Tag Archive for: equality

Invisible By Design: The Data Loop that Perpetuates A “Default Male” World

default maleThe Business Book of the Year 2019 award winner, thoroughly-researched Invisible Women: Data Bias In A World Designed For Men, by feminist advocate Caroline Criado Perez, examines example after example of how women are often missing from the basic data collection that informs how the world –  across all realms of human life –  is designed: The “default male” premise.

We often see binary gender statistics reported in regards to the small numbers represented by women. Let’s flip the statistics to instead reflect the large numbers represented by men.

Over 93% of Fortune 500 CEO’s are male – a record low. 79% of C-Suite executives are men. 83% of boardroom seats worldwide and 95% of board chairs are held by men, and also 82% of boardroom seats in North America and over 95% of chairs are held by men. 98% of the CEOS for financial institutions and over 80% of executive board members are men.

100% of U.S. presidents and vice presidents are male and so now is the 2020 major party campaign race, which – in the context of many countries with influential strong female heads of state in their cultural history – is hinging on becoming an All-“American” leadership trademark.

75% of parliamentary seats are held by men globally. 94% of Nobel Prizes handed out since 1901 have been to men.

76% of news coverage when considering 20 years and 114 countries focuses on men, and 73% of news stories are reported by men. 69% of characters speaking in popular films are men, 77% of protagonists are men, and 79% of filmmakers are men – across eleven countries.

All Academy Awards for Best Director have been claimed by men amidst primarily male nominees, except one.

When men occupy 70% to 100% of representation across spheres, “underrepresented” is a gross understatement when it comes to women.

What is apparent is the pervasiveness of men in our worldwide culture as the default leader, voice, achiever, speaker, storyteller, even…human.

What Does a “Default Male” World Mean?

In her book Invisible Women: Data Bias In A World Designed For Men, feminist advocate Caroline Criado Perez points to the “default male” premise upon which much of our daily world is created – because women are either not though of at all, or just written off as a complexity.

“When typical female heart attack symptoms are called ‘typical,’ this is default male. When ‘gender-neutral’ toxicity levels for chemicals are determined using data on men, this is default male,” says Perez in an interview for Evoke. “When researchers complain that female bodies are too complicated to test on, this is default male—how else could you justify excluding half the world for reasons of simplicity?”

Social activist and journalist, Perez has a track record of advocating for women’s inclusion and visibility. She previously campaigned successfully to keep a woman on the British banknote. She also co-founded the The Women’s Room  – a database of over 2,500 women experts in their fields – to increase the representation of female experts quoted in the media.

The database’s homepage addresses the disproportionate representation of male experts: “The media says that this is because there just aren’t that many female experts around, and the media just reflects the reality of the world. This website is about proving them wrong.”

It could be working to help do so, as women increased from 24% of experts in 2010 to 36% of experts in 2015.

How “Unthinking” Creates a “Default Male” World

As written in Wired about Perez’s findings: “There exists a real gender data gap that is ‘both a cause and a consequence of the type of unthinking that conceives of humanity as almost exclusively male.”

This “unthinking” impacts on women’s health and even lives. What first compelled Perez towards this book was the deadly gender gap of knowledge in the medical world.

As Perez shares in Evoke, “… because public health information focuses on male symptoms, women don’t realize they’re having heart attacks. Worse, doctors don’t realize. The result is that women are more likely to die following a heart attack than men… Our society positions science as neutral; as objective and free of bias. Science deals in facts. In truth. Only, now it turned out that our cultural positioning of men as the default humans was corrupting science.”

Perez gives examples of how ‘default male’ data feeds algorithms that make dangerous leaps and false assumptions: “First, because the datasets on which we train algorithms are hopelessly male biased, voice recognition software doesn’t recognize female voices, translation software translates female doctors into male doctors, and image-labeling software labels men as women if they are standing next to an oven.”

The evidence that the world is not designed for women appears in everything from the size of smartphones, transport and snow-clearing routes that do not reflect the amount of unpaid work women do or their daily travel behavior, automotive crash systems and seats and seatbelts designed for men’s bodies (women have a 47% greater chance of serious injury in a car accident), restroom layouts that don’t reflect the different uses or time needed by the genders, CPR training which normalizes touching male chests only (men have a 23% higher chance of resuscitation in public), and even the temperature deemed comfortable for the office space you may be working in.

The “Default Male” Data and Design Loop

In her book, Perez writes, “No one meant to deliberately exclude women. It’s just what may seem objective is actually highly male-biased.”

The tech industry and the design industry are very male-dominated industries. 74% of computing jobs are held by men, and the turnover rate for women is over double that of men (41% vs. 17%). Across 1980 to 2010, 88% of all information technology patents were obtained by male-only invention teams (only 2% were by female-only invention teams). 88% of engineers in Silicon Valley startups and 89% of executives in Silicon Valley companies are men.

Perez is quick to say that design tends to reflect the needs of the people who are doing the design (for example those who have never been pregnant may not think of pregnancy parking spaces), and there is a catch-22 loop that feeds into male-dominated design.

“Ninety-three percent of venture capitalists (VCs) are men, and these teams suffer from the same problem as male-dominated developer teams: they simply aren’t aware of certain female needs,” says Perez in Evoke. “As a result, entrepreneurs developing new tech for women need good data because they will not be able to rely on a VC already having personal experience with, for example, how terrible all the current breast pump options are. …But because we lack data on female bodies, such entrepreneurs are less likely to have the information they need to make the case for their ideas. They are therefore less likely to get funding. And so tech for women remains, for the most part, of the shrink it, pink it and price it up variety, rather than genuinely catering to women’s needs.”

In Wired, Perez shares that exclusion goes to yet another level when it comes down to excuses or shortcuts for not considering women. She cites a scaled-down male dummy being used to represent a female: “That’s not forgetting. That’s a deliberate act.”

