Curiosity, Mars and the Final Frontier for Women's Advancement

Curiosity Exploring Mars

In the past 40 years, corporations have tackled the challenge of women's advancement by working diligently on two fronts.

1. They have worked on the women. They help women set career goals and tell them what skills they need to enhance in order to get ahead - leadership, self-promotion, negotiation and more. 
2. They have worked on corporate practices and policies. Instituting open job posting, mentoring programs, flexible work, day care options, maternity leave options and more.

And they've gotten each of these areas about 66% right. As a result, women have made great strides into middle management. But they have not made great strides into senior leadership. One reason is what I call The Missing 33%™.

The Final Frontier

This week's landing on Mars by the ship Curiosity suggests this fitting metaphor for what hasn't happened in organizations since the early years of the feminist movement. Companies have shied away from the final frontier - i.e. helping/requiring managers to understand how the mindsets they hold can negatively influence talent decisions about women. And to take action to stop the negative consequences of their mindsets. 

Most companies have avoided doing this work in spite of repeated studies such as the recent McKinsey report that said,

“Of all the forces that hold women back…none are as powerful as entrenched beliefs. While companies have worked hard to eliminate overt discrimination, women still face the pernicious force of mindsets that limit opportunity…."

In other words, the mindsets that people managers hold have a subtle and gradual negative effect on women’s careers. 

We've been tracking over a dozen mindsets that wreck havoc with women's careers. Many of them (such as the culture of merit versus culture of self-promotion) have been turned into advice for women to change (e.g. get better at self-promotion). But this is only half of the solution - and we've seen after decades of this advice handed out generously that it hasn't solved the problem. The other half of the solution is to ensure that managers understand how their seemingly neutral (and in some cases benevolent) mindsets negatively impact women. Even though barriers to women's advancement are now semi-permeable membranes as opposed to glass ceilings, mindsets act to filter men through much more easily than women. 

Exploring the Final Frontier

Here's an example of what I mean. I worked with an executive team responsible for over 30,000 employees worldwide facilitating a discussion about actions they could take to minimize the adverse impact of mindsets on women's advancement. During the discussion, one of the women made the point that trust was very important to her in selecting candidates. A few minutes later, one of the men made this observation,

"Trust is very important for me, too. Trust is earned when I've known someone over time. What I just realized is that when I was in engineering school, there were no women in my classes. So that means that there are no women that I consider among the pool of trusted colleagues that I look to for candidates."

In his case, this seemingly neutral mindset - trust is important - has a substantially adverse impact on women's advancement. Luckily he realized it and will be able to consciously act to remedy the impact.

Recently Catalyst reported that a more inclusive culture can be achieved when white men are engaged as champions of inclusion. At Leading Women, we've begun to see the concrete impact of the gender dynamics work we're doing with women and men from around the globe. If the feedback from the diverse executive team cited above is any indication, their exploration of mindsets/gender dynamics will make a significant difference.

Is your company curious about or exploring the final frontier of women's advancement? Or, do you have similar initiatives underway? Please let me know.

Lead ON!
Susan
Susan Colantuono is CEO of Leading Women and author of No Ceiling, No Walls and Make the Most of Mentoring.
Follow her on Twitter |  LittlePinkBook  |  Facebook  |  Google+  |  LinkedInGroup |  LinkedIn

CUS Words - Fending Off Harassment

Recently a friend of my son's told me that a guy in her office is "kind of creepy" and made comments the other day about liking her shoes. I asked her what she did about it and she said nothing and that she was going to wait a few months and hope he stops.

This is a very common responses - especially among women early in their careers.

I suggested that she needs to start as she means to go and nip this in the bud. I offered several ways she could verbalize her displeasure with his attention. This reminded me of the concept of CUS words that hospitals use when building a culture of safety. It is shortcut for language that escalates if the first message isn't taken in. 

CUS begins with I am Concerned...escalating to I am Uncomfortable...and finally to this is a Safety issue.

Here's how using CUS words could work if you or someone you know is confronted with uncomfortable comments the same escalation can work this way.

