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A few years ago, I was flying to Des Moines and found myself sitting next to a business man. We had this beautiful conversation and he talks to me about his children and their sports teams, then he tells me, "So, why are you going to Des Moines?" And I did say I'm going to talk to a Women's Leadership Conference. And suddenly, this otherwise charming man freezes and shows the deer under the headlights and, finally, he raises his arms to the sky and he goes away, "sorry I am a man. And he goes on to tell me that in his bank, he just went through diversity training and it was the worst thing ever. It was like being punished or sent to the director's office and he said that at the end of his training he had only one message: "It's all your fault". And I thought it was a shame, it's a shame. are the guys we need on our side and instead they feel alienated.
So the next day, I'm in a ballroom full of women talking about the problems we face at work, and I'm not just talking about the headlines of "Me too" about badual abuse, but everyday indignities that are marginalized, neglected, ignored, interrupted, just not taken as seriously as the guy sitting right next to us. And I look at the sea of female heads nodding, I stopped in the middle of a sentence, I said: you know what, we already know it. We need men in the room to hear that instead.
It was a real moment "Aha!" For me because women, when we meet, talk all the time about the problems we face at work, but we do not talk to men, and I really took aware that women who talk to each other is half a conversation. This gives us at best a 50% solution. We need men to join us.
Now, I spent my career as a journalist surrounded by men. I spent 20 years at the Wall Street Journal, I was editor of an economic magazine and USA Today. All my mentors were men. My colleagues were largely men. They were great guys, but as we eliminated them from our conversations, we end up demonizing many of those brave guys who could and should be our allies. And, moreover, many of them are surprisingly destitute: "What are the problems women face at work?" In fact, Pew conducted a survey in which the majority of men believed that the barriers to women in their careers had disappeared. Sexism is solved! But the majority of women in the same survey said that significant barriers remain. That's why I spent three years researching and interviewing men trying to fill that gap. And I also plunged into research.
Now that the data is clear, adding women to your organization makes you more successful. Companies that have leadership in gender balance are more successful financially. Their employees are happier, but research has also shown that my seatmate on the way to Des Moines was right because the diversity training had failed. Harvard professor Frank Dobbin has examined 30 years of diversity training in more than 800 companies. He found that for two groups of black women and women, diversity training made the situation worse. This is explained for a variety of reasons, but one of them was resentment on the part of the white men who were the main beneficiaries of the training. This made them feel bad about themselves – which, by the way, turned out that it was the goal. I spoke to a veteran of diversity, he said, "Hey, what we were doing before is basically beating whites with a two-by-four. we wanted to that they feel guilty. And if they cry even better. So, it's perhaps not surprising that we've been using the wrong strategies for decades, which is why, for example, women still earn only 80 cents per dollar. And for black women, 61 cents, for Latinas, 53 cents. In the meantime, even though women earn more than half of university degrees, we represent only 5% of the CEOs of large companies. A Rockefeller Foundation survey found that one in four Americans think we will literally invent the journey back in time before women run half of the Fortune 500 companies.
So what's going on here? Well, it turns out that nothing of this bias starts there. It begins much earlier, at home from childhood, and it is because of this unconscious bias that we all have and which is buried so deeply in us that we do not even realize it exists.
I am the mother of a daughter and a son. Research tells us that mothers of infants consistently overestimate their baby's crawling ability, but underestimate their baby girl's crawling ability. Then, when these kids reach the age of 2, parents typing in Google: "Is my child a genius, they are more than twice as likely to write this about a two-year-old boy as 'a girl. Then these kids go to school, their teachers are biased. In one experiment, students were subjected to two sets of math tests. An anonymous note, a note with names at the top. Once rated anonymously, the girls outperformed the boys. When they were named with the names in mind, the boys suddenly outperformed the girls in maths. Now, this pattern repeats itself until university, where a student needs an average of A to be considered the equivalent of a college student with an average of B. This means that, by the time these now-grown children, now young men and women, are entering the labor market, they have already realized that women are worth less, and when we value women less, we also value their contributions less. For example, researchers have found that women are interrupted three times more often than men. Northwestern University found that even female Supreme Court judges are interrupted three times more often than male judges. And then when women, when we represent less than a third of a room. Our voices are literally not heard.
When I speak with groups, I very often request a show of hands among the women who have gone through the following scenario: you say something at a meeting and nobody seems to hear it. And two minutes later, a guy repeats exactly what you just said and everyone turns to him and they say, "Hey Bob, good idea you have Bob." Agree, usually, 100% of the hands get up, including mine, because we are a lack of respect that researchers have documented between men and women and that's what I've found of the clearest way when I interviewed transgender professionals. They are the only people who have lived on both sides of this fracture. One of them was Ben Barres. Ben Barres was therefore this neuroscientist at Stanford University. He was born under the name of Barbara Barres and his transition to middle age has already started with a successful scientific career. He told us that after his transition, he went to a conference, that he had submitted a paper and that an audience had been addressed to another scientist. and said, "Wow, Ben Barres, he's so much smarter than his sister Barbara."
