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Five Tips for Getting That Important Job Interview
Many recent college graduates are finding it very hard to get a job – or even an interview for one. The competition is stiff. On average, 250 résumés are received for every corporate job opening. And Forbes reported that half of recent graduates are either underemployed or not using their college degree at all.
The flip side of this situation is that employers don’t think most recent graduates have the skills employers are looking for. A recent survey conducted by the Association of American Colleges and Universities found that fewer than three in 10 employers think that recent college graduates are “well prepared.”
Over the years, we’ve reviewed hundreds of employment applications and counseled recent graduates on how best to get a good job. This process depends on getting in front of the prospective employer, and this means being invited to an interview. So here are five tips that will substantially increase your chances of getting that all-important interview.
Identify the Employers for which You Want to Work
Sending out 50 – or 500 – identical résumés to as many different companies is likely to be a waste of your time and energy. Job applications need to be carefully crafted, individualized sales pitches. To do that, you must specifically tailor each application to what a prospective employer is specifically seeking. This means you should know a great deal about the organization and the open position before preparing your submission. Some of the things you can do in this regard include reading the corporation’s annual report, studying its financial statements, familiarizing yourself with its products or services, figuring out where the position you’re applying for fits in with the organization, the sort of people you would be working with, and the reporting structure. Perhaps most important of all: identifying the nature of its corporate culture and determining if you would work well in this type of environment.
Match Your Skills with Those the Employer Seeks
Focus carefully on the qualifications required for the position. Then you need to identify how your abilities, experiences, and accomplishments uniquely qualify you for the position and distinguish you from everyone else who will be applying for it. Think broadly about what might set you apart. Teaching, research, travel, challenging sport experiences, extensive charitable work, similar work experience, and academic honors.
According to Forbes, employers most want recent graduates to possess the ability to:
Work in teams,
Make decisions and solve problems,
Communicate verbally with people inside and outside an organization,
Plan, organize, and prioritize work,
Obtain and process information,
Analyze quantitative data,
Create and edit written reports, and
Sell and influence others.
Don’t just “write” you have these skills, identify your accomplishments that demonstrate these skills. For example, if you taught a college-level lab class, you might list the skills this required as the ability to prepare progressively more difficult assignments, make complex concepts understandable, and lead a diverse group of people.
Prepare a Standout Résumé
A résumé that grabs a prospective employer’s attention has two components: the substantive content and the story it tells. The content is your skills, achievements, and experiences. Describe with short but specific bullet points. Avoid low-power verbs such as “assisted,” “participated,” and “helped.” Instead, use action verbs such as “led,” “achieved,” and “accomplished.” If the position will involve the use of technical language, be sure to demonstrate your familiarity with it. Include an explicit, specific statement as to why you are qualified for the position.
Most résumés are immediately forgettable because they are boring; make sure yours isn’t. Rather than simply listing your skills, achievements, and experiences, tie them together so that your résumé tells a coherent story: Because of this, I was able to do that, which allowed me to accomplish this. Don’t exaggerate or make unsupported claims, but do highlight what makes you special. As a test, give a draft of your résumé to a friend and ask her or him whether you’d get an interview based just on the résumé.
Use a Personalized Cover Letter
Your cover letter should be short, punchy, and compelling. Its purpose is to focus your reviewer on the salient points in your résumé that make you perfect for the job. A strong cover letter has three components: (1) a clear identification of the skills and experiences that make you a good fit; (2) evidence of those skills in action; and (3) an explicit connection between the job, your work ethic, and your interpersonal style.
Proofread, Proofread, and Proofread Again
Never send an employment application that you haven’t reviewed several times and that someone else hasn’t reviewed at least once. Don’t lose an opportunity for an interview because of a typo or grammatical error. Your first impression is riding on your ability to compose an accurate, persuasive, and elegant résumé and cover letter. Don’t blow it with a careless mistake.
Following these five suggestions will not guarantee you will get the interviews you want, but it will significantly increase your chances of doing so.
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Saying “No.” Here’s a Tip Sheet.
You are asked to do something that won’t advance your career. Can you say “No”? The answer to this depends on several factors:
Where are you in your career?
What time commitment would be involved
How many other noncore projects are you already handling?
Whether you are just starting out or well established makes a difference in your ability to say no. If you have been with your company for less than a year or two and your boss asks you to take on a noncore project, the request is not likely to be a request, but an assignment. On the other hand, if you are a fully functioning member of a team with solid accomplishments behind you, you have considerably more flexibility about saying no. In either situation, however, the essential question is whether saying yes will help you be successful in your organization. Consider whether saying yes will be useful for your career advancement, provide you with experiences to develop essential job skills, or be personally fulfilling. Unless you answer yes to at least one of these questions, you need to think seriously about saying no.
Will it take you away from or disrupt your other responsibilities? Will it reduce the time you spend on things for yourself or time with your friends and family? Depending on who asks, your position in the organization, and the strategic importance for your career of accepting the request, you may conclude you need to take on the project even if it means significantly longer hours on the job and less time for yourself and your family.
If these noncore projects are fairly distributed around your organization, you need to handle your appropriate share. But if these projects are going disproportionately to women or to you in particular because you are so good at them, it is time to start saying no.
Download your Saying No Tip Sheet.
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Do you get interrupted? Here’s your tip sheet.
If you find yourself being interrupted, we have some tips for you. Check out the list below and download a printable Interruption Tip Sheet here.
Preventing Interruptions
Remain confident
Ignore signals that someone wants to interrupt you
Don’t look at people who want to interrupt you
Use non-verbal behavior that shows you are in control (think power posing)
Don’t pause in a way that provides others with the opportunity to interrupt you
Keep your volume up
Form alliances and agree to “protect” each other at the meeting (like the women on Obama’s staff)
Talk with other participants before the meeting to share and discuss your ideas; develop a strategy to make your points without interrupting one another
If one of you is interrupted, have the other say, “I’d like to hear what she has to say,” or “I want to hear this idea”
Speak up for others who are interrupted; it is harder for someone to take control from a speaker when there are two people to contend with
Dealing with Interruptions
If the interrupter is more senior to you, you can use an approach such as: “Joe, would you mind if I finished my point? It will only take a minute…”
Depending on the context, if a person routinely interrupts you, a firm but still pleasant tone may be justified. In this case, you may use language such as: “Excuse me, Jason, I am not finished yet. The point I was about to make is…” or “Justin, I’d appreciate you not interrupting me. You can speak when I am finished.”
