women

Women in Technology: Outsiders Within

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I often hear two commonly held myths from my audiences when I make presentations on gender in the workplace: Myth #1: Things must be different for the younger generation of women and men in the workplace—gender dynamics, in general, must have changed for them. Myth #2: Technology firms like Google, as young companies that reflect youth culture, must have postsexist cultures. My audiences reason that surely young women do not have the same challenges that older women face in more mature organizations. Sorry, but wrong on all counts. In a recent article in the Boston Globe, author Callum Borchers notes that even though high-tech companies create “hip” workspaces to promote creativity and attract young workers, they still have “shades of man cave everywhere.” Borchers explains that the combination of beer kegs, ping-pong tables, Xboxes, and networking events after hours during family time can leave female workers feeling like outsiders. In addition, some women describe hypercompetitive, clubby, and aggressive work styles in these companies that reflect an adult frat-house culture where they receive subtle messages that they do not belong. And the messages are not always subtle. Two different women in the gaming industry in Boston recently received, at different times, online rape and death threats telling them to get out of the gaming world. Not all women in technology feel this way, of course, or have these negative experiences, but the low numbers of women in technology probably reflect a number of factors, which include subtle messages, pervasive stereotypes about women not being capable in math and science, few role models, and pervasive unconscious discrimination. Here are some statistics:

  • 15–17 percent of technology employees in most Silicon Valley companies, which includes Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google, are women.
  • 26 percent of computer science professionals nationwide are female, while 8 percent are black and 6 percent are Hispanic.
  • 3 percent of venture-backed technology start-ups nationwide have a female chief executive.
Technology organizations can attract and retain women if they make an effort. Here are some suggestions:
  1. Invite women to pitch ideas inside the company to overcome a tendency for women to hesitate until they feel their idea is perfectly developed.
  2. Form gender-balanced panels to interview applicants for open positions or to consider promotions to overcome unconscious bias that results in women not being hired or promoted at the same rate as men.
  3. Establish a private room for breast pumping to help attract the best young female talent, and develop family-friendly policies. Women pay attention to these details when deciding where they want to work.
  4. Establish mentoring, sponsorship, and support programs for women within the company.
  5. Fund scholarships for women to study math and science, and sponsor competitions that include lots of women.
  6. Create networking events during work hours or that families can attend (instead of golf outings or after-hours drinking and cigar parties—yes, these still occur).
  7. Encourage men to be allies and redirect attention to women’s ideas when women are ignored in meetings.
  8. Raise awareness of the double binds that women face in the workplace and how women and men can work together to overcome them.
These are just some ideas for how technology companies can increase the diversity of their workforces. Kudos to a number of the big companies, such as Intel, Google, and Facebook, that now admit they have a problem and are starting many of the efforts described above to correct the imbalances they have created. It’s not too late! Women are good at math and science and will pursue those interests if they get the message that they belong in technology professions.]]>

