gender bias

Where Are the Women CEOs?

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In business and in politics, few women have made it to the top—none in politics in the United States, as seen with Hillary Clinton’s recent loss in the 2016 presidential race. And Catalyst reports that the percentage of female CEOs of Fortune 500 companies has been stuck at 5 percent for a very long time. Why has there been so little progress? One factor explaining the dearth of female CEOs is described by Katrin Bennhold of the New York Times as the phenomenon of the glass cliff. The concept of the glass cliff, coined in 2005 by two professors at Exeter University in the United Kingdom, posits that “women are often placed in positions of power when the situation is dire, men are uninterested and the likelihood of success is low.” Bennhold gives the example of the election of Theresa May to prime minister of the United Kingdom right after the Brexit vote, which put her immediately into a lose-lose situation where her chances of success were very low. Bennhold goes on to note that all the men responsible for Brexit “stabbed each other soundly in the back” and ran away. Julie Creswell writes that researchers at Utah State University also report that women are more likely to be promoted to the top job of troubled companies and then “[lack] the support or authority” to make necessary changes. In other words, women are less likely to succeed in glass cliff appointments, and their tenure is often shorter because they are under conditions detrimental to success. Susan Chira of the New York Times describes other factors that contribute to the low number of female CEOs, based on interviews she conducted with dozens of senior women who competed to be CEOs but did not succeed. These women concluded that the barriers for women are “more deeply rooted and persistent than they wanted to believe.” They reported these barriers:

  • Women are not seen as visionary.
  • Women are less comfortable with self-promotion and more likely to be criticized (and villainized) when they do grab the spotlight—and they are often perceived as unlikeable.
  • Men continue to be threatened by assertive women.
  • Women are disproportionately penalized for stumbles.
  • Most women are not socialized to be unapologetically competitive and can be caught off guard by the ruthlessness of competition at the top. One executive explained, “Women are prey . . . They [men] can smell it in the water, that women are not going to play the same game. Those men think, ‘If I kick her, she’s not going to kick back, but the men will. So I’ll go after her.’”
This latter point may also explain research from Utah State University, as reported by Creswell, showing that female CEOs are 34 percent more likely to be targeted by an activist investor who forces them out. A study from Arizona State University found that, out of all chief executive appointments from 2003 to 2013, one in four women-led companies were attacked by activist investors. What can be done? Chira notes that Deborah Gillis, president and chief executive officer of Catalyst, says that it’s not enough for leaders and boards to pay lip service to valuing diversity and advancing women and minorities. They need to put their money where their mouth is by withholding bonuses from leaders if they do not promote women and minorities and increasing bonuses if they do. They must also continue to grow the number of women on corporate boards. More women are seriously considered for CEO appointments when women are board members. Without these efforts, the deck is stacked against women getting the chance to demonstrate leadership from the top.   Image courtesy of businessforward (CC BY 2.0)]]>

6 Steps That Can Help Women Advance in Law Firms

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Progress has been very slow for women’s advancement in law firms. Why is this the case? As Elizabeth Olson of the New York Times reports, women are

