Tag Archive for: Aimee Hansen

Dr. Sarah Carrier, MD: Emergency Physician, JH Quillen VA Medical Center

, ,

Sarah Carrier“Medicine is both an Art and a Science,” says Sarah Carrier, MD. “The science is knowing what kind of disease the patient has. The art is knowing what kind of patient has the disease.”

Carrier speaks of the call to become a doctor, establishing herself as a peer among men and why soft skills matter especially in her profession.

Heeding the “Burden” to Pursue Medicine

Carrier did not come from a medical family (her parents were in engineering and real estate), but recalls being drawn from an early age. After being a volunteer “candy striper” in high school, she began to think of a career in medicine. Her mother’s solid advice was to get her foothold in nursing before seeing if she wanted to invest her study and finances in becoming a doctor.

“I spent ten years in nursing. But there’s an expression in this part of the country that people are ‘called to preach.’ They have a burden to preach, meaning they can’t not do it,” she notes. “Well, in my case, I felt called to medicine. I had a burden to be a doctor and it would not go away.”

What catalyzed the decisive moment to embark on becoming a physician, as a thirty-year old working nurse with small children four and six years, was the shock of losing a good friend in a car accident: “When she tragically died, I thought we never know how much time we’ve got on this planet, so I really don’t want to go to my grave without having tried to do what I felt I was called to.”

Despite the bewilderment of her friends, she spent a year preparing for the MCAT entrance exam and then entered medical school while raising what became three children, still practicing nursing during some of her summers.

From Nurse To “Female” Doctor

Having been a nurse before becoming a doctor gave Carrier a kindred respect for nurses: “I think first being a nurse made me a better doctor, because I know what their job is like and I’m there to work with them. Whereas a lot of physicians come in acting like the boss, it’s a different demeanor and often more of an ego thing. I knew first hand that the nurses you work with can either make your job easy or they can make it hard. You should never forget that you are on a team. You may be the Captain but it is still a team. Everyone matters.”

Working in the South, in a generally more paternalistic culture, Carrier admits that the medical environment still carries a bit of pecking order about it, though there are many more women in emergency medicine than when she began. Nonetheless, she has had to regularly “out” herself as the doctor to her patients.

“When I started, I’d go into the room and patients would presume I was the nurse. I realized it was up to me to let them know that I was in fact the doctor,” says Sarah Carrier. “In my line of work, you are meeting people on the fly. No one comes to the ED because they’re having a good day, so that’s where we start. You have to get good at gaining trust and confidence.”

Carrier has never felt she is competing against male peers in the medical field, but she has organically developed tactics to quickly establish herself as a peer, especially when doctors are calling each other up to transfer patients or get patients admitted into specialist departments, and there is just her voice to go on.

“I want to make sure they know that I’m the doctor, not the transfer coordinator, so I use their first name to create more of a level playing field. Instead of saying ‘Dr. Smith’ for example, I’ll say ‘John, this is Sarah Carrier over here in the ER’,” she notes. “I’ve found the conversation comes more collegial with that small, simple thing.”

One mentor Carrier remembers was a chief surgeon at John Hopkins who exhibited tongue-in-cheek confidence. She would walk through the hallway announcing, “Okay, the girl doctor is making the rounds.” She advised Carrier to not take nonsense from anyone and importantly, to not expect perfection from herself.

Carrier has observed the peer dynamic between female physicians is surprisingly more supportive than she experienced as a nurse. She suspects that being fewer in number relatively increases camaraderie and forthcomingness to support each other.

It’s actually outside of the hospital, when working with other women on volunteer projects, that Carrier has felt her role as a physician can seem to affect the way women relate to her, and she might hold back on that detail when first connecting as friends.

The Soft Skills of Emergency Medicine

With a range of patients from pediatrics to geriatric, women are usually involved in emergency visits, from caregivers to mothers to spouses. Carrier has found that women seem to relate better to other women in these contexts of vulnerability, so being a woman is often an asset.

“Generally speaking, I think men will more often stand with the clipboard and take care of business. In my experience, they don’t tend to try to make the emotional connection as often,” she observes. “Whereas women tend to sit down in the room and talk to people and make the emotional connection.”

She notes, “You don’t have to spend a lot of extra time, but to just sit down and ask, ‘are you under a lot of stress?‘ or ‘what’s been going on besides the baby being sick?’ is enough to let them know that you identify with their situation.”

Carrier often has to speak transparently about health to patients she’s known for only five minutes before the tests, and while she values telling it like it is, she also says that in any profession there’s a delicate line to observe: “I think patients appreciate the fact that you’ll sit down and say, ‘I’ve got some things I’ve got to tell you. Some of them are going to be hard to listen to. Some are good. Some are not so good’. You can be honest, but you don’t have to be brutally honest. You don’t have to say,’ ‘you’ve got a lung mass and it’s probably cancer’. But you can say, ’there’s something there that doesn’t belong there, we need to get some more tests and here’s the five things that might be.'”

Seeing Her Role as Education

Carrier encourages questions and educating people in a way that empowers them in their own health. She has appeared on Discovery Channel’s “Untold Stories of the ER” four times, and while the show dramatizes the emergency room, it also allows her to educate people. An episode in which she throughly explains a heart attack, around a situation where a patient was resisting the diagnosis while going into cardiac arrest, has been viewed over 500,000 times and could save lives.

“I’m basically explaining the physiology of a heart attack, which is something I deal with nearly every day. But the average person doesn’t really understand how they get from feeling fine to being literally at death’s door,” notes Carrier. “So that particular episode where I could explain in very simple terms how a heart attack works matters.”

Appreciation and Presence

Working in a 24/7 emergency situation requires calm in navigating chaos. Carrier has learned how to compartmentalize and switch gears from an urgent situation to a more standard injury, while being present to each patient. Being an emergency physician during Covid has definitely stretched her stamina.

More than anything, her job is a constant reminder of the relative nature of problems, and to appreciate her life. Since returning to school with young children, preserving quality time with family mattered more to her than achieving perfect grades. And it still matters to make that time.

She enjoys being involved in organizations where she can work beside other women outside of the medical field, such as in volunteer groups and, presently, an art commission.

By Aimee Hansen

/by

Will Companies Value the Leaders Who Invest In Inclusion?

,

DEI leadersWhile women report being both increasingly burned out from the pandemic years and vulnerable to leave the workforce, they are also most likely to be rising up to embody the leadership our times ask for.