Don’t forget the power of your coping sense of humor. Even a wry smile can help you stay focused on your objective of keeping the floor.
Download our printable Interruption Tip Sheet here.
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A Very Bad Idea for Achieving Gender Equality
Anne-Marie Slaughter’s 2012 article, “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All,” became one of the most popular in The Atlantic’s history. Slaughter’s message, based on her two years in a high-level job at the U. S. State Department, was that a woman cannot successfully juggle a highly demanding career and the needs of two teenage boys. Many women across the country seemed to respond with a resounding “Damn right.”
We, however, found Slaughter’s article superficial and its conclusions unsupported. In Breaking Through Bias, we wrote, Slaughter’s message is “one of resignation, diminished ambitions, and frustration. We refuse to buy what she is selling.” Hillary Clinton, Slaughter’s former boss, was also critical, commenting, “Some women are not comfortable working at the pace and intensity you have to work at these jobs…. Other women don’t break a sweat.” Slaughter never responded to our criticisms or to Clinton’s. She has now, however, significantly expanded her Atlantic article in a new book, Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family. Unfortunately, we think her book is even more misguided than her original article.
Slaughter characterizes her book as a call to “reforge the sisterhood of the early feminist movement and expand and shape it into a much broader human coalition.” But Slaughter’s “broader human coalition” is not to have the same agenda as the early feminist movement: assuring women have economic, political, and social opportunities equal to men’s. Rather, this coalition’s agenda is “to correct” American society’s overvaluation of competition (read: economic activity) and undervaluation of care (read: domestic activity).
Slaughter argues that achieving “real equality between men and women” depends on our society establishing “an equally valued continuum” of care and competition, these “two great motivators of human conduct.” Such a continuum depends on our challenging “a wider range of conventional wisdom about what we value and why, about measures of success, about the wellsprings of human nature and what equality really means.” Slaughter believes if we do this, America will be renewed “as a country that values work and family equally and enables its citizens to live full and happy lives.”
Slaughter’s views are often thought-provoking and original. But many of her ideas are profoundly wrong, including her assertion, “Most of the pervasive gender inequalities in our society… cannot be fixed unless men have the same range of choices with respect to mixing caregiving and breadwinning that women do.”
This is absurd. Men’s range of caregiving and breadwinning choices is already far broader than women’s. Granted, a man who is the primary caregiver for his children might be called “Mr. Mom” and not receive the same societal respect as the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. But if a man wants to take care of his kids, he can choose to do so. His career may suffer, but nothing prevents him from serving as his kids’ primary caregiver — or shunning caregiving entirely and devoting himself 24/7 to his career.
A woman’s range of choices with respect to caregiving and breadwinning is far more limited. Barring economic necessity, a woman can freely choose to be a caregiver — in precisely the same way a man can. But, a woman cannot choose to be a breadwinner in precisely the same way a man can. This is because women are discriminated against in hiring, promotion, and career opportunities. Women in traditional male careers are discriminated against if they seek to be leaders, competitors, and high-pressure performers. And, once women become mothers, they are discriminated against by being viewed as less competent and less committed to their careers than women without children and men, with or without children.
The discrimination women face is a far cry from being called “Mr. Mom.” It is active, persistent social and economic resistance to their achieving career success comparable to men. Slaughter is wrong when she argues that the key to “real equality” between women and men is an “equally valued continuum” of care and competition. Such a continuum would do nothing to end the workplace discrimination against women. Unfinished Business tells us a great deal about getting stay-at-home mothers and fathers more respect but little or nothing about getting women equal career opportunities. By abandoning the agenda of the early feminist movement, Slaughter has abandoned the fight for “real equality between men and women.” Achieving this equality depends on ending gender bias, not on valuing care more and competition less.
This blog originally appeared on AndieandAl.com/blog
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Are U.S. Millennial Men Just as Sexist as Their Dads?
Millennials, those Americans now between 16 and 36 years old, are often spoken of as if they’re ushering in a new era of enlightened interpersonal relations. For example, in 2013 Time predicted Millennials would “save us all” because they are “more accepting of differences…in everyone.” That same year, The Atlantic stated that Millennials hold the “historically unprecedented belief that there are no inherently male or female roles in society.” And in 2015 the Huffington Post wrote that Millennial men are “likely to see women as equals.”
If these characterizations are even close to accurate, we should expect the pervasive, damaging biases against women leaders to diminish substantially, if not end entirely, once Millennials assume positions of economic, academic, and political power. But before we start celebrating a coming age of gender parity, we need to ask whether there is any truth to these characterizations. Do Millennials really believe there are no inherently male or female roles in society? Do Millennial men really “see women as equals”? Unfortunately, the best information we have indicates the answer to both questions is no.
In February 2016 researchers at the National Institutes of Health published a study on how college biology students view their classmates’ intelligence and achievements. The researchers found that male students systematically overestimated the knowledge of the men in their classes in comparison with the women. Moreover, as the academic term progressed, the men’s faulty appraisal of their classmates’ abilities increased despite clear evidence of the women’s superior class performance. In every biology class examined, a man was considered the most renowned student — even when a woman had far better grades. In contrast, the female students surveyed did not show bias, accurately evaluating their fellow students based on performance. After studying the attitudes of these future scientists, the researchers concluded, “The chilly environment for women [in the sciences] may not be going away anytime soon.”
Millennial men’s views of women’s intelligence and ability even extend to women in senior leadership positions. In a 2014 survey of more than 2,000 U.S. adults, Harris Poll found that young men were less open to accepting women leaders than older men were. Only 41% of Millennial men were comfortable with women engineers, compared to 65% of men 65 or older. Likewise, only 43% of Millennial men were comfortable with women being U.S. senators, compared to 64% of Americans overall. (The numbers were 39% versus 61% for women being CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, and 35% versus 57% for president of the United States.)
Moreover, according to a 2013 Pew survey of Americans, Millennial women are significantly more likely than older women to say that the country needs to continue making changes to bring about equality in the workplace, but Millennial men are the group most likely to say that all necessary changes have been made.
A glimmer of hope was found in the huge survey of Harvard Business School MBAs in a 2014 HBR article, which found that Millennial men were more likely than Gen X and Boomer men to predict that their wives would have equal careers, and less likely to do the majority of the child care. But that hope vanished when the researchers found the gap between what Millennial men and Millennial women believed was still wide: “Whereas three-quarters of Millennial women anticipate that their careers will be at least as important as their partners,” they reported, “half the men in their generation expect that their own careers will take priority.” The gap was similar when it came to child care responsibilities. Fewer than half of Millennial women believed they would handle most of the child care, but two-thirds of their male peers believed the same about themselves.