  • Slightly over 50 percent of current law school graduates (and have been for a long time)
  • Under 35 percent of lawyers at law firms
  • Only 20 percent of equity partners, where the highest compensation and best opportunities for leadership exist
Olson cites a recent study by Anne Urda of Law360 that found that “only nine of 300 firms surveyed had a lawyer work force that was 50 percent or more female.” Olson notes that a number of recent gender bias lawsuits have been filed against law firms alleging substantial gender pay disparities and discrimination for either associates or partners, reflecting
  • Substantially lower starting salaries for female associates compared to their male counterparts
  • Promotions for female associates without commensurate pay increases
  • Female partners being excluded from meetings about client matters, not being allowed to pitch to firm clients, and being thwarted in their efforts to assume greater leadership
  • Company tolerance for female partners being targeted for harassment and humiliation by firm leaders and peers
  • Being made nonequity partners rather than equity partners, where the compensation levels are higher and the opportunities for leadership available
Shira A. Scheindlin, a recently retired federal district court judge writes that in her courtroom, it was rare for female lawyers to have a lead role or to speak at all. The talking was done primarily by white men, with women sitting at the counsel table, usually junior and silent, although they were clearly the ones most familiar with the details of the case. In a study that she recently conducted with the New York Bar Association, the gender of the lawyers who primarily spoke in court in 2,800 cases over four months was recorded. Scheindlin found that
  • Women were the lead lawyers for private parties barely 20 percent of the time.
  • Overall, women were lead counsel for only 25 percent of criminal and commercial cases in courtrooms across New York.
Without the opportunity to be in the lead counsel role, women find it hard to advance in law firms. What can be done?  Scheindlin suggests the following:
  1. Clients can demand that their legal teams be diverse.
  2. Law firms can take concrete steps to pay women and men at the same rate for the same work.
  3. Firms can ensure that junior female lawyers participate in the same number of depositions as their male counterparts.
  4. Firms can ensure that every trial team has at least one woman.
  5. Firms can ensure that women are meeting clients at the same rate as men.
  6. Law firms can make sure that bright, aggressive women are given the same opportunities for leadership positions as their equally qualified male colleagues.
These are serious and concrete steps that can remove the barriers to success for women in law firms. Isn’t it about time?   Photo courtesy of Cal Injury Lawyer (CC Public Domain Mark 1.0)]]>

Insights from New Research on the Gender Wage Gap

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My niece just had a baby and is worried about being paid less than her male peers. She is an engineer with solid work experience on her resume, and she intends to return to work full time. She wants answers from me about how to avoid becoming a victim of the gender wage gap. Unfortunately, new research reported by Claire Cain Miller of the New York Times reinforces that, as a new mother in her late twenties with a college degree and a professional career, she is poised to become a wage gap statistic. I don’t know what to tell her about how to avoid this. Because most companies keep salary data secret, she will probably only be able to suspect unfair treatment but will not be able to prove it. The odds, and statistics, are stacked against her. Miller reports on two new studies on the gender wage gap that sharpen our understanding of what is happening to women’s pay, when it’s happening, and why. The studies, conducted by Sari Kerr of Wellesley College in collaboration with several female colleagues at other universities, combine two databases from the Census Bureau on private sector companies that reveal fresh nuances in the gender wage gap picture:

  • The gender wage gap is wider for college-educated women than for those with no college degree and occurs between the ages of twenty-four and forty-five.
  • College-educated women make 90 percent as much as men their age at twenty-five, but only 55 percent as much by the age of forty-five.
  • Men with college degrees get significant pay increases when they change jobs during those years. When married women change jobs, they are less likely to get big pay increases.
  • Miller cites Kerr as explaining that the bulk of the pay gap, accounting for fully 73 percent of the gap, is from “women not getting raises and promotions at the same rate as men within companies. Seniority and experience seem to pay off much more for men than women.”
  • The wage gap is not as wide for women without college degrees. The gap for this group is 28 percent instead of 55 percent because there are fewer high paying jobs available for men without college degrees to create the larger gap.
Why does the wage gap happen? Miller cites Kerr’s report to explain:
  • High-paying jobs requiring college degrees place more value on long, inflexible hours and face time. Because studies show that the division of labor at home is still unequal, even when both spouses work full time, women’s careers tend to suffer.
  • Women are more likely to give up job opportunities in favor of their husband’s job.
  • Even when women continue to work full time after having children, employers pay them less because they assume women are less committed.
  • When mothers cut back on their hours, their pay is disproportionately cut.
What can be done to achieve pay equity? Miller suggests some workplace and policy changes needed to break the wage gap cycle:
  • Companies can put less priority on long hours and face time in the office and reward results instead.
  • Government-subsidized child care can make it possible for both parents to balance the demands of career and family.
  • Companies should offer moderate-length parental leave for both women and men. (While my niece received a three-month maternity leave, her husband’s company allowed only three days for paternity leave.)
  • Companies need to be transparent about salary data.
I wish I had specific guidance to offer my niece, but I don’t. We are all going to have to continue to push for policy changes that will make equity possible. In the meantime, I hope she keeps fighting for fairness and does not get discouraged. What suggestions do you have for young women who want pay equity? Photo courtesy of Skeddy in NYC. CC by 2.0  ]]>

