Tempered Radicals

"I chose this book because Meyerson brings the notion of social change down to individual people. ‘Tempered radicals’ are people who want to rock the boat, but also want to stay in the boat. They are not the kind of people who agitate from outside — those are other kinds of radicals. Tempered radicals are within the organization, within the workplace, and working to gain the trust of people in power and to make change, not just for themselves, but for everybody in the workplace. They resist quietly, if you will. Meyerson quotes Robert Kennedy in her introduction, and the notion of the importance and rarity of moral courage. I think it takes moral courage to be a tempered radical, to realize that you may put your job at risk if you agitate too much and you’re seen as a troublemaker. And yet you are unable to keep quiet because you see that change is so important. “For women to earn salaries more like men’s, the entire workplace is going to have to be changed.” A tempered radical is not the same as a whistleblower. A whistleblower goes outside of the company or organization and blows the whistle on those people. A tempered radical blows the whistle within the company, creates organizations and alliances to agitate from within. For women trying to make change for women at work, these alliances very much include men. Debra’s book is about how to make change at work and how, as she puts it, to use your difference—the fact that you are a woman or have some other difference— to inspire change in the workplace. I think it is a very important book. What I talk about in my memoir is how it was possible for me to figure out how to make change at Stanford University. I was only an assistant professor when I became the founding director of the Stanford Centre for Research on Women. I was making larger changes at the university, I hoped, by sponsoring research on women, that others would understand some of the difficulties we were experiencing at Stanford. It was also about training students in the next generation to understand the issues for women at work. The centre is now called the Clayman Institute because it was endowed by a former business school student, Michelle Clayman. For me, now, to see that institute flourishing is a great reward for being a tempered radical at a very early stage. I had to convince the provost and the president of Stanford that this was an organization that they needed to fund, sponsor, and support. In my memoir, I describe in detail how I was able to do that, how I amassed male allies and female allies, as well as the foundation world to give me money. That’s the kind of change, I think, that tempered radicals make. It is a hard job to make social change, but it is very doable and in the end, it turns out to be very important. That was later in my career. The provost appointed me to head up a taskforce on recruitment and retention of women faculty because Stanford was not doing well, as compared to our peer institutions, and he was concerned about this and wanted to know why. So we did some interviews of young women and men, and what we learned was that many women were leaving because they were paid less than male colleagues. So I went to him and I said that the taskforce he had appointed needed to look at the data on earnings. He said, ‘Oh, we can’t do that. Salary is private information’ — because Stanford is a private institution. At public institutions, salaries are made public. So he said, ‘I can’t give you the data, but I’ll take a look at the data.’ And I said, ‘Jerry, you can look at the data any time. You appointed this committee. We need to look at the data.’ He finally agreed not to give us the data, but to create a scatter plot where he plotted salary on the vertical axis and years since PhD on the horizontal axis. The scatter plot was very clear. He put a black circle around all the dots that represented a woman, and you could see all the black circles were at the bottom of the graph—low salaries—and when you looked at the top of the graph, the high salaries, there were hardly any black circles. He was astonished by that pattern, although I was not. He then created a process by which the deans had to make this kind of scatter plot for their own schools and justify to him when women had very low salaries. Yes, and we have a woman who is head of the Federal Reserve, and a woman in Europe who is managing director of the International Monetary Fund. So we do have some prominent women in economics. I think economics is much better for women than it was, although again, if you look at faculty members at the more prestigious institutions in economics, they are still relatively few in number. It is very difficult to be at a research university for anybody , and it is more difficult in occupations that are largely male. They are not as supportive of women in terms of getting invitations to speak at conferences, in terms of getting invitations to co-author papers. It is just more difficult to be a woman in an occupation where women are less than about a third. The research seems to show that there’s a tipping point at about 30-33%. When women reach that level of representation, then they are no longer tokens, they no longer get extra scrutiny, they are seen more as part of the group. I’ve seen this myself at the Stanford business school. When I first came to the business school in 1972, I was one of the first two women ever to be on the faculty there. There was a grand total of five women students out of a class of 300 or so. Now, women are around a third of the students—some years even a little bit more—and you can see that women students are now considered part of the group, part of the class. The situation for faculty at the business school has progressed less. Women faculty at the business school still stands at about 16%. That means that they are still tokens, still seen as unusual. I’m not a regular faculty member at the business school. I was turned down for tenure when I came up in the late 1970s and I moved to the school of education and had my career there. Then, as I detail in my memoir, around the year 2000, after all the old guys had died, they asked me to come back and teach. Even though I’m retired now, I still teach my course at the business school. If you look at the patterns of change, you can see that a great deal of change occurred in the 1970s, and a little bit into the 1980s. After that, the pace of change really slowed, both in terms of reduction of occupational segregation and the earnings gap. Some people, who have looked at the trajectory, say that it’s going to be another 50 or more years before there’s wage parity. And I haven’t seen any forecast of how long it will take to have parity in fields where men are dominant now. There would have to be an enormous amount of change with regard to work flexibility before large numbers of women could have careers in the top universities, the top medical centres and in finance, these bastions of male occupations which, as we have said, are very inflexible and provide very little opportunity to combine work and family. No, and this is where I disagree with Claudia Goldin. I believe that the legislative changes in the late 60s and early 70s—and particularly the executive orders that were signed by President Lyndon Johnson—had a tremendous impact on bringing women into occupations that were closed to them and in reducing the earnings gap. Once the Reagan administration began, there was very little change. The affirmative action executive orders were simply not enforced, and there was very little happening with regard to the Equal Opportunities Commission. Some cases were brought, but there wasn’t the kind of governmental push for change that we had had earlier. And so I think if the election in the US turns out to bring people in who do care about women, we will likely see a lot of progress because those executive orders will be enforced, and perhaps new executive orders will be issued, and there will be a climate where we can look for change. In 1971, President Nixon vetoed a bill that had passed congress and was brought to him for his signature that would have established a national system of childcare. He vetoed it saying that it would ‘weaken the family.’ That was his wording, because he felt that women belonged at home, raising their children. And we have never had a bill that came to the president’s desk again, pushing for childcare. If we had such a bill, and the president signed it, I think we would go a long way toward moving women to more equality."