So, it turns out that there is a whole series of communication cuts that exacerbate everything we talk about. Thus, for example, women use more cover language, "I do not like to disturb you but …" or "It could be a stupid question but …" and we use this "high speech", we let's say as a question when really saying a statement, and also women – we apologize like all the time, and we are not sorry. We are also very aware of all these verbal tics that we try as crazy to reduce them. I've met women who have sorry jars on their desk – whenever they excuse themselves, they have to give money. I have met women who have taken drama clbades to be more confident with the men they work with or who have sent vocal coaches to lower the tone of their voices and look more like the men they work with. We women, we bend so hard to integrate into this world created by men for men, we fell to the ground. It's time for men to lean towards us.
Now, the challenge is that even men who want to be part of the solution, often do not know exactly how, and fear is a hindrance. 74% of the men surveyed said they feared the disapproval of other men, the fear of losing their status and the fact that they would not say the right thing to us women and we would cut their heads.
Now, during my interviews with men, I discovered another type of fear, namely the fear of tears. They were men in positions of authority, they said they were afraid to inadvertently say something to a subordinate who would hurt her and make her cry, but research tells us that when women cry at work, It's not because our feelings were hurt, it's because we're pissed off. We are frustrated. We are furious. A crying woman at work looks a lot like a man who shouts at work, but men do not know it. This has very serious consequences for women's careers. In a survey, 79% of men said they were afraid to give women the frank feedback they need to succeed. And we see it in performance evaluation studies. In one study, men got a lot of comments based on metrics. However, women ended up having personality critics with words like "irrational", "strident" and "abrasive". Now, the good news in all of this is that there are actually simple steps that each of us can take. will counter these prejudices, they boil down to awareness, and I'm just going to mention three really easy ones.
- Interrupt the switches. No matter who should feel empowered to say, "Hey Darlene was talking, I would like to hear him finish." Some companies now apply "no-break" rules for their meetings.
- Amplification. Now, it's when a woman says something, then that someone else – it can be a man, it could be a woman – repeats her point of view by giving her credit, attributing name to her idea, amplifying his voice.
- And then & # 39;brag about friends. It's my favorite. This is what women in a consulting firm did when they developed a strategy in which a woman tells her incredible accomplishments to another, and vice versa. And then everyone goes to the boss and boasts of the other.
The bottom line here is to be an ally. Right? Whether you are a man or a woman: denounce bad behavior when you see it and notice your own behavior. Are you the person who attracts attention when a man is talking, but you suddenly want to check your email or Facebook on your phone while a woman is talking? Drop this bading phone. Right?
Now, I realize that none of these steps is a panacea, and we clearly need a systemic change. We need a family leave. We need badyzes of the pay gap between men and women to ensure that men and women are paid equally. But these steps are a start. And if we take them, what could the world look like? Well, it turns out that the World Economic Forum ranks countries according to gender equality and that, for ten years, Iceland has been at the top of the list. So I went to Iceland.
Here is what you need to know about Iceland:
It is the most macho country on the planet. You go to Reykjavík, the capital, and in the middle of it, the Church of Iceland has the most phallic spire you have ever seen. Real story, you look at a picture of me on my first day in Iceland. The hotel receptionist waved me outside to say, "It's a nice day out!" I'm walking outside and it's raining ice. And the ice comes to me from the side. So I go to the nearest museum to get out of the ice, you look at a picture, it's me, I do not ask you, it's the only penis museum in the world. Hundreds of specimens and a hell of souvenir shop. It is a country that values its masculinity and yet, when I was sown with the men of Iceland, these big fishermen and beefy peasants, they said things like, "Of course, I'm a feminist!" There was no political connotation of this word whatsoever. It was a bit like saying "of course I'm human," and I realized that the reason why Iceland is number 1 has very little to do with women, and all to do with men because men realize that gender equality is not a women's affair, it is not a matter of "girls", it is a matter that concerns us all .
It is a humanitarian problem that we all need to work on together to reduce the gender gap. It's the idea that we have to get into the rest of the world, and certainly here in the United States. And I must say that I know it is difficult, but I am optimistic with caution. I've heard hundreds of men over the past year want to to be part of this transformation. One of them was a management consultant and he had written an article on gender equality and he said that it was one of the most difficult things that he has done in his whole life. He said, "Men are worried I to know enough? Make I have the right to talk about this problem? And my answer to you, and my answer to you all: hell yes! Damn, yes! This is how we will succeed in narrowing the gender gap, because when men and women work together, we can change the world.
Thank you.
This piece originally appeared as a TedX speaks on YouTube.
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