After reading the passage below, answer the questions that follow. Be sure to "submit" your response for each question. You will initially receive full credit for each question, but your grade may change once your instructor reviews your responses. Be sure to check the grade book for your final grade.
Gender Judo
Making up 51 percent of the population and 50 percent of the workforce (U.S. Census Bureau, 2018), women are outperforming men in terms of earning college and advanced degrees (U.S. Department of Education National Center for Education Statistics, 2019; Perry, 2013). But when you look at the highest levels of corporate and public sector leadership, it is clearly still a man’s world: in January 2019, a mere 6.6 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs were female, and there were only 127 women in the U.S. Congress (25 out of 100 in the Senate and 102 out of 435 in the House of Representatives). Leaving aside the reasons for the underrepresentation of half the population in corner offices, consider the communication challenges that women working in male-dominated industries face. What is it like to be the lone woman at the boy’s club? And how do women overcome preconceived notions of masculine versus feminine leadership styles?
Some women have found that it may actually be effective to use traditionally feminine communication techniques when dealing with an entrenched masculine culture. Work–life legal scholar Joan C. Williams interviewed 127 highly successful women and found that adopting masculine communication styles often backfired. If you’re too feminine, Williams explains, you’re perceived as incompetent. But if you’re too masculine, you’re seen as difficult to work with. Williams suggests that women engage in what she calls “gender judo” (judo being the Japanese martial art of the “gentle way,” which involves overcoming your opponent by using his own momentum to overpower him) to remind men of the traditional feminine roles (like that of a mother, daughter, or teacher) with which they are comfortable and using those roles to exert authority (Williams, 2014).