Tag Archive for: gender equality

Women Leaders – Walking Out or Walking Onwards?

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For every woman at the director level that was promoted to the next level in 2021, two women directors walked out the door of their company. Women leaders are now demanding more, and leaving their companies at unprecedented rates, according to The Women in The Workplace 2022 report by LeanIn.Org and McKinsey & Company, who have released the research annually since 2015.

“We’re finally seeing the moment where women in leadership are voting with their feet,” said Alexis Krivkovich, a managing partner at McKinsey and cofounding report author.

In this “profound change,” women are indeed deciding to vote for the workplace they want with the most compelling power they will ever have: their presence, time and energy. Nothing short of this will shake up the workplace as we have known it. No matter the current representation, senior women are going beyond just getting access to upper levels and getting clearer on what they would like to experience and see happen there, and seeking that out. Could senior women’s participation from this place of self-empowerment catalyze greater change?

Women Aren’t Leaving, They’re Leaving For Better

“We are in the midst of a Great Breakup in corporate America. Women leaders are leaving their companies at the highest rate we’ve ever seen. They aren’t leaving the workforce entirely but are choosing to leave for companies with better career opportunities, flexibility, and a real commitment to DEI,” said Sheryl Sandberg, founder of Lean In, who leaned out of Facebook this past summer.

About 10.5% of female leaders (senior management and above) left their companies in 2021, compared to 9% of male leaders. On the average year, the spread is close with only a half-point gap.

Senior women leaders, after all the journey they have gained, aren’t walking out because they don’t think they have choices. They are walking about because they finally know they do – and they are taking their leadership assets with them in search of better opportunities. Having now recovered from pandemic job losses, women are more attuned to the relationship they want (and the ones will not tolerate) within the workplace. Women’s threshold to tolerate toxicity and inequity has been thinned, yet the broken rung is still there and the broken record of unequal outcomes plays wearingly on repeat. Women leaders are voting for the relationships they want to have with work.

Cultures That Work for Women’s Advancement

Women are as ambitious as men. Black women leaders (59%) and women of color (41%) are even more likely to want to be top executives (27%). But only 1 in 4 C-Suite leaders is a woman and only one in 20 is a woman of color. For every 100 men promoted from entry level to manager, just 87 women and 82 women of color are promoted.

And the signals that counter advancement come across in microaggressions or more overt dynamics: Female leaders are twice as likely as male counterparts to be mistaken for someone junior. 37% of women leaders said they’ve had a co-worker get credit for their idea, compared to 27% of men. Black female leaders are 1.5x more likely than women overall to have had their judgment or qualification questioned. Many women still feel undermined or passed over in the workplace.

Recognition for and Performance Consideration Of Essential Work 

While women are twice as likely to do be doing DEI-related and inclusion work that is helping with company performance, they are disproportionally carrying an increasingly ‘valued’ aspect of leadership that too often goes unrecognized and 40% say does not factor into the performance review. Meanwhile, women leaders are more burnt out (43%) than male counterparts (31%).

Flexible Work Cultures that Embody the Talk Around Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

Women want a better work culture. Only 1 in 10 women wants to work on-site most of the time, and women will move for flexibility. It’s not surprising considering that 52% of senior female leaders do most of the family housework and childcare compared to 13% of senior male leaders. Women who work the way they want to feel far happier, feel they have more equal opportunity to advance and are less likely to leave their job. Remote work also provides a reprieve from office-based exclusion and as McKinsey points out, that is a fundamental issue for organizations to address: “Companies cannot rely on remote and hybrid work as a solution; they need to invest in creating a truly inclusive culture.”

Over the past two years, being in a culture committed to well-being and DEI has become more important to women, and they are 1.5 more likely to have left a job because they wanted a more inclusive culture.

Better And More Supportive Managers 

Having a supportive manager is a top three criteria for women when thinking of joining or staying with an organization. Only about half of women say their manager encourages respectful behavior on their team regularly. Less than half say their manager shows interest in their career and helps them manage their workload. Black women and Latinas are particularly less likely to feel their manager shows interest in their career, checks in on their well-being or promotes inclusion on the team. They also experience less psychological safety. Women with various intersectional identities see gaps between the lip service to inclusion and what is actually happening in their experience.

Towards A Work Paradigm That Works For Women?

Female directors are becoming more sensitive to the conditions that don’t work for them, and it matters for them and future generations. Women under 30 are highly ambitious to become senior leaders, but 2/3 would be more interested if they saw senior women with a covetable work-life balance, an increasingly important career requirement for younger people.

The press isn’t focused on how bad this attrition of women leaders is for women. It’s focused on how bad the attrition of women leaders is for organizations. McKinsey has previously found that executives teams in the top quartile of gender diversity have a 25% greater likelihood of outperformance (above average profitability) than those in the bottom. LeanIn.Org and McKinsey have several recommendations for organizations following this recent report.

