Recent years have seen growing calls for the greater representation of women in political bodies and corporate boards. But does greater representation for women lead to more power in decision making? Using data from an empirical study of group interaction around deliberation, J. Baxter Oliphant, Tali Mendelberg, and Christopher F. Karpowitz find that the rules around how decisions are made matter; when decisions are majority-based, and there are enough women to control the decision, then men begin to treat women with more respect. When decisions need to be unanimous, minority men are empowered and do not modify their behavior towards women

Karpowitz, Christopher F.

Mendelberg, Tali

Oliphant, J. Baxter

LSE Research Online

blogs.lse.ac.ukhttp://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2014/05/30/majority-based-decision-making-rules-can-help-foster-communication-processes-that-support-womens-authority/With enough women, majority based decision making rules canhelp foster communication processes that support women’sauthorityRecent years have seen growing calls for the greater representation of women in political bodiesand corporate boards. But does greater representation for women lead to more power in decisionmaking? Using data from an empirical study of group interaction around deliberation, J. BaxterOliphant, Tali Mendelberg, and Christopher F. Karpowitz find that the rules around howdecisions are made matter; when decisions are majority-based, and there are enough women tocontrol the decision, then men begin to treat women with more respect. When decisions need tobe unanimous, minority men are empowered and do not modify their behavior towards women.Scholars and advocates have long argued that political bodies should be at least 30 percentfemale if women are to be adequately represented. Below that number, men tend to ignorewomen and push aside their concerns. However, increasing women’s numbers might not beenough if the rules used to make decisions do not also encourage women’s participation. Usingdata from one of the most comprehensive empirical studies of gender and deliberation to date, wefound that unless decision-making rules foster communication processes that support women’sauthority, women will not be fully represented. Unanimous decision rules protect women frommen’s aggressive communication tactics – when women are few. On the other hand, as women’snumbers increase, majority rule better facilitates women’s authority.Communication processes are the key to connecting women’s numbers with deliberativeoutcomes. Gendered roles and expectations construct women’s voices as less authoritative,which puts them at a disadvantage in political settings. How language is used in these settingswill reinforce women’s lower status and authority, and the decision-making rules and the gendercomposition of the group can either elevate or depress women’s authority. When rules and numbers interact tosupport women’s speech, then men will be less likely to interrupt them dismissively, the group will develop a moresupportive sense of rapport, and women’s contributions to the discussion will be valued more.Improving men’s respectful treatment of women’s speech raises what we call women’s “authoritativerepresentation.” Authoritative representation is any feature of communication among decision-makers that affectstheir authority during the decision-making process. By authority we mean the expectation of influence.Authoritative representation is constructed during decision-making; it is a quality of the process of groupinteraction.The act of speaking provides an opportunity to establish authority and status as a valuable member of the group,but the group’s reaction is what affords the speaker this status. To measure how a group supported and respectedwomen’s speech, we analyzed the patterns of interruptions in a sample of groups convened to make a collectivedecision. Interruptions are significant for authoritative representation because they reinforce participants’ statusand build social rapport. We scoured each group’s audio for instances when participants interrupted each other.Interruptions were first identified through a computer program and verified manually; once verified we classifiedeach interruption as negative, positive or neutral.We conducted 94 discussion groups and randomly assigned participants to five-person groups with differinggender compositions. In addition, each group was instructed – again, by random assignment – to use eitherunanimous rule or majority rule for selecting a principle for distributing income fairly. They were asked to distributeincome they would earn in the experiment as well as assume that their decision would apply to society. Thegroups were held in two locations in the United States, one liberal and secular, and one conservative andreligious. The number of women in the group ranged from zero to five. For each participant we created a numberof measures to gauge how supportive or dismissive others in the group were of his or her ideas. These measuresfocus on how negative or positive were the interruptions a person received and how frequently such interruptionsoccurred.Figure 1 – Negative proportion of negative and positive interruptions received by women from men,mixed groupsFigure 1 shows the predicted effect of decision rule and gender composition on the proportion of negativeinterruptions women receive from men. Men negatively interrupt women less as women’s numbers increases, butonly when the decision rule favors their increasing numbers. Majority rule gives the most status to the members ofthe group who form the majority and, thus, can control the decision. When there are enough women to do that,men begin treating them with more respect. However, even when women are few, all is not lost, because a rulethat empowers each member will reduce the negativity that women experience from men. So unanimous ruleprotects women when they are one or two in a group.But notice that a unanimous rule actually becomes a hindrance as women’s numbers grow. That is, women’sproportion