Tag Archive for: IWD

Listen More, Talk Less to Change Your World?

,

Nicki GilmourBy Nicki Gilmour, Executive Coach and Organizational Psychologist

This International Women’s Day 2018 has positive messages regarding professional women’s careers. Messaging that women can go far and fast has never been stronger and some companies are making strides promoting women. Work for good companies, functional teams and good managers as happiness can happen at work and if you are not happy then take control of it.

Every day is women’s day on theglasshammer.com as we don’t just talk about what needs to happen (systemically and or individually) one day per year. For eleven years we have been asking you to #pressforprogress and we have been doing it too. By creating visibility of all types of professional women, celebrating women at work and reducing bias and stereotypes via our training and coaching as well as editorial articles based on research. It has not been easy work and we thank those of you who have persisted in trying to change the world around us.

So on this day and month we choose to look more broadly at the world to understand the narrow issue of advancing professional women at work. Why? Because we understand that the culture outside the office affects the culture inside the office.

International women’s day is a third world and first world issue as we see from the horror stories from near and far regarding how men’s needs are placed high above the human rights and freedoms of women. From #metoo in the States to tribal honor killings in India and Pakistan, the one consistent element seems to be that men are always given more power than women. And, if the small minority of bad guys chose to wield that power in an evil way (thankfully so many men don’t) the system and the cultural norms in first and third worlds are remarkably similarly weighted against women.

At least we are talking about inequities now in a way that never before have been up for discussion. But, how do we change things? Change is not easy as it requires systems, structures and policies (and their enforcement) to change. Behavior is like a river running its course, it just happens naturally and having to create a new pathway without a reason to do so is possible, but hardly probable without perturbation.

Sometimes we all need to feel uncomfortable in order to change. Nilofer Merchant writes in the HBR blog to Listen more and talk less to change someone’s mind. At first, reading this piece I felt sheer horror that girls were being traded for compensation. I felt my values being challenged on every level and I feel a rejection of the culture being described in the scenario to the point that I wondered why I was still reading it. Then, I read on. Ironically, the story was about listening without giving an opinion, in service of having people get to a change point of view themselves. Having no verbal opinion can be powerful in some cases where cultural norms will squash dissent or people that aren’t straight men.

This concept really stuck with me, not least because change is about exactly those three elements – culture, values and behavior and Warner Burke Professor of Organizational Psychology and Change Leadership always says “You cannot change the culture by changing the culture.”

In the continued work of finding a true level playing field, all of us need to understand how to challenge ourselves before we can challenge others.
The sheer idea of not having an opinion and voicing it is contra to most advice we see and having a voice for yourself and for the voiceless is a strategy that cannot be dismissed. But, isn’t it interesting as a career strategy to let people think its their idea?

If like me, you are fairly ambivalent about this then thats ok too! This is the time to have a voice because 2018 is a turning point for people and specifically women to be heard and believed. At work, there is a range of situations where you still aren’t being heard, from meetings where the guy next to you repeats exactly what you said, to no win conversations where power plays are present. My favorite books on this are by Deborah Kolb and Judith Williams who wrote Everyday Negotiations and by dear friend Carol Frohlinger’s and Lois Frankel’s Nice Girls series.

Have a good month, enjoy the #IWD celebrations!

/by

Voice of Experience: Rachel Frye, Aviation Finance Advisory Leader at PwC Ireland

,

Rachel FryeBy Cathie Ericson

“When I was just starting out, I didn’t realize where my journey would take me, but I have realized that it’s ok when the destination you start out with changes,” says PwC’s Rachel Frye.

“Start with a viewpoint, but know you might end up somewhere else, and that’s where you’re supposed to be.

An Unexpected Flight Pattern

Those statements might be considered world-class understatements when considering Frye’s path.