Taken together, this body of research should dispel any notion that Millennial men “see women as equals.” Indeed, this information raises a serious concern that unless something is done soon to change Millennial men’s attitudes toward women, these men ascending to the C-suite may hinder — rather than advance — current efforts to reduce the discriminatory effects of gender bias.
We have heard too many reasonable people make the argument, almost fatalistically, that the arc of history bends toward justice. That is true. But the arc of history bends because leaders work to bend it. Bias doesn’t just die out. Patience may be a virtue, but patience alone will not bring equality.
This article originally appeared on Harvard Business Review.
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Silencing Women’s Public Voices
At the beginning of the Odyssey, Penelope enters the great hall and begins to speak. Her son, Telemachus, quickly tells her to return to her room because speech is “the business of men.” And ever since, men have sought to silence women’s public voices. Indeed, male hostility toward women’s participation in public discourse is far more common today than many of us are likely to be aware. For example, a male attorney recently, admonished his opposing counsel that it wasn’t “becoming for a woman” to raise her voice during a contentious deposition. In sanctioning the male attorney, the judge wrote, sexist remarks such as this man’s are “all too common [and] reflect and reinforce the male-dominated attitude of our profession.”
Law is hardly the only male-dominated activity. Let’s look at three other areas – video gaming, sports broadcasting, and politics – where in seeking to silence women, men’s rhetoric often reaches a shocking level of brazen vulgarity.
According to The Washington Post, “threats and sexual innuendo are par for the course for women gamers.” A case in point is Anita Sarkeesian, a young social activist and media critic. For her website, Feminist Frequency, she created a series of videos entitled Tropes vs. Women in Video Games. Her intent was to expose and critique sexism and misogyny in gaming. Because of this project and the speaking and writing she has done with a similar purpose, Sarkeesian has been subjected to near continuous harassment. At the Game Developers Choice annual meeting where she was scheduled to receive the Ambassador Award, the organizers received an anonymous email, “A bomb will be detonated at the … award ceremony tonight unless Anita Sarkeesian’s … Award is revoked.” Sarkeesian has received images of video-game characters raping her; her Wikipedia page was edited to state she is a “hooker who focuses on drugs”; and a video game was created called “Beat Up Anita Sarkeesian” in which players could punch her image and watch her face become bruised. Utah State University’s Center for Women and Gender was planning to give her an award when the school received an email that the event would prompt “the deadliest school shooting in American history… Anita Sarkeesian is everything wrong with the feminist woman, and she is going to die screaming like the craven little whore that she is if you let her come to USU.”
Despite the threats, Sarkeesian is still speaking, blogging, and making videos, but she says the harassment “sucks. It really sucks, and I don’t want to think too much about it, because I can’t do anything about it. It’s my new normal.”
In late April of this year, Julie DiCaro and Sarah Spain, two TV sports journalists, posted a video featuring a group of men reading to them some of the anonymous online comments they had received. You “should be beaten to death” and “hope your dog gets hit by a car” are among the milder ones. More typical is “Someone tell [her] to SHUT THE F**K UP…dumb broad.”
A catalogue of offensive examples of men’s attempts to silence women would not be complete without a few anti-Hillary Clinton comments: “When she comes on television, I involuntarily cross my legs,” “Shill-ary,” and “I don’t need her to drown me in estrogen every time she opens her mouth” are among the non-obscene ones. And, of course, Donald Trump has not been silent. “If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America?”
We could multiply almost without limit the tasteless, vile instances of men seeking to silence women’s public voices. The question, however, is how a woman should respond when she is the subject of such an attack? The Supreme Court has made it clear that social media threats are prosecutable as a crime just as other forms of threats if there is criminal intent. But because of the difficulties in tracking down perpetrators and the light penalties involved, cyber harassment has a low enforcement priority.
So, a woman subject to cyber harassment – even as severe as that to which Sarkeesian has been subjected – is largely on her own. If she knows the identity of the harasser – and she is not running for President of the United States – she might try responding with humor rather than outrage. For example, one woman who was told she was too ugly to be on TV responded by writing an article for a popular newspaper titled, “Too Ugly for TV? No, I’m too brainy for men who fear clever women.” If she has the ability to produce an interesting, engaging YouTube video, she might use it like DiCaro and Spain to draw public attention to the vile, misogynistic comments she is receiving. But what other actions are realistically available, and is there anything that is likely to really stop the harassment?
In a future blog post we will discuss some practical, effective actions a woman can take in this situation, but we would like to hear your ideas. Have you had experience with social media harassment? Has a friend of yours? What have you done? What do you wish you had or hadn’t done? We’d love to hear from you and start a conversation.
See the original blog at http://andieandal.com/silencing-womens-public-voices/.
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The Goldilocks Dilemma: Why Career Advancement is So Much Harder for Women than Men and What Women Can Do to Change That
America’s workplaces, even in our best-intentioned organizations, are riddled with bias against women leaders. As a result, women seeking to advance in careers — particularly careers in traditionally male fields — face both negative and agentic biases. Negative bias is the result of the traditional feminine stereotype that a woman is or should be “communal,” that is, warm, caring, and gentle. A woman who conforms to the communal stereotype at work is likely to be seen as pleasant, but not suited for jobs calling for competence, competitiveness, and authority. She is also likely to be seen as less talented, less suited for challenging assignments, and less worthwhile to mentor than a man.
On the other side of the “women are not as good as men” coin, a woman who violates traditional female stereotypes and behaves with authority, competence, and independence is likely to be seen as aggressive, abrasive, and bossy. This perception is what we call agentic bias, and we will elaborate on its nature and consequences in a moment.
The intersection of negative and agentic biases creates a double bind we call the “Goldilocks Dilemma.” Women who are nice, pleasant, and supportive are unlikely to be seen as leaders. Women who act with strength and authority, however, are likely to be seen as socially insensitive, unpleasant, and unlikable. Because of this double bind, women are often thought to be too hot or too cold, too soft or too hard, too nice or too abrasive. We will be offering a solution to this dilemma later in this manifesto, but before we go there to see a humorous dramatization of this dilemma, take a look at Hillary Clinton and Jimmy Kimmel’s skit on “Mansplaining.”
Unquestionably, all employers, whether they are governmental, private, or not-for-profit, should do much more to reform their workplaces so that women are evaluated, compensated, and promoted on a basis comparable to men. But waiting for these reforms is unacceptable for a woman who wants to move up now.
