The Latest Insights from Leading NOW

Recently, a podcast host asked me if I’d be interested in doing an interview on gender differences in leadership styles. More specifically, the host wanted me to chat about how women are much more inclusive leaders than men. On the surface, this seems like a positive development for women, and something that’s worth crowing about. It’s also got a lot of traction: viewing women as more inclusive leaders seems like something that will finally get them into the C-suite en masse, no? I declined. No matter how positive it might seem on the surface to point out the “innate” characteristics of female leaders, it never leads to the kind of change we want. Read on to learn about the sinister side of gender essentialism, and how defining women leaders differently doesn’t serve them.

Today's blog post comes from our friend Bridget Frey CTO at Redfin. Redfin and PayScale analyzed the executive teams at 31 of the largest U.S. tech companies and 6,562 salary profiles of people who reported working for these companies. What did they discover? The gender pay gap is half the size at tech companies with more women executives. Read ON!

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.

Equal Pay Day in the United States is 4 April this year, but what does this actual mean? On the surface it means that on average woman in the United States need to work 15 months to earn the same amount that their male peers earn in 12. But this is not the full story.

March 8th is International Women's Day and in addition to the official #BeBoldForChange campaign, other groups across the United States and the world are preparing for an International Women's Strike. A "day without women" is not a new concept and has happened a number of times across the world with varying effect, most notably in recent times, Iceland's Women's Day Off on 24 October 1975. Women from all across Iceland, with different backgrounds brought the country to a screeching halt. According to the Global Nonviolent Action Database: "The striking women achieved their goal of demonstrating the importance of their work, at all levels from home to workplace, to the well being of the country. They essentially shut down most of the nation for the day. While this was their main goal... it even led to the passage of an equal rights bill..." While the bill did little to change things immediately, Iceland is now ranked #1 on the WEF's Global Gender Gap Index. While they still have a ways to go to reach true parity, they have taken steps to insure they are moving in the right direction.

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!

"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.

Over the last few years or so we have noticed a number of CEOs who are being praised in the news for understanding that gender dynamics are real and when they level the playing field for all of their employees they help their company as a whole. In one of Leading Women's blog posts from May 2015, we wrote about Michael Simonds, CEO of UNUM who wrote with deep understanding about women's advancement and closing the leadership gender gap. Our latest nominee for a CEO Who "Gets It" - Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff - was in the news in March 2016 for ensuring pay equity by conducting wage equity audits and making the requisite adjustments, and for naming their first Chief Equality Officer in September 2016.

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.