This is obvious to those who know Japanese food and obscure
to others: Kaiseki is the fanciest Japanese food. No, it is not sushi or any
other of the other straightforward and specialized kinds of food. Kaiseki is a course
meal, with many courses, each of them having what we in western food would consider
many courses. The first round of food is a bit like an appetizer, but in a
kaiseki restaurant we would end up counting any number of small dishes on it.
It is well worth trying out kaiseki if you have not already had it.
But I am getting too excited here and forgetting the story I
was going to write. There is a kaiseki restaurant called n/naka in Los Angeles
where the master chef stays out of view of customers. That is not so unusual in
kaiseki restaurants, which often have chefs out of view, but there is a special
reason: she is female, and some customers will be more satisfied if they can taste
the food without knowing that it is made by woman. You see, kaiseki chefs are
true experts, and nearly all male.
This sounds like a pretty specialized issue having to do
with the norms of Japanese food (sushi chefs are also male, typically), but it
is actually linked with what happens in work places as well, including
important functions such as corporate research and development. We constantly
evaluate the expertise of others, and in teams where expertise is required
these evaluations are closely linked with work distribution and resulting
effectiveness. A chef being assessed as less effective because she is female
means fewer customers at the restaurant. An engineer being assessed as less
effective because she is female could mean an inferior quality product – a problem
for the firm, and also for you if the product happens to be the car you are
driving.
So do we know when the evaluation is fair? This is a topic
that there is much research on, and a typical finding is that it is harder for a
woman to be evaluated fairly by others. Now, thanks to research on research
teams by Aparna Joshi published in Administrative Science Quarterly, we know
exactly how important the evaluator is in determining the fairness. The results are actually quite simple. When a
female assesses others, she will rate them higher the better their education
is. That sounds simple and logical, and I bet you think you do the same. That could
depend on your gender though: when a male assesses others, he will rate them
higher when they are male and will ignore their education. That is a pretty big
difference. These are research teams in a university, so of course we cannot
know whether teams with less educated participants have a more educated way of
assessing each other.
Actually, the story is a bit more complex because it depends
on how strongly the evaluator identifies with his or her gender. Again the
results are simple, but not really encouraging. A man who feels very manly will
rate a woman below men regardless, and lower when she has more education. Yes,
lower. A man who is more neutral will ignore her education and simply rate her
lower than men regardless. So, does this
mean that firms should be careful about using women in roles that call for
expertise to be correctly evaluated? Well, actually the opposite conclusion
seems better. Women are actually good at evaluating women, and at evaluating
men, so if teams had many women (especially in the supervisor role) they would
function better. You could be better off driving a car designed by a team with mostly
female engineers.
Fontoura, Maria. 2014. Meet Niki Nakayama,
One of the World's Only Female Kaiseki Chefs. Wall Street Journal, Aug 8 2014.