Invisible Women in Science: Overcoming the Challenges of Race and Gender

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“I can’t believe I had to learn about these amazing and brilliant women from a movie! Why didn’t we learn about them in school?” lamented an African American friend and colleague. I felt the same way when I saw the movie Hidden Figures, a true story about the African American female mathematicians, scientists, and engineers who worked at NASA in the early days of the space program in the mid-twentieth century. They pushed against humiliations inside and outside their workplace, including racial segregation in their schools, dining rooms, bathrooms, and work spaces. They worked with lesser titles and large pay inequities to perform calculations of orbital trajectories and to solve engineering problems, making space travel possible. Janna Levin, who reviewed the book by Margot Lee Shetterly from which the movie was made, cites Shetterly as saying, “Women . . . had to wield their intellects like a scythe, hacking away against the stubborn underbrush of low expectations” based on gender and race. Their contributions were largely unacknowledged. Why are women’s contributions to science so invisible to most of us? Levin, who is a professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College, also reviews Dava Sobel’s book about women astronomers at the Harvard College Observatory near the turn of the twentieth century. Another carefully researched true story, The Glass Universe tells the story of women astronomers hired and mentored by Edward Charles Pickering, director of the observatory from 1877 to 1919. Pickering is credited with hiring these women and mentoring the first female PhDs in astronomy at Harvard. Nonetheless, he refused to pay them the equivalent of their male counterparts. Star protégée Williamina Fleming, a single mother, complained to him about her salary—$1,500 per year in contrast to $2,500 per year paid to the men—and he told her “that I received an excellent salary as women’s salaries stand. . . . Does he ever think that I have a home to keep and a family to take care of as well as the men?” Her complaints were ignored. Levin notes that science profited from the women astronomers at the Harvard Observatory, but most of us have never heard their names—Henrietta Swan Leavitt, Williamina Fleming, Annie Jump Cannon, Cecelia Payne, and Antonia Maury are a few. Leavitt’s work, known as Leavitt’s Law, made Edwin Hubble’s development of his telescope possible. Hubble’s name is very familiar to me but not Leavitt’s. The recent death of Dr. Vera Rubin brings another unacknowledged female scientist to our attention. Lisa Randall explains that Vera Rubin made one of the most important advances in physics in the twentieth century when she presented convincing evidence of dark matter. Rubin’s discovery well deserved the Nobel Prize, but her revolutionary insight was never officially acknowledged with a Nobel. Randall, herself a professor of physics at Harvard, explains that “the elephant in the room is gender. Dr. Rubin was not alone in having been overlooked for the Nobel.” Randall goes on to note that “of the 204 Nobel laureates in physics, only two have been women.” Why don’t we learn about the accomplishments of women scientists? The history books don’t mention them, but we can make their names familiar to the people in our lives—our daughters and sons, our granddaughters and grandsons, our students. Let’s make a point of it!   Image courtesy of NASA/GSFC/Debbie Mccallum. CC by 2.0]]>

Women and Minorities in Law Firms: The Glacial Pace of Change

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Women have enrolled in law school in equal numbers with men in the United States for the last twenty years, and minority enrollment has also steadily increased during this period. Recent studies, compiled into a series of articles by New York Times reporter Elizabeth Olson show both good news and bad news about the current status of women and minorities in law firms. Olson reports good news based on a study by the National Association for Law Placement (NALP). This study shows that women and minorities made small gains in 2016:

  • Women made up 22.13 percent of partners, up from 21.46 percent in 2015.
  • Minorities made up 8.05 percent of partners, up from 7.52 percent the previous year. Of these, 1.81 percent of partners were African Americans.
  • As associates, women held 45 percent of the positions, a slight decrease from 2009 levels. Minorities made up 22.72 percent of associates, up from 19.67 percent in 2009. African Americans made up 4.11 percent of associates, which is below their 2009 level.
  • Disabled lawyers are scarce.
  • Minorities are represented at higher levels among summer associates but are not hired into permanent jobs.
James G. Leipold, executive director of the NALP, notes that these averages mask big discrepancies by law firm size and geography, and these small gains reflect an “incredibly slow pace of change [that] continues to be discouraging.” Why is progress so slow? Research on women lawyers probably holds answers for minority lawyers as well. Olson reports on a study showing that female law students are clustered in law schools with lower rankings. Because jobs with higher wages and long-term job security go to graduates of highly ranked, prestigious law schools, Professor Deborah J. Merritt of Moritz College of Law asserts that “women start at a disadvantage.” Olson also says women are “underrepresented in the higher echelons of law, including the ranks of judges, corporate counsel, law school deans and professors.” The access to these highly ranked law schools is not a level playing field, either.
  • Fewer female college graduates tend to apply to top-ranked law schools, and, when they do, they are less likely to be accepted. Admissions processes at law schools remain murky and lack transparency.
  • Fewer women are enrolled in law schools that claim to place 85 percent of graduates in “gold standard” jobs (full time and long-term).
As noted earlier, the numbers of women and minorities promoted to partner remain low. Olson reports on another study showing that even when women do make partner at large law firms, there is a pay gap of 44 percent between male and female partners. While there are a variety of possibilities for why this discrepancy exists, two seem most likely:
  • There is an “old boys’ network” at play because of connections made at prestigious law schools that result in the hiring firm landing more deals for large accounts.
  • Men are better at receiving credit for originating big cases that impact annual compensation.
In fact, though, many female partners feel that those credits are awarded arbitrarily, often behind closed doors by all-male management committees, and do not accurately represent women’s contributions. Olson reports on three discrimination lawsuits against three different law firms by three different female partners with such claims. In these cases, the female partners complain of pay cuts, demotions, and terminations, even though they were top earners in their firms. I suggest we watch for the resolution of these gender-bias cases for Kerrie L. Campbell, Traci M. Ribeiro, and Kamee Verdrager. Perhaps these lawsuits will force law firms to change their culture to become more transparent and equitable. Unfortunately, too often it takes a lawsuit to bring about change.     Image courtesy of Rep. Nancy Pelosi.  CC by 2.0.]]>

Three Tips for How to Get More Women on Corporate Boards

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The United Kingdom and Australia have significantly increased the number of women on corporate boards in recent years, while representation in the United States has stalled. Nneka Orji of The Glasshammer reports that female representation in the United Kingdom’s FTSE 100 company boardrooms increased from 12.5 percent in 2011 to 26 percent in 2016. Similarly, Alexandra Spring writes in the Guardian that 26 percent of the director positions in Australia’s ASX 200 companies are now held by women, with a target of 30 percent by 2018. In contrast, Linda Colby of Bloomberg News reports that only 19.9 percent of board seats in S&P 500 companies were held by women in 2015, up from 19.2 percent in 2014. At this rate, Colby notes, it will take more than forty years for women in the United States to reach 30 percent representation on corporate boards. How have the United Kingdom and Australia made so much progress? In the United Kingdom, the Davies Review found that setting a clear five-year target in 2011 of achieving 25 percent representation by women, along with a public commitment from senior leaders to proactively address unconscious bias and other obstacles for women, resulted in the increase. In Australia, research from 2005–2011 found that companies with more women on boards showed higher financial performance. This research led to a 2011 report that called for organizations to set numeric targets and report on them. Australia’s implementation of these recommendations also increased the representation of women on corporate boards to 26 percent in 2016. Why does it matter that more women be on boards? A 2016 study by EY and the Peterson Institute of International Economics showed that “companies with at least 30 percent women in leadership may boost profit margins by 15 percent.” In addition, an earlier study by the index provider MCSI found that companies with more women “delivered 35 percent better ROI since 2010 than those groups lacking board diversity.” It just makes business sense to have more women on boards—but talk won’t get us there. Here are three important components of what worked in the United Kingdom and Australia:

