Today, the most pervasive forms of gender discrimination cannot be understood as something that men do to women, any more than they can be seen as something that women do to themselves. Rather, they seem to stem from attitudes that women and men share as a result of socialization. In Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women (1998), Virginia Valian calls these attitudes gender schemas:

• female managers are just as likely as males to receive high job-performance ratings from their supervisors. Yet, in evaluating the extent to which highly successful managers’ achievements are due to ability (as opposed, for example, to hard work), supervisors rate male managers as having more ability. (Valian, 129)
• in trying to voice their views, women often have to work overtime to get people’s attention and, when they do, are likely to evoke disproportionately negative reactions from those they are trying to influence. Those reactions, in turn, will have a negative effect on other observers who might originally have been neutral or undecided. Because all concerned are unaware of the extent to which they are affected by the woman’s gender, they will attribute their reaction to the woman’s lesser ability. (Valian, 133) This phenomenon has led some critics to point out that if women as a group remain relatively silent in some contexts, it is--given their experience--for fully rational reasons.
• people are often more attentive when men speak and are more likely to recognize male speakers, for example, by nodding and gesturing in response to men’s questions and comments. In discussion groups, people are more likely to respond more extensively to men’s comments than to women’s. (Sandler, "The Chilly Climate Revisited, 1986; 3).
• personnel decisions are very likely to be affected by the composition of an applicant pool: women (and ALANA) candidates fare significantly better if they are in at least a sizable minority. They will be less likely to be perceived in terms of their gender (or race/ethnicity) and more in terms of their qualifications. (Valian, 142)
• when a woman’s qualifications are identical to a man’s, she is still accorded lesser status. In one such study fictitious resumes were sent to department chairs, who were asked to indicate the rank at which a faculty applicant should be hired. The resumes contained information about productivity, teaching, administrative work, and sociability. The names attached to the resumes were rotated so that sometimes the same document had a female name attached to it and sometimes it had a male name. Those with male names were assigned to the rank of associate professor, while those with female names were assigned to the rank of assistant professor. (Valian, 128)
• ALANA women are more likely than white women to be excluded from the informal and social aspects of their departments and institutions--sometimes by white women as well as white men. The isolation these women face is exacerbated when they are few or no women of color who can serve as mentors. (Sandler, 13).
• women who accept the challenge of high administrative positions face isolation as well. A woman administrator is rarely regarded simply as an administrator: she is a woman administrator and subjected to additional scrutiny. If she fails, many will regard this as proof that women are incapable of doing the job. If she succeeds, she is seen as exceptional. (Sandler, 14).

Many believe—equally sincerely—that if women have not attained the same levels of success and recognition as men, it is because their performance does not match men’s. Even those who recognize the existence of subtle forms of gender discrimination often have trouble taking these forms of discrimination as seriously as those that are more dramatic and egregious. It’s simply harder to feel outrage about what can seem to be a series of small, even insignificant, slights. Still, a consistent message in the literature on gender discrimination is that small slights add up to significant inequities over the course of a career. For that reason they should not be ignored, trivialized, or condoned.

Gerdes summarizes several models that have been offered to account for the difficulties that academic and administrative women have had in gaining full equality with their male peers. The first is that women invest less in their careers and thus, for fully rational reasons, are not chosen by decision-makers for high-level positions and awards. According to this theory, men and women do not have different degrees of success because they are treated differently: people who bring fewer years of education, less willingness to relocate, fewer years of continuous service, etc., have less successful outcomes whether they are men or women. This is no longer widely accepted as a major explanation for inequitable outcomes between men and women in employment (Stover, 1996; Valian, 1998). The most telling studies reveal, in fact, that when men and women present equivalent credentials, being female is negatively related to the level of promotion (Gerdes, 1999).

Socialization is another explanation. This model suggests that women are less motivated to seek high-level positions and are less qualified for them because of traits and skills developed in gender socialization. Gerdes and others point out, however, that even if there are fewer women than men who actively seek certain high-level positions in academia, women and men express comparable levels of ambition when they have comparable work status and experience. This fact is more consistent with a structural explanation than with a gender socialization explanation (Bielby, 1996). If certain differences distinguish men and women more generally, and those differences can be attributed to socialization, those differences disappear when men and women in the same occupation are compared (Leuptow, 1996; O’Connell & Betz, 1996). As with the first model, however, this theory cannot satisfactorily account for existing inequities and outcomes.

The final explanation, and the one that gender theorists find most convincing, focuses on organizational factors that make it harder for women to be accepted, to achieve, or to be recognized. Gerdes notes that the strongest evidence that women’s lower achievement is due to situational factors are experimental studies in which hypothetical male and female candidates are constructed to be equally qualified: "A very large number of such studies, many of them involving evaluations of faculty, managerial, or professional women, demonstrate discriminatory judgments of women that relate to gender stereotypes" (6). That is to say, when men and women present comparable credentials or qualifications, men are still evaluated more positively.

The evidence reported in the Study on the Status of Women Faculty in Science at MIT (1999) supports this last model. The results of that study, notable in part because the study was conducted by scientists who were not convinced at the outset that gender had anything to do with their careers, revealed that

• Marginalization increases as women progress through their careers. While junior women feel well-supported within their departments, senior women feel increasingly excluded from playing a significant role in their departments. Slight inequities in resource allocation add up to substantive differences over the course of a career.
• The pattern whereby junior women feel supported and senior women feel excluded repeats itself over successive generations: senior women also felt well-supported when they were young.
• Junior women believe that family-work conflicts will impact their careers in different ways from their male colleagues;
• When isolated, existing inequities can be explained by the unique aspects of a particular situation. When examined collectively, a pattern emerged: the committee and the MIT administration became convinced that systematic if unintentional forms of discrimination against women were at work, even in the face of obvious good will and strong commitments to equality.

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