The best advisors are those who have learned the industry from the ground up, or in the case of Frye, from the air down. That’s because she started in the aviation finance industry in an unconventional way – as a pilot. While a flight student at the University of Oregon, she ended up working as an engineer at the airport, her first foray into adopting the attitude of “Sure, I’ll give it a go!” She found it to be a wonderful complement to her flight training to become immersed in aviation and learn the day-to-day operations, while building contacts with operations people and other engineers.

As she learned more about the private flying industry, she parlayed what she calls the “novelty factor” of being a woman into landing some private jet work.

But her ambition had always been to be a commercial pilot, following in the family footsteps of her dad who was a pilot, so she moved back to the U.K. to earn some additional licenses while working for an airline on the engineering side.

She was due to join KLM just prior to 9/11, when the job vanished as airlines stopped recruiting junior pilots. In the meantime, she received a phone call from an engineering contact of hers who had a client in the financial industry who needed some technical advice. Not knowing what to expect, she attended the meeting and was surprised to discover it was with members of the French, German and British governments, as well as representatives from huge international banks.

It turns out that it was the first time that the airlines had gone into bankruptcy on such a large scale, and the banks were in a quandary as to how to locate and bring back the myriad aircraft. It was uncharted territory, but Frye stepped in and developed a team, and for the next three years acted as a technical director repossessing the aircraft. “I could have felt like a fraud but since this had never done before, I didn’t know any less than anyone else – there was no right or wrong way to go about solving the problem.”

Once they had located and retrieved the aircraft, there was a new dilemma – how to sell or lease them. In an industry that is primarily relationship-driven, Frye stepped into this new role marketing aircraft and working with the law firms. When they had difficulty finding buyers, they turned to leasing and converted others from passenger to freight use. With some creativity, eventually every single bank got their money back.

While the work was a huge achievement in retrospect, she also knows that it was a terrible time in the industry and for her clients, and she found it fulfilling to help these companies who were in desperate need.

As word spread, she became known as the expert and found herself managing other airlines’ distressed assets. Then a leasing company asked her to run their marketing in the Middle East, which seemed like a good fit. While managing their portfolio, she spent time with the CFO and learned about financial modeling and structuring. A bank in Germany asked if she would be the assistant head of the aviation finance practice and with that, she had gone full circle to experience literally every sector of the aviation industry: from flying to engineering to marketing to finance.

“Most people have one of these skillsets, but it’s unusual for anyone’s experience to be so broad-based,” Frye says, emphasizing how useful it is to have the ability to walk into a meeting with an astute understating of the technical engineering side, even if they’re discussing marketing, for example.

When most firms shuttered their aviation practices during the economic crisis in 2009 and 2010, Frye decided to become an independent consultant until the dust settled, a role she ended up holding for seven years, leasing aircraft to companies, advising airlines and various governments, high net worth individuals who were investing, and even the military for the inflight refuelling fleet. This consultancy work culminated in being named “Interim Head of Aerospace Risk” at UK Export Finance, part of HM Treasury in London, immediately prior to joining PwC.

“While it was incredibly varied, it was also a little isolating,” she says. She wanted to step back into something more solid, but knew she could wait for the right role, which came when PwC asked her to head up their aviation sector in December. She finds it to be the perfect fit, because it’s as if she has her own business as she builds out her team, but with the brand equity of PwC.

And she knows without a doubt that she never could have landed where she is if not for the accumulation of her experience to date — connecting the dots, so to speak.

Frye looks forward to building out the team: While she appreciates that PwC is so forward thinking and takes a long-term view, her group’s challenge is to communicate to the industry that they can offer the broad range of skills and support that they do.

“I am excited to have such strong resources that will allow us to really build a center of excellence in aircraft finance,” she says. “We don’t just want to just advise the industry, but help evolve it and pull it forward.”

While it has been a niche area for some time, it is now growing rapidly due to the emergence of markets like Asia and India that are seeing passenger numbers increasing exponentially, bringing with them record aircraft orders. “There is unprecedented growth, and our role is to help our clients navigate the huge amount of change and capitalize on the opportunity,” she says, while also helping them harness new technologies to make the industry more efficient.