Perez told Evoke, “The excuse I came across most often in the course of writing the book was that women are just too complicated. This excuse appeared in fields ranging from the economy, to travel infrastructure, to medicine. Women’s working lives are too complicated, our travel patterns are too complicated, our bodies are too complicated. And instead of engaging with that complexity, researchers prefer to just exclude half the world. They choose to save money rather than to save women’s lives.”

How To Disrupt a “Default Male” World?

Disrupting the “default male” world is overdue, and that too is an understatement.

The way this will ultimately happen is if there’s more women involved in data collection, design and development – so women’s differences and needs will neither be forgotten about nor dismissed.

“Seeing men as the human default is fundamental to the structure of human society,” Criado Perez writes, as noted in Science News. “It’s time for women to be seen.”

Authors Bio: Aimee Hansen is a freelance writer, frequent contributor to theglasshammer and Creator and Facilitator of Storyteller Within Retreats, Lonely Planet recommended women’s circle retreats focused on self-exploration and connecting with your inner truth and sacred expression through writing, yoga, meditation, movement and ceremonies.

By Aimee Hansen

/by

Women’s History Month 2020: Stories We Tell Ourselves.

Nicki GilmourAfter the celebrations and social media posts for international women’s day 2020, we are left with the real work. Gender progress when it comes to women at work and as leaders has stalled. This was first noted in 2018 by McKinsey and Lean in study and The World Economic Forum predicted timeline of two hundred and two years for gender equity overall and specifically ninety nine years in the UK. The USA is not in the top ten for gender equality it should be noted, and American women are not equal under law as American men as the Equal Rights Amendment was never ratified.

So, What is Really Holding Women Back?

In the April 2020 edition of HBR, Robin Ely and Irene Padevic pose and answer the eternal question of “What’s really holding women back?” In their specific case study, they conclude that a crushing long hours game was actually causing dissatisfaction for everyone, but disproportionately affecting women because they singularly were expected to take accommodations which ended up being career damaging actions sometimes. The researchers state,

“Social defense systems are insidious. They divert attention from a core anxiety-provoking problem by introducing a less-anxiety-provoking one that can serve as a substitute focus.”

Ely and Padevic studied a firm where the core problem discovered by them (impossibly long work hours) was not what the firm’s espoused challenge focus which was the ‘inability to promote and retain women’ creating a substitute problem to avoid the real one. The researchers concluded that by using family accommodations or flex work as the solution to the “substitute problem”, an invisible and self-reinforcing social-defense system was created with the result of covering inefficient work practices “in the rhetoric of necessity” while perpetuating gender disparities since only women were truly culturally expected to take advantage of the accommodations.

In my opinion, without knowing the name of the client that these revered psychologists conducted this work at, this is the type of firm that probably charges other firms five million dollars per consulting project to tell them how to work more efficiently but entirely misses the point on the social psychology and how behaviors are formed for humans, both in their own firm and the firms they are busy also creating substitute problems for regarding “diversity” and people. I mean isn’t it hypocritical of big consulting firms and banks to write studies about gender progress when they themselves are so far from getting their own house in order? People notice, eventually or seemingly they don’t notice or choose to ignore it?

Behaviors and Diversity – we tell ourselves what is what (falsely)

A new UN study on “Tackling Social Gender Norms” reports that 50% of the humans in the world still think men make better leaders and in some countries, 70% of people believe men deserve a job more than women do and overall on all factors over 90% of people have bias against women or bias in favor of men if you want to look it at that way. This study importantly and perhaps uniquely measures gender inequality from a social norm perspective and how this is operationalized through beliefs, attitudes and practices most notable the prescribing social roles and power relations between men and women in society that are shockingly defined in western developed countries like the USA over southern European countries like Spain who literally invested the word “machista”. This methodology is super important as the diversity panels and parties that have focused for the past twenty years on “awareness” just aren’t converting behaviors in anyone, women included to ones that make people vote in female leaders in government or at work. Equality begins and ends with equitable behaviors and systems thinking to reduce or destroy the legacy processes and this is just absent in the design of work and the workplace. 

Robin Ely along with Herminia Ibarra and Deborah Kolb are also among my favorite academics on this topic and in many ways nothing can best explain the seemingly large and continued demand for white male leaders than their 2013 piece Women Rising: the unseen barriers which states that women are basically expected to turn into men as those traits are still the ‘mold’. Yet face the double bind when they try to gain experience that would let them internalize the identity and affirmation of a leader that is needed and given to the legacy group of who we believed to be leaderlike.

As the 2013 piece suggests, it is the absence of recognizing bias which is now second generation and covert harder to spot bias that leaves people with beliefs that limit the progress of women and as the Barriers Unseen study reveals,

“People are left with stereotypes to explain why women as a group have failed to achieve parity with men: If they can’t reach the top, it is because they “don’t ask,” are “too nice,” or simply “opt out.” These messages tell women who have managed to succeed that they are exceptions and women who have experienced setbacks that it is their own fault for failing to be sufficiently aggressive or committed to the job.”

This past week we have had an applied case study on who we endorse for as a leader with Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar both folding their campaigns while being criticized for being too shrill and strident and then too nasty respectively. Meanwhile, two ancient white men battle to face off with another ancient incumbent white guy in the other team come November. Some women are licking their wounds on Facebook over Warren it seems in particular, but we know when women and people of color call out gender inequality, the cost of this can be actually  emotionally high as well as career damaging. 

Are we getting anywhere?

Over twenty years ago, Robin Ely co-wrote with David A. Thomas a piece in HBR called “Making Differences Matter: A New paradigm for diversity” that suggested then that we get past the “fairness (and discrimination)” paradigm or simply put the business case of “it’s the right thing to do”. Ely and her co-author also suggested that the next paradigm in 1998 was only the penultimate one and that this second phase was witnessed when companies believed in appointing women to sell to women, and LGBT just sell to LGBT and minorities to sell to minorities with invisible limitations of side show type exclusion from the main attraction. The emerging paradigm from twenty-two years ago is I guess, is still sadly only slowly emerging and that is the learning-and-effectiveness paradigm which requires real work to get to the structural change that is needed. They write,

“Companies in which the third paradigm is emerging have leaders and managers who take responsibility for removing the barriers that block employees from using the full range of their competencies, cultural or otherwise. Racism, homophobia, sexism, and sexual harassment are the most obvious forms of dominance that decrease individual and organizational effectiveness—and third-paradigm leaders have zero tolerance for them. In addition, the leaders are aware that organizations can create their own unique patterns of dominance and subordination based on the presumed superiority and entitlement of some groups over others.”