Will companies begin to put their money (financial and career trajectory rewards) where their mouths are? If not, allowing women to disproportionally shoulder the “unpaid work” of empathetic management and DEI is a strategy for losing the leaders who are tapped in and more valuable than ever.

Our Times Call for Compassionate Leadership

Amidst the pandemic, leadership has become more oriented towards supporting individuals as a whole person, not just as employees, with qualities such as emotional intelligence and active listening. As written in Forbes: “One of the key lessons young people can take from today’s successful executives and leaders is the value of taking care of your people.”

According to Catalyst, employees who report their leaders are empathetic are far more likely to feel engaged, respected and valued, are more likely to stay in their place of work, be innovative and feel a sense of inclusion. When people sense their leaders are empathetic, they also feel more able to navigate the demands of work and family life.

People who see their leadership as empathetic in decision making are also likely to be collaborative and empathetic themselves. And when leaders are more empathetic, it fosters better levels of mental health in their organization. Using empathy as the catalyst for leading with more compassion (not ‘I feel with you’ but ‘I am here to help,’ as we are inherently interconnected) creates even more effective leadership.

As Tracy Bower, Ph.D. sociologist and the author of The Secrets to Happiness at Work, writes in Forbes, “Leaders don’t have to be experts in mental health in order to demonstrate they care and are paying attention. It’s enough to check in, ask questions and take cues from the employee about how much they want to share” – and this drives positive relationships, engagement and organizational results.

Women Are Leading The Deep Cultural Work

According to the Women in the Workplace 2021 Report – a collaboration between McKinsey & Company and LeanIn.org collected from over 423 organizations and 65,000 employee surveys – women are more likely to be carrying the torch of the “deep cultural work” necessary to transform workplaces “healthily and sustainably” in these times.

Women managers are consistently more likely to be supporting employees in their work lives (making the workload manageable, navigating work/life challenges, preventing and managing burnout). Women are also much more likely to be checking in on employee’s overall well-being and supporting them emotionally. In essence, employees are reporting that their female managers are showing up more with the active compassion of ‘how can I help?’

Also, women are more likely to be doing informal DEI work, beyond formal job responsibilities, and spending substantial time doing so. Compared to their male peers, senior female leaders are twice as likely to be making DEI work a part of their weekly work flow (1 in 5 vs 1 in 10). Women are also likely to recruit from and support underrepresented groups, be allies to women of color, to educate themselves, to speak out again discrimination, and to advocate for, mentor or sponsor women of color – although it’s important to note there are still big gaps to bridge in embodying the allies people would most value.

Ultimately, the work women are doing is driving better outcomes for everyone – because employees who feel their managers support their well-being, or who feel DEI is a priority and strong allies are present, are significantly happier, less burned out and more likely to stay around.

Women Are Stepping Up, And Burning Out

Yet while women managers and leaders are heeding the leadership call of our times, they are also undeniably overburdened themselves, with many not only carrying the double-shift of childcare and work, but also feeling the expectation to be “always on” in the absence of clear work/life boundaries in the remote and hybrid workplaces – another issue companies can help to address.

In 2021, 1 in 3 women were thinking about downshifting their careers or leaving the workforce, up from 1 in 4 women a few months into the pandemic in 2020. 4 in 10 women were looking to leave their company or switch jobs. 42% of women felt often or almost always burned out in 2021, a big jump up from 32% in 2020, and compared to 35% of men. That burnout feeling escalates with responsibility level. Among senior women who are managing entire teams, 50% were often or always burned out, and 40% were considering leaving the workforce or downshifting their careers.

Valued in Words, But Not In Actions

Companies are espousing that DEI and employee well-being are important to them. But while 87% of companies say that supporting employee well-being is critical and 70% say DEI work is critical, only about 25% are formally recognizing this work – and even fewer are rewarding it.

Despite stating gender and racial diversity as top priorities, only two-thirds of companies hold senior leaders accountable for progress on DEI goals, and less than one-third hold managers accountable, who are essential to creating cultures of inclusion. Among those who hold senior leaders accountable, fewer than half factor progress on diversity metrics into their performance reviews and less than a quarter build in financial incentives for progress on performance goals – meaning ultimately, the work is overlooked.

Right now, these highly sought leadership behaviors are adding up to be the new “unpaid work” highlighting where companies need to put more value. That women are disproportionally carrying this is a dangerous liability for employers during the Great Resignation. According to the report authors, “Companies risk losing the very leaders they need right now, and it’s hard to imagine organizations navigating the pandemic and building inclusive workplaces if this work isn’t truly prioritized.”

The authors urge organizations to treat DEI like any business priority, including following goals through to assessing effort and progress within performance reviews, and relating that to career advancement and compensation.

It’s Time to Recognize and Reward The Work

Right now, women are feeling burned out while taking personal leadership initiative on collective responsibilities. Companies are sabotaging progress on what they allege to be business priorities by not threading that priority through to enacting accountability, monitoring results and rewarding effectiveness.

“Companies need to incentivize and reward the things that women are doing to create these better working cultures,” says Jess Huang, co-author of the report. “This helps all employees because if it’s rewarded, more leaders will do it.”

Going further, she suggests: ”One solution companies should consider is incorporating criteria into performance reviews that recognizes the work managers are putting into supporting their teams and DEI efforts. Companies should use upward feedback provided by employees on their managers to help take this into account.”

It’s not enough to talk about valuing DEI and supporting the well-being of your employees. More companies need to demonstrate they value the work it takes to make it happen – to retain the leaders that are doing that work.

By Aimee Hansen

/by

Danielle Arnone: Chief Digital & Technology Officer, Combe

,

Danielle Arnone“In times of uncertainty, the focus has shifted from seeking answers to raising questions and building relationships to lead through the unknown,” expresses Danielle Arnone. 

Arnone speaks to leading through disruption, the value of listening and encouragement and the importance of taking risks as the stakes rise.

Be Willing to Challenge, Even as Stakes Rise

“Each step along the way has offered me an opportunity to learn and develop my leadership style. From a career perspective, I continue to challenge myself to push ahead in order to grow,” says Arnone, about her twenty plus year of working in technology, digital and e-commerce across various industries – and most recently, in beauty, health and wellness.

With tech at the center of every business, her work is about leading enterprise change “from the inside out and the outside in.”

Early on in her career, she felt she brought a different perspective to problem solving and would regularly test the status quo. Often the only woman in the room, as she began to move up the ranks and the stakes rose, it began to feel riskier.

“It’s a double whammy. You’re challenging the status quo and you represent change in just who you are,” says Arnone. “I’ve had many moments where I had to remind myself – you’ve got to stick with it – because I believed in what I was fighting for.”