The Confidence Myth : A Book Review

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The Confidence Myth: Why Women Undervalue Their Skills and How to Get Over It, author Helene Lerner acknowledges both the external prejudices and the internal factors that create challenges for women, many of which I have discussed in previous articles. Lerner also debunks some long-held myths about confidence that are important for us to consider: Myth #1: Being confident means you are fearless. Lerner points out that, actually, most people who are successful sometimes feel fear, nervousness, or doubt. In fact, feeling nervous can keep us sharp and alert so that we are poised to do our best at important moments. Myth #2: Being confident means being self-sufficient and not needing help or support. Once again, not true. We all need people to be thought partners, coaches, and cheerleaders who encourage us to take risks and go for what we want. Myth #3: A confident person is calm and certain. Lerner points out that “confidence is taking action while having conflicting thoughts and sensations,” which doesn’t always mean being comfortable. Myth #4: Leadership presence is something you are born with. Not so, says Lerner. Leadership presence involves skills that we can learn. These skills include being authentic, demonstrating poise during stressful times, listening well, dressing appropriately, and using power language to assert yourself (especially true for women). Myth #5: If I don’t do it, no one else will. Lerner notes that learning to say no, setting limits with people, and identifying and prioritizing our own needs are essential to our own success. As women, we are often so focused on the needs of others that we don’t even know what our own needs are. Lerner suggests that we make time for simple pleasures that replenish us; get rid of time bandits like guilt, people pleasing, and perfectionism; and learn to say no. Myth #6: Being a “nice” person means not bragging and not talking about my abilities. We need to be able to toot our own horns and advocate for ourselves. How will others know what we are good at—or how confident we can be—unless we tell them? Myth #7: Women have to be twice as good, or perfectionists, to get ahead. Even in the face of prejudices and negative stereotypes about women, Lerner argues that we need to give up perfectionism. Being perfect is not attainable and striving for that standard is not sustainable. It’s better in the long run to take risks, reach high, and grow from mistakes—and learn to use a standard of “good enough” to keep from getting paralyzed by perfectionism. Myth #8: Good leaders always make rational decisions. Nonsense, once again. Lerner points out that “research shows a positive correlation between intuition and business success.” Learning to listen to and trust our intuition, or inner voice, is not some feminine magical notion. In fact, both male and female leaders talk about the importance of making rapid decisions that draw upon their experience. Lerner states that we can even reframe intuition as “the rapid processing of everything we already know, everything we’ve learned and experienced.” However you explain it, we each have an inner voice we can learn to trust and that can be an important source of information. Lerner’s book is packed with useful information, real-life stories, and exercises to develop important skills for creating the perception of confidence. I highly recommend this book.]]>

Next Steps for Strengthening Relationship Skills

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  • Practice your listening skills.
    1. Listen to someone else without interrupting for five minutes while she talks about something she cares about that she is either dealing with or is frustrated by. You can use nonverbal behaviors, such as nodding or raising your eyebrows, to show that you are listening, but you cannot say anything. Notice what gets in the way of fully listening, and bring your attention back to the speaker. Notice how quickly you may want to interrupt and interject your opinions or your own experiences—but don’t interrupt.
    2. Now it’s your turn. Ask the listener to let you talk for five minutes about something you care about that you are dealing with or are frustrated by. Notice your reaction to having five minutes to talk without interruption. Is this situation unusual? Do you like it? Do you dislike it? Just notice.
  • Distinguish gossip from transknitting. Share the definition of “transknitting” with two other women, one at work and one outside of work whom you talk with regularly. During your conversations, when discussing another person, ask each other, “Is this gossip or transknitting? What do you think?”
  • If you have a relationship that has recently become strained or has come to an end for reasons that you may or may not understand, consider asking for help with using the relational resilience tool described above.
    • An excerpt from my book, New Rules for Women, available at Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/dp/0982056982/).]]>

    What’s Different about Leading Women?

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    New Rules for Women, shows—that women often have different relationship expectations of their female colleagues than they do of males. I call these expectations women’s friendship rules. We begin to develop friendship rules at a very young age, but by the time we are adults our friendship rules have become unconscious. Men have friendship rules, too, but because of differences in our gender socialization, theirs are not the same. Women’s friendship rules tend to be much more egalitarian and relational, while men’s expectations, reflected in most workplace cultures as “the right way to be,” are more transactional and hierarchical. Women expect female colleagues and team members to be friendly, to share personal information, and to be collaborative. In fact, the coach in our opening story seems to be reflecting men’s friendship rules when she asks how to get the women to “just focus on the task” of winning games. I told the coach she was asking the women to be men—and they are not men—which would not work. As their leader, her task is to help them build the strong relationships they need for effective teamwork and to be motivated to win. I also suggested that she was another factor in the motivation equation. Not only do our friendship rules create expectations of peers and colleagues, but my research shows that female subordinates often expect different leadership behaviors from their female managers or leaders as well, needing them to be more relational, too. They do not have this expectation of male leaders. This means the female coach may need to spend more time chatting and getting to know her team members than she’s accustomed to motivate them. Here are five tips for leading women in the office and on the playing field:

    1. Create a shared vision, or picture, of a high-performing team. What is happening? How does it feel to be a team member? How are team members working together? Facilitate a conversation among the team members to help them create a shared vision of what it means to them to be a high-performing team.
    2. Make team agreements, or explicit friendship rules, about how team members will behave to support each other, be friendly, handle disagreements, compete, and have different roles and styles. We are not all the same, and we need to make our expectations clear to each other and find common ground about what to expect.
    3. Tend to relationships, and do not push hurt feelings or misunderstandings under the rug. Create regular spaces to clean the relational field, or take time to talk about interactions that have not gone well and create new agreements about how to handle them next time.
    4. Celebrate successful teamwork.
    5. Encourage friendships, but discourage cliques, for the good of the team.
    Women’s gender socialization means that for many women being team players and collaborating comes easily. We need to be intentional, though, about making our unconscious expectations of each other explicit so that we can both work hard as individuals to reach our individual potential and be authentic and caring as friends and teammates who maintain strong and supportive relationships. We can do both.  ]]>

    Molly and Julie's Story Revisited

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    Molly and Julie (from my earlier post) is described below.  

    Step 1: Presession interviews

    The facilitator conducts a presession interview by phone, before the face-to-face session. Each party is asked to state her hopes for the meeting and to describe what a positive outcome would be. She then tells her version of what happened and why she felt hurt. The purpose of the interview is to help each woman organize her thoughts and her story, to allow the facilitator to know key details of her story to remind her of them during the session if she forgot something significant, and to build the rapport between each woman and the facilitator.

    Step 2: The Two-Hour Face-to-Face Session

    The parties arrange a two-hour meeting in a quiet, neutral location.

    The Facilitator Role

    The role of the third party, or facilitator, for the face-to-face session is to propose a structure, to get buy-in from the participants to the structure, to help both parties listen to each other and not interrupt each other, and to ensure that both feel heard. The facilitator may help keep track of time boundaries that the parties agree to. Time boundaries may be open (“take all the time you need”) or fixed (“take 20 minutes each”), based upon the structure that is agreed upon. It can be helpful, at the beginning of the session, for the facilitator to express her belief that this process can really work and has worked with others to invite an open mind set for the participants.

    Roles and Process for Speaker and Listener

    Each woman takes turns being either the speaker or the listener. This means that the person who goes first as the speaker has all the time she needs, or all the agreed-upon time, to tell her version of the story, as she perceives it, of how she was hurt and why. During this time, the listener can ask clarifying questions or check for understanding (sparingly), but she cannot argue, debate, express her own opinions, or tell her story. Once the speaker has finished, the listener summarizes what she heard and the speaker corrects that understanding until she feels heard by the listener. The listener doesn’t have to agree; she just has to demonstrate that she heard the speaker’s perspective. Once the speaker verifies that she feels heard, then the listener can state what she heard that was a new insight or new information to her. She will have more opportunity to do this again at the end of the session. The listener may be able to apologize at this point by saying something like, “I’m sorry that my actions/behaviors caused this hurt for you.” If she is not ready to apologize, this can come at the end, but the sooner it can be done, and the more often it can be done, the better!

    Role Reversal

    Next, the listener and speaker switch roles and repeat the process described above for speaker and listener.

    Wrap-Up

    Next, each party states or repeats what she heard from the other party that was a new insight or a deeper understanding. Each apologizes for what she said or did that caused hurt for the other person. (Note: Her intentions are irrelevant. What is important is to acknowledge the impact of her behavior.) For the next step in the process, the facilitator asks each party to make a statement about how she is feeling at the end of this session. Usually, if the participants have fully engaged in the process and have been open, they will say that they are hopeful or cautiously optimistic, reflecting the development of some mutual empathy that has reopened their connection and made renewal of the friendship possible. Because this is a deeply emotional process for most people, it can be hard for people to fully articulate their understandings and feelings, and the facilitator can help people feel comfortable to express themselves. As a final contribution, the facilitator again expresses her belief that this process can really work and has worked with others. She can encourage the parties to stay hopeful and be open to moving forward together and letting go of the past.  