of negative interruptions does not decline substantially under unanimous rule. Why? Becauseunanimous rule empowers any minority, including groups in which men are outnumbered by women. Thus, whenminority men are empowered by the decision rule, they do not modify their behavior toward women in the sameway that they do under majority rule.As negative interruptions decrease, women also begin to receive positive interruptions – expressions ofaffirmative endorsement such as “yeah,” “I agree,” or “good point” – more frequently. On average, a woman in agroup with 80% women and majority rule receives 2.5 times the number of positive interruptions that a singlewoman in a group with majority rule receives. When women are empowered, in other words, they receive activesignals of support and encouragement. In addition, on the rare occasions when men do negatively interruptwomen where women are empowered, the men tend to soften their interruptions in ways that increase women’sstatus. Unanimous rule, by contrast, can actually decrease men’s respect for women’s authority as the number ofwomen increases.These patterns of interruptions are not mere linguistic footnotes to the discussion. The negative interruptions menissue women matter – they change others’ perceptions of women’s influence. After deliberation, we askedparticipants to vote confidentially on the most influential member in their group. The participants typicallydisagreed on who that was, so each person received few votes, on average. Still, women’s votes dropped byabout two-thirds when they were negatively interrupted often or positively interrupted little.Groups that do not encourage women’s authoritative representation decrease women’s influence. A simplesolution is to set an encouraging tone. Groups can have healthy disagreements while still issuing frequent supportto speakers and developing a sense of group rapport. Women benefit especially by this affirmation andencouragement, because otherwise their speech is treated less authoritatively than men’s. Political institutionscan overcome these negative effects by increasing women’s numbers and by developing rules that recognize theneed to treat all voices equally in deliberation.The results we discuss here for interruptions hold across a number of other aspects of deliberativecommunication. Employing unanimous rule when women are few and majority rule when they are manyovercomes gender differences in the amount of time participants speak, in women’s likelihood of raising topics thatare of distinctive importance to them, and in women’s willingness to advocate publicly for positions that moreclosely mirror their private preferences. Similar patterns of participation also hold in the real-world setting of schoolboards. Taken together, these various results converge on the notion that women’s standing – the sense in whichthey become full and equal contributors to the group – is facilitated by the norms of status and social rapport thatthe group develops. By attending to the interaction of decision rule and gender composition, organizers ofdecision-making bodies can structure groups such that women’s authoritative representation is enhanced andpreviously marginalized voices will receive the support that they are likely to require.This article is based on the paper Gender Inequality in Deliberation: Unpacking the Black Box of Interaction inPerspectives on Politics.Christopher F. Karpowitz and Tali Mendelberg are the authors of The Silent Sex: Gender, Deliberation, andInstitutions, which comes out this summer from the Princeton University Press. The Silent Sex shows how thegender composition and rules of a deliberative body dramatically affect who speaks, how the group interacts, thekinds of issues the group takes up, whose voices prevail, and what the group ultimately decides. It argues thatefforts to improve the representation of women will fall short unless they address institutional rules that impedewomen’s voices.Featured image credit: World Bank (Creative Commons BY NC ND)Please read our comments policy before commenting .Note:  This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of USApp– American Politics and Policy, norof the London School of Economics.Shortened URL for this post:  http://bit.ly/TZdZrq_________________________________________ About the authorsJ. Baxter Oliphant – Princeton UniversityJ. Baxter Oliphant is a doctoral candidate in politics at Princeton University. He studies politicalpsychology, public opinion, money in politics and political communication. His dissertationexplores the relationship between morality, judgments of political leaders, and political behavior._Tali Mendelberg – Princeton UniversityTali Mendelberg is Professor of Politics at Princeton University. She studies inequality and politics.Her book The Race Card: Campaign Strategy, Implicit Messages, and the Norm of Equality , wonthe American Political Science Association’s Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award for “the bestbook published in the United States during the prior year on government, politics or internationalaffairs.” Her areas of specialization are political communication; gender; race; class; publicopinion; political psychology; and experimental methods.Christopher F. Karpowitz – Brigham Young UniversityChristopher F. Karpowitz is Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Elections andDemocracy (CSED) and Associate Professor of Political Science at Brigham Young University.His research interests include political psychology, political behavior, political communication, andpolitical participation. Much of his research explores how citizens participate in and experiencedemocratic institutions and processes, with special attention to democratic and deliberativetheory. He is a co-founder of the CSED Research Lab at BYU.CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 2014 LSE USAPP

With enough women, majority based decision making rules can help foster communication processes that support women’s authority

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