She continues: “I won’t say it’s not hard, because in my opinion, it’s unnecessarily hard for women in STEM and why we lose so many and particularly those with high potential. At a certain stage, I decided I didn’t want to be another of those women.”

Being in a male-dominated industry can amplify self-doubt, but being aware of that has often helped her to overcome it.

While many hurdles are systemic and the pace of change is very slow,” Arnone says, “I realized that I’m the only one that can get me unstuck and that is powerful.”

Navigating Uncertainty through Vision

Despite the challenges during these pandemic years, Arnone has focused on leading long term change. While the emphasis in tech has often been to develop the next innovation as quickly as possible, today she stops and asks at every critical decision point: “Where do we ultimately want to go? Not just in the next twelve months but what do we want to envision in five or ten years time? And are the things we’re focusing energy on now truly in service of that long-term goal?”

“The circumstances of the last two years have made me a different leader. I had to take a step back and ask: what did I do in this time? And take the necessary steps to hopefully be proud of the answer,” reflects Arnone.

If there’s one thing Arnone has confronted as she rose, it is getting comfortable with uncertainty. She’s found that by letting go of the notion that you need to have answers, you can come together with curiosity and openness as a team, and arrive at better results.

Speaking to vision and prioritization, she says, “You have to conserve energy to focus on what’s really important, knowing that can change in a moment’s notice.”

“I’ve had to get comfortable with ambiguity. We often don’t know the target or the rules of the game to hit the target,” says Arnone.

Listening and Fluidity in Thinking

“The leaders that I admire most have the ability to listen deeply and surface the question behind the question, without putting people on the defensive, and in a way that takes the conversation to the next stage,” says Arnone.

She feels that listening is key and that an analytical approach can be useful in managing conflict and problem solving. “In an emotionally charged situation, I will encourage the team to tease out the facts, take the personalities out of it and then listen for what is not being talked about.”

When it comes to what she brings to the table, Arnone is adept at absorbing new and broad ideas and loves encouraging the exchange of ideas around the table.

She also enjoys the invitation to step out of linear thought and indulge her penchant for abstract thinking, in which perceptions move and change shape, which is not unlike the leadership skill of having the flexibility to navigate uncertainty.

She will often step away from work to get in the zone so that she can reset and let ideas pour in. These days, she’s exploring artistic outlets. She also jokes that if you saw her many playlists, you wouldn’t even believe they belonged to same person.

Encouraging Others Towards Their Best

Arnone finds leaders who encourage others towards their personal best in service of a greater mission to be the most inspiring. She feels it is rare to encounter, but she has had the fortune to have supportive mentors along the way that have greatly impacted what she values most in her life and in her work.

“Encouragement can be an antidote to self-doubt and frustration. It’s as simple as saying, ‘I see you struggling – what’s going on and how can I help you’.”

She wants to be known for her work to develop people and is especially passionate about helping women succeed. She observes that women coming into the workforce today have a strong sense of what they expect from employers beyond a paycheck.

“I want to see this generation of women keep the momentum going. They are demanding more equity, more balanced and fulfilling lives and holding leaders accountable. To me, that is progress.”

By Aimee Hansen

/by

The Value of Being Out as a Leader

LGBT flag_PixabayBy Aimee Hansen

With Monday’s ruling, this moment could offer a new permission slip for coming out at work for many.

In a victory landmark decision, the Supreme Court ruled that existing U.S. Federal Law (Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964) protects LGTBQ workers from discrimination.

The statutory interpretation declared that the current prohibition of “sex” discrimination is inclusive of sexual orientation and gender identity.

Yet, for nearly half of us in the USA, being in the closet at work is a painful reality.

According to 2018 research by the HRC, 46% of LGBTQ+ workers in the U.S. remain closeted at work, only 4% less than the 50% figure ten years earlier.

Major factors for staying in the closet are fear of being stereotyped, fear of making others uncomfortable, fear of losing connections and fear of having attraction to others projected onto them just for being LGBTQ+.

Over 60% of all employees agree that spouses, relationship or dating conversations come up casually at least once a week, which can mean a lot of emotional energy on covering up. Yet, 50% of LGBTQ+ say that they know no openly out employees at their workplace. 28% admit that they lie during these conversations.

Fear of being unaccepted contributes to social avoidance at work (25%), feelings of unhappiness or depression (31%), distraction (25%) and emotional exhaustion (17%), among other negative impacts.

Not only does coming out require a sense of receptivity and support in the workplace, but also bravery, vulnerability and discernment.

It is only an individual choice, but it’s one that has positively surprised some major leaders who took the step.

Top executives speak to coming out of the closet

Top executives who are out offer personal insight on their coming out journey in Bloomberg, many reflecting retrospectively that the cost of not bringing their whole selves to work was too much… and they paid it for too long, perhaps unnecessarily.

Across stories, they express that while everyone’s experience is different, they wish they had known how much acceptance would show up for them once they decided to show up for themselves as LGBTQ+, unapologetically.

“I wish I had known earlier how well I would be accepted by my colleagues at Dow. I would have come out earlier, and my decision would have been far easier. I feared a lot of negativity that never came to fruition,” says Jim Fitterling, CEO of Dow, Inc, who came out only when already senior in the organization. “I would never tell anyone to come out when they don’t feel comfortable, but I know from experience there is a toll you pay when you try to hide part of yourself, and that the perceived pain of coming out is often worse than the reality.”

“I would say be yourself; bring your whole self to work. Please don’t go back into the closet—because you will be the one who fundamentally suffers for it,” says Inga Beale, ex-CEO of Lloyds of London. “And if you’re out at work, you and your business will benefit…I definitely, definitely regret not coming out earlier.”

Owning your LGBTQ+ belonging as an asset to the workplace

“I personally feel an enormous sense of responsibility to take that empathy and the fight I got from growing up different from the majority of the population in the world and draw on that to make sure that every space I’m in,” says Kim Culmone, Senior vice president, Mattel Inc in Bloomberg. “ I’m bringing the voice of perhaps the marginalized or forgotten community into that room of influence and power.”

Dr. Steve Yacovelli, author of Pride Leadership: Strategies for the LGBTQ+ Leader to be the King or Queen of their Jungle, identifies six traits that out LGBTQ+ leaders can leverage to magnify effectiveness as leaders, not only amidst your reports but overall in your greater leadership influence.

These include: being authentic, leading with courage, having empathy, effective communication, building relationships and influencing organizational culture – all of which are competencies that LGBTQ+ leaders more often have in spades.