1. I am Concerned that your comments are focusing on my attire, shoes and not on my work. You might be trying to be friendly, but in the workplace how I look is not an acceptable topic for discussion.
2. I am Uncomfortable that you are continuing your comments about how I look and again asking you to stop.
3. Having asked you twice to stop commenting on my appearance, I am reporting you for Sexual harassment.

If you find yourself in a position of receiving unwarranted attention, try using CUS words to respectfully make clear your boundaries. Hope this helps!

To see what else we're keeping our eye on these days, check us out on Facebook.

Lead ON!
Susan
Susan Colantuono is CEO of Leading Women and author of No Ceiling, No Walls.
Follow her on Twitter |  LittlePinkBook  |  Facebook  |  LinkedInGroup |  LinkedIn

100th Anniversary of International Women's Day

Lead ON!
Susan
Susan Colantuono is CEO of Leading Women and author of No Ceiling, No Walls.
Follow her on Twitter |  LittlePinkBook  |  Facebook  |  LinkedInGroup |  LinkedIn

Lest We Forget

I generally try to stay away from things overly political, but I see frightening trends  (and actual votes) at the state and national level that will take women back to the 1950s when we had no ability to legally plan for families. And the recent vote to de-fund Planned Parenthood could mean that low income women will also have less access to maternal health care.

Why does this matter to women in leadership? Well, several years ago the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston published a study that indicated that access to family planning was one of the most significant factors in enabling women to have careers.

How are women and men allowing this trend to happen? I think it's because we take our rights of access for granted. Rights of access to family planning, rights of access to credit, rights of access to jobs. We believe that these rights are the norm and can't be rescinede and/or we buy into the myth that there is no inequality - in spite of statistics that shows that there is. For example, Ginka Toegel's Fortune story and the HuffPost article illustrating wage gaps by industry (visual above).

Lest We Forget...

This week, Congresswoman Jackie Speier courageously spoke against the de-funding of Planned Parenthood

"As the night wore on, the vitriol and grotesque commentary got worse and worse," Speier, a second-term Democrat from California, told HuffPost. "I sat there thinking, none of these men on the other side have even come close to experiencing this, and yet they can pontificate about what it's like. It just overwhelmed me."

Conservative, republican legislators in Wyoming told their personal stories when they spoke out against exceedingly restrictive and intrusive anti-choice state laws.

Recently a colleague sent me a link to a Story Corps story about a woman in the 1970s who was a pioneer in her profession. Thanks to her and women like her, we have the access that we do to various professions. Listen here as Dee Dickson describes how she made her way as an electrician.

Stephanie Coontz has a new book about the life of women in the 1960s. Worth watching:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Stephanie Coontz
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive

Lead ON!
Susan
Susan Colantuono is CEO of Leading Women and author of No Ceiling, No Walls.
 Follow her on Twitter |  LittlePinkBook  |  Facebook  |  LinkedInGroup |  LinkedIn

Who's Failing Whom?

 In a Forbes.com article, titled " Why Business Schools are Failing Women," Selena Rezvani and Sandie Taylor explain that most business schools do a poor job recruiting and addressing the needs of women. With this I wholeheartedly agree.

But within the article that I came across very disturbing information. They write, here are common questions that women ask:

"--Can I be liked and respected?

--How do I project a firm, credible presence so that I'm taken seriously?

--Can I have the job of my dreams and a family?

--How feminine can I be in this largely male environment?

--What's the best way to maneuver through a male-female power struggle?

--How can I be sure this is a gender issue for that matter?"

While these are important questions, at least if we believe what we read in women-oriented media, they do not get to the heart of women's career success. So, I'd like to offer quick (and slightly irreverent) answers and then get on to more meaty questions.

"--Can I be liked and respected? Yes

--How do I project a firm, credible presence so that I'm taken seriously? See below.

--Can I have the job of my dreams and a family? Yes, reference most of the F500 women CEOs.

--How feminine can I be in this largely male environment? Well, you can't show too much cleavage.

--What's the best way to maneuver through a male-female power struggle? Strategically.

