Where Are the Women Entrepreneurs?

I grew up in a family of entrepreneurs where my mother and many of my aunts were strong businesswomen. I am also an entrepreneur, perhaps because I had female role models, and I have always wondered—why don’t more women start businesses? Claire Cain Miller of the New York Times  agrees that something is wrong with the underrepresentation of female business founders. She notes that while women make up half the workforce and earn 40–50 percent of the degrees in business, science, and engineering, fewer than 10 percent of technology startups are founded by women, and only 36 percent of all US companies are owned by women. Also, many woman-owned businesses are small, employ only the founder, and earn less revenue than businesses founded by men, according to the census data. Why are there fewer women entrepreneurs? Miller cites research reflecting the following factors:

  • Women have fewer role models.
  • People mentor and give venture capital money to people like themselves. Miller notes that this dynamic is called “homophily, or love of same.”
  • Of all venture capitalists, 91 percent are male. Most worked in investment banking, private equity, or consulting and went to the same few universities—Harvard, Stanford, or University of Pennsylvania.
  • Not surprisingly, 91 percent of venture capital-backed entrepreneurs are men. Most of them have degrees from similar colleges and worked in the same firms.
  • Women are outside of these established networks and do not get the same mentoring, contacts, or funding opportunities.
  • Women are also less likely to get management experience before trying to become entrepreneurs. Only 19 percent of top executives are women, so women are less likely to have mentors in senior leadership.
Another disturbing roadblock is that women can experience sexual harassment by venture capitalists, especially when women are raising funds for technology startups. The massive imbalance of power between women and men controlling venture capital funds means that women are often propositioned or inappropriately touched as a condition of receiving funding, jobs, or other help that they need to start businesses. They often do not receive the funding when they rebuff the sexual advance. What difference do women entrepreneurs and investors make for women and for companies? Miller cites research by Linda Bell of Barnard College showing that the gender pay gap shrinks when women are the CEOs of companies, and women are more likely to be promoted when women are the leaders. In another article, Miller  reports that when venture capital firms hire a female investing partner, the financial performance of the venture capital firm improves. While networking groups for women like Astia or women-led investment groups like Broadway Angels can help, women cannot change these lopsided dynamics without male allies fighting alongside them for these changes. Perhaps more men with daughters will be motivated to challenge the status quo. Miller cites a research paper by Gompers and Wang showing that male venture capitalists with daughters show less bias against women in making hiring and funding decisions. We need to tackle this imbalance together with conscious intentionality.   Photo courtesy of Kevin Krejc. CC by 2.0]]>

Male CEOs with Daughters Are More Socially Responsible Leaders

I just came across an interesting new study, reported in the Harvard Business Review (HBR), showing that companies run by male executives with female children rated higher on measures of corporate social responsibility (CSR), defined as “measures of diversity, employee relations, and environmental stewardship,” than is true for comparable companies led by men with no daughters.  This means that male CEOs with daughters spend significantly more net income on CSR priorities than is true for other companies (unless the CEO is a woman, but more on this later). Alison Beard, writing for HBR, reports on this research by Henrik Cronqvist of the University of Miami and Frank Yu of China Europe International Business School, who examined the CSR ratings of S&P 500 companies tracked between 1992 and 2012 and compared the CSR ratings for male executives with male and female offspring.  Beard notes that other researchers have found similar results on voting records for US congressmen who have daughters and for the decisions of US Court of Appeals judges with daughters.  Here are some of the findings:

  • Male CEOs with daughters spend significantly more net income on CSR than the median. Cronqvist and Yu explain that the literature in economics, psychology, and sociology support the notion that “women tend to care more about the well-being of other people and of society than men do, and that female children can increase those sympathies in their parents.” They hypothesize that because the median age of S&P 500 CEOs in the research sample was fifty-seven, these male CEOs may have seen their daughters discriminated against in the workplace and become sensitized to issues of inequality.
  • Male CEOs with only sons did not spend more on CSR.
  • Male CEOs with female spouses and no daughters did not spend more on CSR.
  • Research from Yale University by Eboyna Washington shows that US congressmen with daughters tend to vote more liberally, especially for legislation involving reproductive rights.
  • Beard reports on research by Adam Glynn of Emory and Maya Sen of Harvard that found similar patters among US Court of Appeals judges in cases involving gender issues.
As for female CEOs, Cronqvist and Yu had only a small sample of them available in their study, so they could not draw firm conclusions.  They did make these interesting observations that are worth noting:
  • The companies in their sample with female CEOs had much stronger CSR ratings in every category—diversity, employee relations, environment, product, human rights, and community—than did those of the male-led companies.
  • The researchers calculate that a male CEO with a daughter produces “slightly less than a third of the effect of having a female CEO. Comparisons of the data on congressmen and judges yield similar numbers.”  They conclude that “any man behaves one-third more ‘female’ when he parents a girl.”
These findings add to the growing body of research showing that gender does influence the decisions of leaders, legislators, judges, and other decision makers, in one way or another.  Doesn’t it make sense to have more gender-balanced representation in all decision-making arenas? Photo courtesy of Ruben Diaz, Jr.. CC by-nd 2.0]]>

