Gender Intelligence: Why Different Wiring Means Better Business

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iStock_000014690519XSmallBy Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

Why, after decades of work to advance and empower women, have we yet to close the gender leadership gap? According to Marie Wilson, founder of The White House Project, one reason could be the brain. “I was convinced so much that if we just didn’t the right things, trained women right – and I’m so tired of ‘fixing women’ – we could just make it work. When I met with Barbara Annis, we started to talk about what I had avoided my whole life – brain differences.”

She added, “Wiring doesn’t mean everything, but it means a lot.”

Wilson was speaking at the first ever Gender Intelligence Summit, a conference organized to discuss the neurobiology of gender. Held in Washington, DC, on Friday, the conference featured preeminent scientists on the subject of gender intelligence, as well as corporate diversity practitioners who have incorporated gender intelligence into diversity and inclusion work – and found success.

When companies take into account gender differences within the brain, and teach individuals and companies to appreciate and value those differences, diversity becomes more than a numbers game. Barbara Annis, Founder and CEO of Barbara Annis & Associates and Chair of the Women’s Leadership Board at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, is an expert on inclusive leadership. She said, “We thought that if we got enough women into the pipeline, some of them would float up.”

But, she continued, true inclusiveness isn’t merely about the numbers. It’s time to consider the neurological reasons women work and lead differently than men, and why companies can benefit from appreciating those differences.

For example, men generally perform better than women when it comes to spatial reasoning, while women usually perform better at reading facial expressions. Both are valuable skills for a business team to have in its toolbox. Learning to appreciate these kinds of distinctions can help instill corporate culture with a reverence for difference – which will drive gender inclusiveness on a more meaningful level than simply injecting more women into the pipeline with fingers crossed for success.

Focusing on the benefits of “unlikeness,” Annis said, is one way to encourage companies to change their game, refine processes to retain women, and, ultimately, make more money. “The business case is compelling. You can’t deny it anymore,” she explained.

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Voice of Experience: Carolyn Buck Luce, Global Pharmaceutical Sector Leader, Ernst & Young LLP

CarolynBuckLuceBy Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

“Life is filled with chapters. The ability to live a life worth dying for is an important touchstone for me,” explained Carolyn Buck Luce, Global Life Science Sector Leader at Ernst & Young, and Co-Founder of the Hidden Brain Drain Task Force.

She recommends ten-year planning as a way to manage that life. “Every ten years, I go over what I want to learn in the next ten, and the critical experiences I want to have. I ask, ‘how do I live the next chapter as fully as I can?’”

As a result, Buck Luce has gained a wealth of experience and advice, and has passionately dedicated chapters of her life to helping advance women and girls.

“One of my interests is helping women and girls be all that they can be,” she said. “Women and girls have this ambivalent relationship with power and ambition. For many reasons women and girls are underserved, under-empowered, and under-appreciated around the world.”

She continued, “We need to create institutions that meet the needs of society, and that means women and girls getting comfortable with power and ambition so we can take our place at the table and join men in leadership.”

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Mine’s Bigger than Yours: The Challenges of Being a Female Breadwinner

SuzanneDoyleMorrisContributed by Dr. Suzanne Doyle-Morris

Shhhh… there’s a secret that no one is talking about. The woman sitting at the next desk, your high-flying cousin, perhaps even you… is likely to earn more than your male partner. The trend for women to earn more than the men with whom they share their lives is increasingly prevalent, yet it’s a secret we don’t discuss. The statistics are similar in the US and UK with 20-25% of women outearning their male partners. This is not even including households that are headed by single mothers or professional women who live alone – who by default are the primary breadwinners. With the number of women leaving university now outpacing men, female breadwinning is a trend that is only going to grow.

Before writing Female Breadwinners: How They Make Relationships Work and Why They are the Future of the Modern Workforce, I began to notice how many of my coaching clients, like myself, were main earners for their families. Yet it’s a taboo topic many women avoid for fear of appearing disloyal to husbands or to salve his ego. Did this secrecy mean it wasn’t an issue for these women and the men in their lives? Far from it. As Annie, a documentary filmmaker said: ‘It’s the biggest discussion we don’t have. If we have a row about anything, money’s the one area we avoid. It’s just too problematic.’

