a problem that people, you know, couples, heterosexual couples, actually same sex couples as well, are kind of being forced into patterns of work but do not necessarily reflect contemporary society, where we don’t have this kind of understanding that there’s a male brand breadwinner and a female caregiver with at most a secondary job.
Gene Tunny 23:16
Yeah. And one of the other issues I think, look, we I think I chatted about this with Leonora, that women are more likely to choose caring or professions that are well, caring professions, nursing or well teaching, and they’re typically well, they’re not as well paid as some of the the job, the more jobs that men more Typically or disproportionately represented in so I think that’s a, yeah, that’s another part of it. I just wonder is, I mean, are there psychological rewards to doing some of these jobs? I mean, are the do women prefer to work in these jobs relative to others? Is there any evidence or or psychological reasoning for for that that justifies it? Yeah, look,
Cordelia Fine 24:01
this is the idea of kind of compensating differential. So there’s one economist who, I think, Julie Nelson, who describes it as women being compensated in warm feelings. So look, I think, I think there are a few, a few things to say about that. So one is, you know that there are many people have argued that these kinds of jobs are undervalued, so like setting aside, you know why? Why women are choosing them and men aren’t, they’re also just undervalued, and part of that comes from the sort of rise of gender norms. They haven’t been with us forever, but this idea that caring is caring is something that comes naturally to women and that they’re sort of, they’re doing what’s natural to them. And so it’s not really that kind of work isn’t skilled work, per se, and so it doesn’t have the kind of wages that are commensurate with the skilled work that that it actually. Is, so, yeah, so that’s, that’s one aspect of it, that a lot of this work is skilled, demanding, you know, actually really hard work, you know, aged care, whatever it is, but that it’s, it’s, it’s being that it’s being undervalued. And I think that the other thing that people can overlook is that when we think about these post industrial economies, they they grew through the kind of expansion of these so called Pink collar jobs and so, you know, during that period when women were kind of being brought much more into the labor market. They were these jobs were sort of quite explicitly designated as being for them, and then they were sort of made compatible with this assumption that they would be fitting them around their caring responsibilities. And so so that had a number of consequences. So one consequence was that, you know, these sort of caring possession occupations became very female identified, and that sort of stigmatized them for men. So men would be kind of less interested in participating in what was seen as, you know, female, female occupations. And it also meant that the sort of male jobs weren’t necessarily also being arranged in ways that made them compatible with caring responsibilities,
Gene Tunny 26:30
right? I might need you to explain that a bit more. I’m not sure I understood that properly. I can understand, yeah. I mean, we’ve seen a big drop in the number of males who are teachers, that’s for sure. I’ve seen that. And, I mean, one theory, and I don’t know how much explanatory power this has, or one hypothesis, is that men are concerned about judgments that are made about them, if they’re a male teacher, and they’re just concerned about the the scrutiny, and, you know, concerns about. I mean, you know what I’m I think, I think you know what I what I’m talking about. There’s that concern men have and why they wouldn’t be in in teaching a particularly primary school teaching, but I can’t, it’d be good to sort of explore this. You mentioned that some of the the rise of the pink collar jobs, those jobs were arranged in a way that was they were assuming that women had family or caring responsibilities, yeah, which
Cordelia Fine 27:27
they would have. So, you know, we think about what was happening say, in the 1980s there was this kind of compromise whereby the idea was that it wasn’t that we had a male breadwinner and a female caregiver who was a full time homemaker, but there are more women coming in and having sort of part time jobs that they could fit in around their sort of caring responsibility. So it was still being taken for granted that, you know, taking it home and the kids was was, was their job. And so in order to bring women into those into those jobs, they had to be made such that they could be fit, fit in around those caring responsibilities. I remember being at a sort of industry workshop about gender equality, and someone was talking about how it was sort of impossible to be a part time uniform police officer, because there was a sort of 24/7 demand for policing. And somebody there said, oh, like nursing, right? It was just a good example of, like, yeah, we need nurses 24 hours a day, seven days a week. But somehow they’ve managed to, because most nurses are female, it is actually possible to be a part time nurse, to take periods off and so on and so forth, so but to come back to your question about the stigma. I mean, this comes back to, you know, it’s sort of ugly talk about it, but that, you know, men are higher status than women, and that’s in our, you know, current societies. You know, that’s a function of the fact that men hold the majority of positions of leadership. I mean, a really sort of simple, intuitive way of kind of grasping that the kind of stigma of femininity is to think about, if you had a child, and how you would feel about dressing your daughter in, you know, jeans and a footy top, versus dressing your son in a pink frilly dress. And I think most people would feel more comfortable dressing their girl in the boys clothes than the boy in the girls clothes, for instance. So that’s just