What Liberia Can Teach Us About Electing Women

In 2005, the women of Liberia elected Ellen Johnson Sirleaf as the first female president of an African nation, and we can learn a lot by examining how they did it. In a recent article for the New York Times, Helene Cooper, a reporter who grew up in Liberia before immigrating to the United States in 1980, tells the story of how Liberian women got Sirleaf elected, highlighting valuable lessons for American women. When the Liberian election took place in 2005, Liberia had just emerged from a brutal civil war. Nearly everyone had been a victim or witness, if not a perpetrator, of extreme acts of violence. Children were kidnapped and turned into child soldiers; family members were brutally murdered while survivors were forced to watch. Cooper reports that “more than 70 percent of Liberian women were raped . . . while horrified children were forced to watch their sisters, mothers, and grandmothers gang-raped in front of them.” Cooper notes that while the women of Liberia blamed the men who waged the war for the violence and brutality, when it came time for the first postwar presidential election, initially only 15 percent of the women were registered to vote. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a Harvard-educated global technocrat with significant government experience, was running against a field of men—with an uneducated soccer star in the lead. A group of women leaders got worried and went to work to organize women to vote for Sirleaf. How did a small group of women in Liberia get enough women to register and vote twice in two rounds of voting? The problem in Liberia for getting women to register and vote was time. The men running for president were holding mass rallies, which women did not have time to attend. The majority of women worked in markets to earn their living, which is equivalent to low-wage service jobs in our country, and they were responsible for the child care in their families. Realizing that there was a need for a more effective strategy for engaging women, Sirleaf’s supporters organized to

  • Use radio stations to broadcast their message
  • Provide babysitters and market-stall tenders to free up the women to register and vote
  • Send women into rural areas with bullhorns to stand along the road and broadcast their message of the need for a female president
  • Organize women’s rallies and pass out clean drinking water at the rallies
  • Go door to door passing out t-shirts and flyers
  • Offer young men money to buy a beer in exchange for their voter ID cards to ensure that the men could not vote—not something we could do here, but very creative, nonetheless
The result, ultimately, was that 51 percent of the registered voters were women. On the second ballot, 80 percent of the Liberian women voters elected Sirleaf, who won 59.4 percent of the total vote. What lessons can we draw for electing a woman president? We have not had a brutal civil war, but women in the United States do face deeply entrenched problems in this country that male leaders have ignored for decades. We need to join together to elect women to all levels of government to represent our interests, such as
  • Closing the gender wage gap (which is much worse for women of color)
  • Ensuring that our workplaces are free of sexual harassment by eliminating nondisclosure agreements that silence women when we are harassed and keep the harassers protected and in place
  • Subsidizing child care and instituting paid family leave policies
The women of Liberia have given us a wonderful example of what we can accomplish when we work together. What would you like to achieve as part of a united coalition?   Photo courtesy of Center for Global Development. CC by 2.0]]>