--How can I be sure this is a gender issue for that matter?" Do you see the same thing happening to men?

4 Questions for Career Success

Answering these questions might quell concerns, but they will not help women advance. Instead, here are 4 questions that any woman could ask in order to create a career that soars™:

1. How can I develop and demonstrate the business, strategic and financial acumen that will advance my career?
2. How do I build and nurture the right strategic networks of people inside and outside the organization?
3. What are the worldviews of successful leaders and how can I cultivate mine?
4. How do the answers to these questions change as I move up?

These are certainly not the only questions that will help advance careers, but these questions will serve women at every career stage from grad school to the C-suite and onto corporate boards. You'll find more questions along with answers and tips in No Ceiling, No Walls.

More from Forbes

In the past, I've covered this in our Lead ON! newsletter, but thought it worth posting here as well. From Carol Hymowitz' blog.

"Just 28% of some 800 companies that McKinsey surveyed for its 2009 Women Matter study cited “achieving leadership diversity” among their top 10 priorities and 40% of the companies surveyed said “it wasn’t a priority at all,” Barsh said.

The study also found that women and men have very different views about what’s needed to achieve gender parity in leadership ranks. Some 70% of the female leaders who were surveyed said they thought women needed to hold at least 30% of senior posts in business, government and elsewhere to be taken seriously and to influence decision making. But a majority of male leaders surveyed didn’t think having a critical mass of women in senior roles mattered. (Barsh agreed with the women’s perspective.)

Moreover, many companies “mistakenly think if they offer women flexible work schedules (so they can more easily balance childrearing and jobs) they’ve done enough,” said Barsh. But companies also need to analyze and improve how they developing, paying and retaining women."

And Davia Temin covered the Harvard Kennedy School's Women and Public Policy program, and co-sponsored by the Council of Women World Leaders and the World Economic Forum (Davos). She lists these findings:

• "The more complex the issue, the more diversity improves the correct outcomes of decision-making.
• Quotas do work! In India, where there are gender quotas for female chief councilors in the villages, strong evidence shows that "villagers who have never been required to have a female leader prefer male leaders and perceive female leaders as less effective than their male counterparts," even when performance is identical, according to MIT professor Esther Duflo. But "exposure to a female leader ... weakens stereotypes about gender roles ... and eliminates the negative bias in how female leaders' effectiveness is perceived among male villagers. ...

• There is a strong correlation around the world between gender inequity and poverty: The greater the gender inequity, the greater the poverty.

The overwhelming conclusion of the conference was that the time is uniquely right--the time is now--to make significant impact through a combination of hard data and measurement, case studies and advocacy. Closing the gender gap is, as Bohnet stated, not only a human rights issue, it is a verifiable business imperative for our society's well-being."

To find out what's happening at the Kennedy School go here.

Lead ON!
Susan
Susan Colantuono is CEO of Leading Women and author of No Ceiling, No Walls.  Follow her on Twitter.

2 Steps Back and 1 Step Forward

Since last month when I signed Vision 2020's Declaration of Equality (please go and sign it here: http://www.drexel.edu/vision2020/get_involved/declaration/ ) the Senate failed to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act because the entire republican block including Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins voted against it. That's the 2 steps back.

Now, for the 1 step forward - this week as reported in the Iowa Independent,

"U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) called for testimony on a more than 30-year-old United Nation’s treaty — one that was signed by President Jimmy Carter in 1980 but has never been brought to the floor of the U.S. Senate for an up-or-down vote. The treaty, known as the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women, or CEDAW, has been called an international bill of rights for women and has been ratified by all but seven countries. In addition to the U.S., other hold-out countries include Sudan, Iran, Somalia and three small Pacific Island nations.

“CEDAW is about giving women all over the world the chance to enjoy the same freedoms and opportunities that American women have struggled long and hard to achieve,” explained Durbin, who led the CEDAW hearing as part of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Human Rights and Law. “These are fundamentally American freedoms — the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — and CEDAW is a fundamentally American treaty. Women have been waiting for 30 years. It’s long past time for the U.S. to ratify this treaty and we should do so without further delay.”

