Why Is It So Hard for Women in the Military to Fit In?

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Two million US women are now veterans. During the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the United States military attempted the integration of women into the military in unprecedented numbers (15 percent of service members during these conflicts were women), opening combat and leadership roles to women for the first time. Yet, although women distinguished themselves as leaders and soldiers, Emily King of the Minnesota Women’s Press noted that “service women often feel disrespected and devalued, and many face discrimination.” Benedict Carey of the New York Times and King agree on two of the main factors that make life in the military so hard for women:

  • A sense of isolation for women that undermines their confidence and can lead to depression and suicide
  • The way the military treats sexual trauma, an experience that is more common for women than for men in the military
 

Isolation—Why Does It Happen?

The isolation women face in the military is not unlike what happens to women in other male-dominated industries and organizations, as described in my book, New Rules for Women: Revolutionizing the Way Women Work Together. As in other male-dominated organizations, women often see other women as their competition and do not support or bond with each other. King quoted military women who said, “Women generally don’t bond with other women,” and “There’s a sense of competition [between women] . . . fed by their superiors comparing them with other women rather than with their male peers.” While this dynamic of competition is not unique to the military, the impact on women under conditions of deployment and war may be especially severe. In addition, women in the military also have difficulty bonding with their male peers because they must all live together. Fear of rumors of romantic alliances, along with the potential misinterpretation of friendly gestures by a male peer, results in more isolation for women. It is not surprising, then, that their experience of exclusion has led to an alarming level of hopelessness and alienation felt among many women in the military and a resulting increase in the suicide rate for female soldiers during and after deployment. The rate of depression after deployment is also higher for women than men. The exception is for women who found companionship with other women while in the military.

Sexual Assault

King reported that according to government statistics, “About one in four women experience unwanted sexual contact in the military, ranging from inappropriate touching to rape.” Because reporting sexual assault is discouraged by the structure and procedures of the military, the percentages could be as high as three in four women. The chain of command system of determining guilt means that cases are not reported to civilian authorities, and a highly sexualized boy’s club culture means that perpetrators are seldom held accountable. Consequently, little support exists for those reporting sexual assaults. While Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, of New York, proposed a bill in 2014 that would move these cases out of military courts to prevent commanders from making decisions about prosecuting subordinates for rape and sexual assault, it did not pass in the Senate.

What Needs to Change?

The military needs to recognize the challenges faced by women that men do not face. To create a healthier and more supportive environment in which women can continue to excel without enduring the psychological and emotional damage that results from isolation and sexual assault, the military needs to make several changes:
  • Encourage supportive environments where women can bond and be supportive of each other. Organizations do this by promoting the formation and functioning of affinity groups.
  • Reward a wide range of leadership styles. As in corporations, while women can adopt a masculine leadership style, this style doesn’t play to the strengths of many women. Having to pretend you are someone you’re not, especially in the stressful context of military deployment, can take a toll.
  • Support passage and implementation of laws and policies that would move prosecution of sexual assault cases to civilian authorities to restore credibility and accountability.
Ultimately, we need more women in the senior ranks of the military, at the Joint Chiefs of Staff level, to get the changes that will allow everyone who desires a military career to thrive and bring their best to their service.   Image credit: Photo courtesy of US Army (http://www.army.mil)]]>

Our Discomfort with Powerful Women: What We Can Do

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I recently met a woman from India while we both waited for a train. The first question she asked me was, “Why have you never elected a woman leader in the United States, as we have done in India?” All I could say was, “That’s a good question.” She went on to ask, “Do you think Hillary Clinton will win the election this time? Is the United States ready yet for a woman leader?” I truthfully answered, “I really don’t feel confident that we are ready. The facts are not very encouraging—and I hope I’m wrong.” In a recent article in the New York Times, Bryce Covert cited these discouraging facts:

  • There has not yet been a woman elected to the White House.
  • The US Congress is less than 20 percent female.
  • In 2009, the year after Hillary Clinton conceded the nomination for president to Barack Obama, 13.5 percent of the top jobs in Fortune 500 companies were occupied by women. By 2013, that number rose to only 14.6 percent.
Covert goes on to note two troubling trends:
  • Women and minorities usually make it to corporate leadership in times of crisis.
  • They face backlash and added challenges once they get there that men don’t face.
Covert cited one study of large companies on the London Stock Exchange, which found that those companies who had put women on their boards “had just experienced consistently bad stock performance, while companies were generally stable before they appointed men.” Covert also cited a large study of all the promotions to chief executive at Fortune 500 companies over a fifteen-year period. The study found that “a company’s return on equity was consistently and significantly negative just before a woman or a minority got the job.” Because companies are commonly in crisis when women get the chance to take a senior leadership role, it is harder for women to succeed and more likely that they will be forced out and blamed for the problems. The second trend shows that once hired, women and minorities face challenges and forms of backlash that make success more difficult. Covert cited polling that shows both women and men prefer to have men in senior executive positions. (I have written in a previous article about the preference for male bosses.) In addition, Covert reported research on backlash against women when they act assertively at work. He noted that “female leaders are more likely to be called abrasive, strident, aggressive and even emotional.”  Women of color are also more likely to be called angry and militant when they act assertively. (Read more about this dynamic in another of my previous articles.)

What We Can Do to Help Pave the Way for Women Leaders

Because all change has to start with ourselves, we can take steps to fix these problems:
  1. Support women’s leadership in general. Remember, studies show that both women and men prefer having men as leaders, so we can reverse this trend by starting to be more supportive, in general, of women leaders at all levels and positions.
  2. Notice your own reflex reactions to quickly judge or feel uncomfortable with women leaders. I recently caught myself starting to be critical of a book by a well-known woman. I challenged myself to look for the value in the book, and I found plenty of value. Challenge yourself to ask, “What else could be true?” when you find yourself with an urge to negatively judge a woman.
  3. Whatever your political persuasion, challenge others when they judge a woman candidate as too aggressive, too ambitious, strident, or angry. These were many of the negative adjectives, often expressed by women, that were used to describe Hillary Clinton when she ran in 2008. Challenge people to speak about qualifications, facts, and issues, instead of personal characteristics.
Yes, we have work to do as a country to be ready to elect a female president, but by pushing through our unconscious bias and making conscious choices based on awareness, facts, and issues we can get ready to support women leaders. We can challenge ourselves and others to become aware of unconscious bias that stacks the deck against women leaders. Think about how important it is for girls to have more role models so that they are encouraged to aspire to be all they can be. Your decisions today will impact their future.   Image credit: Photo courtesy of Ralf Roletschek, Wikimedia Commons  ]]>

Knowing Your Value by Mika Brzezinski: A Book Review

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Knowing Your Value: Women, Money and Getting What You’re Worth, recounts her own painful experience of co-hosting the MSNBC political talk show Morning Joe with Joe Scarborough while he was paid fourteen times more than her. Brzezinski describes common mind-sets and missteps that got her into this frustrating and humiliating position—and kept her stuck there for a long time. She also shares tips from interviews with several successful women about how to get paid what you are worth.

Common Mistakes that Many Women Make

Brzezinski discovered that she was not alone in making these common mistakes:
  • Using ineffective negotiating strategies.
  • Accepting low pay for a new job, knowing it is not competitive, but taking it because you feel lucky to get the position.
  • Assuming that working hard to prove yourself will result in raises and promotions.
  • Not asking for what you’re worth.
  • Not owning your success and not taking credit for your accomplishments.
  • Accepting approval from a boss instead of money.
  • Valuing loyalty to a boss or organization instead of taking your career seriously—sometimes you have to quit and go someplace else to get more money and responsibility.
  • Accepting, or internalizing, beliefs that women are not as capable as men.

How to Get Paid What You Are Worth

Brzezinski interviewed several successful women, including Sheryl Sandberg, Valerie Jarrett, Tina Brown, Linda Babcock, Anna Quindlen, Arianna Huffington, and others, and shares many of their tips for getting paid what you’re worth, including the following advice:
  • Do not try to negotiate like a man because being assertive can work against a woman (one of the double binds we face). Instead, women need to communicate why the request is in the best interest of the organization. Document your achievements and state in clear terms what value you have brought to the organization.
  • One interviewee, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz suggested that “the best way to get men to listen is to complement them.”
  • Linda Babcock, author of Women Don’t Ask, said, “When women go in to negotiate, they have to do it by being ‘relentlessly pleasant’ . . . with a big smile on your face.”
  • Anna Quindlen advised that when negotiating for a raise or promotion, “Women have to be tough as nails and warm as toast.” Not one or the other, but both at the same time.
  • Do your homework and come to the negotiating table with information and alternatives. Offer your boss a choice and never ask yes or no questions.
  • Don’t apologize or overexplain.
  • Be ready to walk.
I am glad to be able to report that Brzezinski does acknowledge in her book that the gender wage gap is the result of a systemic problem where women are institutionally undervalued and where unconscious bias creates barriers for women. At the same time she describes clearly the ways that we collude in being undervalued and underpaid when we enact mind-sets and utilize ineffective negotiating strategies that work against us in the masculine world of the workplace. We must stay conscious of the double binds that we face when negotiating—but there is solid advice in this book about how to get paid what we’re worth!]]>