An Industry Where Women Can Take Flight

Frye has always seen her gender as a benefit, since she stands out and can quickly prove her expertise. But, she notes that the biggest barrier the industry faces is getting women to join at all. For example, when one of her fellow female classmates said she wanted to join cabin crew, Frye quickly asked why not flight deck, and was gratified when the friend subsequently became a pilot. The incident opened Frye’s eyes that it wasn’t an automatic choice or consideration for many women.

However, she doesn’t feel that the industry needs equality just for equality’s sake. “You need the best people in the role, and it should be irrelevant what gender they are,” she says.

She urges other women who might want to join the industry to remember that they don’t have to behave in a masculine way to get ahead. Women have an advantage with their high “EQ” and inquisitiveness, she finds.

Frye admits she is the first to say she doesn’t understand something, but finds men might also wonder but wouldn’t say it out loud. “That honesty comes across and works in your favor,” she notes. “It’s ok not to know everything and to ask questions. Being highly curious has informed my journey.”

Using Aviation As a Way to Open Minds

It goes without saying that Frye has a love of travel, which she has tried to instill in her children, ages 11 and 19, primarily to show them that the rest of the world isn’t like Western Europe. Her kids have a list and once a year she lets them choose a trip.

But she never forgets that these experiences are due to the magic of aviation. One highlight was a visit to Jerusalem which they found to be a melting pot of cultures. “We spent three hours learning history and cultures and having a delicious Arabic lunch with our host, and that evening we were back in London,” she says.

“I feel very strongly that if the planet is going to get better for any of us, we have to understand each other, and aviation is critical to that. The more we travel, the more understanding we have and the better our world will become.”

/by

International Women’s Day 2018: Time’s Up For Change

,

survey-network-women1

By Aimee Hansen

“This year, International Women’s Day comes on the heels of unprecedented global movement for women’s rights, equality and justice” states unwomen.org.

The United Nations notes that across the globe, viral advocacy echoed the collective rising of women’s voices in the #MeToo movement to highlight further injustices affecting women, including pay inequality and political representation.

As more women spoke out, the issues affecting women spilled over into the social, corporate and political discourse. In fact, sexual harassment even became an official discussion topic at the World Economic Forum, an unprecedented occurrence.

The selected themes of IWD 2018 send a clear message: We have energetic momentum towards change and equality. It’s time to put that energetic momentum into action.

From Momentum To Action

#MeToo, in its broadest social implication, was about even more than women standing up to sexual harassment and abuse by saying it has affected their lives, too.

It was about bringing the reality of hushed and hidden aggressions against women out into the public discourse – where they can no longer remain denied nor trivialized nor marginalized.

With #MeToo, the conversation became both personal and public, all at once. It echoed through both our homes and our institutions, even if it was somewhat bound to the voices who had the “privilege” of feeling safe enough to speak.

By November 2017, #MeToo was tweeted 2.3 million times across 85 countries. The rising of women’s voices and experiences struck a deep chord in the collective consciousness. With the question of the validity and vastness of the problem widely evidenced, we can focus on how we address change – as individuals, as groups, as society.

International Women’s Day is seeking to take that momentum and extend the reach of both women’s issues covered and women addressed, with urgency:

The International Women’s Day website announced the theme #PressforProgress. building on the strong global momentum for gender parity evidenced by #MeToo and #TimesUp. While the UN theme for International Women’s Day 2018 is “Time is Now: Rural and urban activists transforming women’s lives”.

As stated on unwomen.org, “International Women’s Day 2018 is an opportunity to transform this momentum into action, to empower women in all settings, rural and urban, and celebrate the activists who are working relentlessly to claim women’s rights and realize their full potential.”