“You see the concept of authenticity in generic leadership everywhere,” says Dr. Yacovelli, in OutFront Magazine, “and if I look at folks in our community living authentically as themselves, we’re already exercising that muscle just naturally by being who we are.”

Yacovelli notes,“…I’m seeing more folks saying leadership isn’t just your direct report or organizational structure, it’s about who you influence.”

LGBTQ+ leadership is good for business

The benefit to business of having LGBTQ+ in leadership is no secret.

Research across data for 132 countries has demonstrated that more human rights protection for LGBTQ+ people is good for economic development. Despite this, 70 UN member states still criminalize being gay, let alone being transgender or gender non-binary.

Coming out is foremost a personal decision, and one to be made by each of us.

But it’s also a true leadership choice that has the potential to expand beyond your personal experience to create a ripple rainbow effect within any organization and all who you interact with.

/by

You Know What You Want, But What Are You Committing To?

Aimee Hansenby Aimee Hansen

What desire or longing do you have?

Is there something you want to be, or do, or feel or have?

Is there something within that seeks to be expressed or experienced, or that calls for a change?

Okay, but what are you committing to? 

You may know what you want, but are you affirming your desire and moving towards it?

Often, we habitually commit to undermining our desires.

Until we bring this harsh truth into awareness, we might be working against ourselves. If you have a desire that you are not nurturing, asking yourself this question:

Instead of your desire, what are you actually committing to?

Ask in a day-in, day-out kind of way. Ask when it comes to your habits, actions, thoughts and beliefs.

Often, we are not aware or radically self-honest about what we are actually committing to instead of our true desires.

We think of committing to something as being intentional and deliberate investment towards a goal or agreement. But intention is not necessary.  In practice, repetitive habit alone creates commitment.

On a daily basis, we might “commit” to bottling up anger, people-pleasing, holding back our “no”, scrolling on our phone, over-working and perpetuating 24/7 availability.

Notice how the language “commit” usually refers to a mistake or a crime, whereas commitment refers to a focused dedication.

Take this example of how habit becomes commitment: activate screen time monitoring on your smartphone. How many hours a week are you committing to social media?

Without even realizing it, we do “commit” away from our desires much of the time. If you are dissatisfied in a persistent situation, you can step back and ask yourself what you have been committing to.

This question will often reveal some accountability at play, even if it’s as simple as continued acquiescence to and participation in a situation or circumstance you are not aligned with.

We often commit to a repetition of thoughts and actions that are tethered to our conditioning or our comfort zone or our fear.

What is happening now? 

Check in by asking what is actually happening now. Often, you are more committed to what is happening than what you say you desire.

Here are three examples:

Desire: to write a book
Reality: not writing it
Committing to: working overtime, spending time with your kids, scrolling on Facebook, Netflix before bed, going to the gym, reiterating beliefs about not being qualified, etc

Desire: to be promoted
Reality: stagnant in your position
Committing to: doing office housework, focusing only on skills that you feel comfortable and competent in, being productive rather than demonstrating leadership and delegation, waiting for recognition rather than active self-promoting, etc

Desire: a loving, supportive relationship
Reality: a confusing, uncommitted relationship
Committing to: chasing unavailable people, subjugating your own needs, sticking with what doesn’t work, rationalizing someone else’s behavior, fantasizing what could be rather than seeing reality, etc

As you can see, what you are committed to is not always a negative thing. However, sometimes it is self-sabotaging or shows a lack of faith that you could have what you want.

What can you do? 

Seeing what you are currently committing helps to reveal how you actually feel and what the braver action might be.
Perhaps it’s not the time to write that book based on what you value right now, so you can stop beating yourself over the head with “should”.

Perhaps you have not realized that you are hiding in your comfort zone,and you realize it’s time to start playing at the level you wish to reach.

Perhaps commitment to what you want you requires walking away from what is not good enough, with faith what you want will come.

In each case, it’s enlightening to see what you are actually committing to and whether that aligns with your true desires for yourself.

What are you believing? 

Also, consider whether your mind and heart are in coherence with your desire. There’s a reason why we commit to what we’re actually doing now, even if unconscious.

Our current behavior may match our sense of self-worth, or self-love or our conditioning around what is possible for us or what is normal. It may be rewarding at the egoic fear-based level.

We often want something and also hold limiting beliefs about why it is not desirable or possible, for us. We might hold beliefs that would make the realization itself hollow.

You want to write a book. But your idea about who a published author is doesn’t match your own sense of yourself.

You want a promotion. But you are also terrified the new role would just mean more anxiety.

You want a supportive, loving relationship. But you fear that relationship means compromise and you are too much for anyone.

Despite knowing what we want, some parts of our internal selves might run contradictory to realizing it, or even letting ourselves fully want it.

As Anne Lamott writes, “If you’re not enough before the gold medal, you won’t be enough with it.”

By asking yourself what you long for, observing what you are actually committed to (instead), and investigating the beliefs underpinning what you are habitually doing, you can gift yourself a wake up call.

And then, you can choose to re-orient your energies towards alignment with what you really want.

/by

The Black Ceiling: It’s Not A Minor(ity) Problem

,

broken-glass ceiling

By Aimee Hansen

Even though 2017 was a record year for women in the C-Suite amidst Fortune 500 companies  (32 women in CEO jobs, vs. 21 in 2016) , no African American women have sat at the helm since Ursula Burns stepping down at Xerox in late 2016.

Soon there will be only three black CEOs at all in the Fortune 500, against a peak of seven in 2007, and overall upward trending back in the 2000s.

Further, Anne-Marie Campbell, EVP of U.S. Stores for Home Depot, was the only African American to rank in “Fortune’s 50 Most Powerful Women in Business.” Though Rosalind Brewer did reappear in the C-Suite as the first women and African American to be appointed COO of Starbucks.

The Black Ceiling

In a Fortune article calling out the “black ceiling,” Ellen McGirt writes about the absence of African American women: “Burns’ appointment to the top job in 2009 had been hailed as a milestone. Suddenly it looked more like an anomaly.”

Black women in business continue to feel both excluded from male dominated and white dominated informal networks as well as demoralized by being unrecognized and underestimated.

McGirt writes, “They report environments that they feel continually overlook their credentials, diminish their accomplishments, and pile on cultural slights—about their hair, appearance, even their parenting skills. And they often have fraught relationships with white women, who tend to take the lead on issues of women and diversity.”

Greatest Obstacles, Least Support

According to a Women In the Workplace 2017 study by McKinsey & Company, drawing on data from 222 companies employing more than 12 million people and a survey of over 70,000 employees, women of color “face the greatest obstacles and receive the least support.”