  • Setting specific and time-bound goals
  • Being transparent about committing to those goals
  • Building in accountability and linking remuneration to progress against gender diversity targets
These are important lessons for the United States. We have not yet made these commitments. Are there other steps that you think would increase the representation of women on boards? Please share your ideas in the comments section.   The image in this post is in the public domain courtesy of Hillyne Jonkerman]]>

How to Close the Gender Pay Gap: Massachusetts Leads the Way

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The Massachusetts legislature just unanimously passed the strongest equal pay law in the country. In spite of a legal prohibition against gender-based pay discrimination passed by the state in 1945, the gender wage gap has persisted. Shirley Leung of the Boston Globe reports that currently

  • Women in Massachusetts, in general, make eighty-two cents for every dollar a man earns
  • Black women fare worse at sixty-one cents for every dollar a man earns
  • Latinas fare even worse at fifty cents per dollar
Clearly, having state and federal laws prohibiting pay discrimination on the books for decades has not worked to close the pay gap. The Massachusetts law, which takes effect in July 2018, addresses the wage gap in the following ways:
  • The new law takes steps to promote salary transparency. While companies are not required to publish salaries, employees in Massachusetts can now openly discuss their salaries and join together to compel employers to monitor and fix wage gaps. Employees are still responsible for demanding that wage monitoring occur, but a group of fifty companies in Boston have volunteered to do wage-gap audits and publish their results, which could influence other organizations to act before their employees pressure them to do so. The state treasurer has also set up a website, equalpayma.com, to help women understand how underpaid they might be.
  • The law sets new standards for determining comparable work. These standards did not previously exist, so winning a lawsuit claiming unequal pay for comparable work was almost impossible.
  • The law provides companies with new incentives to monitor and correct wage discrepancies—if they do so, they get legal protection if workers sue for gender-based discrimination. They will be given three years to demonstrate they have corrected the problem if employees sue.
  • The new law also prohibits employers from asking the wage history of applicants until after the employer makes an offer with a salary figure attached. This can help prevent women and minorities from being locked into lower salaries.
This new legislation arose from Boston mayor Tom Menino’s establishment of the Women’s Workforce Council in 2013. This council included representatives of many stakeholder groups and drew upon extensive research reported by Iris Bohnet in her new book, What Works: Gender Equity by Design. Transparency and accountability, two of the most important findings reported by Bohnet, are at the core of the new Massachusetts laws. Focusing only on the gender-wage gap is not enough—we must also address the race-wage gap. New state and federal laws must be passed to provide transparency and accountability for pay equity across race and gender. As Shirley Leung notes, wage gaps are often not intentional. In fact, they are often the result of unconscious bias. But as noted by Katie Donovan, founder of Equal Pay Negotiations, “as long as organizations do not analyze and publish salary data, they have ‘plausible deniability.’” While I believe the Massachusetts law could have gone further, it is a great start, and I hope other states will follow with their own innovations until we finally close the gender- and race-wage gaps.     The image in this post is in the public domain courtesy of Thomas Breher.]]>