From Urban To Rural

UN global efforts for International Women’s Day will focus on women in rural areas, who experience more drastic gaps of inequality than urban women: “less than 20 per cent of landholders worldwide are women, and while the global pay gap between men and women stand at 23 per cent, in rural areas, it can be as high as 40 per cent. They lack infrastructure and services, decent work and social protection, and are left more vulnerable to the effects of climate change.”

This greater rural wage gap is not unlike the greater race and ethnicity wage gap in the U.S., as last year UN Women Executive Director Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka wrote: “the average gender wage gap is 23 per cent but this rises to 40 per cent for African American women in the United States.”

For global progress towards gender parity, moving towards Sustainable Development Goals means urgent action for rural women – action for an adequate standard of living, freedom from violence and harm, access to land and productive assets, food security, decent work, education, health and sexual and reproductive health rights.

From Hollywood Stars To Low-Wage Workers

Two months after #MeToo, Time’s Up (#TimesUp) was spearheaded by over 300 women in Hollywood. Time’s Up is a leaderless, collective movement (run by volunteers and made up of working groups) to counter systemic sexual harassment and sexism in the workplace across all industries.

The movement emphasizes providing legislative and legal resources and support to those women in low-wage industries who face harassment without the resources to effectively speak out and oppose it.

This was in part catalyzed by a letter from 700,000 female farm workers who responded to #MeToo with their solidarity, while expressing the challenges of working “in the shadows” with “too much at risk” to expose sexual harassment, including worries about feeding their families.
An open letter addressed to “Dear Sisters” and signed “In Solidarity” includes the statement: “The struggle for women to break in, to rise up the ranks and to simply be heard and acknowledged in male-dominated workplaces must end; time’s up on this impenetrable monopoly.”

As written by Megan Garber in The Atlantic, “While the former (#MeToo) has, thus far, largely emphasized the personal and the anecdotal, #TimesUp—objective in subject, inclusive of verb, suggestive of action—embraces the political. It attempts to expand the fight against sexual harassment, and the workplace inequality that has allowed it to flourish for so long, beyond the realm of the individual story, the individual reality.”

#TimesUp will challenge workplace sexism “through legal recourse”, “through improved representation in board rooms and beyond”, and “through the changing of norms.”

Among the initiatives are a legal defense fund supported by a GoFundMe effort ($21 million at the time of writing) to protect women in low-wage industries from sexual misconduct and the potential fallouts from reporting it by enabling the resources of legal representation.

It also includes plans for legislation to penalize companies that allow harassment to persist and to discourage the use of nondisclosure agreements that silence victims.

The homepage states, “No more silence. No more waiting. No more tolerance for discrimination, harassment or abuse.”

What You Can Do

International Women’s Day is both a celebration of women’s achievements and a collective call to work together towards gender parity. This year, women can stand in our power of glimpsing more of what is possible when we add our collective voices in solidarity against oppression.

If you wish to further advance gender equality for women who may not have the same resources through #TimesUp, consider donating to Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, or one of the many organizations that work with rural women across the globe for greater equality.

The Time’s Up mission statement also encourages women in positions of leadership to recognize their power in providing opportunities for other women:

“Acknowledge that talent is equally distributed, but work and career opportunities are not. Mentor someone from an underrepresented group in your industry. If you are in a position to do so, hire someone who can diversify the perspectives included in your organization; your team will be better and stronger for it.”

As demonstrated by the movements of women’s voices that have echoed through these past six months, the voice and actions of each woman matters on a day intended for all women.

/by

International Women’s Day: It’s About Every Day

,

group of business women - career-adviceOn International Women’s Day (IWD), The Glass Hammer takes the opportunity to set our focused mission to inspire, empower, and inform you in your professional career against the broader backdrop of achieving gender equality on a global basis.

As United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon states, “Let us devote solid funding, courageous advocacy and unbending political will to achieving gender equality around the world. There is no greater investment in our common future.”

Women…Just One Day?