This manifesto is about how a woman can move up in today’s gender-biased workplaces. We present a set of communication skills, what we collectively call “attuned gender communication,” that women can use to be seen as neither too hot nor too cold but “just right.” Before addressing those specific communication skills, we want to first explore in more depth the nature and operation of the negative and agentic biases. With that information in hand, we will then discuss how they work together to create the Goldilocks Dilemma, and, finally, we will turn to attuned gender communication. We will show how a woman can use this sort of communication to be seen as a person with great organizational value and career potential without running afoul of the Goldilocks Dilemma.
Negative Bias
The enormous disparity in women’s and men’s career achievements is a striking testament to how much harder it is for women to advance in their careers. This career disparity is frequently believed to be the result of some innate difference between women and men. People tend to think women are (or should be) communal, while believing men are (or should be) agentic. As a result of these stereotypes, women are expected to be gentle caregivers, and men are expected to be aggressive providers. If such views accurately reflected reality, the gendered disparities in the career achievements would make perfect sense. If women are cooperative and warm but not ambitious and decisive, if they are friendly and kind but lack competence and leadership ability, and if they are caring and compassionate but not committed or competitive, then it would make perfect sense that women earn less than men, reach the C-suite, equity partnership, and academic tenure less often than men, drop out of high-potential careers at a higher rate than men, and spend more time taking care of children than men.
The problem with the “women and men are just different” view is that there is no empirical evidence that it is true, much less that it is the cause of the persistent gap in women’s and men’s career achievements. Indeed, there is more variation in personality, talent, and ambition among women than there is between women as a group and men as a group.
Women earn less, advance slower, and achieve much less over the course of their careers than men. This is not because they are different, but because too many career gatekeepers don’t believe that women are able to succeed in high-pressure and high-status positions. The real culprit behind women’s and men’s disparate career achievements is the bias fostered by the pervasive and persistent workplace stereotypes about women’s and men’s abilities, potential, and characteristics.
If a woman is assumed to have communal characteristics simply because she is a woman, she is unlikely to be offered significant responsibilities, project leadership, or high-stakes negotiation opportunities – “masculine” tasks that require forceful, competent, and competitive behavior. Instead, when a woman is assumed to be communal, she is likely to be tracked into staff, personnel, or assistant positions, which are “female” jobs that require interpersonal sensitivity, cooperation, and warmth.
A particularly troubling example of gender-based career tracking was revealed by a 2012 study of the attitudes of science professors about women’s potentials as future scientists. Researchers asked biology, chemistry, and physics professors from across the country to evaluate an undergraduate science student for a position as a laboratory manager. All of the professors received exactly the same materials about the applicant; but half were told the applicant was a woman, while the other half were told the applicant was a man. The professors were asked to rate the applicant’s competence and hireability, suggest an appropriate starting salary, and indicate the amount of mentoring time they would be willing to offer the applicant. Both the female and male professors consistently judged the applicant as less competent and less qualified when they thought they were evaluating a woman. Moreover, the professors almost uniformly offered “female” applicants a lower salary and less career mentoring than they offered to “male” applicants. Because of this sort of negative gender bias, women are often not even given the chance to demonstrate their ability to actually perform a job, assignment, or responsibility that has agentic, rather than communal, associations.
It is tempting to think that negative gender bias will lose much of its discriminatory force when the current crop of business, professional, academic, and scientific leaders retire and a younger, more open-minded group replaces them. Unfortunately, a recent survey makes clear that the ascendance of the Millennial generation is not likely to expand women’s career opportunities.
The survey found that older survey participants were comfortable seeing women in traditionally male roles.Men between the ages of 18 and 34, however, were the most hesitant about women in leadership roles. Less than half of these men were comfortable with women as Fortune 500 executives, President of the United States, U.S. senators, or engineers. Given these findings, it would be a serious mistake to assume negative gender bias will vanish as Millennials sweep to power.
Agentic Bias
A woman who conforms to traditional female stereotypes will probably be viewed as pleasant and likable, but not as sufficiently competent or competitive to be a leader. This is because leadership stereotypes are starkly inconsistent with those associated with a woman. Yet, a woman who violates traditional female stereotypes and displays agentic characteristics associated with a leader – forcefully advocating a point of view, single-mindedly pursuing a competitive objective, or fiercely committing to performance excellence – is likely to experience a backlash. She is likely to be regarded as “bitter, quarrelsome, selfish, deceitful, devious, and unlikable.”
The case of Lt. Colonel Kate Germano provides a particularly striking illustration of the negative reactions women face when they behave agentically. In 2014, Germano was appointed as commander of an all-female Marine battalion at Parris Island. At the time of Germano’s appointment, women Marines trained separately from their male colleagues and were held to lower performance standards than the men, even on tasks not involving physical strength. In her one-year tenure as commander, Germano ended many of the Marine’s separate training protocols and stopped affording women special “privileges,” such as chairs after long hikes. Under Germano’s command, the women’s performance scores improved dramatically.
Nevertheless, Germano had to fight with Marine Corps brass every step of the way. In May 2015, she filed a complaint charging her supervisors with undermining her efforts to increase the performance of the female Marines under her command. Germano’s complaint triggered an investigation, and she was relieved of her command one month later, on the grounds that “her toxic leadership style … created a hostile, repressive, unprofessional command climate.”
Germano’s supporters claim she was “firm but fair,” and argue that her leadership style would never have been criticized if she had been a man. Her detractors assert she was authoritarian and abusive, “mistreating” her female recruits. We don’t know enough to pass final judgment on Germano’s conduct, but it is clear she was subjected to severe agentic bias – even if that was not ultimately why she was relieved of her command. Germano was publicly criticized as “too aggressive,” too blunt,” and “too direct” and she was rebuked for suggesting that the Marine’s performance standards for women “are not good enough.” There is no doubt that Germano used strongly agentic behavior to achieve her objective. We wonder, however, whether anyone will be able to help women Marines earn the respect they deserve if they had behaved in a different way.
Admirably, Germano has not given up the fight. In January of 2016, she wrote a thoughtful article in the Military Times arguing if the Marine Corps is to be successful in fully integrating its women and preparing them to perform jobs comparable to the men, women and men must train together. As Germano put it, “Segregation imprints the thought within male recruits that females are ‘the other’ and perpetuates the false position that they are less mentally and physically competent.” And on March 30th of this year, Germano wrote that the Marine Corps refusal to change its existing recruiting practices and segregated recruit train for women, “only serves to reinforce the sexism and gender bias so prevalent in the Marine Corp today.”