a sort of very intuitive example of this fact that you know this idea like, well, if women are doing it, how important? How important can it be? And they’re, they’re, you know, economists and sociologists have been looking at these patterns of women coming into certain kinds of occupations. There’s occupations becoming sort of more gender balanced, or even feminized, and what the effect of that is? So some have looked at, you know, wages going down. And as a job becomes more feminized, and even more recently, people have sort of looked at how much of occupational segregation is actually to do with men tending to leave jobs that have become sort of, quote, unquote, too, too female dominated. And that can you know you can see that at different different levels of fine greatness, you know, it might even be in the form of sort of, what’s called micro segmentation, where it’s about, okay, well, you know which specialties come male dominated, for instance. So you’re still maintaining this distinction between women and men, there’s something very persistent about gender segregation. And when people have done interviews with men who have even chosen kind of female dominated roles, like being a, you know, cabin crew on aircraft, or librarians, they notice that they’re even though they’ve chosen these, these occupations. And these are not ones where you have these concerns about, you know, trying to get access to children in a kind of nefarious way that they’re kind of trying to distance themselves from, from, from it. So they might as well, I call myself a sort of information to do with information analysis. If they’re a librarian, or they talk about, they emphasize the security and the safety aspect of being a cabin crew member, as opposed to the sort of service side of it, which, of course, is quite appropriate. Cabin crew are at core. They’re there for safety.
Gene Tunny 31:33
Yeah, okay, we’ll take a short break here for a word from our sponsor
Female speaker 31:41
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Gene Tunny 32:10
now. Back to the show. I like to look at some of those studies. So you mentioned there are studies where they show that as you have a traditionally male dominated field, and more women enter the field of the occupation, and what the average pay goes down. The average wage was earnings, is that the is that the point you were making? Yeah, that’s right, right. Do you know any examples off the top? Yet, I can have a look at the study. I’m just, it’s just it’s just fascinating point that one. I’d just like to explore that a bit.
Cordelia Fine 32:47
I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna remember. I’m not very good
Gene Tunny 32:50
at members. We can find it after the show. Just keen to have a look at that, that study and and what professions, and just how they establish that, and what the nature of the impact is. It sounds fascinating. And
Cordelia Fine 33:04
look, I think I’m pretty sure that those studies are done in the US, and you know, have to be careful about generalizing to other labor markets. But
Gene Tunny 33:14
yeah, yeah, no problem. Okay. What about dei programs? You have some some incisive comments on or insightful comments on dei programs. What do you see as the the merits or demerits of of those programs? Please? Cordelia,
Cordelia Fine 33:35
yeah, interesting time to be discussing dei and you know, with Trump’s executive orders, and so maybe I’ll just preface my remarks by saying that I have a particular target in my book, which is, I’m not against diversity and quality and inclusion. Hopefully that goes without saying what I’m what I’m criticizing is what I call a kind of business case Dei, which is captured by kind of familiar phrases like, you know, gender diversity isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s the smart thing to do. So, you know, we can create more profit. We can take create more high performing organizations, more innovative firms, by ensuring that we ensuring that we include women, and I have a I think this is there. You know, there are certainly forms of dei that are helpful, and I don’t want to make any sweeping generalizations about the merits of dei that are going on in any particular organization. I think many of them have brought about very beneficial effects, but I think it’s also the case that some di programs are not effective, and often those are quite popular ones, like anti bias training. Yes, but they can also miss the real problems. They can overlook opportunities to genuinely enhance merit, and they’re sometimes unnecessarily divisive, which we’ve definitely seen some evidence of of late. So you know, if we think about the business case dei a lot of gender di programs, although they don’t come out and say this necessarily explicitly, they’re kind of geared around the idea that the problem to be solved by organizations, and the way that we get to gender equality is by solving a kind of under utilization or under development of female human capital. So a kind of classic example of this is Sheryl Sandberg, best selling book Lean In so she wrote that when she was CEO of Facebook. And there’s a sort of associated lean in foundation with lots of resources for for women and companies. And basically, when you look at dei programs, there are. There are basically three approaches which have been dubbed, fix the women, create equal opportunities and value the feminine. Now they all have some pros to them. They’re not sort of unambiguously, you know, ineffective or negative. But you know, they do, they do have some some problems. So maybe I’ll just give you one example, or I can give as many examples as you want, up to three. So if we start with the sort of fix the women programs, and these can be a bit divisive, right? So these are things like women’s leadership and development programs, and the idea is that you’re encouraging women to sort of lean into opportunities to grow their human capital or to be more confident about