Wait. Is having one day designated to over half of the planet’s population itself a barrier to ever achieving gender equality?

We asked Morra Aarons-Mele, blogger, former political consultant, and founder of Woman Online what she thought. “Whenever we focus our attention on a particular issue for a day, we run the risk of thinking and acting for one 24-hour period, patting ourselves on the back, and then putting the issue on the back burner for the rest of the year. The positive change I see is that an increasing number of individuals, governments, businesses, and organizations are considering and working towards gender equality every day. I like to think of IWD as a day where those actors can share their good work and where we can all put focused efforts toward advancing the cause.”

Stepping It Up

This year, with the theme “Planet 50-50 by 2030: Step it Up for Gender Equality”, the UN is focusing on accelerating progress towards sustainable development, which includes 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Many of the goals have heightened significance for women, with “quality education” as goal 4 and “gender equality”as goal 5.

The UN recognizes that sustainable development depends on gender equality. Turned another way, until global society achieves gender equality, including gender equality at key levels of decision making, society will perpetuate an unsustainable world.

On September 27th, 2015, 80 world leaders met in New York to kick-start changes to end discrimination against women, with each country being called to make commitments and pledges focusing on “increasing investment in gender equality, reaching parity for women at all levels of decision-making, eliminating discriminatory legislation, and addressing social norms that perpetuate discrimination and violence against women.”

In the spirit of HeForShe, anyone attending the International Women’s Day Forum in New York, co-hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation and focusing on the business community, is granted a two-for-one registration when they bring a male colleague. It’s not just a women’s issue.

#PledgeforParity

An acceleration to gender equality is necessary, since the World Economic Forum’s most recent prediction indicates that the global gender gap won’t close until 2133, which was a big slowdown from their 2014 prediction of 2095.

The IWD #PledgeforParity campaign, whose partners include EY and Accenture among others, focuses on prompting individuals, both men and women, to “move from talk to purposeful action”in one of five areas: helping women and girls achieve their ambitions; challenging conscious and unconscious bias; calling for gender-balanced leadership; valuing women’s and men’s contribution equally; creating inclusive, flexible cultures.

Accenture is also holding their annual celebration, with live broadcasts around the world, which will focus on “Being Greater Than: It’s about going beyond boundaries and expectations. It’s about raising our voices and our sights to advance the women, the ideas and the goals that will drive the next generation of leaders.”

Walking the walk, Accenture’s annual event is substantiated by every day action with hiring goals and retention practices in place to create accountable change.

It’s About Every Day.

The biggest thing we can take from IWD is that gender equality is about every single day. It’s not only about the special initiative, or the big event, or the dedicated task force. These things only exist to redirect our attention and energies to the prevalent imbalances that current organizational operations too often stem from and collude with.

According to our CEO and resident organizational psychologist Nicki Gilmour, “Action is what is needed, because I’ve witnessed thattoo often companies stop at lip service.Even when they pay for consultation andsolutions, they often take none of the steps outlined; theypull none of the levers available to them to createequity in the system.Instead many firms throw a party on International Women’s Day and feel that the mission is somehow accomplished whilst talent processes and management practices remain untouched.”

IWD is about what happens every day.

As Aarons-Mele puts it, “IWD gives us all the chance to think about how we address rights and equality all other 364 days each year (or 365 days, this year). How can we move beyond thinking and acting on one day to make equality part of the bones of our organizations? How can we make operational and systemic changes so that we don’t have to take “extra” actions that improve the lives of women. How can we improve our systems to have advancing equality baked right in to our missions? We can all benefit from treating IWD as less a be-all, end-all day for women and more as a jumping off point to use each day of the year to advance women’s rights.”

With that, The Glass Hammer will keep talking about gender equality andacting to create real change today,tomorrow, and each day after that.

/by

International Women’s Day

, ,

women smilingInternational Women’s Day known as IWD is on Tuesday 8th March this year and we have great coverage from our writers, our clients and our partners all month long.