Wage Gaps and Work Gaps: Implications for Women’s Lives

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Recently, during a women’s leadership program I was facilitating, a participant, Amy, had an insight. She had been complaining about being exhausted and stressed all the time while trying to juggle a full-time job and family life—she loved her demanding job and her family, but she had no time for herself and was tired all the time. What was her insight? She realized that her husband expected her to do almost all the work of maintaining their home and family and did not really do much to share this load. She had never seen so clearly that she was carrying an unfair share of the burden, and she had also taken it for granted that this was her role. She now began to question these assumptions. In a previous blog, I wrote about the costs to relationships and women’s careers when both partners do not share the responsibilities for family and home care equally. I also wrote about the ways that we, as women, collude in keeping this imbalance in place as Amy was doing as well as the ways we can reverse this imbalance. Tyler Cowen of the New York Times writes that in several ways, women are in fact working more while men are working less. He explains that the Great Recession had a major impact on labor supply numbers:

  • In 2014, about 12 percent of American men ages twenty-five to fifty-four neither had jobs nor were looking for them, compared to 8 percent in 1994.
  • Fewer than 20 percent of men over the age of sixty-five are in the workforce.
  • Fewer teenagers have jobs—35 percent, compared to 55 percent several decades ago.
Cowen points out that women’s increased participation in the workforce has supported American economic growth. The unfair part is that women continue to carry a bigger share of the household chores and childrearing while also working full-time. The distribution of stress is uneven, and Cowen notes that while barriers are falling for women in the workplace, the distribution of work in the home is uneven and results in another type of inequality. No wonder Amy is so tired! But while women are working more, the gender wage gap continues, and women are still paid less than men who do the same work. Suzanne Woolley of Bloomberg News reports on new studies showing that one of the implications of the wage gap for women is a sleep gap. The author explains that people tend to lose sleep over things they feel are not in their control. In a poll conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International, the sleep gap for women has increased by 8 percentage points over the past year. The survey found that the biggest cause of sleep loss is fear of not having saved enough for retirement—56 percent of men reported losing sleep over money compared with 70 percent of women, for good reason:
  • Lower earnings from the gender wage gap mean less savings and social security for women.
  • In 2010, women received one-third less than a man’s average benefit for social security.
  • At age sixty-five and older, women are 80 percent more likely than men to be impoverished.
Yes, the wage gap is important, but it is not the only gap that needs attending to. We also need to pay attention to the inequality of work itself. The implications for our health and our security in our later years are serious. If you and your partner have successfully addressed an imbalance in household responsibilities, I’d love to hear about it in the comments section. Tell us what has worked for you!   The image in this post is in the public domain courtesy of Public Domain Pictures. ]]>

A Gender Pay Gap for Female Physicians: New Research and Solutions

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To the surprise of many, a large new study found a persistent gender pay gap for female physicians. Catherine Saint Louis reports in the New York Times that contrary to previous studies of physician salaries, which drew from incomplete data and could be easily dismissed, this study draws on a large objective sample of ten thousand physician faculty members at twenty-four public medical schools in the United States. The researchers carefully controlled for a variety of factors that can influence income, such as volume of patients seen, years since residency, specialty, and age. Saint Louis reports that after adjusting for these factors, the researchers found the following discrepancies:

  • Female neurosurgeons, cardiothoracic surgeons, and other surgical specialists made roughly $44,000 less than men in those positions.
  • Female orthopedic surgeons made nearly $41,000 less than male orthopedic surgeons.
  • Women made about $38,000 less among oncologists and blood specialists, $36,000 less among obstetrician-gynocologists, and $34,000 less among cardiologists.
  • Only in radiology did women make more—about $2,000 more than men.
  • Female professors made about the same salary as male associate professors even though the female professors outranked them.
Dr. Kim Templeton, the president of the American Medical Women’s Association, notes that while this new research is important, “just having it out there isn’t going to fix the problem.” What will fix the problem? I am proud to report that the state of Massachusetts, where I live, is moving closer to passing legislation to close the gender pay gap, which has persisted in spite of the legal prohibitions against gender-based pay discrimination passed by the state in 1945. Michael Bodley of the Boston Globe explains that the new legislation, if passed, will take the following proactive steps:
  • Require all companies in Massachusetts to undertake a study of their gender-based pay practices and publish the results.
  • Protect employers from being held liable for pay-discrimination lawsuits if they can show that they have undertaken a study of wage disparities in the past three years and can demonstrate reasonable progress toward eliminating the gap.
  • Prohibit employers from asking applicants about their salary history until the employer has made a salary offer. This helps eliminate the negative impact of women’s historically lower salaries.
As long as organizations do not analyze and publish their salary data, they have “plausible deniability,” explained Katie Donovan, founder of Equal Pay Negotiations. But as we know, tracking and researching the numbers are not enough. Both employees and legislatures need to hold organizations accountable for closing the gender wage gap. Do you have success stories for closing the wage gap? I would love to hear them.   The image in this post is in the public domain courtesy of Darko Stojanovic.       ]]>