selling their assets, right? So you know, if you look at the Lean In website, you’ll see videos with titles like, you know how to use body language for power or influence, or how women can be powerful speakers and own any room. Now look, these kinds of resources can be useful. I’ve got nothing against people watching videos like this to try and be more powerful, powerful speakers and so on, and to think about how they’re using their body language. But there’s not, there’s not much evidence that these leadership and development programs are actually effective for one thing. So that’s a, you know, we have to think about the resources and women’s time that’s that’s going into that. There’s also a sort of interesting study suggesting that this kind of talk about let’s empower women to lean in, can actually allow some kind of subtle victim blaming to fly under the radar, because the idea is that you say by sort of indicating that women can solve the problem of gender equality, you’re kind of putting the responsibility on them to solve it, and also a little bit blaming them for causing the problem in the first place by not leaning in, right? But I think that you know the main, perhaps the main problem with the fix the woman approach, is that it’s a distraction from the sort of features of jobs and workplaces that need fixing. So, you know, and this is going to vary depending on, you know, what jobs we’re talking about, what industry in what country. But you know, it’s about improving the quality of part time jobs, for example, working out ways to ensure that jobs aren’t being kind of unnecessarily constructed around this expectation that we’ve just talked about, that workers will never take time for family or for any other reason ever. So it’s not really kind of scrutinizing jobs to think about ways that it might be the jobs or the organizational structures, you know, is there, is there a proper career advancement for this kind of jobs that women are clustered in and so on? Are we undervaluing what women are contributing? So if we turn now to the value the feminine approach. So, you know, we hear, we heard a lot of this following the global financial crisis, for example, this idea that women are risk averse if we have more women on Wall Street or in financial, you know, in financial leadership positions. You know, the financial crisis might not have, might not have happened. And I think the problem with this is, well, one problem is that it’s really, at least in some quarters, and I’d be very, you know, clear to say that some diversity consultants are very careful and cautious and accurate, and the way they talk about these things, other people will engage in the most sort of egregious gender stereotyping in order to sell the idea that you know you can just add women and stir and you’ll enhance your profits, right? So this idea that men and women think in such different ways that if you’ve just got men, you’re missing something really crucial. So we need to bring in, you know, we need to bring in the women. And that will, that will, you know, compliment men’s skills, Nas is insulting to women. It’s actually also insulting to men, and it’s just simply not accurate. When you look at the literature on. Are sex differences and the kinds of traits that are important in in organizations. But I think, you know, moving, you know, setting that aside, I think too often it just comes in the form of lip service, you know, we should value the feminine, as opposed to really thinking about what contributes to organizational success, what merit looks like, and ensuring that that is actually embedded in the organization. You know, is it the people who are ruthless, relentlessly self interested, taking, you know, terrible risks, engaging in misconduct, or actually getting ahead in the organization? And if so, there’s a lot of work that needs to be done within that organization to change what’s rewarded and what’s punished within that within that organization.
Gene Tunny 40:50
Yeah, can, can I ask about that? So to what extent can one organization do this, or unilaterally, given they’re in competition with other organizations and they may need to. They rely on these, you know, the some of the the men, or the or not just necessarily men, but they rely on the people doing the greedy jobs, to do the greedy jobs, to help them maintain their competitive position or get the deals done. If we’re talking about Goldman, Sachs or or JP Morgan. So how do we actually get to that position that you’re describing? Please. Cordelia,
Cordelia Fine 41:27
does that make sense? No, it makes sense, right? It’s hard to answer. So I guess one answer is, you know, this is very broadly speaking, like, you know, I don’t have, like, here’s my five point solution to the financial system. Okay, so I don’t, I don’t have that, let’s but you know, so some people might say, well, regulation can help, and regulation with teeth, because then, you know, the people who are misbehaving, you know, will actually not be rewarded from it. That might be punished. I suppose it’s worth thinking about, you know, competitive advantage in the long term. So if we think about some of the ethical scandals that we’ve seen that, have, you know, ultimately led to, you know, very large losses in share price, for example, you know, if we think about the Volkswagen diesel cheap devices or the Wells Fargo fake accounts scandal, right? You know that it didn’t end up going terribly well for those organizations in the long term, even though, in the short term that you know, it was, it was beneficial for them, or particularly for the people at the top of those organizations. So, you know, I think within organizations, it’s probably important. I, you know, I certainly acknowledge the point you’re making about industry norms, and often, like when I talk about the Volkswagen scandal in a business school environment, people who come from the auto industry, you know, say, look, a lot of this, you know, the way that