Stepping back, we are interested in what happens when women leaders take stock of their own value. All along, women have been trying to pave the way for those behind them by fighting to have a seat at the table. But increasingly, women are realizing that modeling leadership is not only about the rooms you are able to walk into, but also the rooms you are willing to walk away from. Because we need to walk towards creating organizational missions and cultures where all women (and people) are welcome and supported to lead and live their lives.

That is the power of esteeming the self. How would that mindset shift, at a collective level, give rise to more change in our workplace?

By Aimee Hansen

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Women in L&D Leadership: Why Aren’t There More?

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women in l&dLearning and development (L&D) is an industry where women are considered to thrive, but that reputation is shockingly more substantiated by the abundant representation of women entering the field than the slimmer percentages in leadership roles. 

As leveraging L&D expertise becomes more critical to propelling women into senior roles amidst reskilling/upskilling demands across industries, can the L&D field address its own gender ratio flip at the leadership level?

Female-inclined Field, Same Leadership Gender Gaps

By the disproportionate numbers entering into the field, women are clearly drawn to leading on education. A recent survey showed that both education and human resources were among the top five areas for job satisfaction for women. Gallup research has previously found that women slightly outrank men on accepting and empathizing with others as well as being able to recognize and develop people’s potential, natural matches for the L&D field.

Training Industry research has also shown that women in traditionally “female” fields (such as L&D) are more likely to have access to training in strategy and negotiation, key leadership skills, relative to fields like tech or government—which makes what happens at the leadership level more astounding.

L&D is often housed in human resources, where women comprise over 70% of managers, but that’s an inaccurate reflection of L&D senior leadership composition.

As called out by #womeninlearning, a movement began by Sharon Claffey Kaliouby and co-founded with Kate Graham to amplify the voices of women in the L&D sector, research by Donald H Taylor revealed that the more senior you go in the US and UK, the more absent women are in L&D roles.

While support and entry level positions were 67% female and 33% male, this ratio flips entirely at the senior level—where leadership positions are 69% male and 31% female.

The gender advantage toward women already dissipates at mid-authority roles (51% male, 49% female) and practitioner roles (53% male, 47% female), where the split is equal but men become overrepresented versus entry level numbers.

Additionally, Namely found that women entering human resources made nearly 11% less than male counterparts, the gap widening around age 45. In organizational and industrial psychology, the gap was 17.7%. A salary and compensation report from the eLearning Guild in 2018 found that women beginning e-learning roles in their 20s start with a 6% pay gap, which increases to 20 percent at 60+ years. Men also received double the average bonus given to women, .5% higher raises, and 16% more average total compensation, despite women in the sample having higher education levels.

One survey of L&D professionals by Training Journal showed that one in four respondents felt outright discriminated against because of gender, many feeling penalized for being a working mother. Greater were the race disparities. Chief Learning Officer data has shown that only 9% of learning managers are Latino, 5.6% are black, and 2.2% are Asian.

Looking to L&D To Advance Women Across the Board

While the L&D industry’s reputation as a women-oriented field conceals its own perplexing gender leadership gap, the industry is itself being heralded to lead the way on recovering lost ground on gender equality and making advances.

Amidst the vast and disproportional hit that Covid-19 pandemic response measures have had on displacing and exasperating disadvantage for women in the workforce, online learning is being championed as a primary ally in returning opportunity to and empowering women in professional roles.

“It is only when they have access to quality information and ways to decipher it that women can march ahead towards leadership roles in organisations,” writes Dr. S.K Nigam in HERSTORY. “And sectors like Corporate Learning and Development have a huge role to play in this.”

Training Zone in the UK observed that from the beginning of the first lockdown in March 2020, “the number of women enrolling in online courses tripled, with a 250% year-on-year increase in female enrollments across our business and management courses.”

Training Zone also found that since the pandemic, 75% of US employers are more likely to hire people with online education.

In addition to “seeing more women taking the initiative in using online learning to combat the impacts of the pandemic on their careers,” the organization emphasize that organizations need to assume this responsibility too.

A D2L survey reported an awareness gap around training resources: only 48 percent of women reported having access to online learning platforms at their company. But according to Nigam, an international survey indicated that among a sample of 300 companies, 59% reported they ran women-specific learning and development programs, the number going up to 79% among large enterprises.

Upskilling/Reskilling Demands are Elevating L&D’s Profile

Writing in Chief Learning Officer, Amy Borsetti, senior director at LinkedIn Learning Solutions, points to the LinkedIn Learning’s “2021 Workplace Learning Report” to affirm that “L&D is well-positioned to have a long-term, elevated role within organizations today, from promoting internal mobility to actively creating a more inclusive and equitable workforce.”

“One thing this year has made clear is that skills are the new currency in the workplace,” write Borsetti, later continuing, “From an organizational standpoint, creating a culture of continuous learning is a competitive advantage. Those organizations that seize the moment, and get this right, have a higher likelihood to outpace their competitors. It’s not just about learning itself — it’s about the outcomes.”

Whereas being seated in HR has arguably distanced L&D from the core business value and strategy discussions, Borsetti argues that the C-Suite has never been more actively engaged than it is right now. The LinkedIn Learning report found that over half of the 1,260 L&D professionals surveyed felt that L&D is evolving in prioritization from a “nice to have” to a “need to have.” And 63% of L&D professionals reported having a seat at the C-Suite table, a 27% lift within one year.