Gender-Neutral Family-Friendly Policies: The Unintended Consequences for Women

Where are the senior women scholars? Universities have been concerned about the underrepresentation of women at senior tenured levels for more than twenty years, especially in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) disciplines. I wrote about several studies seeking to explain this dearth of senior women scholars in a previous article. In response to the underrepresentation of women, many of these institutions implemented gender-neutral family-friendly policies in the 1990s. Justin Wolfers, an economist writing for the New York Times, reports new research on the careers of economists in the United States that shows surprising, unintended consequences of these policies for female economists. Wolfers reports that in fact, some gender-neutral policies have advanced the careers of male economists at the expense of women’s careers, which is probably also true in other disciplines. The specific gender-neutral policy under investigation here is the tenure extension policy, which grants one extra year to the seven-year tenure process to both women and men for each child. The intention of this policy is to create some family-friendly flexibility in the early years of an academic career, when the pressure to achieve tenure (publish or perish) in order to keep an academic job collides with the years when young women and men are ready to start families. Wolfers reports that new research by three economists—Heather Antecol, Kelly Bedard, and Jenna Stearns—shows a significant differential impact of the tenure extension policy on the careers of women and men. These researchers compiled data on all untenured economists hired over the past twenty years at fifty leading economics departments. They then compared promotion rates at institutions with tenure extension policies to those without them. This is what they found:

  • Tenure extension policies resulted in a 19-point rise in the probability that a male economist would earn tenure at his first job.
  • In contrast, women’s chances of gaining tenure at their first jobs fell by 22 percent.
  • Before the implementation of tenure extension, a little less than 30 percent of both women and men at these same institutions gained tenure at their first jobs. Consequently, the new policy significantly decreased the number of women receiving tenure.
One of the main flaws in the logic behind the gender-neutral tenure extension policy is that women and men experience the same distractions from their writing and research after the birth of a child. Wolfers cites Alison Davis-Blake, dean of the University of Michigan’s business school, as saying, “Giving birth is not a gender-neutral event.” Wolfers goes on to observe that “women receive parental benefits only after bearing the burden of pregnancy, childbirth, nursing, and often, a larger share of parenting responsibilities. Yet fathers usually receive the same benefits without bearing anything close to the same burden.” In fact, the study authors found that men who took tenure extension used the extra year to publish their research, resulting in higher tenure rates. No parallel rise in publication rates was seen for female economists. One of the study authors, J. Stearns, cautions that not all gender-neutral family policies are harmful. She notes that standard parental leave policies for both parents have reduced the stigma for women. Let’s note that it took female economists to uncover the harmful impact of this tenure extension policy on women—and there are not many female economists. What other unintended consequences could be negatively accruing for women from well-intentioned family-focused policies? What else might we be discovering if we had more female economists asking these questions? Do you have experiences or thoughts about the possible unfair impact of employment policies where you work? Let me know.   The image in this post is in the public domain courtesy of anekarinebraga.]]>

Hillary Clinton and Theresa May: How Gender Bias is Still with Us

Every so often things happen in the world that, for a moment, make underlying biases and stereotypes visible that are usually underground and hard to see. I believe this happened in the United States with the subtle, and not-so-subtle, emergence of racism when Barack Obama ran for president, was elected, and tried to govern. I believe gender bias and sexism are emerging now with the first-ever nomination of a woman, Hillary Clinton, by a major party for the presidency in the United States, and with the election of Theresa May as Britain’s new prime minister. Julia Baird of the New York Times writes, “The fact that a cluster of men lead the world merits no comment. But if women start to slowly enter the ranks—Theresa May, Angela Merkel in Germany, possibly Hillary Clinton in the United States—it’s treated as . . . some kind of gynocratic coup d’etat: a new ‘femokratie’ . . . the ‘dawn of a female world order. ’” One British paper warned, “The women are coming!” Baird notes that several insulting stereotypes have been used to describe May as a leader, including the Nanny (because she will now have to “mop up” after the Brexit mess created by her male counterparts) and the Thatcherite label of Iron Lady because she is known to take strong positions and be persistent. Baird observes that “our notions of mature women in power urgently need updating.” In the online publication Vox, Ezra Klein surfaces some other sources of gender bias in presidential politics when he tries to understand and explain the gap between Clinton as a public speaker—described as careful, calculated, cautious and uninspiring—and Clinton described by staff and colleagues as brilliant, funny, thoughtful, effective, and a good listener. Being a good listener is the hallmark of Clinton’s campaign style. In 2000, she conducted her senate campaign in New York State by doing “listening tours.” She won her senate seat against long odds because she listened and came to deeply understand what people in New York cared about. Once in office, she got legislation passed that addressed the concerns of her constituency. But, as Klein writes, “modern presidential campaigns are built to reward people who are really, really good at talking”—not listening. Klein goes on to point out that “we ran a lot of elections in the United States before we let women vote in them—a process developed by men, dominated by men and, until relatively late in American life, limited to men. ” Our election process also favors traits particularly prevalent in men—talking over listening. Klein cites one of my favorite gender linguistics scholars, Deborah Tannen, who explains that women value listening to build rapport and relationships. She contrasts this preference with that of men who emphasize the status dimension of communication—talking to increase status, or to win, versus listening to gain allies and build coalitions. A point by Klein that I find most interesting is that “presidential campaigns are built to showcase the stereotypically male trait of standing in front of a room speaking confidently—charismatic oration versus deep relationship.” Klein also offers observations by Brookings scholar Elaine Kamarck, author of Why Presidents Fail and How They Can Succeed Again. She found that “successful presidential leadership occurs when the president is able to put together and balance three sets of skills: policy, communication, and implementation.” Campaigns only test communication. Clinton is criticized for not being an inspirational speaker, but she has a long track record of making policy and getting things done in government through relationship and coalition building. While I agree that she has made some mistakes in her political career, isn’t it sad that her depth of policy and legislative experience and her track record for getting things done are overshadowed by an opponent who is all entertainment bluster with no accomplishments or experience in governing? Trump loves to talk about the process being “rigged” against him, but it seems to me it is actually rigged for him as a man who loves to talk to large audiences and increase his status by putting other people down. This is a form of gender bias I had not seen before, and it explains a lot. Is it new to you, too? What other gender bias is getting clearer for you in this election? Please share your observations in the comments section.   The image in this post is in the public domain courtesy of Jens Junge.]]>