Vision Statements and Codes of Conduct

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Sample vision statement and code of conduct

Vision statement The women of [this organization] are a community of high-performing women who support each other to realize our own potential and the potential of our teams and to provide exceptional service to our clients. Code of conduct To realize our vision, we

• Surface our friendship rules—we talk about our expectations • Stay present and engaged with each other, even in the face of disappointment • Give each other feedback about the impact of our behaviors • Are trustworthy—we transknit, but we do not gossip • Maintain confidences when asked to do so or else say we cannot • Celebrate and acknowledge each other’s achievements • Compete for rewards and resources while affirming our relationships • Engage in meaningful disagreement and listen to each other • Challenge ideas, not people • Help each other feel heard in meetings • Self-disclose to the degree we are each comfortable • Are authentic—we share where we are directly to each other • Ask ourselves, “What else could be true?” when we feel judgmental of another woman

  An excerpt from my book, New Rules for Women, available at Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/dp/0982056982/).]]>

New Research on Family-Friendly Policies in the Workplace: Lessons from around the World

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recent New York Times article Claire Cain Miller gives examples of some of the laws that have been passed around the world to address family and career balance:

  • Chile passed a law, the most recent version in 2009, requiring employers to provide and pay for child care for women with children under two.
  • Spain passed a law in 1999 giving workers with children younger than seven the right to ask their employers for reduced hours without fear of being laid off.
  • The United States passed the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) of 1993, which provides workers with twelve weeks of unpaid leave.
  • Many other countries in Europe provide long, paid maternity leaves—some up to one year—and part-time work protections.
Several new studies, summarized by Miller, have produced some disappointing findings about the “unintended consequences” of these laws for women. We need to learn from these experiences. Here are some of these findings:
  • In Chile, the result of the requirement for employers to provide child care has been a decrease in women’s starting salaries of between 9 percent and 20 percent.
  • In Spain, women’s right to work part time has resulted, a decade later, in a decline in full-time stable jobs for all women, with companies 37 percent less likely to promote women and 45 percent more likely to dismiss them.
  • In the United States, as a result of the FMLA, women are 5 percent more likely to remain employed but 8 percent less likely to be promoted than they were before the law was passed.
  • A study of twenty-two countries with family-friendly policies found that women were more likely to be in dead-end jobs and were less likely to be managers.
Clearly, this news is not good. So what are the lessons we can learn about how to get more support for working families without penalizing women?
  • Make sure employers do not bear the costs so that they do not pass them on to their employees as in Chile. Three states in the United States offer paid family leave and finance it through employee payroll taxes, which seems to be working.
  • Keep policies gender neutral and encourage both women and men to use them. In Sweden, family leave policies encourage both parents to take time off for a new baby. In most other countries, including the United States, these policies are considered to be for women, and it is nearly all women who take advantage of them. If men take advantage of family-friendly policies, perhaps they will be seen as policies for everyone, and not just for women.
  • Continue to challenge the myths about women’s careers, described in previous blogs (“Myths about Women’s Careers,” part I and part II), and work toward equal partnership with the men in our lives.
Do you have other ideas about how to overcome the unintended consequences of family-friendly policies for women? Please let us hear them. We need to figure this out together.]]>

Next Steps for Dealing with Negative Stereotypes

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  • Discounted or doubted yourself?
  • Apologized before presenting your ideas in a group or meeting, such as saying, “I may be wrong” or “This is probably a stupid question”?
  • Felt like an imposter or fraud when you got a promotion or opportunity?
  • Looked in the mirror and really disliked what you saw?
  • Tied your self-image to your appearance or clothes?
    • Level II—Have you ever
    • Said something negative about another woman and denied it when she asked?
    • Talked negatively about a woman behind her back and smiled to her face?
    • Made a commitment to support another woman and didn’t do it when the time came?
    • Said to someone, “She’s such a bitch”?
    • Made fun of another woman’s appearance behind her back?
    • Said or thought, “You can’t trust women”?
    • Spread a rumor that you had heard that cast doubt on another woman’s competence?
    • Seen another woman’s ideas attacked or ignored in a meeting, whether you agreed with them or not, while you sat back and watched in silence?
    Use the following scoring guide to reflect upon your answers:

    1–3 checks = You exhibit low internalization of negative stereotypes about women.