you You’re kind of gaming the system in terms of emissions. You know, these are, these are industry norms. And if you, you know, if everyone else is doing it, then you know you’re at a disadvantage. If you, if you’re not doing it too. So, you know, one can recognize this thing. But I think it’s also probably important to recognize that there can be quite a lot of variation within firms, even within the same within the same industry, so that we there’s a probably limit to the extent to which we can, you know, blame sort of industry wide conditions on what’s going on, but, but I think you know, If you know, if CEOs are going to be saying that they are earning their very large, often very large salaries, then if they’re just, you know, doing what everyone else is doing, and there isn’t much scope to do things differently, then that, then that seems, that seems a bit that does seem A bit strange. And I think you know, particularly when we’re talking about these kinds of they’ve been described as Hobbesian environments, where you do have people behaving in ways that benefit themselves, but are not necessarily benefiting the organization. It does seem to me that there is scope to think about what’s actually being rewarded and who’s advancing in those organizations. I mean, one really nice example of that. It wasn’t a it wasn’t so much a gender equality example, but it was to do with a cultural change on deep sea oil rigs and. And it was the impetus was to increase safety, because it was a sort of new oil rig. There were, you know, it was becoming even riskier, even more dangerous. And there was this concerted effort. It was called safety 2000 strategy, and it involved doing like thinking about what is being defined as competence here? Is it? Is it genuine competence, or is it just performances of masculinity? Are we making people behave as if they always know what they’re doing, or are we creating an environment where people say, I don’t feel safe, or I don’t know how to do this? Do people on the you know? Are we creating environment where it’s just produce as much oil as you can, regardless of other considerations. Or, you know, is safety a little bit, you know, more of a more of a concern, and this, this strategy was remarkably successful in reducing the safety rate, but it also increased productivity and efficiency of of oil production. And the other thing that it did, and this wasn’t that they weren’t looking for this as an outcome, but it really changed the almost all men who are working on these rigs in those kinds of roles, they became to understand themselves quite differently as men. So they used to be sort of hyper masculine environments, and the researchers found that they become quite different. They were, they were safety conscious, they were quite compassionate. They might be, they might be like sending baby tapes of Mozart, you know, for for colleagues who just had a new baby. It, you know, it actually had, as you would expect, these these efforts to change the culture, changed the way that men behaved, how they interact with each other, and even how they understood what it meant to be, what it meant to be a man, and their kind of understandings when they’re asked of what it meant to be a man were quite sort of gender neutral, or even sort of even feminine. So I think, you know, that’s a really good example of where you originally had a situation in which, you know, competence was aligned with masculinity. And when they actually made the effort to they didn’t have a gender hat on, but when they actually thought, you know, what’s going on here? How can we create a safer environment? It not only did create a safe environment, but it also didn’t have a detrimental effect on the kinds of things that affect the affect the Bottom. Bottom line,
Gene Tunny 47:29
yeah, that’s a good example. I think that’s in your book, isn’t it? If I remember that correctly, yeah, yeah, very good. Okay, excellent. Now there are a couple of things I wanted to cover just before we we wrap up, you make a comparison between market thinking and relations thinking, and you see that as a you see this market thinking as a concern. Could you just explain briefly what you mean by market thinking versus relations thinking, please? Cordelia, yeah,
Cordelia Fine 48:00
so market thinking, I’m kind of referring to the sort of, you know, classic approach that mainstream economists might take towards understanding these kinds of phenomena like the gender wage gap, and we’ve talked a little bit about that already. Relations thinking is, I was really drawing, you know, to give it some more formal academic title, I was drawing on a sociological theory which is called relational, uh, relational inequality theory, which is developed by sociologists called Donald Thomas COVID, Stevie and Dustin Abbott, Holt. And it’s quite a mouthful. I hope I pronounced the names correctly. But just to take a step back, and I think, you know, it’s important to be clear that I’m not, you know, I think the way that economists, the information that economists have produced about the gender pay gap, for example, using their sort of typical decomposition analysis like this, is really useful information, you know, it’s helping us see what are the different parts that are contributing to the gender pay gap. So one thing we can see is it’s not just employers paying women less for the same work, right? Okay, so we can there’s still, there’s still a gap which, which might is a candidate for discrimination and underpayment. But we can also see that there are contributions from factors like, you know, what kind of firms or organizations people are working in, you know, the human human capital variables and so on. So, you know, this is useful. This is useful information. But sort of to take a step back a bit social scientists when they are trying to understand complex phenomena like the gender pay gap, they’re always operating within frameworks that have, you know, favored theories, particular