How Women Decide: A Book Review

Therese Huston has written an important new book: How Women Decide: What’s True, What’s Not and What Strategies Spark the Best Choices. The book combines her own research with a comprehensive review of literature on gender differences in decision making. Some of her findings disprove stereotypes about gender differences, while others confirm and explain differences in decision making between women and men. To address these differences, Huston offers decision-making strategies for women. She notes, “Books with advice on decision making for men can be terrible for women. . . . Women need their own playbook.” This is the best playbook on decision making for women I have seen. Here are some of the findings and strategies that stood out for me.

Some Challenges for Women

Huston notes these and other challenges that women face as decision makers in organizations:
  • Women face underlying sexist assumptions that they can’t be trusted to make big decisions. A man only has to worry about making a judgment when making a big decision, while a woman has to worry about making the judgment and being judged because her judgment will be questioned.
  • If a man makes one pivotal decision for his organization, it will carry him a long time. Williams and Dempsey note that women, on the other hand, experience the “prove it again bias” as their good decisions are considered to be a fluke.
  • Women’s decision making is also impacted by something Huston calls “stereotype threat,” or the fear of living up to negative expectations that others have of your group. This fear can create distraction and anxiety for women that can result in hesitation and underperformance. I experienced stereotype threat as a young woman when my high school guidance counselor told me, “Girls are not good in math.” I became terrified of math and avoided it throughout college, thereby limiting my career options in significant ways. I later discovered that I am actually quite good in math, but my anxiety and hesitation from this stereotype threat limited my options. Women may avoid leadership positions and fear decision making for similar reasons.

Some Ways Women and Men are Equal as Decision Makers

Huston debunks a number of myths and stereotypes about men’s and women’s decision-making abilities:
  • Although many people believe that men are more decisive than women, scientists find that men and women struggle with their options equally.
  • Stereotypes suggest that women make decisions intuitively while men make decisions analytically. There is, in fact, no such term as “men’s intuition.” However, Huston reports that men get gut feelings about decisions as often as women, and women are as analytical—perhaps more so—than men in decision making because they know their decisions will be questioned and their case must be solid.
  • Men can read emotions and body language—both important sources of data for decision making—as well as women, but they don’t feel as motivated do so. Women are more motivated to pay attention to nonverbal cues as a self-protection skill because they have less power.

Differences in Risk Taking

Although men and women are equally skilled decision makers, significant differences exist between women and men in making risky decisions. Huston reports:
  • Risk taking is a skill, not a personality trait, and boys get more encouragement to practice this skill than do girls.
  • Several studies show that men overestimate their knowledge and abilities while women underestimate theirs. Overconfidence has been shown to be a major obstacle to smart decisions. Women’s more accurate self-assessment means fewer errors in judgment.
  • Neuroscience has uncovered evidence that the spike in cortisol levels produced by stress has the opposite effect on men’s and women’s approaches to risky decisions. The most stressed-out men pursue options that have big costs and a small chance of big benefits, while the most stressed-out women go for the smaller, more guaranteed success.

