gender

Indirect Aggression – Part 2

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January was when I started my new role. Probably three months later, my old boss scheduled a yearly performance review with me, which was unusual for a lot of reasons. Normally, performance reviews are more timely. And she had her boss on the phone with her. She doesn’t like confrontation, so I felt like she was having him do it for her. She didn’t say a word the whole time. It was like she was just sitting in the background, listening.

I was just shocked to get a negative performance review, even though on paper my numbers looked good. It felt like a lot of things had transpired behind the scenes so that she could throw Kate under the bus.

For Kate, the indirect aggression happened when her boss threw Kate under the bus by undermining her behind the scenes and then having someone else deliver the bad news. One more example of behavior that is intended to be hurtful but is denied, using silence as a weapon, was demonstrated in one of the roleplays developed by research participants who were managers in state government. The aggression was indirect but quite mean in its intentions:

Four women who work together in an office have just come back from lunch. Marcia was not included in the outing.

“I’m stuffed,” declares Lee, puffing out her cheeks and dropping a container of leftover food on her desk.

“That was a good place to go,” notes Judy, suggesting that they go back again sometime.

Rose casually asks, seemingly to no one in particular, as she takes off her coat, “Do you want to go out after work today?”

Lee says yes and suggests, “Do you want to go to that place that we went last Friday?” Judy, Rose, and Arleen agree that this was a cool place and they would like to go there after work.

In the meantime, Marcia has been sitting at her desk in the same work area, listening to this postlunch chatter and wondering what she has to do to be included in this group. The women seem to have such a good time, and she wishes they would give her a chance to show she could fit in with them. She decides to take a shot at it. Maybe she hasn’t been assertive enough and they think she isn’t interested. She sees an opening in the conversation and says, “Do you know where one of my favorite places is?”

She is chagrined when they ignore her and continue chatting as though she hasn’t spoken and isn’t there.

“So let’s plan on going to that same place,” says Lee, turning her back to Marcia, rolling her eyes, and giving a knowing look at Rose and Arleen.

“We’ll be there—what time do you guys want to get there?”

“How about seven?” offers Arleen. “We can take my car. I’ve got enough room for four,” she says, making it clear that no one else is going to join their group.

Marcia screws up her courage and decides to give it one more try, figuring she has nothing to lose, and asks, “Did you know there’s a new club that’s actually got a place for the kids?” No one responds to her this time, either.

After a short, pregnant pause, Lee declares, “All right! Break’s over!” The role-play ends.

Welcome to the middle school lunchroom in the grown-up workplace. While this was a role-play, it was presented as an example of typical dynamics between women in the workplace. It was one of many such roleplays presented during the study to demonstrate indirect aggression—probably an old and deeply buried pattern that is a form of horizontal violence.   An excerpt from my book, New Rules for Women, available at Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/dp/0982056982/).]]>

Working Women in China: A Sticky Floor and a Glass Ceiling

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New Rules for Women: Revolutionizing the Way Women Work Together, and found they faced some very familiar challenges, as well as some unique ones created by their cultural context. They face similar challenges both in their relationships with one another in the workplace and in systemic problems, such as a very wide gender pay gap and very low representation in both middle and senior leadership roles. The Chinese women in my research reported negative dynamics in their relationships with other women in the workplace that were similar to those described by the rest of my research participants. For example, they reported feeling unsupported by senior women, who were often harder on junior women than on men and did not try to mentor or help younger women advance. As I explain in my book, these dynamics reflect internalized negative stereotypes about women and demonstrate the structural impact of women being less valued than men in societal and organizational cultures. Evidence that Chinese culture still places higher value on men can be found in a recent New York Times article in which the authors, Didi Kirsten Tatlow and Michael Forsythe, described the resurgence of long-repressed traditional values in China. The authors noted, “More and more men and women say a woman’s place is in the home, wealthy men take mistresses in a contemporary reprise of the concubine system, and pressure for women to marry young is intense.” And we’ve all read about the preference for male children that, in the context of the one-child policy, has resulted in female babies being killed or abandoned. These are the signs of a patriarchal society. Tatlow and Forsythe, along with Yang Yao of China Daily, offer these statistics showing the impact of this resurgence of traditional values on women in the Chinese work force:

  • Chinese women are losing ground in the work force compared with men and make up just 25.1 percent of people with positions of “responsibility.” This describes senior management roles, as well as supervisory and middle management positions. Women in China refer to this lack of opportunity at lower levels as the “sticky floor.”
  • Fewer than one in ten board members of China’s top three hundred publicly traded (CSI 300) companies are women.
  • Thirty of the thirty-one state-owned companies listed on the CSI 300 have no women in senior leadership. The Chinese government could mandate that women be represented in senior management in these state-owned companies, but they do not.
  • No woman has ever served in the Politburo Standing Committee, the highest level of Chinese government.
  • The gender pay gap has grown significantly in the last two decades: in 1990 it was 77.5 percent, and in 2010 it was 67.3 percent for working women in urban areas. It was 56 percent for rural women in 2010.
While there is clearly a glass ceiling in China, the women I interviewed complained that they must first get past the sticky floor before a glass ceiling is even a problem to tackle. Attitudes about women belonging in the home mean that they have difficulty being considered for most positions or promotions, and men are clearly preferred. The labor laws are vague and unenforceable and do not define gender discrimination. Companies are even free to state “no women need apply” when advertising open positions. The Chinese women in my research also described intense pressure, even from other women colleagues, to marry young and have a child quickly because of the one-child policy, a dynamic unique to China. These women described a fear of being shunned by their women colleagues if they did not have a child. On a positive note, Yao reported that, inspired by Facebook’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg’s book, Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead, groups of women in Beijing are starting to meet to organize networking events and seminars to help women advance and grow.  Women in China are finding a collective voice, which is how change will begin in the right direction.]]>

Indirect Aggression

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I walked in and there were two of the women that were in my group walking ahead of me. I said, “Oh, hey—how are you guys?” And they kind of looked over their shoulder and gave me this look, with that curl in their lip and roll in their eyes. They got on the elevator and as the doors closed, one of them said, “We’re going to get coffee”—click—and the door closed in my face.

As seen above, indirect aggression includes both verbal and nonverbal covert behaviors that could seem innocuous but are intended to hurt. They can include not only the use of body language, such as eye rolling, but also silence, as demonstrated in the story from another white nurse in her fifties, Janet, about her interactions with other women at work:

I’d go up to talk with them about something, and they’d all pick up the phone and pretend they were talking. So, for the longest time, I thought, “God, they’re on the phone a lot!” You know, it was just a smoke and mirrors kind of thing—and I was brand new to the organization, a lot younger than them, and they certainly weren’t going to let me in.

Smoke and mirrors—now add to this another thread in indirect aggression—denial. One example of denial in the adolescent-girl literature includes this description by a ninth grader: “Last week, I asked my friend why she was mad at me—I had no idea why—and she said, ‘I’m not mad at you.’ Right then I knew she was mad at me.”   An excerpt from my book, New Rules for Women, available at Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/dp/0982056982/).]]>

Why Is Violence Against Women So Widespread? Where Is the Outrage?

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recent article in the New York Times reported these statistics:

  • 35 percent of women worldwide have experienced physical violence.
  • In the United States, 83 percent of girls aged twelve to sixteen said they experienced some form of sexual harassment in school.
  • In the European Union, only 14 percent of women reported their most serious episode of domestic violence to the police because these reports are not taken seriously.
Violence against women has reached epidemic proportions and is present in every single country around the world. Sisonke Msimang, in her article “The Backlash Against African Women,” suggested that the surge in violence against women can be understood as a backlash against the progress that women have made in recent years. She contended that, especially in Africa, “it has taken some time for the conservative backlash to develop into a coherent and organized force” joined by churches, tribal leaders, and politicians.

Progress for Women and Girls

If we see the epidemic of violence as a backlash against women’s advances, what are these advances? Somini Sangupta of the New York Times reported that positive changes have occurred in the global context over the past twenty years, as a result of pressure put on world governments by the participants at the 1995 Beijing World Conference on Women:
  • As many girls as boys are now enrolled in primary school.
  • Maternal mortality has fallen by half.
  • Women are more likely to be in the labor force, although a significant gender pay gap persists.
  • The share of women serving in legislatures has nearly doubled, though women still account for only one in five legislators.
  • More countries have passed laws protecting the rights of women, though the laws do not mean anything if police, judges, and medical personnel do not take violence against women seriously.
Clearly, progress has been made, but there is still more work to do.