Black women consistently perceived less managerial support, less opportunities and less objectivity.

Only 31% of African American women felt managers advocate for their opportunity (vs 41% of white women), only 23% felt managers helped them to navigate organizational politics (vs 36%) and only 28% felt managers defend them or their work (vs 40%).

Only 48% of African American woman felt they had equal opportunity for growth (vs 59% of white women), only 29% felt the best opportunities go to the most deserving (vs 40%) and only 34% felt promotions were based on fair and objective criteria (vs 41%).

The report also found that “inequality starts at the very first promotion” in general for women but is more dramatic for women of color. Among women, African Americans had the lowest promotion rate (4.9% vs. 7.4% for white women) and the highest attrition rate (18.2% vs. 15.4%).

With slower advancement, African American women are more likely to move on in the corporate world or want to go on their own, since they hold higher ambitions to be a top level executive than white women but encounter more obstacles.

Professor Ella Bell Smith from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, notes, “To be able to advance, we know that there are several things — you have to have good mentorship and sponsorship, which means that you have to have some type of relationship, constructive, positive relationship with the managers and executives in your company. You have to perform three times as hard….The formula I like to use is performance plus relationship equal advancement.”

Lack of Inclusion

Without access to networks, African American women feel excluded from the relationships that create opportunities for recognition and advancement. African American women were also far more likely to report they never have senior contact.

Speaking at the Most Powerful Women summit, Anne-Marie Campbell pointed out, “Inclusion is not just a professional thing, it’s a me thing.” She argued it’s up to leaders to explore and broaden their social circles to befriend people of different races and backgrounds, and to open more diverse conversations in the workplace.

Thasunda Duckett, CEO of consumer banking at JP Morgan Chase, also said, “Without emphasizing the importance of an inclusive culture, you’re missing out on talented individuals who don’t feel that they can bring their entire selves to the table.”

Distorted Perception

Indeed, the Walden University report states, “In order to advance, African American women have tried to display work-appropriate behaviors so as to avoid stereotypical images that label them as angry, combative, and aggressive.”

Stating that African American women rarely receive truly constructive feedback or receive inappropriate feedback, Professor Smith observes, “Black women, if they come in too aggressive, assertive — I like the word assertive — they’re told that they’re angry. If they come in too tough, they’re told that they need to soften. So, there’s no right way that they can be. The flip side of that is if you come in trying to be more nurturing and more caring, then you hear, ‘Well, you’re not tough enough.’ So, it’s a very slippery slope…. because after a while, you start believing what you’re hearing, and then you don’t know how to behave. Then you wind up sabotaging yourself, because you really are not bringing your full voice to the table. You can’t lead, you can’t make a difference, you can’t contribute if you’re only bringing half of yourself to work.”

Peripheral Roles

According to the Fortune article, Ursula Burns isn’t surprised that she has no immediate followers in her footsteps, one factor being that black women who do make senior positions are too often concentrated in support positions, removed from product and money, rather than operational roles.

“HR isn’t going to get you there,” Burns told Fortune. “Communications and the arts aren’t going to get you there.”

“You have to really contribute to the bottom line of the business, which does not include HR, which does not include social responsibility. You have to really show that you can run a business. It’s very hard to do to get those positions, particularly if you’re an African-American woman,” echoes Professor Smith, “It’s hard if you’re a white woman. It is triple-time harder for African-American women and other women of color, too. This is not just a phenomena that hits African-American women. It hits us the hardest, though.”

Not a “Priority”

It’s not only that black women are excluded from networks but making sure the talents and performance of black women is cultivated, recognized and rewarded is often not a corporate priority, even amidst the diversity agenda.

At the MPW summit, Mellody Hobson, president of Ariel Investments, said: “Another thing that bothers me is that we’re ‘working on’ this, but we aren’t ‘working on’ anything else that matters in our companies. You either do or you do not. You do not ‘work on’ better earnings.”

In Fortune, Burns attributes much of her career success to the support that she received from Xerox, but most companies don’t want to invest and focus for a group that comprises less than 7% of the U.S. population. “For one,” said Burns, “they don’t like to leave the other women out.”

Not a Minor(ity) Issue

The McKinsey reports notes, “When companies take a one-size-fits-all approach to advancing women, women of color end up underserved and left behind.”

This recently appeared in my Facebook feed from a women named Stacy Jordan Shelton: “I loathe the word ‘minority’. Ain’t nothing ‘minor’ about any of us.”

Diversity efforts that are monolithic and treat women of color as a side issue simply fail from the outset. To recast the problem, resulting in benefiting some women while overlooking others, is to proliferate inequality with different players. If diversity isn’t intersectional, it’s far worse than ineffectual. It’s ironic.

That’s only one reason why the black ceiling is neither a “minority” or a “minor” problem. But it’s a real one.

/by

Why Leaders Need More than Mirror Reflections

,

female-leaders-looking-in-her-mirror-reflection-featuredBy Aimee Hansen

Amidst increasing access to a broader worldview, we are paradoxically retreating into narrowing, amplified, separated tunnels of perspective.

One of the clearest examples is the side-by-side blue feed, red feed posted by The Wall Street Journal. These views are never side-by-side but rather constructions of completely different realities.

Social media (with Facebook at top) is a news source for 62% of U.S. adults, and when our Facebook newsfeed is increasingly a tunnel lined with mirrors, the sum reflection is silos of distortion.

Diversity of thought is a muscle that is essential to leadership, and one that we may be getting weaker at flexing when it comes to developing our worldview in our personal and societal lives. Whatever we practice, we become better at. So arguably, we are getting better at listening to people who think like we already do.

To be effective leaders, we have to increasingly be more vigilant about the practice of inviting diversity of thought in, even when it’s difficult to do so.

How Facebook Is Narrowing Our Feedback Loop

As highlighted in the The New York Times, it’s our interaction with social media that both biases and narrows our exposure to different viewpoints and different stories.

Frank Bruni writes, “The Internet isn’t rigged to give us right or left, conservative or liberal — at least not until we rig it that way. It’s designed to give us more of the same, whatever that same is: one sustained note from the vast and varied music that it holds, one redundant fragrance from a garden of infinite possibility.”

When our ideas and perspectives are not challenged, but only reinforced by our customized curation of news through interaction with social media,“we retreat into enclaves of the like-minded” with increased speed and depth, while missing out on a breadth of perspectives.