Effective Decision-Making Strategies for Women

Huston offers practical strategies for women at the end of each chapter. Here are some that I found particularly thought-provoking and useful:
  • Use your intuition, an important source of data, as a starting point in your decision-making process—but only trust it up to a point. Then hunt down the data to ground your decision before you make it. Don’t rely on intuition alone.
  • When you are talking about your successes in a job interview, draw attention to the successful risks you have taken. This will help counteract the stereotype that women are not decisive and do not take risks.
  • Keep your confidence dialed down when making a decision to ensure it is grounded and smart. Then dial your confidence up when you need to sell your decisions to others.
Women receive a lot of mixed messages and are subject to many confusing double binds as leaders and decision makers. Huston offers an important playbook for how women can navigate these minefields and leverage their strengths. Reading this book will open your eyes and give you practical strategies for overcoming the challenges of making decisions as a woman. Let me know what you think.   The image in this post is in the public domain courtesy of Helpsg.  ]]>

Myths about Women’s Relationships

One of the most enduring myths about women is that women are mean to each other and undermine each other at work because of the Queen Bee Syndrome. Some women do have stories of sabotage by another woman at work. My research, published in my book, New Rules for Women: Revolutionizing the Way Women Work Together, found examples of this type of behavior between women but also identified ways that organizational systems set women up against each other. In fact, this behavior between women is no different than the same behavior reported by all marginalized groups. Token representation sets marginalized group members against each other to compete for limited opportunities in environments controlled by dominant group members. This behavior is not unique to women. The participants in my study also talked about the importance in their lives of women’s support. Several new studies, reported by Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant in the New York Times, confirm that strong evidence exists to knock a hole in “the myth of the catty woman.” Here are some of the findings from those studies:

  • When researchers studied the top management of the Standard and Poor’s 1,500 companies over twenty years, they found that when the chief executive was male, it was unlikely that more than one woman would make it onto the senior management team. When the chief executive was a woman, more women joined senior management.
  • On corporate boards, women are less likely than men to be mentored or promoted to senior management positions—unless there is already a woman on the board.
  • In Latin American politics between 1999 and 2013, female presidents appointed 24 percent more female ministers to their cabinets.
  • When women negotiate on behalf of other women, they are able to boost their own salaries, too.
Yes, there are still some Queen Bees in organizations, particularly in male-dominated ones where opportunities for women’s advancement are limited. And men can also be quite mean to each other, though their behavior is often viewed as healthy competition and has no name equivalent to Queen Bee. Let’s look for ways to lift each other up and move past negative stereotypes about women. For the most part, these stereotypes are not true and definitely not the whole story. Here are some ways that women can continue to support each other:
  • By mentoring each other and being role models for supporting women.
  • By celebrating each other’s accomplishments, especially when they are overlooked.
  • By helping each other get heard in meetings.
  • By talking with each other and agreeing to compete and have each other’s backs. Yes—we really can do this!
If you have experiences supporting or being supported by women in your workplace, please share them in the comments section.     The image in this post is in the public domain courtesy of Startup Stock Photos.]]>

A Gender Gap for Female Attorneys: Where Are the Women?

Even though women make up close to half of all law school graduates, Shirley Leung of the Boston Globe notes that a gaping gender gap exists in the legal profession. She speculates that it could be the long hours required by large firms, the male-dominated culture of those firms, or outright discrimination, but “women drop out.” Leung reports that

  • Women comprise only 36 percent of the profession, according to the American Bar Association
  • Only 18 percent of women are equity partners at the largest firms
  • Women earn only 80 percent of the typical equity partner, according to a study done by the National Association of Women Lawyers
  • In high profile cases, women may be on the litigation teams, but they are relegated to roles behind the scenes and do not have speaking parts
Why does this last point matter? Leung cites Kim Dougherty, past president of the Women’s Bar Association, as noting, “getting more women to play big roles in courtrooms increases their chances for advancement, better pay, and opportunities to seek judgeships, which require lead trial experience.” Both Dougherty and Nancy Gertner, a retired federal judge, suggest that judges can impact change from the bench by asking for more gender diversity among attorneys in courtroom proceedings. By setting such policy for their courtrooms, they can open opportunities for women to litigate in lead roles. The judge presiding over the Sumner Redstone case in Boston is a recent example of a judge who “walks his talk.” When only male attorneys spoke for both sides in the opening arguments of the trial, Judge George Phelan commented on the lack of female attorneys. His comment may result in participation by more women lawyers as this case moves forward, but Gertner notes that this will only matter if the women have real speaking roles rather than just cameo appearances. We need more judges like Phelan and Gertner who create fairness and opportunity for all lawyers in their courtrooms.   The image in this post is in the public domain courtesy of Activedia.]]>

