In 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).