The Goldilocks Dilemma
Women encounter negative bias by conforming to traditional female stereotypes and encounter agentic bias by violating those stereotypes and behaving with authority and strength. Because of negative bias, career advancement is impossible if a woman consistently behaves in a communal way. But, because of agentic bias, if she consistently behaves in an agentic way, it may be impossible for her to achieve career success and to be liked. The Goldilocks Dilemma places women between a rock and a hard place. As a result, women often choose to be less ambitious in order to be more likable.
Harvard Business School (HBS) found in 2011 that its women prepared more but participated less in class than its men; at graduation, the women received significantly fewer academic honors than did the men; and after graduation, the women reported their HBS experiences as far less positive than did the men.
In seeking an explanation for why women and men responded to HBS in such different ways, Harvard found two principal factors adversely affected women students. First, there was an obvious clannishness on the part of male professors and male students that made the women feel isolated. HBS took immediate steps to correct this problem. But, Harvard also uncovered a far subtler and more intractable problem. It found that the women were “self-editing in the classroom to manage their out-of-classroom image[s].” The women were found to be less comfortable participating in the rough and tumble of class discussions because they believed they would be penalized for violating traditional gender stereotypes. The women were trying to appear less forceful in the classroom to appear more likable outside of class.
Thus, extraordinarily talented women studying at one of the most distinguished business schools in the world were holding themselves back because they were worried that they would not be socially accepted if they competed “too hard.” These women were trying to succeed a little less in order to be liked a little more. This is a disastrous strategy for escaping the Goldilocks Dilemma. It masks a woman’s true abilities, while failing to give full play to the qualities that make her likable.
The Goldilocks Dilemma also creates a particularly crushing problem for women with children. On the one hand, it is assumed that mothers need to be available to their children at all times, and, therefore, mothers are viewed as less committed to their careers than women without children or men (without regard to whether they are fathers). If, on the other hand, mothers demonstrate they are fully committed to their careers, they are viewed as bad mothers.
Career gatekeepers typically believe that mothers are overly concerned with work/life balance, poorly matched to the demands of their jobs, and less attractive candidates for promotion than women without children. In addition, mothers who show a strong commitment to their careers are presumed to be less warm, less nice, less friendly, less likable, and more hostile than women without children. Because of the Goldilocks Dilemma, mothers are less likely to be hired and are more likely to be offered lower salaries than childless women – despite being equally competent. One study found that when mothers were compared to women without children, mothers were 79 percent less likely to be hired, 100 percent less likely to be promoted, offered an average of $11,000 less in salary, and held to higher performance and punctuality standards.
Consequently, mothers must perform the high-wire juggling act of raising children and managing a career while finding a way to overcome the Goldilocks Dilemma.
Attuned Gender Communication
There is a clear way forward for a woman to achieve career success despite the Goldilocks Dilemma. The key is for a woman to learn to exhibit both communal and agentic characteristics in the right measure at the right times. A woman who can do this can manage the impressions others have of her so that she is neither too soft nor too hard but just right. Perhaps the best way to understand the basic insight underlying attuned gender communication is to look at yet another recent study.
Researchers tracked 132 female and male MBA graduates over an eight-year period. Some (but by no means all) of the women in this group were highly self-aware and comfortable behaving communally, agentically, or employing both sorts of behaviors simultaneously, depending on the impression they wanted to make to accomplish their objective in a given situation. Women with the ability to consciously manage their behavioral style received 1.5 times as many promotions as agentic men, 1.5 times as many promotions as communal women, 2 times as many promotions as communal men, and 3 times as many promotions as agentic women.
The most successful women in this study understood that their behavior directly controlled the impressions people had of them. These women were highly sensitive to the reactions other people had to how they presented themselves. They were aware of the effect of their verbal and nonverbal behavior. They were willing to change their presentation style if the reactions they were getting and the impressions they were making were not the ones they wanted. Highly aware female MBAs understood that their career success was directly influenced by their style: their presence, attitudes, posture, body movements, facial expressions, dress, voice patterns, responses, and reactions.
Attuned gender communication, thus, is the conscious control of what you are communicating to the people with whom you are dealing as a result of the totality of your verbal and nonverbal behavior. Many factors will influence when, why, and how you manage your communications, but two factors are key to your doing it successfully. The first is a high degree of self-awareness: awareness of your feelings, reactions, and attitudes, your verbal and nonverbal behavior and the image – impression, sense, feeling — you are presenting of your abilities, credibility, and potential. The second is your capacity to change that image by changing how you present yourself, including changing your presence, manner, and confidence. A woman using attuned gender communication is capable of dialing down agentic behavior and dialing up communal behavior or the reverse, depending on both context and objective. To get a better sense of how a woman can do this, we want to examine particular behavior patterns.
First, here are a few nonverbal behaviors you should avoid because they are seen as unredeemably communal and, therefore, likely to trigger negative bias.
Don’t tilt your head, act flirty or coy, smile excessively or at inappropriate moments, nod excessively, or raise your voice at the end of a declarative sentence.
When you have a point to make, don’t undercut the strength and importance of your comment by beginning with phrases such as, “I may be off base here but …”; “I don’t know if this is helpful but …”; “Maybe I’m wrong about this but …”
Unless you have actually done something deserving of an apology, don’t say, “I’m sorry.” This phrase may be ideal to express sympathy or strengthen friendships in a social context, but in the workplace the phrase undercuts your gravitas and suggests you are somehow at fault.
Avoid behavior that suggests you have low power, little self-confidence, or poor task competence.
Avoid the use of a soft, hard-to-hear tone of voice, frequent repetitions and false starts, tentative pauses in a presentation, and the use of filler words such as “hum,” “perhaps,” or “uh-huh.”
Avoid slumped body posture, nervous hand gestures, averted eyes, and frequent touching of your hair, jewelry, or clothes.
So much for negative behavior. Let’s look now at a few ways to project competence and confidence, while also coming across as warm, inclusive, and likable.
When you are at a conference table, spread out. Don’t be sloppy or obviously hog space, but use as much space as the most important man does.
Sit tall, have your arms on the table in front of you, and lean forward slightly when you speak.
Gesture inclusively, maintain a warm and pleasant facial expression, and pay obvious attention to others. Likewise, when you are standing, stand tall with a relaxed and open body posture. Directly face the person or people you are addressing.
Don’t cross your ankles or shift your weight from one foot to the other while standing.
Use your full height.
Gesture away from your body with calm, inclusive gestures, and don’t cross your arms over your chest.
Maintain moderate eye contact with the people with whom you are interacting.