We are in 2020 still hiding behind our deeply ingrained beliefs that women aren’t as leaderlike and that babies are the reason we are not promoted in the same numbers or authorized in the same way as our male counterparts are. Yet, childless women do not get promoted or authorized any more than women with kids do as they are hit by the same stereotype which is easier than addressing the real issues for all women and all humans, which is work simply isnt working for most people anymore without one person taking a back seat and due to pay inequity, it is usually the woman if we are speaking heteronormatively in the structure.

Women can be great, smart, experienced, and full of solid plans and still be dinged with a negative stereotype even when like the Elizabeth and Bernie situation are the saying the same thing. While the positive stereotype of great leader, competent, full of potential is still attributed to the male version of themselves or a much lesser version of themselves.

The stories we tell ourselves about the way it is, or what is better have been whispered in our ear by our grandmother, our parents and our surrounding society and are reinforced everyday of our lives. These stories are placed both subliminally and explicitly and create our beliefs and criteria and our behaviors. The stories that we tell ourselves that time will fix inequality are not true. The only thing that will stop this within our lifetime or even our children’s lifetime is to do the work regarding our deepest constructs of “what boys are and what girls are” while addressing the systems that enable and endow advantage and create disadvantage for no other reason than biology.

/by

2020 International Women’s Day: A Call To Take Individual Reins On Collective Equality

On March 8th, we again approach International Women’s Day, since 1911 a day for celebrating the achievements of women across social, economic, cultural and political spheres and for calling for accelerated actions towards gender parity. 

The theme for the 2020 event is “An equal world is an enabled world” – and the campaign hashtags are #EachforEqual and #IWD2020. Supporters are asked to strike the campaign ‘hands out equal pose’ on social media in order to spread the word for a stronger call-to-action globally.

As theglasshammer pointed out last year, both the celebration of achievements and shedding light on overlooked issues are valuable. But while one day of talking and hashtagging and ‘striking a pose’ creates salience and hopefully momentum, change asks for something less visible, less glib and even closer to home. The substance is in the message.

It’s not only about advocacy for systems and organizations and political bodies to change. It’s not only in the PR and action-based global campaigns. The call-to-action might both feel full circle and also frustrating, but it remains a big part of how change happens – especially in the places of privilege: We each have a daily, personal responsibility to create equality.

Beyond what we ask of governments or organizations, we can each work to advance the practice of equality in our own thought processes and actions. We can wake up more to the ways we each, on a daily basis, are often reinforcing the very discrimination and inequalities that we advocate against.

Gender Gaps Persist In Power and Visibility Across Spheres of Influence

A categorized breakdown by UNWomen.org highlights the immense gap between current reality and gender parity across several important fields of influence. 

It has taken 25 years for political representation of women to double to women holding still only 1 in 4 global parliamentary seats. The Fortune 500 reported a peak in Women CEOs in June 2019, but that milestone “peak” is less than 7% of 500 CEO seats. To date, only 53 of the 900 Noble Peace Prize winners have been women, with only 19 winners in the categories of physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine. Only 30% of STEM current researchers are women, and only 35% of STEM students are.

When it comes to media representation, the creative engine of our cultural narrative, women are one third as visible as men. A global media study across 20 years and 114 countries showed that “only 24 per cent of the persons heard, read about or seen in newspaper, television and radio news are women.” Women are also only 26% of persons covered in digital media and a decade-long stagnant 37% of news reporters. Only a pithy 4% of total stories challenge gender stereotyping. 

Entertainment, it seems, reflects reality in the relative skewed representation towards men’s voices and men’s experience. A popular films analysis across 11 countries found that only 31% of all speaking characters were women and only 23% had a female protagonist, perhaps not shockingly mirroring that 21% of filmmakers are women.

Women are not only scarce in positions of power and influence. We are simply less present in the cultural feed that influences so much of our conditioned perception.

UN Women “Generational Equality” Campaign Also Iterates Individual Agency

As stated on the campaign site, #EachforEqual is calling for ‘Collective Individualism’: “Individually, we’re all responsible for our own thoughts and actions – all day, every day. We can actively choose to challenge stereotypes, fight bias, broaden perceptions, improve situations and celebrate women’s achievements.”

The UN International Women’s Day 2020 campaign also reflects the ‘collective individualism’ theme: “I am Generational Equality: Realizing Women’s Rights,” with a continued focus on uniting all advocates for equality – regardless of race, age, country, gender, religion, ethnicity etc – but especially across generations.

2020 represents 25 years since the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action at the UN’s Fourth World Conference on women, which is “recognized as the most progressive roadmap for the empowerment of women and girls, everywhere” and set out to achieve global gender equality across 12 critical areas.

According to UN Women, this is a pivotal year for taking worldwide stock of progress made on women’s rights, and accelerating gender equality now.

The organization reports, “The emerging global consensus is that despite some progress, real change has been agonizingly slow for the majority of women and girls in the world. Today, not a single country can claim to have achieved gender equality. Multiple obstacles remain unchanged in law and in culture. Women and girls continue to be undervalued; they work more and earn less and have fewer choices; and experience multiple forms of violence at home and in public spaces. Furthermore, there is a significant threat of rollback of hard-won feminist gains.”

What Could Collective Individualism Look Like? 

“We are all parts of a whole,” iterates #EachforEqual. “Our individual actions, conversations, behaviors and mindsets can have an impact on our larger society.”

