Women working in Utah’s Silicon Slopes face tough obstacles — in part because of cultural norms tied to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
That’s what social scientist Alyssa Calder Hulme found in her master’s thesis research at the University of Chicago. Separate research by the Utah Women and Leadership Project at Utah State University found that about 1 in 4 Utah women experience workplace inequities.
One woman who Calder Hulme spoke with for her research couldn’t figure out why a male counterpart’s career took off while hers stagnated. Even people from her team sought out the man for advice.
When this woman asked him for advice, Calder Hulme said he showed her his social schedule. It included seeing the CEO at youth nights, over-the-fence chats with a neighbor who worked on his team and poker games with another C-suite executive.
Those relationships let him keep up with company scuttlebutt.
“She was just floored,” Calder Hulme said, “because those places of social interaction are not places that she is welcome to come to, and it’d be very weird if she showed up at a poker game to try and learn about new positions at the company that would be opening up.”
Calder Hulme heard stories like this a lot, and she attributes it to the structure of the LDS Church. Bishopric meetings are for men only. Youth activities often split up the boys and girls, along with their adult leaders. Study participants also reported that church members are “often discouraged from making friends with members of the opposite sex, especially once they're married.”
Calder Hulme, who got her undergraduate degree at Brigham Young University, found in her research that LDS men in Utah are “very, very unlikely to have working lunches with women.” Outside of Utah, she found that LDS women she spoke with had those important interactions with male counterparts and managers “all the time.”
“So you have these separate social spheres that are unlocking doors for men to navigate a really obscure future pathway for their careers,” Calder Hulme said, “and women cannot access that space, or at least not nearly as easily as these men can.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Ciara Hulet: Trying to avoid one-on-one interactions with a member of the opposite sex isn't unique to members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. What do you think is different here?
Alyssa Calder Hulme: So the degree definitely is different. You have the density of membership in a place like Utah County, where, you know, if you go out into public [the majority of] the people you're around are members of your same church and are able to see you, and if they see you doing something that they view as incorrect, they might judge you. They might gossip. They might make assumptions. There's this fear of judgment or fear of appearance of doing something wrong that seems to really constrain men. And they have so many people
CH: Are there other obstacles hindering working lunches with members of the opposite sex in Utah?
ACH: When you go to a school like Brigham Young University that is run by the church, those cultural norms get solidified into business best practices. In a BYU ethics class every year, they go through this scenario where the professor says, “Would you go to lunch with a female coworker?” The voices in the room that are 80% male, the loudest voices say, “No, it's wrong to be one-on-one with a woman. It's going to risk my marriage. It's not worth the appearance of evil.” And frequently, the Family Proclamation was the thing that was referenced.
CH: What language specifically in the Family Proclamation is perpetuating some of these issues in the workplace in Utah?
ACH: It states that, through divine design, fathers are to preside over their families, and mothers have primary responsibility for the nurture of their children.
One of the quotes that kept coming up was that when these male employees are talking to women, they reference the “primary responsibility for their children” as reasons why they were not invited on a work call or weren't invited out to go bowling with the rest of the team, or what have you.
They're trying to respect the position and the many complicated responsibilities that these women have, but in using this language, they're actually assuming a lot about a woman's priorities and her inability to navigate them herself.
CH: What do you think needs to happen to improve Utah women's chances for success in the tech industry?
ACH: Women need to be validated and to know that they're not alone.
The number one thing that I can tell managers to do is take their female employees out to lunch and lead by example. Publicly invest in your employees, and the women will spread that news far and wide. You'll gain a reputation for being somebody who is willing to help women navigate their career space.
I also want to address the wives of the men in leadership positions. The way that they negotiate friendships with their spouse is shaping the economic reality for the people that their husband interacts with. We need to change the rules about mixed gendered working lunches. It's normal, it's safe, it can be done in public, and there's nothing actually wrong with that.
CH: How are Utah companies and BYU reacting to your research?
ACH: So I've been really heartened by the response so far. I've been hired to come and speak and do workshops with several of the top tech firms in Utah. I'm also in discussion with the BYU MBA folks and the women's organizations there as well.