Unfortunately, instead of highlighting the very real challenges that are faced daily by women in the U.S., Durbin instead closed his call with this:

“The U.S. does not need to ratify CEDAW to protect the rights of American women and girls,” concluded Durbin. “While more progress is needed, women have fought long and hard for equal rights in the U.S. and have won many victories along the way. … American women have rights and freedoms that far exceed those required under CEDAW — and ratifying the treaty would not change current U.S. law in any way. The United States ought to ratify the treaty to ensure our dedication to the protection of human rights around the world isn’t questioned.”

And, if that's the perspective needed to get the U.S. to ratify thereby separating itself from the Sudan, Iran and Somalia on this issue, so be it, but Michelle Chen aptly points out in a Huff Post editorial that ratification could cause headaches for our legislators on two provisions of Article 11:

"(d) The right to equal remuneration, including benefits, and to equal treatment in respect of work of equal value, as well as equality of treatment in the evaluation of the quality of work;
(e) The right to social security, particularly in cases of retirement, unemployment, sickness, invalidity and old age and other incapacity to work, as well as the right to paid leave"

If you care about legal protection for the gains we've made and further action on the family-friendly policies that study after study says are important for women's continued gains in the workplace, consider a call to your senator on this issue.

Lead ON!
Susan
Susan Colantuono is CEO of Leading Women and author of No Ceiling, No Walls.  Follow her on Twitter.

A Smorgasbord of News from Around the Country...and Globe

News from our Kiwi Friends...

In its Census of Women's Participation, published today, the Human Rights Commission outlines where women are losing past gains, and is particularly critical of private companies.

"The corporate sector remains an embarrassment for New Zealand in terms of diversity of governance, at a time when women are increasingly consumers, customers, clients, employers, employees and investors," the report says.

It is perplexing that boardroom doors are shut to women at a time when global business requires transformation."

 And from the U.K.

"According to Beverley Skeggs, professor at Goldsmiths, University of London, the gender pay gap between graduates is not improving. ' are much less likely to get equivalent jobs, they are less likely to be promoted as quickly so there is absolutely phenomenal gender inequality in our society that hasn't been addressed," she remarked."

Exec Women Fired More...Choose Departures More

I tried to read the original report, but the best I could do was find an article in Time that had some meat about it and the Oregon State Universtity news release.

"Women executives  are more likely to be asked to leave than men (2.9% versus 0.9 %), plus more likely to leave on their own accord (4.3% versus 2.8 %), says the study, which was conducted analyzing Standard & Poor's information on 1,500 firms, and was published in October's issue of Economic Inquiry. "The evidence suggests that women are being drawn out and forced out at higher rates. However, we don't see too much evidence of a systematic pattern in the types of firms that are forcing or having women drawn out," says lead author John Becker-Blease, an assistant professor of finance at Oregon State University. 'So, in a sense, it seems the playing field is uniformly tilted against women across firms.'"

Here's an interesting related statistic:  

Globally, senior male executives (75 percent of them) usually have a stay-at-home partner, while 74 percent of senior women executives have a partner who works full time.

Encountering Gender Fatigue

I've thought a lot about this as I've worked with F500 corporations this year. I see, especially in young women and many men in leadership, a belief that gender is no longer an issue in advancement decisions. This in spite of ample evidence to the contrary. HR execs who report statements such as, "she wouldn't want that position because she has a family" (so she's not even offered an opportunity to consider it) or who report that out of 40 or more managers viewed as high potential successors for executive positions none are women. And so I was pleased to come across the term "gender fatigue" in this Washington Post article by Selena Razvani.

"Others see gender discrimination as the reason why we're not experiencing change. Elisabeth Kelan, a scholar on gender in organizations, notes the shifting appearance of this workplace inequity. "The nature of gender discrimination has changed, moving from being blatant to being more subtle. The latter is much harder to detect and act upon. This does not mean that blatant gender discrimination has gone away―but subtle forms of gender discrimination are very common experiences in the workplace today, yet rarely expressed as such."