In resonance with #EachForEqual, UN Women states that change “isn’t just about big headline moments, legal victories and international agreements: the way we talk, think, and act every day can create a ripple effect that benefits everyone.”

On this point, the UN Women campaign has introduced “12 Small Actions with Big Impact for Generation Equality.” These include: share the (domestic, unpaid, parenting) care, call out sexism and harassment, reject the binary, demand an equal work culture, exercise your political rights, shop responsibly, amplify feminist books and movies and more, teach girls their worth, challenge what it means to be a “man”, commit to a cause, challenge beauty standards and respect the choices of others.

Hira Ali in Forbes also offers up four suggestions for activating #EachForEqual: create awareness about generation equality; support non-profit organizations for women; celebrate, support and collaborate with other women; and start mentoring girls early.

Most of all, when it comes to all belief constructs, we need to challenge where we’ve swallowed the story ourselves. While we cannot control or choose every thought that crosses the pasture of our minds, we can wake up to realizing that our thoughts, instincts, feelings, etc are unconsciously biased by internalized societal gendered conditioning. And we can know that this is further reinforced by systemic bias, so we’re often more supported to go down the well-trafficked path of bias. 

Paradigms are hard to shake. Often we neither realize insidious bias is in play, nor how it permeates our thoughts, our fears, our assumptions and our actions. As theglasshammer CEO Nicki Gilmour recommends, “Test assumptions for best results.”

This is part of why Catalyst’s #BiasCorrect Campaign, launched in 2019, actively focuses on helping “individuals identify and mitigate the biases that exist in our workplaces and within each of us.”

The overall IWD campaign message of 2020 seems to boil down to this: Call yourself to action, for the collective change. Anything that is systemic will eventually falter if more and more individuals no longer acquiesce, consent, conform or comply – in the many conscious and unconscious daily ways we do – to support the status quo.

This year’s IWD2020 theme is iterating that agency for change begins with intentionally becoming more equality, inside and out, in how you perceive and show up in the world.

Authors Bio: Aimee Hansen is a freelance writer, frequent contributor to theglasshammer and Creator and Facilitator of Storyteller Within Retreats, Lonely Planet recommended women’s circle retreats focused on self-exploration and connecting with your inner truth and sacred expression through writing, yoga, meditation, movement and ceremonies.

/by

Where the “Pink Collar” Has Been Flipped Up in Today’s Workforce

Pink CollarYou’ve heard of blue collar jobs and white collar jobs. A lesser-known concept in the world of labor economics is “pink collar jobs.” They’re the jobs that have traditionally and predominantly been held by women.

The term likely came about in the aftermath of World War II. As many as 5 million women entered the workforce between 1940 and 1945 to fill the roles left behind by men. When men came back from the war, women were largely relegated to teaching, service, and clerical roles. The term really took hold in the late 1970s when Louise Kapp Howe, an author who focused on social issues, published her book Pink Collar Workers, which explored the lives of nurses, secretaries, and teachers — industries dominated by women at the time.

There have been some momentous shifts — and other not-so-progressive shifts — in pink collar jobs since World War II. For example, based on U.S. Census data, the top six jobs with the highest percentages of women (90% or more) in 1940 included nurses, midwives, telephone operators, secretaries/stenographers, domestic service workers, and boarding housekeepers.

As you can imagine, the jobs in those top six spots today have changed dramatically. They’re much more focused on health and child care. Based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, they include pre-k and kindergarten teachers, dental hygienists, speech-language pathologists, dental assistants, childcare workers, and medical records technicians.

What’s particularly interesting is looking at which jobs have seen the biggest increases and decreases in the percentage of women between 1940 and 2019.

For example, jobs that have become “less” pink collar in the eight decades since World War II include tobacco manufacturers, textile manufacturers, janitors, musicians, and nurses. One of the most popular examples of fading pink collar norms lies in the nursing industry.

If you were to travel back in time to 1940, you would see that 98% of nurses were female (based on U.S. Census data). Today, that percentage has fallen to 89%. That 11-point drop might not seem like a big deal, but it is. Here’s why. Though women still dominate this traditionally pink collar field, more men continue to enter.

Experts attribute this trend to a number of factors. For one thing, there’s an incredible demand for health professionals, and there simply aren’t enough women to fill the demand. On the other hand, nursing schools have begun to rise above the gender stereotypes (that nursing has to be seen as a “woman’s job”), targeting men in their recruiting efforts and contributing to the de-stigmatization of the job.

Many jobs have also become “more” pink collar since 1940. One particularly strong example is the real estate industry. In 1940, 10% of women were real estate agents, according to the U.S. Census Data. Today, that percentage has ballooned to 59%.

There have also been significant increases in the percentage of women in highly technical fields, like law (3% in 1940 vs. 33% in 2019) and medicine (5% in 1940 vs. 41% in 2019), and service fields, like housekeeping (78% in 1940 vs. 89% in 2019) and restaurant hospitality (56% in 1940 vs. 71% in 2019).

Meanwhile, the data show that there have been only slight shifts between 1940 and 2019 in the percentage of women working as teachers and secretaries — and in private households.

It’s interesting to study these so-called pink collar jobs over time because the lines between pink collar and non-pink collar are rapidly blurring. Take a look at these Bureau of Labor Statistics projections for the fastest growing and declining industries in the U.S. through 2028.

The top four fastest growing industries (home healthcare services, outpatient care centers, individual and family services, and offices of health practitioners) are dominated by women. Meanwhile three of the four most rapidly declining industries (tobacco manufacturing, federal electric utilities, and communications equipment assembly) are dominated by men.

It only makes sense that, as so-called blue collar jobs decline due to factors like globalization, technology, and the shrinking of unions, more men will take on pink collar jobs, and more women will work in roles that society has traditionally seen as male.

As gender stereotypes and bias in the workplace dissipate, it’s important for companies to attract women by using gender-neutral language in their recruiting efforts. They should also promote pay transparency and offer work flexibility for both male and female workers.

Check out the full analysis of trends in pink collar jobs and accompanying data visualizations.

