The Latest Insights from Leading NOW

Women don't want to talk about it... men don't want to own up to it. The far too silent barrier to women's advancement is the dynamic of Non-Parental Gender-Based Role Expectations. Here's why.

At the tail end of 2016, the CEOs of 27 large companies made an unprecedented announcement: they pledged to have 50% of their top leadership roles filled by women by the year 2030. To achieve the goal, they identified key actions for senior managers including: "...address unconscious bias; base advancement on performance rather than time in the office; promote women into operating roles with responsibility for profit and loss; set targets and communicate them; and actively sponsor promising female leaders." Executives in the EU and Australia have similar coalitions in place. Time to break out the champagne, right? Not so fast. Surprisingly—or perhaps unsurprisingly, depending on how cynical you are—not everyone agrees that we need more gender equality initiatives. In fact, there are many men and some women who think actions like calls to promote women into operating roles, setting targets and sponsoring promising women are frankly unnecessary and unfair.

It was a great joy and pleasure to celebrate International Women's Day 2017 in Australia with Lighthouse Group, American Chamber of Commerce, Engineers Australia, Medtronic, Treasury Wine Estates, and Westpac! Thank you all for the most amazing and inspiring week. Here are some photo highlights from the week's 11 distinct presentations with over 2500+ women and men who care about closing the leadership gender gap in Australia:

The theme for International Women's Day 2017 is #BeBoldForChange. In preparation for a week of related events in Australia, I checked to see what Google could tell us about "bold women".

Shakespeare's Hamlet denounces his mother's swift remarriage by saying, "Frailty, thy name is woman." One could suggest that researchers have been doing the same for the leadership gender gap. As I read the key findings from LeanIn/McKinsey's latest research I notice a pattern with how they reported on gender issues. Take a look at these excerpts from the "Women face an uneven playing field" section and see if you can catch it:

Take a look at the nine seconds of burbling Yellowstone “mudpot” action above. Here at Leading Women, we love this video because it’s a perfect metaphor for shaking things up. And when it comes to shaking up the mindsets of managers to take action to close the leadership gender gap, we’re even more passionate. “I have taken a lifetime to create these mindsets,” said one of our clients, a European executive at a global company, “and now you have destroyed some of them in three hours.” Ka-pow!

In February 2015, I was invited to the Government Summit in Dubai (think World Economic Forum for government officials). I was the opening speaker for a workshop on gender balance. The participants had all been improving the lives and economic participation of women in their countries for years. They came together to share experiences and extend their work in order to move further toward gender balance. They included high ranking women (and some men) from throughout the world - including countries covered by the U.S. recent immigration ban.

"History must be learned in pieces. This is partly because we have only pieces of the past...which give us glimpses of what has been but never the whole reality." Thomas Cahill, author: Sailing the Wine Dark Sea This quote about the fragmentary nature of history reminded me of the photo I took of the goddess Artemis in the museum on the Greek Island of Delos (her birthplace). Artemis, the huntress, was one of the most widely venerated ancient Greek goddesses and seeing her I reveled in the thought that in certain cultures deities could be - and still can be - women.

See the Silver Linings?

Generic unconscious bias training and its umbrella intervention, diversity training, have been around for decades, but they have still failed to close the leadership gender gap. In their article Why Diversity Programs Fail, Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev argue that this is because too much diversity training is mandatory, prompting resentment and defensiveness from managers. “Trainers tell us that people often respond to compulsory courses with anger and resistance—and many participants actually report more animosity toward other groups afterward,” they write.