By Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)
A few months ago, a friend of mine wrote a post on Facebook about something that had frustrated her at work. My friend, who works in a technology role for a federal contractor, had received an email from a male colleague, asking if she wouldn’t mind helping to set up the office kitchen for a team party. All of the other women on the team got the email. None of the men did.
This may seem like a small thing, being asked to set up some refreshments for an office party. But, when you add up the consequences of being asked throughout your entire professional career to do these small chores, it’s not. Microinequities like these are the building blocks that make up a workplace culture that positions women as the helpers, the cleaners, the fixers, the note-takers, the coffee-makers, the party planners, the support staff to the “real” workers – even if their job description is the same as everyone else’s.
The second shift sees women in dual career households coming home at the end of the day, and doing the majority of housework and childcare compared to their partner. Even women in full time jobs who make more money than their husbands do the same amount or more at home, a recent Simmons College study [PDF] showed.
But the second shift is not simply a phenomenon that takes place after work. It’s a symptom of a broader cultural expectation that women clean up messes wherever they are. Women are getting stuck with the second shift at work too. And doing all that extra work, work that’s not considered mission critical in the least bit, can be a drag on your time and your power.
My friend did something brave. Rather than sigh heavily and just go help set up, she chose not to ignore the sexist slight. She replied to the email, pointing out that none of the men on the floor were asked to help out with the party, and it’s not appropriate to expect only women to.
That’s another factor – it takes a lot of courage to stand up to microinequities. Since they’re so small, the perpetrator may not even realize he or she did anything wrong. It’s easy for them to laugh it off as a joke, or worse, accuse the aggrieved of overreacting. And in the immediate sense, the payoff is small.
But calling out this kind of behavior is a long game, and ultimately it makes the work environment a more equitable place where women will be taken seriously. In the short term, at least you won’t be fuming later over what you “should have said.”
Women In The Boardroom
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PartnersToigo
Partners“The Toigo Foundation is committed to ethical leadership and broader diversity of thought and experience in business. Our mission is to foster the career advancement and increased leadership of underrepresented talent by creating mechanisms for greater inclusion from the classroom to the boardroom.”
WeAreTheCity
PartnersWeAreTheCity.com was founded in April 2008 with the aim of providing information to women who wish to progress in their careers via networking and events. The concept of the website is to provide services that not only help women develop themselves both personally and professionally, but also contributes to a wider strategy of supporting working women in the UK more broadly by bringing together the charity sector and potential entrepreneurs on to one common platform.
WeAreTheCity’s core pillars are as follows:
WeAreTheCity in numbers (Sep 2015)
Core service and programme offerings aimed at corporate clients
WeAreTheCity provide the following services & programmes to a number of organisations who are seeking to support and enhance the careers of their female workforce
For more information about our corporate services, please contact Info@wearethecity.com
In 2012 WeAreTheCity was recognised by both Mumprenuer and the Good Web Guide for our work in the female community.
In 2015, WeAreTheCity was awarded the Company of the Year Award by RBS Focused Women
WeAreTheCity also has a sister site in India, www.wearethecity.in.
Innovation is a Significant Driver of Corporate Growth: Sharpen Your Innovation Skills Using These 3 Helpful Tips
Managing ChangeInnovation is a word that is often used in association with business growth and competitiveness, but what does innovation in action look like and how can you make sure you are flexing your innovative muscles at work?
Recently, Harvard Business Review reported that the lack of innovation was one of the biggest mistakes Steve Ballmer made as CEO of Microsoft. He didn’t necessarily do anything wrong. After all, he did manage to keep Microsoft’s stock price steady during his time as the company’s leader. But, he didn’t really create a “wow factor” around Microsoft or its product lines either. As a result, Ballmer has been the topic of much media debate over whether or not he led the company with enough attention on innovation.
While Microsoft has not met the same demise as former tech giant, RIM, the message to companies is pretty clear: innovate or die. Julia Kirby, author of the HBR article writes, “Despite two decades of seeing the problem, very few CEOs have thought seriously about how their organizations should be reinvented if innovation matters more than anything else. Well, guess what: it does.”
As a recent Deloitte report suggested that innovation is not limited to a select few within a company’s org chart. Instead, companies need to start recognizing the value of institutional innovation, which Deloitte describes as, “redefining the rationale for institutions and developing new relationship architectures within and across institutions to break existing performance trade-offs and expand the realm of what is possible.”
Where do you fall on the innovation spectrum?
If innovation is becoming the cornerstone of competitive businesses, innovative people will become even more valuable. If you want to remain an asset to your company, you need to continue to sharpen your innovation skills, so that when the opportunity arises to turn ideas into actions, you will be ready. The following tips will help you keep innovation on the top of your to-do list each and every day.
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What to Do If You’re Sick of Taking on the “Second Shift” at Work Too
Office PoliticsA few months ago, a friend of mine wrote a post on Facebook about something that had frustrated her at work. My friend, who works in a technology role for a federal contractor, had received an email from a male colleague, asking if she wouldn’t mind helping to set up the office kitchen for a team party. All of the other women on the team got the email. None of the men did.