Explaining why they avoid talking about her earnings compared to her husband’s, who is investing his time and savings in a start-up company, Annie says: ‘If you open up that can of worms, you can never go back. My way of dealing with it is to avoid bringing it up. I know if that if I forced the issue, about him contributing more with the children, for example, it could get ugly. If I looked at it like his or my money, we’d have a lot more trouble.” So as the number of female breadwinner rise, what are the challenges they face entering uncharted territory between the genders?

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Ten Inspiring Voices

iStock_000014186302XSmallBy Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

Today we’re celebrating our 2000th post (check out our Founder and CEO Nicki Gilmour’s article this morning on inclusive leadership), by reflecting on the things we’ve learned while working to inform, empower, and inspire women to break the glass ceiling.

As Editor of The Glass Hammer, one of the most fulfilling parts of my job is the opportunity to interview extraordinary women and tell their stories through our profile series like Voices of Experience, Movers and Shakers, and Intrepid Woman.

Today I’m sharing ten things I’ve learned from our Voice of Experience profiles that have personally impacted me and my journey – I hope you’ll find them just as inspiring!

1. Think About the Kind of Life You Want to Live

To illustrate the importance of what she called “living the life of the possible,” Sheree Stomberg, Head of O&T Administration, Global Operations & Technology Chief Administrative Office at Citi, shared a moving story about her grandfather.

“He lived life with no regrets – he was very active into his 90s. He lived the art of the possible,” she said. “When he was 65 he suffered a heart attack. The doctor said he must live a life without physical exertion, not eat food that was too hot or drink things that were too cold… he looked at the list and tore it up. The doctor said he wouldn’t live 5 years.”

She continued, “When he was in his 70s, we went mountain climbing in Alaska together. And when he was 75 he went back to tell the doctor about it.”

“I’m not advising people to discredit medical advice,” she joked. “But he always looked for how to move life forward. That’s what I mean about living the life of the possible.”

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Senior Management Holds the Key to Gender Parity: It’s the Culture, Stupid!

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Nicki GilmourBy Nicki Gilmour, Founder and CEO of The Glass Hammer

As founder and publisher of theglasshammer.com, I am proud to pen our 2000th article today and to share with you some of our latest thinking and around gender parity. We are proud to have spent the last four years creating a “must read” online publication designed to help professional women actively manage their careers. We have had the pleasure of covering the most progressive research on gender from well-known think tanks and attending events with fantastically inspirational speakers, as well as hosting our own panel discussions and networking events.

It seems appropriate to celebrate our 2000th article with a look at what components could play a major role in helping a critical mass of women to break the glass ceiling over the next few years. After all, if the last twenty years is closely examined, we would find only an incremental change in the number of women in leadership roles in major companies. (For example, as The Economist recently reported, while the proportion of working women has risen from risen from 48% to 64% since the ’70s, women still only make up three percent of Fortune 500 CEOs.) Similarly, the advice given to women since the 1980s hasn’t changed much either and has been predominantly to act more like men.

Is this strategy working for women? Whilst it definitely makes sense to provide women with a guidebook to how the game is played currently, I cannot help but feel this method ignores the elephant in the room. What might that be? Culture.

It means addressing the culture question and exploring tough topics around why macho works styles are still revered. Asking how culture is formed and maintained and who gets to most heavily influence it should be on every leader’s list of things to look at in 2012. This examination and honest diagnostic approach would enable senior management to look at the systemic issues that are preventing women and other minorities from advancing from middle management to senior management roles and onwards to the boardroom.

Behind the scenes here at theglasshammer.com, beyond creating empowering content for our readers and community members, we have begun to conduct research and write white papers on under-represented groups in the workplace. Our work explores topics  such as women in technology teams, LGBT women at work, and multicultural women in financial services. This work is conducted via our sister site Evolved Employer and is focused on helping companies understand how to architect their company culture to be inclusive and supportive of talented people who don’t necessary fit or want to be categorized into one box or other based on their outward appearance. (Hello Generation Y.)

Many companies and the people in them are still not clear on the business case for spending time developing talent as a business driver. “Smart people come in different packages” is the best way I can explain the need for dispelling myths around what a leader looks like. Diversity work is deeply personal and quite hard because it challenges every deeply held belief we’ve ever had. No one wants to admit to ourselves that we have biases. Often, unconscious bias, even those held by women, protects those who have historically held power, in order to uphold the status quo and maintain workplace traditions. Micro-inequities are often upheld by the very people who are most hindered by them.

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