Your facial expression should be warm and pleasant.
Hold your head straight with your chin slightly up.
Speak with authority; use clear, direct and unambiguous statements.
Humor can be a great tension reliever. Avoid self-deprecating humor, but a humorous response to a sexist comment or biased observation is often more effective than apparent indignation.
Always dress and groom purposefully in light of what “look” you believe will be most effective to accomplish your objective. This will be different in different contexts, but whatever the context, you want your appearance to convey self-confidence, competence, seriousness, and warmth.
These few suggestions should make clear that attuned gender communication involves combining agentic and communal behavior to be seen as competent and confident, but not cold or unpleasantly aggressive. Attuned gender communication does not require you to mute your forcefulness or downplay your ambition or competitive instinct. It does, however, require you to recognize that the forceful agentic self-assertion that might work for a man is not going to work for a woman. You should never be hesitant to speak up, assert a point of view, or give instructions, but you need to do so while projecting a sense of pleasant engagement, an openness to different points of view, and a keen social sensitivity. Men can be jerks and still move into leadership positions; women who are seen as jerks or worse are unlikely to ever do so.
Emotion in the office is another minefield for women, so let’s think about how you can effectively use attuned gender communication for career advancement despite the stereotypes about women being emotional. If you show emotion, you will likely confirm the gender stereotype of an irrational and out of control female. You must learn to express your feelings in ways that allow you to come off as competent, intentional, and in control, not as irrational, excitable, or unstable.
There are six emotions that are particularly problematic for women in the workplace: anger, frustration, resentment, distress, sadness, and contempt. The first five of these – anger, frustration, resentment, distress, and sadness – are fraught with problems in their own right, but they are particularly dangerous emotions for a woman because they can trigger crying – and crying in the office is almost always a bad idea.
Whatever reasons you might have to cry at work, try not to do so. Crying in response to work-related events – a lost customer, extraordinary pressure or stress, a poor performance review, a low bonus, or frustration with the way you are being treated – is likely to reflect poorly on your competence and leadership ability. Such a display of emotion implies you are weak, unprofessional, and lack control and confidence.
For women to be recognized in their careers for their ability and leadership capability they need to be able to utilize the positive aspects of both communal and agentic behavior. When negative bias is a distinct possibility, women need to play up their agentic characteristics to dispel the assumption that they lack competence, confidence, or a competitive appetite. Likewise, when agentic bias appears to be a distinct possibility, women can temper their forceful behavior with a healthy dose of warmth and inclusiveness. The trick for a woman is to pair agentic behavior that exhibits power and confidence with communal behavior that projects warmth, inclusiveness, and social sensitivity.
Attuned gender communication depends on understanding the operation of negative and agentic biases and how they create the Goldilocks Dilemma. Gender bias is alive and well in American workplaces, and it is the primary reason why career advancement is so much harder for women than it is for men. But with attuned gender communication women can escape the Goldilocks Dilemma and advance as far and as fast in their careers as their hard work and talent will allow them.
See http://andieandal.com/goldilocks-dilemma-career-advancement-much-harder-women-men-women-can-change/ for the full version with active links.
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HILLARY CLINTON: THE SUM OF ALL STEREOTYPES
It is often difficult to point to concrete, real world examples of a woman who has been disadvantaged in her career specifically because of gender stereotypes. For the most part, people who control women’s career advancement are generally unaware that they rely on gender stereotypes when making hiring, promotion, and compensation decisions. And when those decisions have discriminatory consequences, multiple explanations are frequently available to explain the outcome. Even though an organization’s employment practices strongly suggest gender bias, its leaders typically believe – quite sincerely – that they and their organization are totally bias-free.
There are, of course, egregious instances of overt sexism. The Marines’ firing of Lt. Col. Kate Germano for her “abusive leadership style” in seeking to improve the performance of female recruits under her command is one obvious example. Another example is the male attorney who was recently sanctioned for telling his opposing counsel it wasn’t “becoming of a woman” to raise her voice. Nothing in contemporary American society, however, compares to the hostile, stereotype-driven criticisms of Hillary Clinton.
Clinton is obviously a highly successful woman. She has achieved being a top-flight lawyer, a first lady who played a major policy role in her husband’s administration, a twice-elected United States Senator, a former Secretary of State, and now the presumed Democratic Party’s nominee for President of the United States. It is hard to point to anyone – woman or man – who has had a more visible, successful, or varied public service career than Clinton. Yet, it is also hard to point to anyone who has been subject to the degree of public vilification that she has – vilification not because of the substance for her policy positions but for her supposed personal characteristics.
Clinton is routinely called unlikable, bitchy, cold, robotic, calculating, out of touch, pandering, pathologically ambitious, ruthless, selfish, distant, paranoid, untrustworthy, a nasty and mean enabler, a congenital liar, corrupt, unethical, dishonest, programmed, and inauthentic.
What these characterizations of her have in common is that all of them are frequently used to disparage strong, forceful, assertive women. A warm, modest, and caring woman is viewed as pleasant and likable – but not suited for a serious leadership role. A strong, forceful, and independent woman, on the other hand, might be viewed as competent, but decidedly not pleasant, nice, or likable. Every one of the derogatory characterizations of Hillary Clinton reflect what we have called agentic bias; that is, the bias that is displayed towards women who behave in confident, competitive, and assertive ways and, therefore, who are not conforming to traditional female stereotypes such as modesty and deference.
As men become more successful, it is well established that they become better liked, but as women become more successful they become less liked. In Clinton’s case, that discontinuity has played itself out in spades. By achieving extraordinary success, she has become extraordinarily disliked – she is simply too aggressive, too difficult, and too cold.
Clinton, of course, is not the only highly successful woman to be characterized as having unattractive personal characteristics. A recent analysis looked at the social media mentions of Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s CEO, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, and Anne-Marie Slaughter, former director of Policy Planning at the U.S. State Department. While all three of these women were consistently characterized as highly competent, Mayer was described as annoying and a terrible bully, Sandberg as crazy and bizarre, and Slaughter as destructive and not a good wife.
Nevertheless, Clinton is sui generis when it comes to open, aggressive criticism driven by gender bias. Bernie Sanders shouts, and he is viewed as forceful; Clinton shouts and she is viewed as shrill, out of control, and overly emotional. When President Obama speaks in clear, logical, detached terms, he is being thoughtful and articulate; when Clinton does, she is cold, calculating, and programmed.