According to the NYT, “Technology makes it much easier for us to connect to people who share some single common interest,” said author Marc Dunkelman (“The Vanishing Neighbor”), and easier to avoid “face-to-face interactions with diverse ideas.”

According to network scientist, Vyacheslav Polonski writing for the World Economic Forum, previous research has shown that increased contact with people who share our previously held beliefs makes those beliefs more extreme.

We become more confident, vigorous, and emboldened as we begin to adopt a new group identity. At the same time, we becoming increasingly ignorant to the dynamics of alternative world views. There is both power and peril.

Confirming Our Own Biases

According to The Guardian, “Since online content is often curated to fit our preferences, interests and personality, the internet can even enhance our existing biases and undermine our motivation to learn new things.”

One bias that is supported by echo chambers is confirmation bias, where we look to see our own preconceptions confirmed rather than fully taking facts, data, or opposing viewpoints into consideration. We are drawn to prove ourselves right by consuming information that matches our opinions even though “being exposed to conflicting views tends to reduce prejudice and enhance creative thinking.”

As Warren Buffet said, “What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.” With too much information to deal with, it’s a survival strategy to ignore most of it, but we tend to selectively ignore what does not agree with us.

The Boardroom Echo Chamber

If we want to know more about the dangers of decision-making inside of a (digital) echo chamber, we can look to the corporate boardroom, because that has existed mostly as an echo chamber for decades.

In 2015, Fortune 500 companies filled 399 vacant or newly created seats, the highest number of seats since Heidrick & Struggles began tracking. But when faced with a record opportunity to increase diversity, the Fortune 500 boardroom stuck to its own kind.

Tapping from the “usual suspects” (73% of appointments were current and former CEOs and CFOs), the range of industry backgrounds narrowed, women appointments stalled, Latino appointments remained flat, and Asian-American appointments fell. The only improvements in diversity were African-American (1% point) and international experience (32.2% points).

In sum, older white male seats or new seats were filled with older white males with international experience. From the perspective of social diversity, boards elected more mirrors to reflect similar viewpoints, not more windows to bring in diverse perspectives.

Diversity Makes Us Smarter

According to the Harvard Business Review, the key differentiator of leadership (and the career arc of a leader) is a process of inclusiveness in decision making, the ability to take into account a 360 degree context.

Underlining the importance of gathering multiple perspectives, Associate Professor Laurence Minksy and Julia Tang Peters write, “Habitual outreach prevents insular thinking, opens doors to ideas and collaborative relationships, expands problem-solving perspectives, and increases the range of resources for implementation.”

As reiterated by Scientific American, social diversity enhances creativity, encourages the search for novel perspectives, and leads to better decision-making and problem solving. Katherine W. Phillips, a Paul Calello Professor of Leadership and Ethics, writes, “Simply interacting with individuals who are different forces group members to prepare better, to anticipate alternative viewpoints and to expect that reaching consensus will take effort.”

“Being with similar others leads us to think we all hold the same information and share the same perspective,” writes Phillips. This keeps us from effectively processing information, and hinders creativity and innovation. Whereas in a context of diversity, we are less complacent with our perspectives and begin to consider alternatives even before personal interaction takes place.

“Simply adding social diversity to a group makes people believe that differences of perspective might exist among them and that belief makes people change their behavior,” writes Phillips. We work harder on both a cognitive and social level, become more diligent, and more open-minded because we anticipate it will take more to come to a consensus.

Also, disagreement with those who are socially different to us also does more to spark our consideration.

“When we hear dissent from someone who is different from us (eg. by race or political party), it provokes more thought than when it comes from someone who looks like us,“ writes Phillips. “When disagreement comes from a socially different person, we are prompted to work harder. Diversity jolts us into cognitive action in ways that homogeneity simply does not.”

Your Diversity Muscle

As Phillips points out, diversity of thought is a muscle we have to exercise. “You have to push yourself to grow your muscles.”

So as a leader, ask yourself where are you allowing yourself to be drawn into an echo chamber? Are you being inclusive in your own decision-making?

And, where in your workplace do you see a tunnel of mirrors in need of some windows?

/by

How Professional Women Can Turn Anticipation Into a Leadership Boon

,

Managing ChangeSpell “words” backwards, and it becomes “sword.” When it comes to language in management meetings, it turns out that women wield a double-edged sword, a way of either weakening or strengthening their leadership position through the way they wield their words.

Research has found that as they speak, women tend to be more likely to be simultaneously aware of the concerns and agendas of others, and to adjust their language to reflect this. Professor Judith Baxter, Professor of Applied Linguistics at Aston University, UK calls this “double-voicing.”

Simply put, the ability to strategically incorporate what you anticipate others are thinking or feeling as you speak can be a career-boosting skill in your back pocket, if wielded selectively and well.

Anytime you are not only speaking your thoughts or views but are at the same time reflecting and incorporating what you believe others may think or feel into what you say, you’re double-voicing. You’re voicing for yourself and for those you’re speaking to or with.

It’s a “double-edged sword” which you might be using to undercut your leadership presence. But used strategically, it’s a masterful skill you can harness as a powerful leadership asset.

Women and Double-Voicing

In studying top-level conversations across seven major companies in the UK, Baxter found one fundamental distinction between male and female leadership language: “Women were four times more likely than men to be self-critical, qualify their comments, speak indirectly or apologetically when broaching difficult subjects with board members or when managing conflict.”

Baxter argues in a Babel article that as women climb the corporate ladder, in order to gain acceptance and approval they practice “serious linguistic work such as the carefully judged use of apology, humour, self-mockery, understatement, implied meaning and deference in order to minimise direct confrontation or criticism from male colleagues.”

How Double-Voicing Can Dilute Your Leadership

We already know that women’s words often are not treated the same as men’s in the office. When women are more assertive with their words, they can be judged more harshly than men are, for going against gender norms. So there’s strong reasons why women adapt how they speak.

But it’s harmful when women habitually use their tongue to weaken their own leadership stance. According to Baxter, double-voicing can be used to deliver “self-inflicted wounds.” For example, when double-voicing is used to pre-empt how others might perceive you as the speaker, you simply deflate your own authority and words.

This might sound like, “I realize I’m not the expert, but…” or “Sorry if I’m speaking out of turn, but…” or “I don’t mean to be difficult, but…” In her observations of top meetings, Baxter heard one woman caveat that she was “talking too much,” having taking only spoken twice, and watched the men nodding in agreement.

As Baxter told Virgin, women use double-voicing “to pre-empt criticism from colleagues and not to appear demanding or boastful. Double-voicing makes women seem less threatening to colleagues, both male and female.”