As Borsetti puts it in Chief Learning Officer, “The reality is, the shelf life of learning programs is shortening at the same or faster clip than the shelf life of jobs.”

The acceleration of pandemic response-correlated disruption, such as displacement and job creation from automation and the more autonomous work-from-home office, has made ongoing reskilling/upskilling both individual and organizational agendas. Meanwhile, attaining microcredentials and refining essential soft skills are on the rise too.

The report found upskilling/reskilling were the top priorities for L&D professionals in 2021, especially internal mobility: “The conditions have never been more right to prioritize skill development as the new corporate currency, level the playing field, create a more equitable workplace and achieve business results that wouldn’t be possible otherwise,” notes Borsetti.

But the question is not only what is needed, but how it should be done. What is garnering attention is exactly how L&D structure, content and approaches evolve to meet the current context in which education must engage, much of which was not considered amidst the whiplash reactivity to online education brought on by the pandemic.

Dr. Rumeet Billan, Chief Learning Architect at Viewpoint Leadership Inc, observes: “We continued to perpetuate our traditional understanding of what L&D is supposed to look like, instead of what learning is supposed to feel like.”

L&D professionals are speaking to how learning is evolving towards being more accessible and customized, self-driven and on-demand, context-relevant, bite-sized, blended, flexible, on-going and more akin in interaction to everyday work activities.

“Transformative learning is an art. Designing a training session is choreography – it’s a sequence that makes the learner reflect, feel, and draw connections that are applicable and practical to them. It’s an experience,” says Billan, who also adds: “The future of learning should look and feel different. We should be intentionally redefining the traditional notion of L&D, how we design and deliver content, and how a learner experiences training and development.”

Can L&D Lead its own Gender Equality Change?

“…I do believe what we’re doing here is opening people’s eyes. Once you see the imbalance, it becomes almost impossible to unsee it,” notes Kate Graham, co-founder of #womeninlearning. “Just look at the speaker line-up of any conference and you can instantly see if that organisation is paying any heed to gender balance and the voices of women.”

So as L&D rises in position in the C-Suite’s vision agenda and increasingly focuses on the learner experience to shape the design and delivery of learning, what kind of experience will be created for the women aspiring to rise to leadership in this very field?

By: Aimee Hansen

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Is Gender Bias Amplified in the Virtual Workplace?

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Virtual workplaceWhile remote working is a key element to creating more gender equality, the coexistence of the virtual workplace alongside virtual schooling has exacerbated the disproportional hours women spend on caregiving and domestic work, driving women to exit the workforce or consider downshifting their careers.

The dissolution of physical boundaries between home and office and classroom very rarely affords a woman with children “a room of her own” in which to conduct her professional life, unlike her male counterparts.

And now the remote workplace itself—the virtual meeting room and Zoom office—is introducing a mixed bag of gender-related impacts, neutralizing some imbalances while magnifying others.

How the Virtual Meeting Room Could Neutralize Gender Bias

As of February, researchers in Forbes reported that sentiments towards moral, motivation and collaboration related to the virtual workplace have been dropping into negative territory since November among executive leaders. Yet women leaders remained more positive than men—especially in relation to impact of the virtual workplace on productivity, decision-making and communication. Women leaders were more positive about the chairing of online meetings and that it sets the space that ‘ensures all team members can contribute to meetings’.

While men are socialized to establish dominance and position in team communications, women are inclined to establish relationships and build trust. Some research has indicated that virtual media, with a lack of non-verbal cues and three-dimensional richness, can led to greater misunderstanding in communication, but also diffuses the ability for men to dominate team interaction.

“With completely remote-meetings, the physical and social dynamics of in-person conversations unhinge the norms of hierarchy,” speculates UX researcher Allison Yu. “In Zoom, everyone is literally on an equal grid.”

Yu points out that when the active speaker is everyone’s primary focus on a Zoom screen, the act of cutting someone else off simply becomes more blunt. The virtual office also mitigates height bias, which favors men.

Whereas access to senior leaders is generally lower for women and women of color especially, Yu argues access becomes more equalized in a virtual workplace where some of the more exclusionary casual networking meet-ups, cultivated through affinity bias, aren’t as frequent or prevalent.

How the Virtual Meeting Room Is Proliferating Gender Bias

On the other hand, the virtual meeting room is also playing out to magnify pre-existing gender dynamics—such as male executives winning competency points for speaking longer while women lose them, passion expressed by women leaders being perceived as overemotional by male counterparts, men being 33% more likely to interrupt their female than male colleagues (manterruption), women speaking up 25% less than men in the meeting environment, and live reverbalizaton and appropriation by men of ideas previously introduced by a female colleague.

According to Catalyst research, 1 in 5 women has felt ignored and overlooked by coworkers using video calls. 45% of women business leaders say it’s difficult for women to speak in virtual meetings and 42% of male business leaders agree. Additionally, 31% of women and queer/non-binary respondents reported “getting talked over, interrupted, or ignored more frequently during virtual meetings than those held in person” in a July 2020 survey by the Society of Women Engineers.