Author: Meredith Wood

Bio: Meredith Wood is a vice president at Fundera. She is frequently sought out for her expertise in small business lending and frequently contributes to SBA, SCORE, Yahoo, Amex OPEN Forum, Fox Business, American Banker, Small Business Trends, MyCorporation, Small Biz Daily, and StartupNation.

/by

Happy International Women’s Day 2019. Does Change Start Here?

,

 

Nicki Gilmour

Celebrations and recognition of women and women specific issues are being highlighted today around the world and inside corporate offices. Celebrating and making people aware of amazing women and their accomplishments is excellent. Shedding light on social, economic or cultural issues that do not get enough attention is also great. Better to have it, than not have it for sure.

However, does change happen because of it? No, change requires more than a day of talking and a hashtag (which by the way is officially #balanceforbetter which hints at two things, balance of power, not just more balance for women)

But, when all is said and done, it is just a hashtag that means pretty much zero when it comes to actual behaviorial change or any action for anyone whatsoever. Now that we have named the elephant in the room on the sheer vacancy of going through the motions of pretense, perhaps we can talk real talk about change?

Awareness is the first step. But, only the first step in change.

How do we achieve parity. equality, equity or meritocracy?

I like the #biascorrect idea that Catalyst is motioning this IWD (International Women’s Day). Stereotypes limit us. Anyone who has ever been stereotyped will tell you that. Catalyst provide resources to address that bias and in this instance, convey that words matter.

What is less discussed, are the false positive stereotypes and head starts that many women and many men but not all, give to men as leaders and heads of teams, families, power structures generally. That is the balance of power piece we really need to discuss.

What can you do?

Recognize that you probably implicitly have bias. We all do. I coach people to examine their paradigms regularly, as your mental model is formed via your life experiences and their context. That means, you probably are operating off ideas that your family and society told you was the “way it is” and that way it was, was steeped in notions of one gender’s needs being met before others.

Socialization, not brain differences feed into cognitive process whereby we place evaluative meaning on everything. Men are not from Mars and Women are not from Venus. We are all from Earth. The backlash we are seeing is due to people trying to maintain a historically granted place of power and is not surprising. The protection of the patriarchy by women,  is to do with their socialization under men’s rules and women’s place in the structure of society so far, secure but secondary so fear on an unknown alternative prevents change and fuels racism, nationalism, and is why we see sexism by women against women.

We need to educate everyone on the benefits of equality and equity as the patriarchy is a system not a gender or a person and does not serve very many people other than the bad guys ( their reckoning is here, though) in this modern world.

It is only when we stop our bias cognitively, and make efforts to behaviorally change that we can be freed from false expectations around diversity parties, celebrations and hashtags actually changing anything. Stop asking the women to balance for better and start asking everyone to stop believing everything they think to be true. Test assumptions for best results.

Enjoy this satire piece in The NY Times today. I could not agree more.

Enjoy the day, however you spend it.

/by

Why Gender Equality is Good for Men – Part Three of Three

gender pay gap

Guest Contibuted column by Lisa Levey

Parts one and two of Exploring Why Gender Equality is Good for Men have highlighted how the familiar trope that gender equality is a boon for women and a bust for men is just plain wrong.

Today, we spotlight how gender equality is linked to positive career, and most significantly overall life, satisfaction.

Gender equality supports men’s satisfaction in the workplace and in their lives

Men in more egalitarian couples report greater job satisfaction and less intention to leave their jobs. It follows that men who don’t feel as beholden to problematic work norms [having more flexibility and choices] and who spend more time with their children, developing stronger relationships, are better able to enjoy rather than feeling trapped by their work.

Men who feel less pressure to conform to rigid stereotypical gender roles have a stronger sense of being in a high quality relationship with their partner, and may even have more, and better, sex. A controversial 2014 New York Times article Does a More Equal Marriage Mean Less Sex?, that reported more traditional gender norms meant less sex when it came to household chores, caused a stir. The problem was the 1980’s data meant many of the couples married in the 1970’s or earlier, when changing gender norms were far less acceptable.

A Cornell professor and her colleagues analyzed 2006 data and found more egalitarian couples indicated having sex as frequently, if not more so, in addition to reporting as great or greater satisfaction, than peers in more traditional relationships.

Based on data for men across European countries and American states, a 2010 study concluded that men in more gender equal societies – compared with those in more traditional ones – had a better quality of life overall based on factors such as less violence and stronger marriages.

It’s not difficult to understand why many men feel disoriented as shifting gender norms continue to redefine what it means to be a man. The masculinity code – translated as needing to always be in control, focusing disproportionately on accomplishment, suppressing emotions of sadness and tenderness, and perhaps most challenging of all, continually needing to prove one’s manliness, day in and day out – was clear.

But that definition of masculinity, while accruing benefits for men, also does great harm. Ironically, that masculine worldview is largely responsible for the challenges plaguing men today – jobs sent overseas to maximize profits, a revised employer- employee value proposition that’s transactional in nature, an implosion of the financial markets brought on by out-sized risks, technology without safeguards, and the list goes on.

Men demonizing gender equality are sadly fighting the wrong enemy. Gender equality is about men having more choices and less pressure, more support and less isolation. Males live in a gender straight jacket with a long list of “shoulds”that define how men must behave – and not behave – to be deemed worthy.

In recent decades the world has opened up for women to new possibilities and ways of being [and yes, big challenges remain] yet men are deeply constrained by old gender scripts.

Gender equality is not the enemy of men. In fact, it just may be thing that can finally set them free.

Contributor Bio

Lisa Levey is a veteran diversity consultant, having worked with leading organizations for more than two decades to assist them in realizing the underutilized leadership potential of women. Her current work focuses on engaging men as allies and partners. She led the design and development of the Forte Foundation’s Male Ally signature resource platform for engaging men in diversity work and architected a pilot program to launch corporate male ally groups. She blogs for the Huffington Post and the Good Men Project on gender norms at work and at home. In the spring of 2018 partnering with her husband Bryan, Lisa is launching Genderworks, a coaching practice for dual-career professional parents to support them in navigating the obstacles to gender equality at work and at home. Lisa earned an MBA with highest honors from the Simmons School of Management and a BS with distinction from Cornell University in applied economics.