Why We Need More Women on Corporate Boards

The wealth gap in the United States is outrageous, as highlighted previously by the Occupy Wall Street movement and progressive Democrats like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. The pay of corporate CEOs continues to skyrocket, even when their companies underperform, while millions of citizens struggle to earn a living wage. The earnings of the middle class have been in steep decline, but corporate boards approve ever-increasing compensation packages for CEOs. I always assumed that if more women were on corporate boards, there would be a reversal of this trend—but new research shows the opposite. While past studies show that having more women on boards is good for company performance, Gretchen Morgenson of the New York Times reports that according to a new study, “companies with greater gender diversity on their boards paid their chief executives about 15 percent more than the compensation dispensed by companies with less diverse boards.” Why might this surprising trend be happening? Morgenson notes that while no one knows for sure, some experts point to the following possible causes:

  • Relatively few women (roughly 20 percent) serve on corporate boards, and those who do may feel pressured to go along with the “vote yes” culture of most boards in order to keep their seats.
  • The board compensation committee determines CEO pay, and women do not commonly serve on these committees, much less as chairwomen. Morgenson notes that last year, only two out of ten committee chairs of the most diverse boards were women.
  • The same women directors often hold multiple positions. Morgenson notes that nearly one-quarter of women directors at S&P 500 companies held multiple board seats compared to 19 percent of men. This group of women might be sought after because they do not rock the boat.
Many qualified women with C-Suite experience have not been tapped to serve on corporate boards. It seems likely that a larger proportion of women on boards will create space for more women to join together to resist the “culture of yes” and help bring CEO pay back to more reasonable levels. Token representation makes it difficult to speak out. Let’s keep pushing for more women on boards.   The image in this post is in the public domain courtesy of Benjamin Child.    ]]>

Tips for Retaining Women in Architecture

The field of architecture is hemorrhaging talent. While women make up 50 percent of many graduate architecture programs, they drop out of the profession in large numbers once they start working. What is going on? A recent study on diversity by the American Institute of Architects, reported by Robin Pogrebin in the New York Times, found a lack of gender equity in the profession that contributes to women leaving:

  • Women and minorities are less likely to be promoted to senior positions. When younger women do not have role models in senior roles, they may be discouraged and conclude that the opportunities for women are limited.
  • The percentage of female architects in the United States has been stagnant for more than ten years at about 25.7 percent.
  • African American women make up less than 0.3 percent of the industry. These low numbers make it especially challenging for African American women to be accepted or taken seriously in the profession when there are so few representatives of this demographic.
  • Female architects are considered intruders by contractors and construction workers at construction sites. Their presence is often resented or not respected.
  • Younger women with architecture degrees are often pushed into drafting and interior design roles, while men design the building structures and are given more face time with clients.
  • Many architectural firms lack support for work-life balance, making it necessary for many women to choose between becoming a parent and staying at the firm and in the profession.
 

Tips for Retaining Female Architects

According to Pogrebin, the American Institute of Architects study suggests that the following behavioral and policy changes can help create environments where female architects can be successful and will want to stay:
  • Treat female architects as professionals. For example, do not call a woman a “girl,” especially in client meetings. (Yes, this really happens.)
  • Make sure that the women on a project are introduced and not made invisible.
  • Don’t comment on women’s bodies or clothes more than you would on men’s.
  • Don’t apologize for swearing in front of female architects. They can probably take it or will tell you if they are offended, just as men would do.
  • Don’t interrupt or talk over women.
  • Promote women into positions of power and influence.
  • Provide overtime pay, flexible schedules and paid parental leave to support family life for both women and men.
These suggestions for behavior and policy changes will go a long way toward changing the culture of the architecture profession to one where women will feel they can utilize their talents without having to fight against unconscious and conscious bias that creates an unequal playing field.   The image in this post is in the public domain courtesy of Daniel Lozano Valdéz.]]>