In September, University of Iowa Grad student Claire McDonnell shared a video call recording on TikTok entitled “live footage of being a woman in STEM” that went viral within 48 hours. The clip shows her repeatedly being interrupted by fellow male students when pitching project ideas and having her own ideas appropriated and re-presented by her peers, though she was the only with with actual work experience with the topic.

As written in the New York Times, Georgetown University professor Deborah Tannen asserts that the remote workplace amplifies pre-existing conversational imbalances in who gets heard. Whereas men will tend to be argumentative and speak longer to convey authority, women will often be succinct, self-deprecating or speak in more indirect ways to not take up more space than necessary and be likable.

“Women are systematically seen as less authoritative,” said Jessica Preece, associate professor in political science at Brigham Young University. “And their influence is systematically lower. And they’re speaking less. And when they’re speaking up, they’re not being listened to as much, and they are being interrupted more.”

As put forth in Fast Company, women also have weaker informal relationships at work and office politics are still at play as “the official virtual meeting represents only a fraction of interactions, and real power dynamics will move backstage, excluding women as needed.”

Research also shows more women (46%) are struggling with group work than men (37%), often picking up more of the undefined, collaborative-based tasks and carrying the load of remote office housework. Also, “when faced with poor visibility or communication on what their colleagues are doing, many women compensate by working more,” an impulse which can be amplified by lack of co-presence in the remote working office.

How to Diffuse and Disrupt Virtual Bias?

While the flexibility of the remote workplace is generally supportive to gender equality, and virtual meeting rooms could counter or neutralize aspects of gender bias, the last year has revealed that entrenched cultural gender dynamics will reveal themselves, sometimes more so in altered circumstances. If gender inequality is inherent within our culture, it’s frankly alive and well in our virtual offices.

Next week, we will explore how leaders, managers, allies and women colleagues can play a role in addressing and mitigating the dynamics of virtual bias.

By Aimee Hansen

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OP-Ed: Going Back to “Normal” or Creating A “New Normal”?

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Kate IslerI, for one, don’t want to go back to normal. We have an opportunity this month, during Women’s History Month, to assess the current state of women’s equality around the world and make the appropriate and overdue changes to create a new normal. As I look around today, there is no question that the global pandemic has had a disproportionate effect on women and that the gains made over the past three decades have been all but wiped out in the past 12 months.

Women, and especially mothers, are leaving the workforce at unprecedented rates to shoulder most of the childcare and home-schooling responsibilities caused by the pandemic, resulting in unemployment numbers that set us back to the 1980s. But almost more alarming are the “getting back to normal” discussions I hear every day. The normal that so many are talking about nostalgically were not equitable or profitable for women, especially women of color.

Policy matters. Changes being debated on the state and federal level matter. One recent example, in particular, stands out: The Idaho state legislature voted down a bill that would have given the state access to $6 million in funding (approved by the Trump administration) for early childhood education. The opposition to the funding included comments from Idaho Representative Charlie Shepherd (GOP) who stated during the debate, “I don’t think anybody does a better job than mothers in the home, and any bill that makes it easier or more convenient for mothers to come out of the home and let others raise their child, I don’t think that’s a good direction for us to be going.” Mr. Shepherd later apologized for his remarks, but his words still ring heavy and hard. Until state and federal policy makers see, accept, and support the fact that most families have two incomes, and that women desire to live fully realized lives, we are going to continue to fight this shift back to the undesired “normal.”

We are at a historic inflection point. We have an opportunity to create a new normal. Women comprise over 50% of the population and are responsible for 85% of the consumer purchasing decisions. Plus, research has proven time and time again that increased diversity has a direct correlation to increased profitability for businesses.

The way forward is not backwards.

Women working together can seize this opportunity to create new work environments that allow the other half of the population to thrive and flourish. The way forward includes:

  1. Women supporting women. This doesn’t mean that we always need to agree, but we need to support one another. Purchase from women-owned businesses. Mentor a younger woman colleague. Talk explicitly about barriers and successes so other women don’t think they are alone in this work.
  2. Dispelling the myth that there is only room for a few women leaders. There is always room to increase the numbers, whether that is in the boardroom or at the table. Bring your own chair if there isn’t one. And always bring a spare chair with you to meetings, in case your colleague forgets hers.
  3. Be explicit about what you need to be successful in a work environment. For far too long women have kept quiet about what they need and been made to feel singled out and isolated. You are NOT the only one.
  4. Realize that you have power and even more power with a team. So often women feel that they are powerless based on circumstances outside of their control. Gender equity is a team sport. Build or find your team and work together to achieve your vision. There is power in numbers.

Don’t settle for going back to “NORMAL.” This is a once-in-a-hundred-years opportunity to reset the table. Let’s build on the work that has been done by countless women and men to take a major step forward in cultural evolution.