Why There Are So Few Senior Women on Wall Street

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Why are there so few women in senior management in the banking and investment industry, also known as Wall Street? In spite of a plethora of diversity committees, women’s leadership programs and retreats, and inclusion training in Wall Street firms for at least the last two decades, the representation of women in senior positions has not changed much. A major investment bank has never had a female CEO, and only 2 percent of hedge fund managers are women. Sam Polk, a former hedge fund trader, explains in an article in the New York Times that the hypermasculine culture of Wall Street firms remain unchanged because “men rarely do or say anything” to challenge the overt and covert sexism all around them. The pressure to conform and fit in to be promoted is reinforced from day one. The overt sexism that women experience, such as pressure to sleep with bosses, retribution when they don’t, and loss of opportunity after taking maternity leave, is one type of sexism that creates barriers for women, but it is covert sexism that Polk is most concerned with in his article. He explains that “most of the sexism on Wall Street occurs when women aren’t in the room.” He calls this “bro talk,” where men casually talk about women as sex objects and body parts as a way of bonding with each other. Polk reflects on his own experiences in high school, in college, and as a bond trader on Wall Street where he heard men who were role models—fathers, coaches and bosses—denigrate women. He notes that while he felt uncomfortable hearing and participating in this type of talk, he never said so because “it feels really good to be in the in-crowd.” Protesting would have been “embarrassing and emasculating” and, he admits, bad for his career. Now the father of a daughter, Polk regrets his silence and explains, “‘Bro talk’ produces a force field of disrespect and exclusion that makes it incredibly difficult for women to ascend the Wall Street ladder. When you create a culture where women are casually torn apart in conversation, how can you ever stomach promoting them or working for them?” He urges men to be allies—to finally bring about change in the Wall Street culture and other organizational cultures they are in, men must insist that women be spoken about with respect. He makes the point that a relationship exists between “bro talk” and the rape and sexual abuse of women and girls. Polk states, “When we dehumanize people in conversation, we give permission for them to be degraded in other ways as well. . . . Our silence condones this language.” In another article describing the new movie Equity about female executives on Wall Street, author Melena Ryzik interviewed women who are currently investment bankers who agree that the culture of hypermasculinity still exists. They detail a number of sexist assumptions and double binds that create barriers for women:

  • The assumption that women will leave to marry or have children so there is no reason to promote them.
  • The demand that women have to continually prove themselves before they get promoted, while men are given a chance to prove themselves after promotion.
  • The conflict between being too tough or too pliant and being called overbearing when expressing an opinion.
Barbara Byrne, an investment banker at Barclays and a producer of the film, asks, “When do we get our fair share, when do we get a seat at the table?” It will take both women and men to change the culture of sexism. Let’s hope that many men heed Polk’s call for an end to their silence. Are you a man, or do you know a man, who speaks out when other men are demeaning women behind closed doors? We need men to stop participating in “bro talk” and challenge other men to stop, too. It will help us all to hear your success stories.   The image in this post is in the public domain courtesy of Helpsg.  ]]>