    4–6 checks = You exhibit moderate internalization of negative stereotypes about women.

    7+ checks = You exhibit strong internalization of negative stereotypes about women.

    2. Think about your vision for how you would like women to behave toward each other at work. Create a personal code of conduct for how you want to behave. Post it and look at it daily to remind yourself of how you want to be.   An excerpt from my book, New Rules for Women, available at Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/dp/0982056982/).]]>

    The Gender Wage Gap for Teachers and Nurses

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    CNN recently reported that, among full-time workers, women earn about 78 cents to a man’s dollar, according to the latest numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This gap is more pronounced for black women (64 cents) and Latinas (56 cents) compared to every dollar earned by a white man. One of the most surprising findings for me is that this gender pay gap persists, even in female-dominated professions like teaching and nursing. For example, women hold 70 percent of elementary and middle school teaching jobs, yet men still earn more for the same role. The CNN report goes on to explain that “male teachers earn a median of $1,096 a week, whereas women earn $956—about 87 cents to the man’s dollar.” The most shocking news about the gap for me, reported in the New York Times by Catherine Saint Louis, is that the pay gap for nurses did not narrow from 1988 to 2013—twenty-five years! I was surprised that any gender pay gap exists for nurses considering that between 90 percent and 93 percent of nurses are women. I thought that surely this was one profession where there would not be a gap. But this is not the case. Here are some facts from a study of 290,000 registered nurses:

    • Overall, male nurses make $5,100 more on average per year than female colleagues in similar positions.
    • Male cardiology nurses are paid on average $6,000 more per year.
    • Male chronic care nurses make roughly $3,800 more than women.
    • Male nurse anesthetists are paid $17,290 more per year on average.
    The researchers reporting these pay gaps for nurses could only speculate about the reasons for these persistent gaps:
    • Men may be better negotiators.
    • Women may have a tougher time getting promoted.
    • Only about 20 percent of nurses who work in hospitals are unionized, which may be a factor.
    • A lingering bias may persist that a man is more of an expert because he is a man.
    We need to be aware of the persistent gender gap in almost all professions in the United States. As explained by Terry O’Neill in Ms. Magazine, the gender and gender/race wage gap undermines women’s economic security, and lawmakers continue to dismiss this harsh reality. She noted that, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, the gap is closing so slowly that “if we keep going at the current pace, it will be the year 2058 before women have wage parity.” If you agree with me that 2058 is too long to wait, then it’s time that we get together and demand that our lawmakers take this issue seriously and legislate for pay equity.]]>

    Career Sabotage – Part 3

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    When I worked in the emergency department, I was in charge every night—and the people who worked with me enjoyed me being in charge, or at least that was what was said to me. I had beautiful reviews and had some great pals, many of whom were at my wedding. Fast-forward about five years, and I have now decided to leave my management position to go back to the emergency department. So I talked to the emergency department manager, who has been a friend of mine for twenty-five years. About three weeks into the process, when I hadn’t heard anything, I went back to my friend who was the manager of the emergency department and said, “So what’s going on?” She got this really awful look on her face and she twitched—and she was tripping all over herself and said, “You’d better talk to your boss.” So I sit down with my boss, who says to me, “There is a problem. They don’t want you there.” You could have knocked me over with a feather. She went on to say this one, this one, and this one—my friends, people who had been at my wedding—had gone to their bosses and said, “We don’t want her.” I was shocked. We would go out after work together; we would talk to each other on days off. Sometimes I would help them out with babysitting or they would help me. If I had any kind of a party or get-together, they were first on my list to invite. They were the people I laughed with at work; they were the people I cried with at work. They were there through my divorce, through a terribly tough time in my life. Why would my friends turn on me like that? That they would stab a friend in the back for no apparent reason for their own selfish gain? Well the bottom line was, they were afraid that I was going to usurp their perceived position. Keri’s story is an example of the impact of mixing friendship expectations with the hierarchical norms of masculine work environments, which can trigger horizontal violence. In such cases, acts of covert career aggression can leave the recipient feeling not only bewildered but shocked when it happens. Career aggression can also damage a woman’s self-confidence. Angella, a diplomatic services manager in Mexico, explained that “When someone is saying bad things about you, after a while you start to feel that maybe the bad things are true.”   An excerpt from my book, New Rules for Women, available at Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/dp/0982056982/).]]>