When Clinton was revealed to have used her personal email account to conduct some State Department business, it was loudly proclaimed she should go to jail; when it was revealed that Colin Powell did exactly the same thing, it was a big yawn. If she competes hard, she is ruthless; but if she wins she is lucky or the system is rigged. It’s hard to see a course of conduct open to Clinton that will not provoke further criticism – except, of course, retiring from public life entirely and baking those chocolate chip cookies.
There may be other reasons that Hillary Clinton is so regularly attacked for being untrustworthy and unlikable. But if she were a man and had done precisely the same thing, can there be any doubt that the criticism would be more civil, less personal, and more substantively grounded? As the most successful woman in public service of her generation, Clinton is the prime target of agentic bias; indeed, she embodies the sum of all gender stereotypes.
See more at http://andieandal.com/hillary-clinton-sum-stereotypes/
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Attuned Gender Communication
It is unlikely any of us will see workplaces that are completely free of gender bias in the foreseeable future. No matter how well-intentioned an organization may be, there are inescapable gender roles and expectations that are established by our society from the time we are born. We believe, however, that career opportunities for all employees (both women and men) can be drastically improved if everyone – managers, entry-level employees, women, and men – became more attuned to gender communication.
Whether you are a woman or a man, you have undoubtedly felt the presence of gender stereotypes. Often, women are presumed to be “communal,” that is, warm, caring, and gentle. Men, in contrast, are expected to be competitive and authoritative. When men let their “more gentle side” show, they risk being the recipient of a derogatory, gender-biased joke. Likewise, women who defy the communal stereotype can be labeled as “cold,” “cruel,” “mean,” “unlikeable,” or far worse words that need not be repeated here. These biases develop early in life, and are played out on playgrounds across the country.
Fast-forward twenty years from a preschool playground and, unfortunately, you will not find significantly different stereotypes. Women seeking to advance in traditionally male fields face negative and agentic biases. Men face a host of gender biases as well. Our book, Breaking Through Bias, does not specifically address biases that men face but we firmly believe that awareness and adoption of attuned gender communication – by both women and men – is critical to achieving a more gender-neutral workplace. We have also found that the most successful leaders – and their organizations – understand gender biases and find value in employees that can exhibit both communal and agentic characteristics.
We have elaborated previously on the “Goldilocks Dilemma.” Women in the workplace face a unique dilemma: should they maintain the traditionally female, communal role, with the consequences of negative bias, or present a stronger, more authoritative persona, with the consequences of agentic bias.
Because of these biases, women who are nice, pleasant, and supportive are unlikely to be seen as leaders and find it difficult to advance in their careers. They are presumed to be less competent, inferior mentors and managers, and less worthy of advancement.
In contrast, women, who act with strength and authority frequently face an agentic bias, where they are seen as aggressive, abrasive, and bossy, so they are presumed to be socially insensitive, unpleasant, and unlikable. Although a man can be passed over for promotion if he has an overly aggressive personality, agentic bias is most likely to work to the detriment of the woman and the overall organization. As one article recently observed, this double bind – what we call the Goldilocks Dilemma – is faced by Hillary Clinton.
Attuned Gender Communication
Using attuned gender communication allows women and men to improve their potential for career advancement. Studies have found that an employee is more likely to be promoted if she can exhibit communal and agentic characteristics in the right measure at the right times, what we call attuned gender communication. And, perhaps just as importantly, women and men can both benefit from a better understanding of attuned gender communication. Such employees have superior communication skills, improved efficiency and relationships, and they stand an increased chance of advancement.
In a recent study, researchers tracked 132 female and male MBA graduates over an eight-year period. Some of the women in this group were highly self-aware and comfortable behaving communally, agentically, or employing both simultaneously, depending on the impression they wanted to make. Those women with the ability to consciously manage their style received 1.5 times as many promotions as purely agentic men, 1.5 times as many promotions as communal women, 2 times as many promotions as communal men, and 3 times as many promotions as agentic women.
The most successful women understood that their behavior directly affected the impressions other people had of them, they were highly sensitive to the reactions others had to them, they were aware of the effect of their verbal and nonverbal behavior, and they were willing to change their presentation style if the reactions they were getting and the impressions they were making were not the ones they wanted. Given the male-dominated business world these graduates entered, these women understood that career success was directly tied to how others perceived them: their presence, attitudes, posture, body movements, facial expressions, dress, voice patterns, responses, and reactions. They were found to be those best positioned to excel.
The most diverse and successful workplaces, however, should value attuned gender communication from all employees. Men and not just women can benefit when they are conscious of the impressions they communicate to others. While many factors influence when, why, and how an employee will manage her or his communications, two factors are key to doing it successfully. The first is a high degree of self-awareness: awareness of your feelings, reactions, and attitudes, your verbal and nonverbal behavior and the image – impression, sense, feeling – you present about your abilities, credibility, and potential. The second is the capacity to change how you present yourself, including changing your presence, manner, and confidence.
We firmly believe that an organization benefits in many other tangible ways when attuned gender communication is adopted by its employees. Effective leaders understand that employees can better achieve the organization’s goals using attuned gender communication. Organizations that communicate well will operate more effectively, and organizations that retain and promote quality employees, rather than losing them only to have to train new employees, are more efficient. As Crain’s Chicago Business recently noted after surveying more than 1,000 working women, “Two of five women left their jobs in the past five years because they didn't see career growth or advancement opportunities at their current workplace. That's a terrible churn rate and, as anyone who runs a business knows, an expensive one.”
Whether you are a woman or a man, attuned gender communication combines agentic and communal behaviors to be seen as competent and confident, while not cold or unpleasantly aggressive. Attuned gender communication does not require a woman to mute her forcefulness or downplay her ambition or competitive instinct. It does, however, require her to recognize that the forceful agentic self-assertion that might work for a man is not going to work for her. Likewise, men who can adopt attuned gender communication and balance their competitive inclinations with an appreciation for communal behavior will find that their relationships among colleagues will improve, as will the success of the organizations for which they work.
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Does your employer have a motherhood bias?
The biases you are likely to face in your pursuit of career advancement as a mother with children still at home are rooted in a pervasive American assumption that mothers should be committed to their children without restraint or reservation, that children’s emotional health and academic achievement depend on their mothers being available to them 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Never mind the time a father, relative, friend, or trained caregiver spends with a child; it is a mother’s time that is critical and irreplaceable.
We will say a word later as to why this ideology of intensive mothering is just that, an ideology unsupported by evidence or experience. For the moment, however, the important point is that only 16 percent of Americans believe a mother should work full-time outside of the home. Inevitably, therefore, as a mother pursuing a full-time career -- and desiring to succeed at it -- you are going to encounter biases simply because you are a mother.