But trying to disarm the perceived critical viewpoint of others, when it comes to your authority or expertise as a speaker, has the reverse impact. When a woman hedges the very act of speaking, she is stealing the power of her words before she even gets them out. Baxter consistently found this kind of double-voicing was viewed negatively by all colleagues, damaging to the leadership positioning and authority of women.

Double-voicing can also take more seemingly benign forms that still undermine speech. “I probably haven’t understood you correctly, but…” or “I have probably got my wires crossed but should we consider…” or “You have probably thought about this point already, but…” This puts the speaker on the back foot.

How Double-Voicing Can Strengthen Your Leadership

In her book, “Double-voicing at Work: Power, Gender and Linguistic Expertise,” Baxter asserts that double-voicing is a form of “linguistic expertise.” The challenge is to use it deliberately.

Baxter writes in a Babel, “I suggest that double-voicing need not be a sign of weakness, but could actually be a source of strength.” She notes, “Double-voicing could be a highly sophisticated strategy to consolidate team relationships while achieving a female leader’s own agenda.”

According to Baxter, double-voicing can be used to “draw out a colleague who is silent, or to silence another who is outspoken, and to anticipate an emerging conflict and to soothe it into resolution.” Above all, it can help you communicate more effectively and inclusively as a leader.

If effective leadership means moving towards social awareness (not just self), being inquisitive (not directive), building power with (not over) colleagues, as well as showing an outward focus in your language, then double-voicing is a very powerful leadership skill when applied well.

For example, when applied not to second-guess your contribution as a speaker, but demonstrate insight and forethought about how others may feel about the content you are sharing, double-voicing can be “a highly constructive tool for leadership.”

It’s a skill to be able to anticipate the likely thoughts of the audience and incorporate those thoughts into your message to bring others onside as you are speaking. It’s a skill to reflect awareness of cultural or situational expectations. It’s a skill to pre-empt or diffuse criticism or agendas that could dilute the impact of the core point you are getting across. It’s a skill to reflect the perceived audience perspective in a way that builds greater solidarity with you as the speaker.

This could sound like, “The first question you may raise is…”, “Right now, you are probably wondering about x, and I’ve thought about that..”, or “At this point, we may all be asking ourselves…”

Double-voicing used intentionally, powerfully and iteratively reflects a “sophisticated linguistic expertise.”

Women’s voices are too seldom heard in the top executive offices and boardrooms for lack of representation. A woman’s double-voicing may reflect an internalization of the dialling down of women’s voices, a trace of acknowledgement that her voice is new here and has not always been validated.

But it’s time to self-validate. Flip double-voicing around as a leadership asset, and it’s one way to dial female leadership right up.

By Aimee Hansen

/by

4 Steps to Put Positive Thinking Into Action for Success At Work

,

happy working womenYou’ve heard about the power of positive thinking and the perils of negative thinking, but when it comes to your ability to reach goals or make dreams happen, the polarities of positive and negative thinking may matter less than getting the friction right between them.

In her HBR article, Gabrielle Oettingen, professor of psychology at NYU and University of Hamburg who has studied human motivation for twenty years, suggests that while negative thinking will never deliver you at the doorstep to your next goal, positive thinking – especially in the form of fantasizing about outcomes – hides some dangerous pitfalls that could keep you from the stairs.

Positive Outcome versus Pursuit

Achieving a goal takes some muster in walking the steps to get there. Even if they are small steps, it’s important to energize yourself towards taking them.

In their research paper, Kappes & Oettingen discuss that “positive fantasies do not lead people to anticipate having to exert cumbersome effort. Instead, positive fantasies allow people to embellish idealized paths to idealized future outcomes.”

Imagining yourself having already coasted without obstacle to your goal can be counterproductive. You mentally feel as though you’ve already arrived at your goal in the present moment, so you relax rather than energize. This can “obscure the need to invest effort in tasks that demand effort.”

Kappes & Oettingen found that fantasizing about a positive outcome can inhibit generating the energy you need to pursue it. They observed that positive fantasies about outcomes created lower physiological (systolic blood pressure) and behavioral energization than negative or neutral fantasies. The research showed “a causal relationship between positive fantasies about desired futures and low energy devoted to their realization.”

As Oettingen writes in HBR, “You’re less motivated to buck up and make the strong, persistent effort that is usually required to realize challenging but feasible wishes.”

They found, “Instead of promoting achievement, positive fantasies will sap job-seekers of the energy to pound the pavement, and drain the lovelorn of the energy to approach the one they like. Fantasies that are less positive – that question whether an ideal future can be achieved, and that depict obstacles, problems, and setbacks – should be more beneficial for mustering the energy needed to attain actual success.”

Easy versus Hard Steps

In further research, Kappes, Sharma & Oettingen found that when potential donors to charitable causes were encouraged to fantasize an ideal resolution to a current problem, they were less willing to put bigger and meaningful resources into actually helping address the problem.

When the demands for time or money were easy, or required relatively few resources, the positive thinkers were in step with the control group. But when the problem asked for more commitment from them – more time, more money, more effort – they folded. Since they’d already fantasized the ideal future as true, the effort to get there seems “overly demanding” now.

Fantasizing about the ideal outcome can mean not only failing to build up the energy to move towards it but also at some level rejecting that it should require significant energy and resources. That’s no recipe for being the agent of your dreams, wishes, or goals.

Positivity Gone Sour

As Oettingen writes in the European Review of Social Psychology, fantasies about attaining a positive future predict low effort and little success. What happens when you fantasize that a future outcome is highly accessible to you and yet your reality fails to meet it – possibly because you never harnessed the necessary drive and resolve to get there?

The opposite of positivity. The more we fail to reach the outcomes we believe should be accessible to us, the more it grinds us down. Oettingen notes, “Low effort and little success translate into more depressive symptoms over time.” This is whether it comes to an external goal (writing that book) or a personal desire (creating more healthy boundaries).

Unrealistic optimism has a habit of ending in hurt, when success doesn’t walk on over and take you by the hand to skip away into tomorrow, the way it did (kind of) in your mind.

“Mental Contrasting” – Put the Positivity into the Process

Rather than solely “indulging” in thoughts of a positive future or solely “dwelling” in the obstacles of a present reality, Oettingen has put forth both in papers and in her book Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation that the power is in “mentally contrasting” the two.

Oettingen developed the process “W-O-O-P”: “Wish-Outcome-Obstacle-Plan.” Her book applies this process to three areas: health, personal and professional relationships, and performing at work.