 

Kate Isler is the Co-Founder of TheWMarketplace, an economic engine for women, as well as the Co-Founder of Be Bold Now, a non-profit focused on accelerating gender parity. With over 20 years of international executive leadership experience gained working for Fortune 100 companies, Kate’s journey of leadership, challenging the status quo, overcoming adversity and breaking gender stereotypes motivates and inspires. She shares her incredible story and insights in her memoir, Breaking Borders (HarperCollins Leadership), available everywhere books are sold.

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2020 Year In Review: Are We Ready for the Bigger Questions in 2021?

2020 Year in ReviewThe world turned upside-down in 2020 as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic event altered our daily lives and conversations on a collective level.

In this annual year in review, TheGlassHammer considers the major updates that we’ve witnessed for women, diversity and inclusion.

Women’s Representation in Leadership in 2020

First of all, a quick glance at leadership statistics. Based on 2019, an “all-time record” of 37 women were represented among Fortune 500 CEOs, three being women of color. Nearly 93% of top companies are still steered by men, with few black men present.

The Global 500 includes 13 businesses run by women, none being women of color. Over 97% of the world’s top businesses have men at the helm. When it comes to boardrooms seats globally, women held 16.9% of seats though research cites women’s board presence as a business imperative.

Although VC-backed founder teams that include women hire 2.5 times more women, raise more in capital and generate more revenue, 2020 has brought a dip to the already marginal amounts of Venture Capital funds going to women founders (only 1.8% as of September 30th, down from 2.6% in 2019)—with industry speculation that funders are ‘playing it safe’ within their staid networks.

Korn Ferry also observed that global firms have in many ways leaned towards freeze mode rather than opportunity and innovation during the “giant pause,” especially in leadership.

Meanwhile, continued lack of women in tech and tech leadership contributes to rendering women invisible by design in our world.

COVID-19’s Big Impact on Gender Equality

Though many women we’ve interviewed have felt fortunate for the work-life integration of remote working and the Zoom living room office, this sudden shift was brought by collective trauma and simultaneous to at-home care-taking and education responsibilities.

More broadly on a global scale, we’ve tipped into a staggering regression in gender equality that is getting lost in the conversation.

The World Economic Forum declared COVID-19 “the biggest setback to gender equality in a decade.” UN Women reported that “While everyone is facing unprecedented challenges, women are bearing the brunt of the economic and social fallout of COVID-19”—which is widening the gender poverty gap and the gender educational gap.

Women are disproportionately employed in the industries most impacted by the pandemic, and their jobs are 1.8 times more vulnerable than men’s, according to McKinsey’s study of pandemic gender impacts.

While women make up 39% of overall employment, they accounted for 54% of job losses as of May 2020 – an employment exodus so overly female that it’s been dubbed a “shecession.”

“As COVID-19 has disproportionately increased the time women spend on family responsibilities,” write the McKinsey researchers in Harvard Business Review, “women have dropped out of the workforce at a higher rate than explained by labor-market dynamics alone.”

In the US, women are taking on 1.5 to 2.0 extra hours of family responsibilities per day – including at home education responsibilities. For many the multiple changes are off-setting mental health, physical well-being and work-life balance.

A Deloitte Global research survey which polled 400 working women around the globe found that 82% found their lives had “been negatively disrupted by the pandemic” and 70% of those women were “concerned about their ability to progress in their careers.”

Deloitte found that among women who had experienced shifts in their daily routine from the pandemic, 65% had more household chores and a third had bigger workloads. Among these women, those shouldering 75% or more of caregiving responsibilities tripled (from 17% to 48%).

The research also found that women without caregiving responsibilities were experiencing different kinds of stressors, more likely to feel they needed to be always “on” and available at work (53% vs. 44%).

These women reported feeling overwhelmed more so than their caregiving peers (58% vs. 41%) – which highlights a need for women to create their own healthy boundaries despite the normalized, technology-enabled business culture of 24/7 availability.

Both teams of researchers push for policymakers and business leaders to “take action now” to curb the impact on women, as the “do nothing” scenarios show far graver gender equality and economic impacts.

Women’s Leadership In Headlines in 2020

While the floor is being seriously shaken on gender equality on a global level, women have featured in the leadership headlines of 2020.

The death of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (RBG) on September 18th, amidst the presidential election campaign, closed a 27 year stint and preceding judicial legacy that included redefining gender roles, challenging sex-discrimination, supporting women’s reproductive rights, voting for same sex marriage and confronting other social inequities. The loss of RBG has thrown the future balance of the highest court decision-making into question.

In RBG’s words, ”Women’s rights are an essential part of the overall human rights agenda, trained on the equal dignity and ability to live in freedom all people should enjoy.”

The Supreme Court replacement was a woman considered to be of conservative ideology, Amy Coney Barrett. This gives us pause as it is a great example of the conflict that arises when we try to hold competing ideas in our head. In this case the happiness of another woman in the seat adjacent to the notion that she may not rule in the interests of women’s rights with a track record to show such tendencies.

Meanwhile U.S. Senator Kamala Harris collected yet another breakthrough first in her expansive leadership career when she became the first women US vice president-elect this November.