Certain of these biases are overt and hostile. A 2005 study found mothers were 79 percent less likely to be hired, 100 percent less likely to be promoted, offered $11,000 less in salary, and held to higher performance standards than women without children. Discriminatory biases of this sort may very well rise to a level that calls for legal action, so if you experience them keep this in mind.
Workplace biases against you because you are a mother can also be wrapped in apparently benevolent behavior: you may be “excused” from night meetings, not assigned to projects requiring travel, encouraged to leave work early or come in late, and held to lower performance standards than your colleagues. But such treatment is anything but benevolent. When you are effectively taken out of the rough and tumble of the career advancement game, you are going to lose the chance to “win” at that game, and you are being discriminated against, pure and simple.
Biases against you as a mother can also show up as “tests” of your career commitment. Andie joined her current law firm when our daughter was two years old. A partner who she was working with on a client project started leaving voicemail messages, asking in a condescending tone to meet at 5 p.m. if she would “still be around.” Andie made it a point never to be available at 5:00, but she always offered to talk with him by phone that same night any time after 6 p.m. or to meet personally with him any time after 6 a.m. the next morning. He never took her up on any of her suggested meeting times. He wasn’t interested in meeting, only in demonstrating his commitment and Andie’s assumed lack of it.
When you behave like a man – work hard at your career and raise children at the same time – you can also encounter agentic biases of the sort we discussed in an earlier blog post. Demonstrating your commitment to your career through strong agentic behavior is likely to win you respect as competent and engaged, but it is also likely to trigger a backlash: isolation, exclusion from valuable opportunities, hostile and overly critical evaluations, an obvious lack of support and resources, and a reputation as a bad mother.
Apart from these sorts of motherhood biases, you are also likely to have to contend with the issue of guilt. You will continuously be told, subtly and not so subtly, you should be spending more time with your child, you have your priorities wrong, and you are depriving your child of what she or he needs most: a mother’s attention and presence. It is virtually impossible to be immersed in this ideological sea without swallowing some of the salt water. If you find yourself in this situation – wanting to stick with your career but worried that you are doing so to the detriment of your children – keep in mind that no study has ever found that a mother’s work outside her home has had an adverse effect on her children’s well-being. Indeed, Kathleen McGinn, a professor at Harvard Business School, recently found that women whose mothers had worked outside the home are more likely to have jobs themselves and hold supervisory responsibilities than women whose mothers stayed at home full time; moreover, they earn 23 percent higher wages. She also found that the men raised by such mothers were no less likely to have successful careers than other men. McGinn summed up her research with this comment: there is “a lot of parental guilt about having both parents working outside the home. But what this research says to us is that [by doing so] you’re … helping your kids.”
In these introductory posts, we have outlined the five key gender biases against women pursuing careers – negative, benevolent, agentic, self-limiting, and motherhood. In our future blog posts we will address how you can avoid or overcome these biases and tackle topical subjects as they arise.
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Who We Are and Why We Write and Speak About Gender Stereotypes
We are both partners in major law firms; we are married to each other; and we have a daughter who is now 25. For many years we have participated in fundamental decisions about women's and men’s careers -- their hiring, assignments, supervision, compensation, and promotion -- and we have mentored and coached many women in a variety of professions. While Andie has been writing and speaking on gender stereotypes and biases for almost 20 years, we began to do much of this work together a few years ago. So who are we?
Andie: I was lucky. I began my law career in a small firm where I never encountered gender bias in any shape or form. I learned to be a real lawyer without even once being made aware that I was a “woman lawyer.” When I left that firm for a much larger one, I started to see dramatic differences in the ways women and men were being treated at the law firms I was interacting with. I saw women being passed over for opportunities and responsibilities; I saw women struggling with obstacles in their career paths that were not in men’s; and I saw fabulous women who faced unreasonable and unnecessary demands as they tried to practice law and raise children at the same time.
Coming face-to-face with gender bias was a shock for me. I probed the problem, talked to women at many firms and businesses, and examined assignment and promotion policies. I eventually realized that the only way women would advance in their careers to the degree they aspired -- and all of the research shows that young women are just as ambitious as young men -- is to take control of their career situations. I concluded women could not passively accept gender-biased organizations. So about 20 years ago, I started to do everything in my power to help professional and businesswomen achieve both career success and personal happiness.
During the past 10 years, I have addressed more than 100 groups through keynotes and workshops, and have written many articles. The following snippet from an email is typical of the reactions to my message: “Wow! … You hit the nail on the head! … You have stated the keys to success candidly, effectively, and succinctly. I especially like the down-to-earth practical examples that you give.” Because of emails like these, I decided to expand my work in an effort to help as many women as I possibly could.
Al: The firm I helped found and where Andie started her legal career merged in 2015 with a much larger firm. During the more than 40 years before that merger, I know we offered women career advancement opportunities second to none: varied, substantive, and gender-neutral. Yet despite our best efforts, we continually lost far more women than men, and we never had more than 10 percent women equity partners. I now believe we could and should have done more to mentor, coach, and sponsor our women attorneys. But I also believe that too many of them were unable to perform at the top of their game in our male-dominated environment. We had few senior women to serve as role models for them, and their ability to effectively compete against their male colleagues for opportunities and advancement was not what it needed to be. As a result, many of these terrific women became frustrated, confused, and unhappy. And they just left.
After watching this process repeat itself over many years, I started to meet with a group of talented women outside of our firm who had been able to advance successfully in male-dominated work environments. As I talked with them and with Andie, I grew increasingly convinced that what our young women lacked was information and coaching. I have now been coaching highly talented women for several years, and I have watched them, with the right encouragement and preparation, claim their fair share of the seats at corporate and professional leadership tables and speak with voices that are being listened to.
Women don’t need to change who they are to get ahead, but they do need to follow some concrete, practical advice about how to deal with the stereotype-driven dynamics of their interpersonal relationships with their male colleagues, supervisors, clients, and customers. With that advice, I believe, they can change those dynamics and structure their careers so that they find them professionally and personally fulfilling.
Us: By speaking and writing together, we believe we can offer truly helpful and immediately actionable advice to women. We present a variety of communication techniques that women can use to avoid the career-disrupting effects of gender biases. Women should be able to go as far and as fast in their careers as their talents and hard work will allow them. Based on our experience and recent research, we are convinced women will be able to do just that with the information and advice we offer. We are writing this blog to share that information as widely as possible. So please, join us on this journey!
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