key concepts, important variables that tend to get included or excluded and often particularly. The kinds of methods that are used to investigate their questions. And so in sort of what I call market thinking, when economists are trying to understand inequalities between women and men, such as in the gender pay gap, the key concepts do tend to be focused on individuals. So we might talk about the, you know, the differences between women and men in how they develop and use their human capital. So, you know what, as we’ve just been talking about, and then once we’ve controlled that, we can, we can infer that the gap that’s unexplained, so to speak, you know, maybe that’s discrimination. Maybe it’s something else that we haven’t measured yet. We don’t, we don’t know. Okay, so as I said, I said, I think this can be useful, but it only goes so far. And it, you know, and we’ve already talked about lots of the different ways in which, you know, even when we take a single number, like the percentage of the gender pay gap that can be attributed to overwork, for example, there’s a lot more going on around and I think there we need different frameworks and different conceptual theories and conceptual resources and variables and methods to understand what’s going on. And that’s where I draw on what I call relations thinking. And so in this particular theory, the way they distinguish themselves, you know, from the from the economists, if they’re thinking about the gender pay gap, for example, is that for economists, the kind of assumption is that wages are determined by the labor market. In the labor market through the sort of laws of supply and demand, but they say, Well, look, it’s not the labor market that’s actually determining wages, but organizations so managers aren’t kind of just rubber stamping the wage that comes down from the invisible hand, but that these wages are the result of people negotiating in organizational life. And so yes, of course, human capital variables are important. Of course, supply and demand is important, but they’re really focused on how, how people are relating to each other and making demands on organizational resources. So whether that’s particular industries asking for support from governments in the form of subsidies or tax breaks or regulatory environments that are beneficial for them, whether that’s particular groups of people making claims on wages or conditions or other kinds of benefits. Um, it’s all to do with these negotiations between groups of people who are in sustained relationships with with with each other. And you know, some some people play with more hands in their cards, in their deck, in their hand, then, yeah, then others and stronger and stronger ones. So what they argue is that part of that has to do with the kinds of, you know, the status of the kind of occupation that you might be in, or the human capital variables that you have. But it also has to do with what sociologists call status characteristics, which to do with, you know, gender, race and class or education level. And so, you know, one example of this, which I think is really interesting, kind of really interesting test of relations inequality theory, is that they say that, you know, this link between wages and productivity. Okay, they say, look, managers aren’t, you know, super accurate calculators of individual merit and productivity. There’s this loose coupling between productivity and market forces, and that leaves plenty of scope for bias to creep in. And one of those forms of bias can be gender bias. You know, we’ve already talked about this idea that, you know, caring professions are undervalued because it’s seen as not really skilled work, but just, you know, what comes naturally to women, or what they find, what they find rewarding. And so what they’ve argued is, if this is right, then when we see positions that are being dominated by high status groups, like white men, those kinds of groups are going to have a better, easier time of making demands on organizational resources than occupations that tend to be dominated by lower status groups, so women and members of ethnic minorities, for example, or people don’t have particular educational credentials, and a really example, interesting example of a study that that was supportive of this idea was an analysis of both us and Australian workplaces. And what they found was that in more most of these workplaces, unsurprisingly, the managers were earning more than the core production workers, which isn’t which isn’t very surprising, but what they found was that this kind of, what they call class inequality was bigger when the workers were primarily women and the managers were primarily men, and they found a sort of similar result when managers were primarily white in the US. Or a native language speaker in Australia, and this is, you know, controlling for, you know, things like education and experience. And so the idea here is that that kind of gender biases and other kinds of biases can become embedded in jobs themselves over time, in ways that are shaped by the demographics of who’s doing those jobs, you know. And that takes us back to this conversation about when, when jobs become feminized, they have a harder time making claims on these organizational resources, which helps to explain why we sometimes see the wages, the wages going down. And of course, there’s a there’s a history to jobs, you know, and in some cases, this history will go right back to a time when it was sort of enshrined in policy that certain jobs were for men and they needed to be paid more because they were the breadwinners and they had a wife and to keep of course, that seems Like a very alien idea now, but those kinds of assumptions about the value of a particular job, can you know, can can follow, can follow those jobs? Yeah, it’s not like we start the Monopoly board all over again at the start of each year or each each decade. There are these kind of legacies that that, that linger on.