Disclaimer: The opinions and views of guest contributors are not necessarily those of theglasshammer.com

/by

Why Gender Equality is Good for Men – Part Two of Three

gender pay gap

Guest contributed by Lisa Levey

Part One of Why Gender Equality is Good for Men looked at the positive effects for men in their relationships with their spouses and children.

Part Two focuses on the positive health implications – both physical and mental – for men with a more egalitarian world view.

Gender equality benefits men’s physical health

Gender is highly linked with health risks and outcomes and men continually draw the short stick. But men’s health challenges are substantially driven by their own attitudes and behaviors [which they can change.]

Men who espouse more traditional beliefs about gender make less healthy choices. They drink more alcohol, smoke more, and are more likely to take drugs as well as paying less attention to eating healthily or getting enough sleep. They’re less likely to seek medical care for preventive reasons or to follow their physician’s instructions when they do seek care. Real men don’t seem to think they need to cut their portion sizes as they age, limit how much beer they drink, or spend precious time going to the doctor but they make these decisions at their own peril.

Gender equality benefits men’s mental health

In addition to benefiting men’s physical health, gender equality plays a vital role in men’s mental health. Men more involved in the daily activities of raising children, as they rock their child to sleep, braid their daughter’s hair or give their teenager a shoulder to cry on, have the chance to experience a physical closeness and intimacy that is life affirming. Biology reveals that men are programmed for emotional connection. As men care for their children, the hormone’s associated with bonding rise, just as they do for women.

Gender equality powerfully benefits men’s mental health by countering the tendency toward isolation. In comparison to women, research indicates men struggle to a substantially greater degree with developing and sustaining friendships that feel fulfilling and meaningful.

Gender equality gives men permission to be soft – and bold, to be scared – and brave, to be silly – and serious, to be in control – and let go. It allows men the full range of their emotions, not just the socially acceptable ones like anger and desire.

Men who ascribe to less traditional gender norms have lower rates of depression and suicide, the most extreme response to the masculinity straight jacket that leaves men unable to reach out and to work through difficult emotions. Men commit suicide at four times the rate of women and middle age white men are more than twice as likely to kill themselves as the population at large. Clearly something is amiss for men.

Gender equality lowers men’s work-life stress

Men have been saddled with the primary breadwinning role for too long. And while the bias toward men as primary providers persists, a Pew study suggests there may be change afoot. While more than 70% of women and men reported it was very important for a man to be a good provider, women identified their breadwinning responsibility – and that of other women – as far more important than men.

It’s understandable why many men struggle with not being the primary provider, a role for which they have long felt acute responsibility and received social and financial reward. Yet many men fail to see how their partner’s earning capacity provides not only far greater security for the family but also far more flexibility for them. With a financial teammate, men can more easily contemplate starting a business, leaving a bad employer, or push for a promotion. Gender equality helps men to not feel stuck and without options.

Multiple research studies document that men in more egalitarian relationships report lower levels of work-life stress. What may seem counterintuitive for men is that devoting more time to their lives outside of work actually minimizes their work-life stress. The same has not been found to be true for women.

The conclusion seems to be that women and men who intentionally share home and child care responsibilities can simultaneously enable women to focus more freely on their careers and men to feel less pressured to always be working. It enables men and women to engage in multiple deeply meaningful roles in their lives.

Contributor Bio

Lisa Levey is a veteran diversity consultant, having worked with leading organizations for more than two decades to assist them in realizing the underutilized leadership potential of women. Her current work focuses on engaging men as allies and partners. She led the design and development of the Forte Foundation’s Male Ally signature resource platform for engaging men in diversity work and architected a pilot program to launch corporate male ally groups. She blogs for the Huffington Post and the Good Men Project on gender norms at work and at home. In the spring of 2018 partnering with her husband Bryan, Lisa is launching Genderworks, a coaching practice for dual-career professional parents to support them in navigating the obstacles to gender equality at work and at home. Lisa earned an MBA with highest honors from the Simmons School of Management and a BS with distinction from Cornell University in applied economics.

Disclaimer: The opinions and views of guest contributors are not necessarily those of theglasshammer.com

/by

Why Gender Equality is Good for Men | Part One

,

gender pay gap

Guest contributed by Lisa Levey

Gender equality is one of those loaded topics that can bring conversation to a halt.

Women’s empowerment has been portrayed as a link to all that men have lost, whether its perceived loss of professional opportunities or loss of the privilege of not having to deal with housework or childcare. There is a fear that expectation of females being subordinate dissipates with equality, which is an outdated expectation to have in modern society to start with but surprisingly present still for some families.

Women’s rising power has left many men seething and many more with a gnawing fear that gains for women mean losses for men. The incredible irony is: the culprit is not gender equality but misguided thinking about masculinity which is shared by both genders and that exacts such a high toll on men.

Read on to discover why based on research, rather than hyperbole, gender equality is a gift for men that keeps on giving.

Gender equality benefits men’s physical health

Gender is highly linked with health risks and outcomes and men continually draw the short stick. But men’s health challenges are substantially driven by their own attitudes and behaviors [which they can change.]

Men who espouse more traditional beliefs about gender make less healthy choices. They drink more alcohol, smoke more, and are more likely to take drugs as well as paying less attention to eating healthily or getting enough sleep. They’re less likely to seek medical care for preventive reasons or to follow their physician’s instructions when they do seek care. Real men don’t seem to think they need to cut their portion sizes as they age, limit how much beer they drink, or spend precious time going to the doctor but they make these decisions at their own peril.

