By 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.
Three Questions You Must Ask Yourself to Be an Inspirational Leader
Ask A Career CoachI had a client recently share with me her desire to be a more inspirational leader in her organization. I asked her why this was important to her. She said she wanted to have greater impact and greater engagement within her teams. Shoulders slumped, she quickly confessed she was not really sure how to do that. What would you do to be a more inspiring leader?
Most people believe they can be more inspirational by watching others who are inspirational and then doing what they do. There are certainly lots of books and tapes we can buy to read about how we can be inspirational leaders. Earlier in my career, I enviously observed my boss’s boss. He was a large man with a commanding presence – at least 6ft 2 inches, 230+ pounds. One time I saw him palpably excite a roomful of 400+ people with his booming voice and speech, ending in a standing ovation. But here’s the problem. I am 5ft 2 on a good day and hard as I try, the booming voice is hard to emulate.
So, here’s what I have learned on my journey to be more inspirational as a leader. The most important first step in being an inspirational leader is being INSPIRED ourselves. So the right question to ask is not who we need to emulate and how we become an inspirational leader. The right question to ask ourselves is WHAT INSPIRES US?
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Gender Intelligence: Why Different Wiring Means Better Business
Featured, Industry Leaders, LeadershipWhy, 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
Voices of Experience“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
Expert AnswersShhhh… 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
Extraordinary LivesToday 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!
Featured, Industry Leaders, LeadershipAs 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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Three Boardroom Challenges—And How to Overcome Them
Managing ChangeWhen we hear about women in the boardroom, it is often about their absence rather than their presence. The research firm Catalyst finds that only 15.7 percent of board directors are female in the United States—a number that has remained largely stagnant for the last five years. Creditsafe reports that women hold only a quarter of director seats in the United Kingdom.
Why is this? Because women have difficulty getting on a board despite their qualifications, says Beth Stewart, Managing Director of Trewstar Corporate Board Services, a source firm whose mission is to source and place qualified women on boards. Through her experience, Stewart has seen that it is easy for even the most well-intentioned board directors to proceed with business as usual.
“There are lots of qualified men who are easy for search firms or fellow board members to find,” Stewart says. “So why make the effort, rock the boat, take the risk, or ask for a favor to get a woman on a board?” She notes that most board search firms are paid to find board members, but not specifically female board members. “The search firms have many interlocking relationships—for example, if they take a CEO from Company X for Board Y, they will expect to get other recruiting business from Company X .”
With challenges like these to even getting a board seat, we hear little about the specific obstacles that women face who have defied the odds and made it to the boardroom. But once there, there are still more hurdles to contend with. According to a range of workplace and governance experts, as well as experienced board members, here are a few insights on how to clear them.
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Negotiation November: Leading a Negotiating Team — Three Essential Steps to Success
Expert AnswersNegotiating on your own can be tricky. Things get exponentially more complicated though when negotiation must be played as a team sport.
Let’s say you’re leading a shared services group that’s been given a mandate to centralize certain functions currently residing in individual business units. Chances are your team will face challenges from the business units affected about how your group will meet their needs. Your team will need to sit down with them to work things out.
Or, if you are trying to close a complex sale, it probably won’t be enough to merely assure your prospective client that your team will be able to seamlessly deliver on the proposal. A meeting between your team and the client will be required to make your case.
These situations (and many others) demand that you and those you lead negotiate effectively as a unified team. Not easy!
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Remote Work is on the Wishlist This Year
Office PoliticsWhat are women wishing for this year? According to a new survey from Microsoft Office 365 and 85 Broads, the answer is a more flexible work arrangement. According to a survey of members of the women’s networking group 85 Broads, a full 90% of respondents would prefer a regular remote working schedule, and 81% of women said they’d be more satisfied with their jobs as a result of remote working. Given the opportunity, they would work from home 3.1 days per week.
That’s more than half the week away from the office! The main reasons women desired a more flexible work arrangement included work/life issues, better productivity, and a shorter commute. In fact, it is notable that so many individuals felt being at work prevented them from getting work done. What is it about the workplace that is so draining?
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Voice of Experience: Suni Harford, Managing Director and Regional Head of Markets for North America, Citigroup
Voices of Experience“I’m constantly learning in this job,” said Suni Harford, Managing Director and Regional Head of Markets for North America at Citi. “And that’s great after twenty-five years in the business, to say I learn something new every day.”
Harford, who co-heads the firm’s women’s initiative in addition to her day job, shows inspiring enthusiasm for her career – and, she said, it comes from doing work she enjoys.
“It sounds silly to say that the most exciting thing I’m working on right now is just doing my job, but these markets make for interesting days, and it’s very rewarding.”
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