Gene Tunny 56:19
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that sort of situation. I mean, it’s still in the I mean, there’d still be people alive today who would have experienced that or, I mean, they’d be very old now, but I know that my my great aunt, when she was a teacher, she had, I think the teachers have to resign when they had a baby, when they had a child, and, yeah, yeah, yeah, extraordinary. And then she needed to get special approval to go back to work, because she had to for financial reasons from the Education Department. When she was a and she had young children, it was, you know, and that’s suddenly the, I mean, that was the 1960s right? I think still early 60s, maybe
Cordelia Fine 57:02
it changes the rule within at least some of our lifetimes,
Gene Tunny 57:06
right? Yeah. I mean, there’s Yes, so, yeah, it’s just extraordinary to think like we have come. We have come a long way. But I take your point that there could, there’s still these. It sounds like there is your hypothesis that these norms, they’re so biases, they’re so widespread across industries, that the normal sort of market operations that economists would talk about forces of supply and demand, the ability of say you’re being undervalued in one job, so you’re a female working in a job where you’re not being valued. Well, what the economist would say is, well, then there’s an opportunity for you to move to another job. Well, an employer who recognizes your value should be able to offer you a job, a higher paying job, and you can take that job at another, at another workplace. Now, I know that’s sort of an idealized, abstract sort of model, but that’s, I think that’s how a lot of economists thinking are thinking about it. But is the hypothesis that because these, there are these biases, these are norms that sort of, that type of thing can’t happen.
Cordelia Fine 58:10
Yeah, it’s, I think it’s that the that this, this idea of the the mechanisms of supply and demand acting as a correction on overpayment or underpayment. You know, it is an idealization, and it’s not clear that there is sort of distortion of it, distortion of it in practice, to the extent that you know, is it? Is it a helpful to what extent is that a helpful assumption when we’re trying to understand, when we’re trying to stand understand gender equality? I mean, you know, one example, I think, is when we think about aged care workers, for example. So not that long ago, there was a Fair Work Commission that ultimately resulted in pay rises for certain people working in the aged care industry. But you know, that didn’t happen kind of necessarily organically, through processes of supply and demand, even though, you know, often in these care sector areas, we do have a supply a supply issue. It had to sort of be forced through unions, right? I mean, Another example might come from analyzes of CEO pay. So there’ll be some arguments that would say, Look, we’re not, we’re not really seeing, you know, neutral market forces here measuring genuine productivity and contribution to the to the firm, we’re seeing a kind of expensive game of executive leapfrog, where one CEO uses the best paid CEO as a kind of a standard for, usually, his own salary, right? You know? So these, obviously, these are complicated issues, and people can people. Can argue about it, but yes, the the sort of relations thinking would be much more skeptical about how powerful this market mechanism of supply and demand is in actually, kind of determining wages and ensuring that there’s this close coupling between productivity and wages.
Gene Tunny 1:00:22
Gotcha. I think I’ll have a closer look at that literature. It sounds fascinating. I think economists, we it’s it’s incumbent upon us. We need to think about just how applicable our abstract models are to the real world, where we’re making certain assumptions about how things work. And I think it’s important to then confront those with actual well data or experiences or just understanding what’s happening out there. Okay, so, yeah, we’ve had a Oh, two in depth conversation. This is really interesting. It’s, you know, really important issues, really fascinating. I love, you know, I like thinking about how the labor market works, learning about, you know, all of these studies I haven’t heard of before. I’d like to end with this question good early, just to give you another opportunity, I’m keen to understand what your recommendations are. I think we sort of started talking about that when I asked that, that question that maybe was a bit that I wasn’t very well expressed on my part. But how could we fix the problems that you see? Do you think that the market outcomes we’re experiencing, are they? They’re unfair, they’re significantly unfair. Do they require significant government interventions to fix Can you give us a sense of that your thinking there, please.
Cordelia Fine 1:01:38
Yeah. So this is you know, for me, these, these are, I think this is a hard question to answer in the abstract, because so my, you know, my book isn’t focused on any particular country, and partly that’s just because, you know, often the interesting studies that have been done, you know, have been done in all different countries, depending on which data sets the researchers happened, happened to use. And then even you know, so there’s a huge amount of variation in the situation. You know, the US context is very different to the Swedish context, for instance. And then even within countries, you know, it depends on the industry, you know, in some in some industries or organizations like I think, there are continuing issues of, you know, straightforward agenda bias in terms of how people are being evaluated, whereas in other industries or in other firms, Actually, organizations have done a really good job of ensuring that women and men are being evaluated fairly. And, you know, the research supports the fact that, you know, sometimes things aren’t fair, and sometimes things things are. And there’s, there’s some examples of that in the book. So you know, if you’re if your organization is already doing a really good job of making sure that job applicants are being evaluated fairly. Then, you know, that’s not going to be a priority for you. Whereas, if, if you’re in one of the organizations that doesn’t, that’s, that’s pretty low, that’s pretty low hanging fruit. So again, that’s that. It’s difficult to sort of talk about that in the in the abstract, but I suppose, yeah, so one, I think one way that we can make progress, I think, is to continue to try and reorient our economy And our society away from this old fashioned breadwinner, caregiver model, which, I think, for a number of reasons, isn’t really working for anyone. And you know, some of that’s going to be about changes at the government level. Some of that’s going to be a changes in the organizational level. Sometimes that’s even going to be about decisions that people private, decisions that people make, make in their in their own homes. I think we do need to do a better job of kind of many cases, scrutinizing our concepts of merit, particularly, and I think particularly in male dominated industries or occupations where there can be a conflation of merit with just performances of masculinity. Now, you know, we it’s not, I think we have to be careful about saying like, well, anything that has a smidge of masculinity to it that must just be, you know, gender biased, you know, it’s something we have to be able to talk about and disagree and disagree on and discuss, but we do need to be, as I said before you know, thinking about who’s getting rewarded, and are they genuinely contributing to the organization, and are there contributions that people are making to the organization that are not being recognized? And not being rewarded. And we need to make sure that when we do identify where we’re going wrong, that that is reflected in both our formal systems and our informal system. So selection criteria, promotion criteria, onboarding, training, but also the sort of informal norms, the rituals, the heroes, the kind of advice that people, that people are, are, you know, giving to other people about this is how you get ahead in this organization.