Gender equality benefits men’s marital satisfaction

Alongside women’s influx into the workforce over the last half-century, there’s been a shift in how men experience marriage. Marriages became more unstable – at first – as women began evolving from a more subordinate to a more egalitarian role. In the 1980’s the divorce rate among couples where the woman was more highly educated exceeded that for couples where this was not the case. Yet through time there has been a profound shift. Beginning in the 1990’s, women’s higher educational attainment no longer predicted elevated divorce rates and the marital stability of educational equals rose.

A professor at Brigham Young University studied the division of labor for married couples and those living together across 31 countries. She found couples with a more shared approach to caring for their children and homes were happier in their relationships than couples with a more specialized approach.

Based on my research with parents who sought to proactively share the load at home, both men and women described the power of walking in each other’s shoes and having each other’s backs. They saw themselves on the same team, spending their precious energy on navigating the challenges of equality in a still highly-gendered world, rather than on arguing with each other.
Across the U.S., states with a higher percent of couples in traditional marriages report escalated divorce rates compared to states with a higher percent of dual earner families. Data indicates changing gender norms and family values go hand in hand.

Gender equality benefits men’s relationships with their children

Society has been terribly unfair to men by invalidating the importance of their parenting role. This messaging has no doubt seeped into men’s thinking and worldview. Ironically, both men who live paycheck-to-paycheck and men with incredible wealth similarly perceive prioritizing time away from work to bond with a new child as a luxury rather than a necessity.

Yet if fathers knew how vitally important they were to their children’s lives, they might make different choices. When fathers are involved early and often, their children benefit in critical ways. Positive father involvement from the outset translates into better academic outcomes, more favorable social behavior, fewer discipline issues and greater happiness. The effects of fathering – both good and bad – stay with children far beyond their youth, manifesting during their adult lives via career success and the ability to manage stress, among other ways.

Based on the inaugural 2015 State of the World’s Fathers study, infants attach to both of their parents from the outset if both are actively involved with their care. Paternal engagement is a protective factor for kids who are close to their dads with children being half as likely to suffer from depression during their youth. In other research, fathers who assume a more egalitarian partnership at home raise daughters who are more ambitious.

Not only do fathers influence daughters but daughters influence fathers. A study highlighted in the Harvard Business Review reports men with daughters run more socially responsible companies, particularly with regard to diversity. Men should hope to work for a company where the male CEO has a first born daughter because if he does, he’ll see more money in his paycheck than if the first born is a son.

Gender equality gives men more flexibility and freedom

Men have been saddled with the primary breadwinning role for too long. And while the bias toward men as primary providers persists, a Pew study suggests there may be change afoot. While more than 70% of women and men reported it was very important for a man to be a good provider, women identified their breadwinning responsibility – and that of other women – as far more important than men.

It’s understandable why many men struggle with not being the primary provider, a role for which they have long felt acute responsibility and received social and financial reward. Yet many men fail to see how their partner’s earning capacity provides not only far greater security for the family but also far more flexibility for them. With a financial teammate, men can more easily contemplate starting a business, leaving a bad employer, or push for a promotion. Gender equality helps men to not feel stuck and without options.

Multiple research studies document that men in more egalitarian relationships report lower levels of work-life stress. What may seem counterintuitive for men is that devoting more time to their lives outside of work actually minimizes their work-life stress. The same has not been found to be true for women so really isn’t it time for men to see and talk about the benefits of getting on board with gender equality.

Tune in next week for the second installment of why gender equality is good for men.

Disclaimer: The opinions and views of guest contributors are not necessarily those of theglasshammer.com

/by

Is Temporal Flexibility Key to Closing The Gender Pay Gap?

, , ,

money money moneyYou don’t need to work in a male dominated occupation to find your pay check weighs light relative to your male colleagues – particularly, if you’re in business.

In March 2015, the US Census Bureau released the latest pay statistics from 2013, including median earnings by detailed occupation, showing that full-time working women earn 78.8% of what full-time working men do. The census data revealed that across 342 occupations, women (barely) out-earn men in only nine.

Across the nine, the female pay advantage is “nearly inconsequential,” ranging from .2% (counselers, dishwashers) to 6.2% (producers and directors), with a margin for error that could wipe the gap. Yet a very significant pay gap (advantage: male) persists across most professions, even when women are prevalent in them.

Data on relevant occupations illustrates the point:
Occupation % in occupation who are women Women’s earnings as a % of men’s earnings
Securities, commodities, & financial services sales agents  30%  55%
Financial specialists, all other  55%  60%
Personal financial advisors  31%  61%
Financial clerks, all other  61%  62%
Financial analysts  32%  63%
Financial managers  54%  64%
Market research analysts and marketing specialists 56%  75%
Accountants and Auditors  59%  75%
CEOs  23%  76%
Compensation, benefits, & job analysis specialists  74%  78%

Source: Drawn from US Census Bureau, 2013 American Community Survey

While frustrating gaps in occupations that are historically male-gendered (eg CEOS, financial analysts, securities) may come as less of a surprise, the gap within female skewed jobs (financial clerks, marketing, accounting) underlines that closing the gender pay gap takes more than female representation.

Are men just more valued? Nancy F. Clark of Forbes WomensMedia writes that when men move into female dominated occupations such as nursing, the overall pay of that occupation and level of tasks included in the job remit begins to improve. If appears that when men enter an occupation, its value goes up.

But, what’s going on in finance and business?

Gender Penalties Are Bigger in Business Jobs

Claudia Goldin, Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard, found in her research that when it comes to explaining the majority of the residual gender pay gap, “what happens within each occupation is far more important than the occupations in which women wind up.”

Among high-earning occupations, Goldin found those grouped as “business” have the biggest gender pay “penalty” for “being a woman relative to a man of equal education and age, given hours and weeks of work” whereas “science” and “technology” occupations have the smallest ones.

Census Bureau data shows that women make up only 24% of “computer, engineering and science occupations” and earn 83% as much as men. Women make up 54% of “business and financial operations occupations” but earn only 75% as much as men.

Non-Linear Earnings Are Penalizing Women

“Quite simply the (residual) gap exists because hours of work in many occupations are worth more when given at particular moments and when the hours are more continuous,” writes Goldin.