As a multiracial woman, she will also be the first Black person and person of South Asian descent to hold the office – with hopes that she may become the first women US president.

And it’s no surprise that Catalyst CEO Champions for Change who pledged to support women and women of color into leadership are leading in bringing more gender and racial equity into leadership.

Where Do We Go In 2021?

A paradox of the events of 2020 is that some conversations have become so divisive they can barely be approached, while other social injustice topics have finally been put on the table where we cannot look away from them—especially, systemic racism.

If we want real change, more conversations need to be put on the unavoidable table, no matter how much vulnerability they bring up or how hard they are to confront, within and between us.

As a culture, we are arguably becoming more conscious of the many aspects of cultural social architecture we have been complicit in accepting as normative – down to the level of making visible the microaggressions that uphold racism.

Many top executive women who have spoken to us this year are emphasizing taking diversity and inclusion out of its departmental silo. As a side dish discussion, it’s at best lip service.

What will the leadership numbers look like when we review the board and executive levels of 2020?

And regardless, we are still talking year after year about top business leadership in the 90th percentiles of men and far too few people of color, as we report on “record highs” that are only micro-progress.

Can we talk about that?

Right now, we are witnessing a drop in women employment so fast that it’s crippling any progress on global gender equality. A few women making headlines in leadership will not offset that.

Do the ethics of companies and leadership still carry a paradigm that depends on this gap?

Can we talk about that?

As we enter into 2021 having already adopted the language of the “new normal,” the question increasingly becomes what do we want to make it?

Will we be willing to make the invisible even more visible? What questions are we willing to ask? Instead of being caught in crisis response, are we ready for real cultural re-envisioning?

What values are at the center of a “new normal” and where is it taking us? What connects us, what divides us, and can we find our way back home?

Where do we need to stop telling the same narrative and further stand up, from within ourselves?

Are we ready to find out, together?

By Aimee Hansen

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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

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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

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Why Gender Equality is Good for Men | Part One

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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

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Hidden Truths about Making Gender Equality Possible for Ambitious, Dual Career Couples

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Guest contributed by Lisa Levey

Most millennials, particularly those that are highly educated, see an egalitarian marriage as the ideal.

Yet despite improvements, a clear divide persists in how women and men perceive – and experience – gender equality.

Men are far more optimistic about progress for women in the workplace and both genders don’t see eye-to-eye regarding what the other contributes to the care of the home and family. A 2017 study across eight countries found men were more likely to perceive housework and childcare as equally shared and both genders saw themselves, not their partners, as the ones scaling back on their careers after becoming a parent.

This blog shares hidden truths, based on extensive research and personal experience, about what does help to make gender equality not just an aspiration, but a reality, or far more of one.

Understanding the cycle of inequality:

It’s difficult for couples to appreciate, before children, the powerful forces that drive ambitious women and men, professional equals, to devolve into gendered norms after becoming parents. The story often goes something like this:

A child joins the family. Dad takes little time away from work, feeling the intensity of professional demands and the fear that prioritizing family will jeopardize future career prospects. While on parental leave, mom becomes the undisputed parent expert, owing to her daily immersion caring for their child. When mom returns to work, she becomes the flexible parent, typically by default. If like most new fathers, dad works more hours than before children, feeling the familiar professional pressures heightened by a powerful awareness of his provider role, one society continues to place disproportionately on his shoulders.

Dad continues his career climb, feeling an increased drive to maximize his income and professional potential. Meanwhile mom struggles mightily to combine her former professional life with motherhood. At work her inability to be all in, given her role as the primary parent, leads to misguided beliefs about her professional commitment and leadership potential. She feels disoriented and angry. She wonders why her life as a mother bears little resemblance to before, while her husband’s, pre versus post-child, seems little changed.

Understanding how parenthood comes to be the death knell of gender equality for so many couples with egalitarian intentions, puts couples in the driver’s seat, enabling them to navigate the challenges and make choices that keep them firmly on the gender equality path.

Cultivating a partnership mentality:

As couples feel the egalitarian ideal they highly value slipping away, it becomes natural to channel their anger and frustration at one another. A far better solution is for them to instead spend their precious energy to collectively identify, and employ, the levers of change they can influence such as simultaneously adapting work schedules to enable greater sharing at home and considering the tradeoffs involved with buying a bigger house.

Egalitarian couples come to see their partner on the same team rather than as the problem. Anchored by a shared perspective, possibilities open up as couples work together to navigate the real problems – the rampant attitudes, policies, and practices – that keep women and men from what they deeply desire: to be both successful, committed professionals and involved parents.

Planning ahead:

So often couples talk in broad strokes, with few specifics about having children, often underestimating the impact on many aspects of life – work, marriage, finances, and time. What helps is getting clarity on what’s most important for each person individually, and collectively as a couple, in this next phase of life.

Beginning with the question – What will it look like to nurture two professional careers once we become parents? – helps couples to create a joint work-life vision for their growing family. Discussing questions like those below enables couples to start imagining and planning how the first phase, of parenting pre-school children, could work.