Gene Tunny 1:05:28
Gotcha. So who’s your book? Just Just wondering. Just just occurred to me, then who, who are you aiming your book at? Who would you I mean, I guess you want as wide a readership as possible everyone, yeah, yeah. But I’m just wondering, I mean, it seems like it needs to be read by people in I mean, it gives people in corporates something to think about, gives policy advisors something to think about. Also gives economist something to think about too. How can we make sure that we’re analyzing these, these labor market phenomena as best we can? Are we measuring the right things, that sort of thing, are we asking the right questions, testing the right hypotheses, so that, you know, just just wondering, what’s the what would you like to see as a result of your book?
Cordelia Fine 1:06:12
Yeah, so Well, one thing I’d like to see, and we haven’t really talked about this, is, you know, in many ways, this book is a it’s a science book. So it’s, you know, a large part of it we haven’t really talked about this is talking about sex, differences in behavior, where they come from, what partly what they are, where they come from. How persistent are they, you know. So my book spends a lot of time challenging ideas that can be quite popular, including mine, economists that you know, we have these because of evolution. We have different personalities in the sense of traits, abilities, skills, values and motivations. And so even in the situation of perfect equality, we’re always going to see inequalities of outcomes. So I don’t reject that point of view out of hand. I think it’s really it’s a quite widely held point of view, roughly speaking. And you know, we are biological creatures, we have evolved. Our minds have evolved, and there are sex differences right in our in our bodies and our reproductive roles. So a lot of the book is it’s just people who are interested in these questions about how we become who we are. And in the book, I point out that there are quite different evolutionary theories on offer about the evolution of the human mind and social life, and the kind of evolutionary psychology that has a lot of currency in the popular domain, and perhaps I would say among some economists, is not the only theory on offer, and I don’t think it’s the most the most compelling. So part of it is thinking about what other evolutionary perspectives on the human mind can tell us about this issue of why the division of labor exists, why it’s so persistent, for example, so part of it’s just a kind of intellectual curiosity,
Gene Tunny 1:08:13
yeah, fair enough. I mean, maybe I should have asked you about that. So have you got time now, just to, just just keen, to understand what are those alternative perspectives. So I think the one perspective, if I’m getting this right, is it this? This view that evolution means that men are there, the hunters. They’re going to be the aggressive ones, the ones who go out and kill the beasts and bring them back, and the women are doing the work around the campfire. The doing looking after the children is so they’re more suited, like evolutionary to or they’re more predisposed to those sort of caring roles, is that the sort of synopsis of that view is that, is that wrong? And why is that wrong? Or what are the other perspectives? Yeah, um,
Cordelia Fine 1:08:56
no, that’s that’s not wrong. And the evolutionary psychologists and also we have to think about, you know, sort of reproductive success as well. Where the differences in the evolutionary accounts come from is what’s, what’s in our minds, right? That enables us to successfully survive and reproduce in these sort of demanding environments. And so for the evolutionary psychologists, you know, you often hear people talk about, oh, you know, dismissing social science as being blank slate test. So what they mean by that is a mind that has the sort of general purpose learning capacities of sort of associating stimuli with response, or, you know, stimuli with stimuli. So we have this sort of general purpose associated learning, but not much else. And the evolutionary psychologists would say, Look, we just can’t, there’s we don’t get enough information from the environment to be able to solve the kinds of challenges that we face as humans. So there must be. Some pre existing content in our minds. And in addition, that content is at least in some realms, different for women and men, because the kinds of challenges that women and men faced and the kinds of solutions that were most successful were different, okay? And that comes back to, you know, men being able to, you know, impregnate many females, females. Okay, I think people are so familiar with that I probably don’t need to ban on it. They’re quite right that, no, that a sort of completely blank slate view of the human mind is not a plausible one. But there are other evolutionary perspectives that do not that take a quite different view on what it is that we are born with that enables us to solve these problems. So one point of view is that we’re born with biases to copy certain kinds of people. So we copy people who are kind of like us. So we actually have a same sex bias. We tend to copy people who are the