In many occupations, earnings “have a nonlinear relationship with respect to hours” – for example, a 70 hour week is rewarded in well over double the earnings of a 35 hour week and working 9-11 am counts much more than working 9-11 pm.

It’s less a matter of whether women take time off work to have children or seek flexible hours. It’s whether they are disproportionately penalized for the time they are absent from the office or for working their hours outside of the standard work day.

“Some occupations have high penalties for even small amounts of time out of the labor force and have nonlinear earnings with respect to hours worked,” Goldin writes, and then the gender pay gap is bigger. “Other occupations, however, have small penalties for time out and almost linear earnings with respect to hours worked.”

In previous research, Goldin and Katz quantified the occupational difference in pay penalty among Harvard 1990 graduates. They found that a similar 10 percent hiatus in employment 15 years after receiving their BA (18 months break) meant a decrease of earnings of 41% for MBAs, 29% for JDs or PhDs, and 15% for MDs.

Reduction in earnings as a result of time-off “was linear in lost experience” for MDs, but highly nonlinear for MBAs. “Any time off for MBAs is heavily penalized,” reports Goldin.

Remuneration penalties can result in women going to a different occupation, shifting down within the occupation hierarchy, or being out of work. The research found that when part-time work is largely available, women take off less time (eg pharmacists). Because it’s less available in business, women end up taking off more time even with higher penalties.

Goldin writes, “A flexible schedule often comes at a high price, particularly in the corporate, financial, and legal worlds.”

Closing the Gap

Goldin suggests that the last chapter to achieve gender equality involves “changing how jobs are structured and remunerated to enhance temporal flexibility.”

She found that certain contextual factors close the gender pay gap, such as when colleagues can more easily be substituted for each other and when information can easily and cheaply be relayed between colleagues.

Forbes contributor Clark advises to get the ball rolling on arranging temporal flexibility before you need it – anticipating and addressing the issues that need to be overcome.

How committed is your firm to making temporal flexibility work for women and for the company itself? What evidence do you see? Firms that are serious about gender equality will be proactive in making it work – and add up – for both.

/by

Does Being LGBT Still Matter or Are We in a Post-Bias World at Work?

Nicki GilmourRecently, I was asked to speak at The Conference Board’s Diversity and Inclusion conference in NY. My topic can be paraphrased into ‘why culture eats strategy for breakfast when it comes to diversity’ and most other things for that matter. In my session I was asked, “Do you still think that being LGBT matters since there has been considerable societal and workplace progress recently?”

My response was, “It depends on which firm you work for.” This holds true for a similar question regarding gender and essentially any social identity matter these days. Anecdotally, over the past seven years of theglasshammer’s existence, a small number of you have told me that it does not matter; that you are a woman at work and it has no bearing on your career. I see a small group of people echoing this sentiment when it comes to applying the same question to being LGBT at work. Conversely, most of you have told me or have acknowledged formally in print that, yes being a woman does matter and having other social identities, such as LGBT or being Multicultural, are factors that affect how people perceive you at work regardless of your talents. It even has affected how some of you see yourselves, famously coined as the imposter syndrome.

My first caveat is that you are entitled to any construct of belief that works for you, as personality and personal experiences are so often overlooked or discredited when they should not be. Ambition and access to the right relationships along with the natural desire often embedded into our personalities (conscious or otherwise) to assimilate to dominant group behaviors can trump a lot of adversity in any part of the world or in any workplace.

Many people enjoy hard work and find the climb exhilarating. There is something to be said for believing something and then growing your reality from that place. That is why we have theglasshammer and why books like Lean In exist; to give you every chance to think about networking, negotiation, and career advancement on your terms should you choose it. Further to that, if you buy into the concept that you control your destiny, you won’t see or perceive obstacles to be because of your social identity at work; this concept works for some people, myself included, until I studied Organizational Psychology. There is a certain personality who can make it anywhere, but the question sometimes becomes at what cost? I count myself in this category. If I was a flower I could grow happily on a rock. The downside of this strategy is that I would be completely ignoring the environmental forces around me that help other flowers grow with less energy and better soil on the meadow.

Stereotypes- Alive and Well

I want to share a shocking, previously unseen study with you that my good friend and associate Dr. Frank Golom conducted to prove that we don’t live in a post-bias world and that social identity matters.

The new study uses the famous and now forty-year-old “Think Manager, Think Male” trait research conducted and progressed by Virginia Schein. This new study by Dr. Golom et al extends the groups to include gay managers and lesbian managers in addition to (presumed) straight female and male manager categories.

Dr. Golom, whilst at Columbia University, surveyed almost 200 undergraduate and graduate students in the NY metro area. Eighty percent were women and a small percentage of all respondents were LGBT-identified. The results will astound you and make you think twice about any beliefs you may have around the next generation creating change just by virtue of being born as Gen Y.

Despite the survey responders being mostly women, the group that was elected as having the most leader-like traits was the straight male manager group. This group was ranked as most competent, productive, and emotionally stable amongst other attributes.

So perhaps these young, educated women might answer a direct question such as, “Do you want to be CEO?” as, “yes”, yet blatantly stated their group as a whole to be a less able group (remember this is a stereotype, actual competency levels were not measured as no individuals were presented here as subjects).

Furthermore, lesbians as a stereotyped group were rated as hostile and less competent than straight men yet had an edge over straight women ( as ranked by straight women, go figure?). Gay men really bore the brunt of the evils of stereotyping in this survey. They were assigned very low rankings on every trait that is considered to be leader-like, despite the slogans that people write on their Facebook such as, “It gets better”.

How can this be, I hear you ask? Well, you have all heard about unconscious bias and stereotyping but perhaps it is good to note that (mostly straight) women are guilty of it too. It is less discussed that (mostly white) women have a role in keeping the status quo in place due to their proximity to the current power structure, just as it is also a stereotype to think men don’t want to be involved and do something.

Read more

/by