  • How much child care feels comfortable?
  • How will we manage child care when the normal routine breaks down?
  • What will stay the same – and what will need to change – in how we manage our professional lives?
  • How will we ensure that the work-life model we’ve put into place is working?

These discussions help create a compass that guides decision making as couples confront the inevitable complexities, choices and tradeoffs required of dual-career parents. The goal is not to have all the answers but rather to begin a conversation, one that will stretch over decades, about how to put the puzzle pieces of their lives together in ways that seek to preserve the gender equality they value.

Prioritizing the couple relationship:

Becoming parents often leads to putting the couple relationship at the very bottom of the priority list. But women and men who seek a long-term, egalitarian relationship do so at their peril. The ongoing investment of time and attention is foundational in cementing the egalitarian mold for combining careers and caretaking.

What this means is the couple relationship needs to be on par with – if not more important than – either children or work. Egalitarian couples walk in each other’s shoes, intimately understanding all it takes to make the engine of work and family run. This sharing facilitates the depth of connection that helps relationships endure long beyond the child rearing years.

Supporting atypical gender norms:

Armed with the understanding that powerful norms reinforce traditional gender roles, egalitarian parents work pro-actively to counter them. That could mean: saving money well before a child is born or adopted, allowing dad to also take an extended parental leave or dad clarifying new boundaries at work, enabling him to more equally share the demands of being a caregiver,enabling his partner to keep investing in her career.

Supporting atypical norms could mean mom fighting her tendency to over manage at home, instead treating her husband as a true co-parent, or bringing down the pressure by relaxing her cleanliness standards, instead prioritizing time for connection and fun.

Realizing the power of modeling for your kids:

Confronting the challenges to gender equality in a world of gender inequality is easier when it becomes a parenting goal. In interviewing couples seeking to walk the egalitarian path, I heard them repeatedly describe how meaningful it felt to show their children that women and men can be amazing caretakers and ambitious professionals. Stopping to consider what messages their behaviors send to their children helps mothers and fathers to step back and readjust when inevitably, they veer off course from their egalitarian ideal.

Living within your means:

Money plays an outsized role in a couple’s ability to create an egalitarian partnership and it’s not just about the pay equity gap. Rather couples at their financial edge feel the need to maximize income, often leading to privileging the more lucrative job and through time widening the gap in importance and earnings between their two careers.

The problem with the more lucrative earner being seen as having the primary career is that it greatly reduces his, or her, ability to make choices, such as putting limits on excessive work demands or leaving a job that’s unhealthy or a poor fit. Creating an economic buffer allows couples to pivot as needed, all the while continuing to value both careers.

Though dual career couples are ubiquitous, egalitarian couples are not. The difference is both nuanced and profound. For couples who want equality to characterize their lives together as parents, it requires awareness and skill to write their own work-life script, because even in 2018 the egalitarian model of careers and kids remains the road far less travelled.

About the author

Lisa Levey is a veteran diversity consultant, working with leading organizations to assist them in realizing the underutilized leadership potential of women. Her current work focuses on engaging men as allies and partners. As a consultant, she led the design and development of the Forte Foundation’s Male Ally signature resource platform. She blogs for the Glass Hammer, the Huffington Post and the Good Men Project on gender issues.

Her award-winning book The Libra Solution spotlights the obstacles and enablers to gender equality for dual-career professionals raising children. Lisa and her husband Bryan, a technology executive, have been featured in Fast Company magazine and on ABC News with Charlie Gibson in stories about their egalitarian work-life approach. Their coaching practice Genderworks supports dual-career professional couples in laying a foundation for, and navigating the obstacles to, gender equality as parents. Lisa earned an MBA with highest honors from the Simmons School of Management and a BS with distinction from Cornell University in applied economics

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Let’s Move from a Gender War to a Gender Partnership

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nominate

Guest contributed by Lisa Levey

Gender equality is not about winning a war!

The war metaphor distracts us with finger pointing, blaming, and endlessly seeking to justify who’s the perpetrator and who’s the victim. The war metaphor keeps us stuck. The reality is we all – both women and men – fall victim to highly gendered thinking. We are stuck in gender binaries and it has been, and in many ways continues to be, our conditioning.

In an experiment that has been repeated many times and redesigned in multiple ways, both women and men demonstrate a male-bias for leadership positions in the workplace. The experiment might go something like this: participants are asked to rate the resumes of candidates for a leadership position. They are told that each group will be evaluating the strength of one among multiple candidates. What the participants don’t know is that everyone is looking at the same exact resume. The only thing that has been changed is the name and gender [and in other experiments the race or ethnicity] of the candidate. Both women and men evaluate the supposed male candidate more favorably, even indicating he should be paid more.

The Revolution of Declining Expectations

Several years ago at the pinnacle of the financial implosion, I listened to Harvard Law Professor Nancy Gertner’s keynote address at a women’s leadership conference where she passionately described the women’s movement in the 1970’s as a revolution focused on changing the workplace and changing families, not about women having the choice to work outside the home. She went on to say that far too little had changed in either sphere and that change requires viable alternatives, which remained elusive, with companies overwhelmingly still family unfriendly and as a result, continued skewed gender norms at home. Retired Federal Judge Gertner [appointed during the Clinton administration] described the current state as the Revolution of Declining Expectations which needed to be remedied by igniting the consciousness of women and men[LL1] [LL2].