same sex, or we tend to copy the people who are most prestigious, because they’ve been successful. So we’re gonna, you know, we should copy, we should copy them, right? So we have these, they’re called Content biases. There’s other points of view that say, well, actually, we can actually go quite far in understanding these capacities that we have that enable us to cope in the world with even less, even less than that. So we have, if we just start off with keen interest in people, particularly faces and voices, you know, like we all know babies, you know, from an early age, they’re already kind of gazing at us, right? We were tolerant of each other in ways that other animals typically, typically aren’t. And then we do have these very powerful General, General learning abilities. And we also have this culture where we are teaching and learning and picking up information, and you can get a long way with with just that kind of starter, starter kit. So this is a kind of really live debate within evolutionary science. And what I argue in the book is that, you know, part of what makes us so successful, or maybe sort of the thing that makes us most so successful as a species, is our capacity to to cooperate, our capacity to, you know, pick up, enhance and pass on, you know, culture, you know, beliefs, technologies, ideologies, values, practices and so on. And that we can understand the gender division of labor as something that has kind of culturally evolved, because it was a because it was efficient, and then we’ve built up this sort of whole structure around it, but we have minds that are in order to enable us to cooperate. Have all these sort of capacities to enable cooperation. So we’re very good at picking up norms. You know, here we are. We’re having a conversation. You’re the interviewer. I’m the interviewee. You didn’t have to say to me at the beginning, all right now, Cordelia, I’m going to ask some questions, and you’re going to answer them, and please stay seated. You know, don’t leave, you know, right? So all these norms
Gene Tunny 1:13:07
don’t leave. What I asked really silly questions. So, yeah, go ahead, yeah.
Cordelia Fine 1:13:13
We kind of take it for granted, but we, you know, we can identify people as holding particular social roles. We have identities as particular members of particular groups. So, you know, you’re an economist, I’m a psychologist, you know, you’re a man, I’m a woman, right? And so we learn the roles. We have an identity. We know what the expectations are, you know, we’re just really, really good at that as creatures. This is something that no other animal does, and that we can understand gender and the gender division of labor as really recruiting all of all of these capacity. So it is an evolutionary account, but it’s not the evolutionary account that we think of from from evolutionary psychology. Gotcha.
Gene Tunny 1:13:56
Okay, I’m gonna have to go reread that, that section I probably focus more on the the economic sort of sections. And looking, think, reading about the gender pay gap, I should go back and read that. That’s fascinating. And it’s, it’s something that economists, yeah, definitely, probably should think more about. And, yeah, I’m gonna have to, I’m gonna have to have another look at it sounds, yeah, sounds, sounds like there’s a lot of, you know, really interesting research that you’ve that you discuss in the book. So very good. Well, anything else important that I’ve missed or I haven’t appreciated Cordelia before we wrap up?
Cordelia Fine 1:14:34
No, it’s been a great conversation. I’ve really enjoyed
Gene Tunny 1:14:36
it. Excellent. Yeah, well, well done on the book. I’ll put a link in the show notes, and definitely recommend people check it out. I think that, yeah, very, very important issues, and I mean issues we’ve been talking about for I mean, gender pay gap certainly is one of the most studied issues in economics. It’s always you. Been there. There’s lots of, lots of really fascinating research on it. And I mean, Claudia golden won the Nobel Prize a year or so ago, if I remember, yeah, not last year, the year before, and yes and yes, lots of really good, good points to think about in your book. So Professor Cordelia, fine. Thanks so much for your time. I really enjoyed the conversation.
Cordelia Fine 1:15:24
Oh, not at all. It was a pleasure. And thank you for having me on the podcast, of course. Okay,
Gene Tunny 1:15:28
thanks, Cordelia, thanks, righto. Thanks for listening to this episode of economics. Explored. If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please get in touch. I’d love to hear from you. You can send me an email via contact at economics explore.com or a voicemail via speak pipe. You can find the link in the show notes. If you’ve enjoyed the show, I’d be grateful if you could tell anyone you think would be interested about it. Word of mouth is one of the main ways that people learn about the show. Finally, if your podcasting app lets you, then please write a review and leave writing. Thanks for listening. I hope you can join me again next week.
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Credits
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