The phenomenon Kelan describes is called "gender fatigue," a state where people, as a default, tend to perceive their workplaces as gender neutral. Gender discrimination is seen as happening elsewhere or as incidents of the past that would not happen today. Most people don't want to believe that they work in and support a discriminatory workplace (or that they themselves discriminate), so they justify and rationalize that the discrimination doesn't exist.

I contend that the bystander effect is also at play. The more people there are in a given situation, the more we diffuse responsibility and assume "someone else will handle it." Many people know that gender inclusion is an issue, but think it's someone else's job or that another person is tackling it. Building on this observation, Bain & Company, along with Harvard Business Review, conducted a survey early this year that highlighted the levels of interest in parity work. They found that more than 70 percent of employees believe gender parity programs are failing. However, 84 percent of women surveyed believe that gender parity should be a strategic imperative for their company; while only 48 percent of men agree."

That's a lot of food for thought!

Lead ON!
Susan
Susan Colantuono is CEO of Leading Women and author of No Ceiling, No Walls.  Follow her on Twitter.

Another Smorgasbord

Executing Executive Compensation
In a recent Bloomberg News article about F500 women CEO compensation, a compensation expert was quoted as saying,

“When you see numbers like this, one can truly say that the glass ceiling in Corporate America has been shattered,” said Frank Glassner, CEO of San Francisco-based Veritas Executive Compensation Consultants LLC. “I don't remember seeing women ever getting paid more than men.”

He was commenting on the fact that, according to Bloomberg, the 15 F500 women who were also CEOs in 2008 got a 19 per cent raise in 2009 — while the men took a 5 per cent cut.

This has VERY little to do with the glass ceiling being shattered. As several studies in the past have indicated (and later comments in the Bloomberg article attest) most of those women were earning significantly less than their male counterparts. This isn't a smashing of the glass ceiling, it's what could be called a "market adjustment" in response to wage inequity. To quote Graef Crystal, the analyst who crunched the numbers,

"compensation committees are saying we don't want to have any trouble" over underpaying women, "so if we err, let's err on the side of giving them too much."

A Peek Into IWiNs
We call internal women's initiatives and networks IWiNs. Sylvia Ann Hewlett and DeAnne Aguirre recently provided a peek into the women's advancement activities at AMEX, Deloitte, Citi and Cisco. Read about them here.

Tearing My Hair Out
If I see another study that over-emphasizes interpersonal skills or personal attributes to explain why women are better leaders, I'll go bald! Not long ago, ASPIRE released the most recent claiming that women will be the leaders of the future because they self-describe as matching 8 out of 10 of the most needed leadership attributes. What are these? Integrity, emotional intelligence, responsible, takes action, people-person, aware of behaviors, change agent, true to self, visionary, inspirational. (BTW again as I mention in my book, No Ceiling, No Walls, the women do NOT match on "inspirational", although men do.)

These are not the criteria that get people into the corner office. They are nice, but insufficient. Along with them are the hard skills like business, strategic and financial acumen. As long as studies continue to under-measure these, the more women will wonder why they aren't moving into the C-suite!

Damned if You Do...Doomed if You Don't
This earlier Catalyst finding (that women are seen as competent or liked, but rarely both) seems to be turned on its head the higher women move up the ladder. A new study led by assistant professor Ashleigh Shelby Rosette of Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business found that:

“In business environments, even if women are thought to be sufficiently competent, they are frequently thought to be not very nice,” said Rosette. “But on the tiptop rungs of the corporate ladder, competence and niceness may have a certain level of compatibility for women top leaders.”

Although both top executives and middle managers were described as successful, students only evaluated females more favorably than males when they were in top-level positions. They rated these women as more competent for having faced double standards and triumphing over exceptional hurdles.

Participants in the second study also rated women as more relationship-oriented because they expected top women to engage in a more traditionally ‘feminized’ type of leadership, an employee-focused leadership style that is increasingly viewed as effective.

Both the double standard and feminization of management perceptions help explain why women top leaders were rated as more effective leaders overall than men."

Lead ON!
Susan
Susan Colantuono is CEO of Leading Women and author of No Ceiling, No Walls. She blogs on networking for PINK Magazine. Follow her on Twitter.

