voting

When Women and Men Work Together: The Costs and Benefits

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Many women and men are still wary of working together when their work requires them to have one-on-one meetings or to travel together for business. New research reported by Claire Cain Miller of the New York Times  reveals that almost two-thirds of the 5,282 registered voters surveyed by the New York Times say, “People should take extra caution around members of the opposite sex at work.” Miller notes that these results also partially explain “why women still don’t have the same opportunities as men. . . . They [women] are treated differently.” Like many women, my work sometimes requires that I travel with male colleagues for my business. I currently have wonderful male colleagues with whom I have respectful and trusting relationships. I also have had those other experiences, so I understand the need for caution, especially for younger women. Early in my career in two different contexts, two senior male colleagues who had the power to offer me business opportunities used their power to demand sexual favors. Both were married, older men. They may not have thought of themselves as “demanding favors” and may have thought they were offering me a compliment by propositioning me—but they probably knew they were abusing their positions. Because of their power to cut off my much-needed income, their actions put me in a very difficult position. I did rebuff them both—and they both stopped hiring me. The financial impact was devastating for me. Women and men need to be able to work together, yet Miller describes real reasons to be wary:

  • Power differences do make it difficult for the lower-power individuals to protect themselves. Their vulnerability is real. This is true for both women and men. However, men do still hold a higher proportion of the high-power positions, so women are still more likely to be vulnerable.
  • The recent examples from Uber and Fox clearly show that sexual harassment is still being perpetrated and tolerated and ignored by the highest levels of leadership. This makes women and men more afraid to report unwanted and unwelcome advances.
  • The perception of inappropriate behavior in the workplace, whether or not it has actually been experienced that way, can ruin careers.
The discomfort women and men can experience working together can clearly result in negative impacts on women’s careers:
  • People tend to hire and promote people like themselves with whom they are most comfortable. Miller, in a previous article, described this phenomenon as “homophily.”
  • Women may not be invited to join a male boss on a business trip because of his fear of a perception of inappropriate behavior by the female employee or by others. Women may, then, lose opportunities for advancement and exposure to new business networks. This can be career limiting.
  • If women have difficulty getting one-on-one meetings with male bosses, they may not be able to demonstrate their readiness for promotions.
I wrote in a previous article about the “tax” women pay due to fear of sexual assault and sexual harassment. What can organizations do? Miller suggests keeping office doors open for one-on-one meetings, utilizing conference rooms with glass walls, and going for after-work drinks or dinner with multiple coworkers. Communication is key—companies can teach women and men how to have honest conversations about how to work together. Organizations should also have multiple, clear procedures and supports available for employees to use when they feel inappropriate behavior has happened. Often, perpetrators are unaware of the impact their behavior has had, and they need some low-key feedback and counseling to change their behavior. I wish it was not still necessary for women and men to exercise thoughtful caution when working with each other, but it is. We can manage this dynamic and have enjoyable and productive work relationships without penalizing women’s careers. What has worked for you?   Image courtesy of Highways England. CC by 2.0]]>

What Liberia Can Teach Us About Electing Women

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In 2005, the women of Liberia elected Ellen Johnson Sirleaf as the first female president of an African nation, and we can learn a lot by examining how they did it. In a recent article for the New York Times, Helene Cooper, a reporter who grew up in Liberia before immigrating to the United States in 1980, tells the story of how Liberian women got Sirleaf elected, highlighting valuable lessons for American women. When the Liberian election took place in 2005, Liberia had just emerged from a brutal civil war. Nearly everyone had been a victim or witness, if not a perpetrator, of extreme acts of violence. Children were kidnapped and turned into child soldiers; family members were brutally murdered while survivors were forced to watch. Cooper reports that “more than 70 percent of Liberian women were raped . . . while horrified children were forced to watch their sisters, mothers, and grandmothers gang-raped in front of them.” Cooper notes that while the women of Liberia blamed the men who waged the war for the violence and brutality, when it came time for the first postwar presidential election, initially only 15 percent of the women were registered to vote. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a Harvard-educated global technocrat with significant government experience, was running against a field of men—with an uneducated soccer star in the lead. A group of women leaders got worried and went to work to organize women to vote for Sirleaf. How did a small group of women in Liberia get enough women to register and vote twice in two rounds of voting? The problem in Liberia for getting women to register and vote was time. The men running for president were holding mass rallies, which women did not have time to attend. The majority of women worked in markets to earn their living, which is equivalent to low-wage service jobs in our country, and they were responsible for the child care in their families. Realizing that there was a need for a more effective strategy for engaging women, Sirleaf’s supporters organized to

  • Use radio stations to broadcast their message
  • Provide babysitters and market-stall tenders to free up the women to register and vote
  • Send women into rural areas with bullhorns to stand along the road and broadcast their message of the need for a female president
  • Organize women’s rallies and pass out clean drinking water at the rallies
  • Go door to door passing out t-shirts and flyers
  • Offer young men money to buy a beer in exchange for their voter ID cards to ensure that the men could not vote—not something we could do here, but very creative, nonetheless
The result, ultimately, was that 51 percent of the registered voters were women. On the second ballot, 80 percent of the Liberian women voters elected Sirleaf, who won 59.4 percent of the total vote. What lessons can we draw for electing a woman president? We have not had a brutal civil war, but women in the United States do face deeply entrenched problems in this country that male leaders have ignored for decades. We need to join together to elect women to all levels of government to represent our interests, such as
  • Closing the gender wage gap (which is much worse for women of color)
  • Ensuring that our workplaces are free of sexual harassment by eliminating nondisclosure agreements that silence women when we are harassed and keep the harassers protected and in place
  • Subsidizing child care and instituting paid family leave policies
The women of Liberia have given us a wonderful example of what we can accomplish when we work together. What would you like to achieve as part of a united coalition?   Photo courtesy of Center for Global Development. CC by 2.0]]>