    Guidelines for creating relational resilience

    Goal: To create mutual empathy to repair a relationship Skills and Competencies Needed: Listening skills, skills for asking clarifying questions, the ability to apologize. Process: Turn taking as both speaker and listener
    Before the face-to-face meeting
    • The participants engage support from a third party to facilitate the meeting. • The facilitator interviews each woman before a two-hour face-to-face meeting.  
    During the two-hour face-to-face meeting
    • The speaker tells her story until she feels she has conveyed the important points. • The listener summarizes what she understood until the speaker feels fully heard. • The listener shares new insights or understandings gained from listening to the speaker. • The listener apologizes for the impact of her actions, if she is ready. • The participants switch roles and repeat the above steps. • In the wrap-up, each participant repeats what she now understands and apologizes again. • Each participant shares a feeling about the session (hopeful, optimistic, etc.).
      An excerpt from my book, New Rules for Women, available at Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/dp/0982056982/).]]>

    How To Be Helpful without Burning Out at Work

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    recent article in the New York Times, Adam Grant and Sheryl Sandberg talk about how selflessness and helping behavior are expected from women in the workplace, both as supervisors and as colleagues. Scholar Joyce Fletcher explains that many women place a high value on helping others and being a team player. Others also expect us to be helpful, nurturing, and generous with our time and talents. Yet Grant and Sandberg cite several studies showing that when women help others by being informal mentors, volunteering to organize office parties or charity events, and offering to support colleagues, they benefit less from it than men do. And “if a woman declines to help a colleague, people like her less and her career suffers. But when a man says no, he faces no backlash. A man who doesn’t help is ‘busy’; a woman is ‘selfish.’” These different expectations set up another double bind for women—we are expected to do extra helpful things that men are not expected to do, which may cause us to miss career opportunities. And if we don’t help, we are disliked and receive lower performance ratings. Grant and Sandberg also report that an analysis of 183 studies, spanning 15 countries and dozens of industries, shows that women are significantly more likely to feel emotionally exhausted. They note that “in their quest to care for others, women often sacrifice themselves. For every 1,000 people at work, 80 more women than men burn out.” Here are three ways women and men can prevent burnout for women:

    1. Track and reward helping behavior. Most organizations track and reward individual accomplishments but do not require or reward communal helping behavior. Expecting both women and men to be helpful to the team by assigning communal tasks rather than relying on volunteers and rewarding or valuing helping behavior from both women and men will help to correct the imbalance that often exists.
    2. Prioritize our own needs as women. Remember Tammy? She forgot to make her own needs as important as the needs of her staff. She will actually be more helpful to them if she takes care of herself and does not burn out. In his recent book, Give and Take, Grant explains that to achieve high performance with low burnout, people need to prioritize their own needs along with the needs of others.
    3. Men can speak up more to support women and share the load. In a previous article, I shared research showing that men tend to dominate meetings and interrupt women. Instead, men can speak up to draw attention to women’s contributions and can do their share of the team support work and mentoring.
    Let’s be clear. Organizations and teams need helping behavior to be successful, but that work needs to be equitably shared by both women and men to be done effectively. Please share ways you have found to help at work without burning out.]]>

    What Makes Teams Smart? (Hint: Women)

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    New research reported in the New York Times shows that one of the most important characteristics of effective, or smart, teams is that they include a lot of women—not just equal numbers, but actually more women than men as team members. This is more proof that organizations need more women at all levels and in all functions because most decisions of consequence, in every type of organization, are made by teams or groups. The authors of this new study, Anita Woolley, Thomas W. Malone, and Christopher Chabris, report being surprised to find that the smartest teams had three characteristics in common:

    1. The members contributed equally and were not dominated by one or two members.
    2. The members individually scored high on a test that showed skill at reading complex emotional states in the eyes of others. Even in virtual teams, where people could not see each other’s faces, the researchers reported that smart team members scored high in theory of mind, or “the ability to consider and keep track of what other people feel, know, and believe.”
    3. The teams with more women outperformed teams with more men.
    These findings make sense in the context of previous research showing that differences in gender socialization result in different patterns of strength in women and men. Early feminist scholar Carol Gilligan found that women more often develop and utilize an ethic of care, or concern for others, when making decisions, while men more often develop an ethic of justice, or concern about fairness. Another early scholar, Jean Baker Miller, wrote about the centrality of relationship, or self-in-relation theory, in the identity development of girls. Her work evolved into relational cultural theory, summarized by Judith Jordan, which celebrated women’s relational skills and also looked at the intersections of gender with race, sexual orientation, class, and other dimensions of difference and power. All of this is to say that it makes sense that having more women on a team will give the team greater capacity to tune into each other—to listen, empathize, and collaborate to draw out the wisdom of a group to make the best decisions. Unfortunately, recent studies also show, as I have previously reported, that women have a hard time getting their ideas heard in many teams, especially when women are in the minority. If you are collecting information to build a case for hiring and promoting more women in your organization, be sure to add this new study to your file, and share it with your boss and coworkers. Changing the gender balance on teams by adding more women can produce better results for the organization. This new study, along with several others that I have written about previously, can help us chip away at persistent negative stereotypes and unconscious gender biases that create barriers for us. Have you seen the benefits of having many women on a team—or the consequences of not having enough women? Please share your experiences.]]>

    Women Get Interrupted: Four Ways to Stop This Pattern

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    my clients and many women in my research talk about how difficult it is to get their ideas heard in meetings and about the double binds they find themselves in when they try. Kathy, a technology manager in her thirties, explained, “They say that men interrupt each other all the time and women don’t. If I’m in a meeting and I interrupt, I get in trouble, but I don’t see men get in trouble when they interrupt me. They say that women don’t do it, but when you do, it’s seen as very aggressive and inappropriate.” Alice, a technology manager in her fifties, said, “There were eight men on the team and I was the only woman. It was a constant battle [to get heard], and I almost had to be perceived as a bitch to get my point across—and then I was perceived as a bitch.” Eventually Alice left this team and took a lesser assignment. In both cases, Kathy and Alice worked in predominantly male environments and were seen as aggressive and inappropriate when they pushed to be heard. It’s not uncommon for women of all ages in these environments to feel they are in a no-win situation and to then become silent in team meetings, or to leave, to the detriment of the team. In a recent article in the New York Times, Adam Grant and Sheryl Sandberg wrote about the pervasiveness of women being interrupted or having their ideas shot down before they even finish speaking in meetings. They reported new studies showing the broad scope of the double binds for women in many workplace settings when they try to contribute their ideas. One study from Yale psychologist Victoria L. Brescoll found that “male senators with more power (as measured by tenure, leadership positions and track record of legislation passed) spoke more on the Senate floor than their junior colleagues. But for female senators, power was not linked to significantly more speaking time.” Another study by Professor Brescoll asked professional men and women to evaluate the competence of chief executives. She reported that “male executives who spoke more often than their peers were rewarded with 10 percent higher ratings of competence. When female executives spoke more than their peers, both men and women punished them with 14 percent lower ratings.” Grant and Sandberg report other studies showing that men who spoke up were rated as more helpful, while women who spoke up did not receive any increase in perceived helpfulness. We need to interrupt these patterns of double binds and punishments for women who try to speak up. These patterns not only harm and discourage women from participating, but also deprive organizations and teams of valuable ideas. Here are four tips to interrupt gender bias:

    1. Share ideas anonymously. Sandberg offered this method of soliciting suggestions and solutions to problems anonymously, to create a gender-blind environment for the evaluation the ideas. She compared this method to the discovery made by some orchestras that the only way they could achieve gender balance was to hold auditions behind screens so that the gender of the applicant was not known by the selection panel. It was also necessary for applicants to enter the audition on a carpet so that the sound of women’s high heels did not give them away as they entered. Magically, with the implementation of anonymity, these orchestras began to hire significantly more women.
    2. Encourage women to speak. Leaders need to notice when the women on their teams may have given up and stopped participating and then invite them to speak.
    3. Institute a “no interruptions” rule. Grant and Sandberg share this best practice used by a colleague that worked to make his whole team more effective.
    4. Increase the number of women in leadership. The presence of more women in leadership shifts these dynamics as people get used to women speaking and leading.
    If you have been successful in creating mixed-gender environments where you or other women have been able to overcome these double binds, please share with us what you have learned.]]>