I suggest you read the essay again. PG clearly writes that Jessica's way of dealing with people is by listening. And she's damn good at that. It is harder to listen when you speak, or when everybody watches your every move.
Thanks, I read it twice. But as with the economists I link to, this happens even to women who are perfectly vocal. I submit that there is something else going on here besides her just being naturally quiet.
He's not just showing appreciation. He's rectifying a problem of her being underappreciated by society at large.
So a) there is a well-known societal problem of women being underappreciated, especially leaders. And b) he added gender to his essay by talking about how they were dating and she was the mom and how her special skills were the kind of thing that get called feminine. (Note the many comments here explicitly relying on that.) He also talks explicitly about how people don't notice her contributions because they read her as a secretary, which is a very gendered phenomenon.
So whether or not gender is the formal thesis, the essay is shot through with gender-related issues.
>there is a well-known societal problem of women being underappreciated, especially leaders //
This approach begs the question [assumes the conclusion it supposedly seeks to find]: it seems as likely that a certain type of person is underappreciated. That a lot of women are of that type may be true but that doesn't make it an issue of sex per se. Reading between the lines of the essay Mr Graham hints that he feels one reason his wife is underappreciated is because she shies away from vocal conflict. That at least leaves a hypothesis that this is not really about the sex of the person but about character traits that are more often found in one sex than the other.
You might for example say there is a societal problem of women being forced to use stepladders when in fact it is short people that use stepladders and it happens that women on average are shorter than men.
The topic has a little interest to me in understanding attitudes of those in one area of work I'm in (loosely "craft as a leisure activity"). Other workers - almost all the people in this sector are women running their own businesses - always assume that I'm just there to carry the heavy boxes [which I usually can't due to a back injury] rather than actually function as an integral part of the company. In short they read me as the minion and her, my co-worker, as the boss. Basically we're in the sex-opposite position of Mr Graham and Ms Livingston wrt our roles in the business we're in.
From the public side of things I've been asked more than once if there was a woman available to do my job instead of me. Which I find particularly hilarious if then my female co-worker has to ask me what to do.
If this were the only sort of discrimination that went on, and if people were simple automatons, yes, your "just a trait" thing might have some explanatory power.
However, we have a historical record millennia long with enormous discrimination against women. Were women not allowed the vote until a century ago because their character traits mysteriously changed enough for them to finally be responsible? Did their character traits start changing in 1970 such that they were suddenly suitable for medicine, law, and science (and, briefly, technology)? [1] Because the feminine character was certainly cited as a reason why women shouldn't vote or be allowed to pick particular professions.
Further, we receive all sorts of gender socialization, starting with color-coding infants, moving up through toys and education, and continuing through all sorts of gender expectations during youth. A lot of education is explicitly about building character. A great deal of what you call "character" is learned behavior.
I'd think that you working in an area where you are treated as an idiot because of your gender would make you aware of how arbitrary this stuff is.
Yes, there is. It's the undercurrent of sexism that runs through almost every human encounter. But that undercurrent can run deep or shallow depending on whether the people involved acknowledge it and actively try not to let it affect their decisions. This essay is a great effort at making the undercurrent shallower.
Oh, definitely. As I said, I appreciate him speaking up. But in speaking up for his woman while reinforcing sexist notions and ignoring how this happens to other women, it has a "two steps forward, one step back" feel to me. I appreciate the piece, but I'm disappointed as well.