This may seem like a small thing, being asked to set up some refreshments for an office party. But, when you add up the consequences of being asked throughout your entire professional career to do these small chores, it’s not. Microinequities like these are the building blocks that make up a workplace culture that positions women as the helpers, the cleaners, the fixers, the note-takers, the coffee-makers, the party planners, the support staff to the “real” workers – even if their job description is the same as everyone else’s.
The second shift sees women in dual career households coming home at the end of the day, and doing the majority of housework and childcare compared to their partner. Even women in full time jobs who make more money than their husbands do the same amount or more at home, a recent Simmons College study [PDF] showed.
But the second shift is not simply a phenomenon that takes place after work. It’s a symptom of a broader cultural expectation that women clean up messes wherever they are. Women are getting stuck with the second shift at work too. And doing all that extra work, work that’s not considered mission critical in the least bit, can be a drag on your time and your power.
My friend did something brave. Rather than sigh heavily and just go help set up, she chose not to ignore the sexist slight. She replied to the email, pointing out that none of the men on the floor were asked to help out with the party, and it’s not appropriate to expect only women to.
That’s another factor – it takes a lot of courage to stand up to microinequities. Since they’re so small, the perpetrator may not even realize he or she did anything wrong. It’s easy for them to laugh it off as a joke, or worse, accuse the aggrieved of overreacting. And in the immediate sense, the payoff is small.
But calling out this kind of behavior is a long game, and ultimately it makes the work environment a more equitable place where women will be taken seriously. In the short term, at least you won’t be fuming later over what you “should have said.”
Read more
Movers and Shakers: Karen Catlin, Developing powerful women leaders in the tech industry
Movers and ShakersAfter a successful career working as a senior executive in the technology industry, Catlin is now focused on making sure women working in tech today have the resources to be successful. “I want to make sure women in tech are not opting out of the industry for the wrong reasons,” explained Catlin. “I want women to feel empowered, educated, and encouraged to have the career that they aspire to.”
Highlights in Catlin’s Career
After graduating, Catlin accepted a job at Brown researching hypertext, which was an innovative function at the time. “This was a great opportunity for me get involved with this research that was growing at the time,” explained Catlin.
Catlin moved to London with her husband, who is originally from England. Here she had the opportunity to work at a Hitachi Research Lab that was based in the UK. “It was a great experience not only working in the UK, but also working for a Japanese firm,” Catlin said. “I highly recommend that everyone gains some international experience if they can. It teaches you the skills that you need in order to be effective in different environments and different cultures.”
Although her experience working abroad allowed Catlin to gain valuable knowledge and add essential skills to her toolkit, she and her husband, who is a software developer, both felt like if they were going to work seriously in the technology industry, there was only one place for them to be. So, they packed their bags and headed back to the US with their sights set on Silicon Valley.
Catlin immediately found a job working for Go Corporation, a company that was working on tablet technology long before anyone else. She recalled being intimidated at the time even though she had a great technical background and education in technology. “If I knew the term ‘Impostor Syndrome’ at the time, I would have definitely said that I had it,” said Catlin. “I wasn’t sure I was up to getting an engineering job, so instead I got a job writing software and documentation that would teach other engineers how to write code.”
While she loved teaching other engineers, Catlin also discovered that she also enjoyed the challenge of getting things organized. She explained, “At the time Go was experiencing a lot of changes to their software specs, and they needed someone to guide the development team through this process. So I become involved in technical project management. I transitioned from being a software engineer to a manager at that point.”
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The Problem With a Masculine Corporate Culture
Office PoliticsThe idea that “masculine identity” is a social construct is not a new one. As Robin Ely, Professor of Business Administration and Senior Associate Dean for Culture and Community, points out, different cultures associate different attributes with men and masculinity, but in almost all cultures, such attributes—whatever they may be—are more highly valued than those associated with women and femininity.
Ely’s recent study, a collaboration with her colleague, Stanford University consulting professor Debra Meyerson, proves without a shadow of a doubt that an entire culture can dramatically shift when stripped of its traditional masculine identity.
“Unmasking Manly Men: The Organizational Reconstruction of Men’s Identity” took Ely and Meyerson 130 miles off the coast of Southern Louisiana, landing them smack-dab in the middle of one of the toughest, most male-dominated work environments imaginable: an offshore oil platform. The manager of the oil rig had implemented innovative approaches to leadership development in order to reduce unsafe behaviors stereotypically associated with “macho” men, such as taking unnecessary risks, refusing to ask questions that make them appear vulnerable, and pressuring coworkers to prove themselves through acts of physical bravery. However, he wasn’t achieving an effective result.
He found that by stripping the oil rig away of its traditional masculine identity, there was a noticeable shift in the entire culture of the rig: communication improved, men listened to each other more, they learned from their mistakes, and placed more emphasis on teamwork.