Step #1 Wish

First, you bring the wish you have for the future to mind, a goal or change that is challenging but possible to achieve in a certain time frame. Maybe it’s getting the lead role on a project team.

Steo #2 Outcome

Second, you let your mind run with fantasizing about the future if your wish came true – what does the best possible outcome feel like? Maybe you imagine yourself in the position and handling it brilliantly, feeling confident and strong.

Step #3 Obstacle

Then, you mentally elaborate on the current reality that stands in the way of realizing this future – what obstacles exist? Bringing up obstacles isn’t negativity – it’s taking a glance at the map so you plan your route strategically. Oettingen advises to ask yourself, “”What is it in me that stands in the way?” simply because you can’t control others. Maybe you realize you have a tendency to undermine the critical role you play in the team’s success because you focus on enabling them.

Step #4 Plan

Make a plan for how you can overcome the obstacle. When it comes to overcoming ingrained behaviors or dealing with specific obstacle scenarios, Oettingen suggests using an implementation intervention such as an “if/then” statement. For example, “If I talk about the team’s success, I’ll play up my personal approach to getting the best results from a team.”

Through Mental Contrasting, Oettingen and Schwörer argue that you are now linking the future to the reality: “It creates determined goal pursuit, reveals the critical situation (obstacle of reality), and links the reality with the instrumental action to overcome the reality (goal-directed action).”

If you have high expectations on being able to overcome the reality, this leads to increased effort, more engagement, and hence more success. The positivity comes in being able to envision yourself taking agency in overcoming the obstacles to make your wish attainable.

On the other hand, if the “WOOP” practice reveals low expectations in being able to overcome obstacles, you may want to discern to put your resources and attention elsewhere.

When we hone our positive thinking power towards our ability to take each necessary step towards our wishes – even the challenging ones that ask for our strength, humility, or perseverance- then positivity can stop being only a beacon in the distance, or a warm feeling for something we’ve yet to do, and become a guiding light that keeps us moving on the path to what we most want.

By Aimee Hansen

/by

Why Being a Working Mom is Good for Your Children, Not to Mention Gender Equality

,

Working motherAt work, or on your way? You may be helping your daughter’s professional future (and we’re not just talking college fund) or improving gender equality in your son’s future household.

As part of their new Gender Initiative, which seeks to “change the conversation around gender and work”, Harvard Business School released a study of over 30,000 adults across 24 countries which explored how having a working mother as a child affects educational, economic, and social outcomes as an adult. A working mother was defined as a mom that ever worked (part-time, full-time, etc) outside of the house before her child (the survey participant) was 14 years old.

Across the 24 countries, daughters of working mothers grew up to be more likely to have completed more years of education, to be employed, to be in supervisory roles, and earn higher incomes than daughters of non-working mothers. Sons of working mothers grew up to spend more time on household chores and taking care of family members than sons of non-working mothers.

Particularly, daughters of working moms in the USA have half a year more education, are 36% more likely to have a supervisory role (33.4% v 24.6%), and earn 23% more ($35.5K vs $28.9K average) than daughters of non-working moms. Sons of working moms spent 7 more hours caring for family members and 15 minutes more housework compared to sons of non-working moms.

According to lead researcher Dr. Kathleen McGinn, “This is as close to a silver bullet as you can find in terms of helping reduce gender inequalities, both in the workplace and at home.”

The Impact of Alternative Parental Role Models

Exposure to role models is critical for women in the workplace, in order to be able to envision yourself in a role which otherwise might not seem accessible. The working mom effect also comes down to alternative role modeling, the opening of possibilities around roles and responsibilities.

The researchers were not concerned about the nature or intensity of a working mom’s work, whether it was full-time or part-time, but rather simply how it played out when children were exposed to “a role model who showed you that women work both inside and outside the home.”

According to McGinn, “What it’s about is modeling alternatives for your children, letting them see that there are multiple roles that women can play and multiple roles that men can play in their lives at work and lives at home.” As the study showed, experiencing alternative role models that “aren’t constrained by really tight gender stereotypes” had different impacts for daughters and sons.

“What daughters of working moms see is that it’s okay to go to work, it’s completely normal, that’s something that women do,” said McGinn. “Sons see something really different and that is everybody has to pitch in here. There’s no good way to maintain a management of a life outside of the home and a life at home unless everybody at home is working together.” Previous research has shown that sons of working moms are also more likely to be married to working women.

McGinn told the Washington Post, “…working moms are affecting their children’s gender attitudes. They’re affecting the way they think about what’s appropriate behavior. And those gender attitudes in turn are affecting outcomes.”

Underlining the point, she says, “There are very few things, that we know of, that have such a clear effect on gender inequality as being raised by a working mother.”

No One Path For Parenting

According to McGinn, “There’s very, very little research suggesting that being raised by a working mom is bad for kids. I think that’s something we harbor.” It appears we do, and it’s exactly these notions that the research hopes to dispel.

A previous Pew survey found that while 34% of working moms felt increasing numbers of working moms were good for society, an equal 34% felt it was bad, and a further 31% felt neutral about it.When you look at the total population, negativity towards working moms gets stronger (41%), showing the influence of a strong societal belief. But when asking all adults this question, respondents with a working mom were less negative than those without.

Mothers who work full-time are also likely to be hardest on themselves when rating their own parenting, only 28% rating themselves as a 9/10 (about same as dads at 26%) versus 41% of part-time workings moms and 43% of non-working moms.

As Gender Initiative director Robin Ely points out, “So much of what people think they know about gender is simply not substantiated by empirical evidence but instead is informed by gender stereotypes.” The objective of the initiative is to break the conversation from the stereotypes.

In the HBS study, working mothers actually spent equal time caring for their children.A meta-analysis has shown that children of working mothers have less depression and anxiety and recent research found that quantity of time with children between ages 3 and 11 matters less than the quality of your presence when you’re with your children.

McGinn is quick to point out that this doesn’t mean moms should work, just that there are benefits to alternative role modeling which go against societal preconceptions.

“There’s a lot of parental guilt about having both parents working outside the home,” McGinn says. “But what this research says to us is that not only are you helping your family economically—and helping yourself professionally and emotionally if you have a job you love—but you’re also helping your kids. So I think for both mothers and for fathers, working both inside and outside the home gives your kids a signal that contributions at home and at work are equally valuable, for both men and women. In short, it’s good for your kids.”

Ultimately, it’s up to every family and every woman to make their own decisions about what is right for them and not based on societal ideas of what’s right for all families, all women, or all children.

No such “right” exists.

By Aimee Hansen

/by