The career tip of the week has a distinct hint of counting our blessings as we look at the broader scope of women everywhere. My advice today is to get out of the weeds and do some big picture perspective taking today. Never mind the nitty gritty at work, list the 3 regular tasks that you enjoy most at work currently. Now look ahead at what you want to achieve in the next 18 months. Are you on track to increase the number of things that you enjoy doing? If so, excellent! if not, time to think about what is your next move to improve your work life and while you are at it, take a look at the big picture also. What can you commit to doing to make your life overall better and more fulfilling?

Check theglasshammer.com all month for our International Women’s Day coverage and our usual selection of excellent profiles.

By Nicki Gilmour, Executive Coach and Organizational Psychologist

Contact nicki@theglasshammer.com if you would like to hire an executive coach to help you navigate the path to optimal personal success at work

/by

International Women’s Day Coverage: Professional Women in Nigeria

International Women’s Day is an opportunity for theglasshammer.com to look at the status of professional women in other parts of the world. Africa is a huge continent with varying business environments. South Africa gets the most attention followed by somewhat negative attention for Nigeria due to reported high levels of corruption.

Nigeria is Africa’s most populous country and largest economy is in the midst of an workplace equality revolution. How easy is it for Nigerian woman to climb the corporate ladder in modern day Nigeria?

Today, the participation of women in corporate managerial roles is being discussed at all levels of Nigerian society. Traditionally a Nigerian woman’s place was by her husband’s side but todays Nigeria is becoming a much different society. In the last decade women have held positions of leadership in the Nigerian Medical Association, Nigerian Bar Association and the Institute of Chartered Accountants. In government, the two important cabinet positions of finance and petroleum are also held by Nigerian women. These advances have stirred Nigerian public sentiment over the viability of women in positions of power. The minister of Nigerian finance, Diezani Alison-Madueke recently felt the need to state, “We are there not because we are women. We are there because of our competence as managers.”

The present reality and the future progress

Despite being well educated with the appropriate training and experience Nigeria is still facing a problem when it comes to getting women into top level positons in the corporate world. But the ambitions of young, professional Nigerian women seem to be rising to meet this challenge. In a 2008 survey conducted by Nigeria’s University of Ilorin, 52.5% of female Nigerian managers were 21 to 30 years of age while only 25% were between 31 to 40 and 15% were between 41 to 50 years old. This represents a massive boom in the early hiring of young female professionals into Nigeria’s managerial roles. The Chairperson and Chief Executive of Britannia U Group, an oil and gas conglomerate, Catherine Uju Ifejika said, “We are able to hold your homes together, and we are beginning to translate that into boardroom jobs, and then owning companies. In six years I have formed seven companies.”

Today’s recent rise in public discussion and government interest in the participation of women in the corporate world comes from newly published studies on the economic benefits of female participation. A big push to include women comes from the economic success of neighboring South Africa and its relative achievements in this area. Winihin Ayuli-Jemide, a Lagos-based entrepreneur and former lawyer said of South Africa’s women, “They dominate the low capital businesses, the ‘informal sector’ such as manufacturing knitwear, tie and dye and homemade food for sale in municipal markets.” She sees this as the key to South Africa’s success but wants Nigeria’s women to aim higher. She cites investment, particularly in oil and gas as Nigerian women’s most efficient way to gain economic and power equality.

International studies also seem to have had a large impact on Nigeria’s view of professional women. McKinsey and Company, a multinational management consulting firm, has since 2007 published a series of surveys and studies entitled Women Matter. The overall conclusion of these studies is that companies with a higher female representation at the executive level maintain a higher economic output than those with lower representation. Winihin Ayuli-Jemide welcomes the influence of these studies and cites the need for more African based research. She says, “In Africa we really don’t have information about gender issues, nothing on how we are doing in the economy.”