So, what does work on an oil rig have to do with corporate America? The concept of not just pushing against masculine leadership stereotypes, but dismantling them entirely can be transferred to the corporate landscape. This could be necessary if organizations continue conflating concepts of leadership competence with images of masculinity.
Ely says the research speaks to the question of how men construct identities in the workplace and the larger role organizations play in shaping this process. “In other research,” she says, “we have seen that conventional masculinity often becomes the performance standard, even when an alternative standard would be more beneficial to the organization, not to mention to women employees with an interest in career advancement.”
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Why Women Need Solidarity: Tokenism Harms Us All
Managing ChangeCritical mass, the generally accepted theory regarding women on boards and executive management, says that when women occupy more than 30 percent of the positions in a specific group, positive social change within the organization starts to happen.
That is, when you have a certain number of women in elite circles of leadership, the theory suggests that firms will have better representation of women at senior levels. The firm will put more effort into recruiting and retaining women, leadership styles will improve as more diverse models emerge, discussions will become more inclusive and dynamic, attitudes about who’s suited for which jobs will change, and the company will perhaps devote more resources to the types of programs that level the playing field for women.
But there’s an uncomfortable gray area between having no women in a group of leaders and having three or more women in that group, and that area is tokenism.
Tokenism isn’t just bad because it implies that token women don’t really “deserve” their spot. In fact, token women are by and large accomplished and deserving of their role, and they probably fought tooth and nail against negative stereotypes to get it, only to have people (both men and women) in their firm consider them undeserving of their title.
In fact, tokenism also harms all women. When leadership groups are still at the tokenism stage of diversity, token individuals are set up to compete mainly with one another, and they are likely see other token individuals as a threat to their own power.
A new working paper out of Columbia Business School and the University of Maryland Robert H. Smith School of Business indicates that tokenism is alive and well at today’s top companies. The research shows that tokenism is actually keeping women out of top jobs. The longitudinal study of companies in the S&P 1,500 shows that when organizations find themselves with a female CEO, they are less likely to have women in other top jobs, especially line positions. Similarly, when a woman is in one category (line versus staff) of senior management positions, it is less likely that there are other women in senior management positions in that category.
As the percentage of women in senior management roles at top companies is increasing at a glacial pace (for example, in 2012, only 14.3 percent of Fortune 500 companies had a female CEO, a marginal increase since 2009 when it was 13.5 percent), now may be a critical time to examine why. Is tokenism keeping more women out of top jobs? What role are other women playing here? It’s not a pretty picture.
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Voice of Experience: Deborah Lorenzen, COO, BK University, BNY Mellon
Voices of ExperienceDeborah Lorenzen, COO, BK University, BNY Mellon, recently celebrated her 20th anniversary with BNY Mellon. This milestone is enriched by a career that has been fundamentally involved in the growth, development and enrichment of the company’s structure, business strategies and corporate culture.
Lorenzen has taken on roles in many different disciplines, locations and business units at BNY Mellon including special projects, program management, and Corporate Trust. She’s worked in San Francisco, New York, Edinburgh and London. Now in her latest role as COO of BK University, Lorenzen hopes to be part of an exciting new era of transformative change at the global financial services company. BNY Mellon provides services and solutions across the investment lifecycle.
The roots for BK University and Lorenzen’s involvement in the project were actually planted in the late nineties when she received an unexpected phone call at her desk. “One day my phone rang and it was Gerald Hassell, who had just become president of the company. He was calling because he wanted someone who could figure out how to launch a corporate University. And it took some time to get here, but I am now the COO of BK University. At the time, we weren’t ready for this on an institutional level, but now we are,” recalls Lorenzen.
On Defining a Career Path
When she looks back at her career path, Lorenzen agrees that it was not the most linear. However, she feels that her deep vault of experiences is what has shaped her and prepared her for her current role. Lorenzen said, “My interests are in how we run this company and becoming part of the leadership team that helps drive this company forward. Perhaps there could have been a more direct career path, but for me it was really important to understand a number of different disciplines and to be a more effective and well-rounded leader with the perspective to go along with the global nature of our business.” She continued, “Every single opportunity I took has helped me to understand our business more deeply.”
For Lorenzen, taking advantage of the opportunities presented to her throughout her career has contributed to her success at BNY Mellon. “I believe the greatest risk you can take in your career is to stand still,” said Lorenzen, “You have to move and you have to put yourself out of your comfort zone because that is the only way you learn. You don’t regret the things that you do. You may regret the things you don’t do.”
Impacting the culture of her company in a positive way is something that has always been a source of pride for Lorenzen. “One of the things I am most proud of is the time that I have spent connecting people,” explained Lorenzen. “I once spent six months in Edinburgh working with 400 employees of a business we had just acquired. I helped them understand how we got things done in this organization and explained the culture of our company. I enjoy making those linkages for people so that they can be more successful.”
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