We Did It? Part 1

In Part 2, I challenge the Economist's title "We Did It!". Here's an analysis of the lead story entitled Female Power. It addresses why there are more women in the workforce, the opportunities and challenges.

Why - this is pretty accurate and irrefutable (except for the vacuum cleaner - as far as I can see women spend as much time on housework now as my mother did in the 50s).

1. Feminists who raised consciousness
   
2. Women role models (e.g. Thatcher and Clinton)
3. Vacuum cleaners - reducing time required for housework
   
4. The pill - giving women control over reproduction
   

Challenges - parenthood

1. "Many children have paid a price for the rise of the two-income household."
2. "Childless women in corporate America earn almost as much as men. Mothers with partners earn less and single mothers much less."
3. Millions of families still struggle with insufficient child-care facilities and a school day that bears no relationship to their working lives.
   

Opportunities

Women will be the beneficiaries of the growing "war for talent"

Increasing women's participation in the labour market to male levels will boost GDP by 9% in America

Flexible work arrangements


More women-owned companies

Lead ON!
Susan
Susan Colantuono is CEO of Leading Women and author of No Ceiling, No Walls. She blogs on networking for PINK Magazine. Follow her on Twitter.

Happy International Women's Day

The statistics are stunning! Watch this slideshow to learn:

• There is no country in the world where women’s wages are equal to those of men.
• The value of women’s unpaid housework and community work is estimated at between 10 to 35% of the world’s gross domestic product — amounting to between US $4.7 trillion and $15 trillion in 2005.
• AND more...
  

Brought to you by the International Development Research Centre.

As Hillary Clinton said during her confirmation hearing:

"If half of the world's population remains vulnerable to economic, political, legal and social marginalization, our hope of advancing democracy and prosperity will remain in serious jeopardy. We still have a long way to go and the United States must remain an unambiguous and unequivocal voice in support of women's rights in every country, every region, on every continent."

This is why the World Economic Forum issues its Gender Gap report (see earlier post). This is why women's history month is worth celebrating - the history of women's experience must remain in our awareness.

We Got The Entire Cabinet!
I'm happy to report that President Obama created an interagency Council on Women and Girls. President Kennedy created the first Commission on the Status of Women. President Clinton created a White House Office for Women’s Initiatives and Outreach, which was abolished by President Bush. From NOW.

I follow the Women's Museum on Twitter and they sent a link to their International Women's Day blog. It's worth a look.

Lead ON!
Susan
Susan Colantuono is CEO of Leading Women. She blogs on networking for PINK Magazine. Follow her on Twitter.

Obama/Biden's Agenda for Women

Wondering what the Obama/Biden administration has in mind for women? Well, you can find the agenda here...and women's concerns are defined as far ranging to include:

• Healthcare
• Research into Women's Health
• Supporting the Right to Choose
• Preventing Unintended Pregnancy
• Preventing Violence Against Women (here and abroad)
• Pay Equity
• Investing in Women-Owned Small Businesses
• and more...

AND you can go here to share your vision for America with the President and VP-elect. Here's what I wrote:

"NPR has run a series entitled "This I Believe" and every time I heard a listener essay I was reminded that I believe in women's power to lead. My vision for America includes more women in leadership positions and a sustained focus on women's issues.

This has been an historic election season for women. I have the audacity to hope that the Obama/Biden administration will capitalize on the increased visibility of women in order to tap frequently less visible, but highly qualified women leaders for key positions in the administration, in the federal government and on the courts.

I commend you for the issues on the women's agenda and hope to see great progress on all of them - including a pro-choice majority on the Supreme Court and guaranteed access to birth control. Though it might not be immediately obvious, these two issues are related. Research published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston several years ago found that the increase in women's earning power directly correlates to our reproductive rights.

My vision for the country? An America where young girls viewing the news (paper, TV, web) see their gender represented in historic proportions and grow up knowing they have the opportunity to be and do whatever they want because their control over their bodies is protected."

AND here's another call to action from Linda Basch of the National Council on Research for Women.