A lack of mentorship for rising women in the corporate world has also been blamed for Nigeria’s lack of women in senior positions. And women who attempt to learn are sometimes seen as more of a secretary and/or mistress then colleague. A respondent to a survey conducted by Petroleum-Gas University of Ploiesti who has over 12 years in the corporate banking, oil and gas sectors had this to say. “There was a stage in my career where I was discriminated against as a family woman, when I was given a mentor, he was too bossy and spoke to me sometimes as if I were his girlfriend. He wanted me to stay late evening at work and wanted me to also meet up with him in restaurants, canteens… I could not keep up with these demands and our relationship became tense…. I prefer to have female mentor…it is easier to compare notes and learn from one another’s effort.”

Many Nigerian Women also feel that they must sacrifice their familial lives for the careers in an effort to appear more “macho”. In a 2011 survey by the Petroleum-Gas University of Ploiesti, a respondent was quoted, “The corporate environment here in Nigeria is difficult and very Macho. As a woman you have to strive harder and do twice as well as the guys in order to be noticed or succeed. Women are always considered not fully committed, especially if married with children”.

But despite deeply entrenched gender roles, Nigerian society’s view of women as professionals seems to be changing. The same survey mentioned in this article by University of Ilorin in 2008 showed that 90% of respondents believed Nigerian women were capable as managers and can possess leadership traits which are similar to their male co-workers. This indicates an encouraging trend that will possibly change gender dynamics further and will take time to play out in real working environments over the next ten years.

By Ben Rozon

/by

OP-ED: Why what your company does the other 364 days of the year beyond International Women’s Day is what matters

Nicki GilmourIn celebration of 2014’s International Women’s Day (IWD), and in keeping with the mission of The Glass Hammer to inform, inspire and empower you in your career, the many interesting, useful events that IWD creates will be covered extensively here throughout the month. Instead, today let’s talk about the elephant in the room; what is your company doing every other day to ensure that systemic biases are removed so that you thrive, not just survive?

Organizational culture, the often tacit and engrained ways that work gets done in your firm, is where the rubber meets the road for diversity, despite it often still being treated like the entrance checklist to Noah’s Ark. Observing the behaviors of leaders and managers will tell you a lot about your potential to get that corner office. Practically speaking, you can start to examine what actions get rewarded, what gets tolerated, what gets rewarded and who gets authorized to lead.

A good example of someone who fell foul to how things were being managed at their firm is Ina Drew and the London Whale scandal, which demonstrated that doing your job sometimes isn’t enough since silent endorsements of other people’s bad behavior, or even failure to act, can sink you. Ignore your people’s behavior at your peril is advice for a leader of either gender, but there is an added dynamic of having to prove yourself as a female leader.

Will we see change by 2020?

We all want to say yes. We all want to say we live in a post-bias world where meritocracy rules. In a recent survey by Accenture for International Women’s Day, 70 percent of the 4100 respondents globally said that the number of women CEOs will increase by 2020; with 15 percent believing the increase will be significant. Whilst admiring this optimism and hoping these results to be true, due to the absolute lack of growth over the past six years, this scenario is hard to envision. Data and history show the contrary, and I think there is a huge behavioral gap between what people think they want and consciously voice, and then what they unconsciously do.

Recently, I was involved in a career session where I presented research by a colleague of mine who extrapolated the “Think Manager, Think Male” research to include further dimensions around “Think Manager, Think Straight Male.” The respondents to the survey were aged 18-28 and were mostly females based in NYC. The results were surprising, with the survey revealing that respondents believed that straight men still had more leadership traits than straight and gay women. Interestingly, gay men were assigned attributes that least lined up with what they thought a successful manager looked like. Stereotyping is real. I am pretty sure if you had of asked these women if they wanted to be CEO, they would have said yes. Yet they are authorizing the other gender to do the job based on just that –their gender (and the intersection with their sexual orientation as straight).

Read more

/by