Yes, women can be a top leader -but if she has children, she had better be a good mom first. And men get major kudos for being an involved dad, BUT he better be a breadwinner too or we’re not quite sure what to make of him.
Both men and women suffer from a dissonance between their egalitarian ideology and their behavior. Take for instance the common scenario where a man strongly espouses gender equality, yet somehow that doesn’t translate to his negotiating a parental leave for more than a paltry week or two or realizing that his relationship to work must evolve if he plans on being a co-parent rather than a parent-assistant. No more flying out to a client on a day or two’s notice or heading out for 18 holes of golf, feeling fully justified because he spent an hour on Saturday morning playing with the kids.

I saw this dissonance in stark relief as a member of a research team examining millennial dads. In The New Millennial Dad: Understanding the Paradox of Today’s Fathers, two-thirds of men reported they should share care of their children equally with their spouse but only one-third actually did so. At the same time, over 90% of millennial fathers indicated wanting greater responsibility and men were twice as willing as women to seek advancement, even if it meant more time spent at work.

Similarly, a woman passionate about gender equality, especially about her husband sharing the load at home, fails to realize that her dictating the terms of engagement when it comes to parenting and household management renders him a servant, not a partner. Instead of grabbing the baby in frustration if dad doesn’t know what comforting techniques work best, she – and he – are better served in the long-run by her encouraging his efforts and giving him alone time with the baby when he can develop his comforting repertoire. And, if she blows a gasket when her husband returns from school shopping with their daughter sporting – to mom’s mind – an awful haircut, she must realize her parenting micromanagement not only saps his confidence but chills his desire to be involved.

The Mirror Image of Gender Inequality

The metaphor I’ve coined to illustrate the complexity of gender, and the fight for equality, is that of a mirror image.
Men, because of their gender, enjoy a privileged status in the workplace, which I’ve seen is highly challenging for many men to see or accept. His path upward is facilitated by countless subtle and not-so-subtle norms, ranging from male senior leaders who see in him themselves earlier in their careers, his knowing – having been schooled in the masculinity code – the importance of self-promotion for advancement, and his intense commitment and singular focus on work fueled by having a spouse or partner who is accountable for home and family management.

Similarly women, because of their gender, enjoy a privileged status as a parent and the leader at home. Everyone assumes a mother knows how to nurture a child instinctively, rather than the reality of her building skill through trial and error. School and camp default to mom as the go-to parent, even if dad explicitly asks to be called first, as my husband and I witnessed year after year after year. If a woman decides to step out of the workforce for a time, because the pressure at work feels too great and/or she wants to spend more time with her child, she is comforted by the familiar trope that she is being a good – no better – mother. But it’s hard to imagine a man feeling supported to stop working – or even cutting back at work – so he can be a better father. Ask dads who are the primary caretakers, as I have, about feeling welcomed into the mom clique at school or on the playground. While some have a positive story to tell, it’s far more common to hear about their feeling excluded, literally like the odd-man out

While women continue to struggle for their rightful place at the workplace leadership table, similarly men continue to struggle for their rightful place at home and as a parent/ caretaker for their loved ones.

The Power of Gender Partnerships

For the last 2 ½ years, I have seen the type of consciousness raising that Judge Gertner described as a remedy for the Revolution of Declining Expectations in a very unlikely place, the campuses of elite business schools. It began with my attending the first event hosted by the Harvard Business School Manbassadors, a group of men who sought to support gender equality at business school and in the workplace. Over more than two years, I have been researching male ally groups across the country and it has given me great hope for the future of gender equality.
These young men work closely with their female peers who are involved with women’s leadership groups on campus. They have candid conversations about gender, educate themselves about gender inequalities at work and at home, and work together to affect change.

I have been deeply inspired listening to young men share their desire to be a good partner in fully supporting their girlfriend’s/ wife’s career aspirations and being an inclusive leader that facilitates the professional development and advancement of women and men. They see supporting gender diversity and gender equality as both the smart thing as well as the right thing to do. They have seen the struggles of their sisters, mothers, friends and work colleagues and they have heard the challenges of their female business school peers. They want to make it better, not only for women but for themselves too. They don’t want to be absent dads and they’re tired of the locker room talk and behaviors. It doesn’t square with the women they see all around them, including the women they care about in their lives.

Male ally groups have provided a powerful forum for men to get involved and to transition from ‘the problem’ to ‘part of the solution.’ Working side-by-side with their female peers, these men and women are grappling with gender in all its complexity and seeking to rewrite the gender rules.

Rather than sapping our energy fighting with one another, or becoming resigned to ‘that’s the way it is,’ women and men can be far more effective working together to make gender equality real and not just aspirational in our lives.
That my friends, is key to getting us unstuck!

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.  
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