What We Can Do to Stop Violence Against Women

To start with, we have to find our outrage about worldwide violence against women before we can find the energy and inspiration to take action locally. Msimang reported that the only effective deterrent to a wave of new laws proposed in South Africa to limit the rights of women has been a “loud and organized women’s movement.” In India, large numbers of people, women and men, turned out to demonstrate against the lax laws and sexist attitudes that encourage rape and harassment of women, and, consequently, new legislation has been passed. In addition, a public debate has begun about the treatment of women in India. In the United States, media attention and demonstrations have put the spotlight on campus rape and have embarrassed some high-profile universities into changing the policies and practices that allowed them to turn a blind eye to rape on campus in the past. Where’s your outrage? What can you do in your community to help ensure that girls and women are not harassed or assaulted? Do you know the statistics on sexual assault in your community and local schools? Do you know the statistics on domestic violence in your community? Do you know the status of local shelters for victims of domestic violence? What can you do to educate your neighbors and organize local support for schools and neighborhoods to prevent sexual violence? Thinking globally and being informed is essential, but we can all find a way to act locally to stop violence against women.]]>

What Men Gain When Women Are Successful

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new research, reported by Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant in the New York Times shows that gender equality is good for men, too. Consider some of these benefits for men in organizations:

  • Bringing on more women makes work teams more successful.
  • Women bring knowledge, skills, and new networks to the table.
  • Women take fewer unnecessary risks.
  • Women tend to collaborate in ways that strengthen teams and organizations.
  • Venture-backed start-ups with higher numbers of female executives are more successful.
  • Firms with more women in senior leadership generate more market value.
When companies are successful, more rewards and promotions are available for both men and women. Men’s careers do better in the long run when companies grow, and leveraging diversity in the global marketplace helps companies grow. Men also have a lot to gain at home by sharing the housework with their partners. Sandberg and Grant report studies that show happier marriages and longer lives—and more sex—for couples who share chores. All good, right? But wait! There’s more. Fathers, mothers, and children all benefit when men become more involved in parenting. Men become more flexible, empathic, and patient, and they are more satisfied with their jobs and have lower blood pressure and rates of cardiovascular disease when they care for children. And the children are more successful in their lives, too, when they see fathers doing housework and mothers pursuing careers. Gender equality is not only good for men, good for organizations, and good for marriages and families—it is also good for society. Sandberg and Grant reported that “25 percent of United States gross domestic product growth since 1970 is attributed to the increase in women entering the paid work force. Today, economists estimate that raising women’s participation in the work force to the same level as men could raise GDP by another 5 percent in the United States.” Gender parity will be good for all of us.]]>

Deep Patterns from the Middle School Lunchroom

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I expect them in adolescence. I don’t expect them at forty-five or fifty. Oh, I’m certain that the bullies in junior high school are still bullies today. Have you been to a high school reunion?

Although these behaviors are frequently said to be related, few studies have been conducted to make a direct connection between adolescent “mean girl” behavior and adult women’s experiences with each other in the workplace. Yet the connection seems obvious and could explain why the negative experiences of women with each other in the workplace are so pervasive. These behaviors probably reflect marginalized group behavior that is ancient, deeply held, and learned at a very young age. A frequent question from my audiences is, “But aren’t things different now for girls than they used to be, with Title IX and access to sports?” While some situations have surely changed, and change is always happening, two excellent studies conducted in 2002 and 2003 that covered diverse groups of girls from first grade to high school in various parts of the country found that the messages adolescent girls still receive have not changed in significant ways. Girls still learn from the larger culture that how they look (being skinny and blond) is more important than how smart or talented they are—and so many girls, including girls of color, have no hope of ever measuring up to the cultural standard. There is still a widespread expectation among girls that they will subordinate their own dreams and goals to please a man when they grow up and that they will be the primary caregivers in their families. Check out the magazines and websites that adolescent girls read to find these types of messages. Girls may now expect to work once they are parents, but they still may not expect to be the primary breadwinner unless they have grown up in a single-parent household.   An excerpt from my book, New Rules for Women, available at Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/dp/0982056982/).]]>

Women in Technology: Outsiders Within

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I often hear two commonly held myths from my audiences when I make presentations on gender in the workplace: Myth #1: Things must be different for the younger generation of women and men in the workplace—gender dynamics, in general, must have changed for them. Myth #2: Technology firms like Google, as young companies that reflect youth culture, must have postsexist cultures. My audiences reason that surely young women do not have the same challenges that older women face in more mature organizations. Sorry, but wrong on all counts. In a recent article in the Boston Globe, author Callum Borchers notes that even though high-tech companies create “hip” workspaces to promote creativity and attract young workers, they still have “shades of man cave everywhere.” Borchers explains that the combination of beer kegs, ping-pong tables, Xboxes, and networking events after hours during family time can leave female workers feeling like outsiders. In addition, some women describe hypercompetitive, clubby, and aggressive work styles in these companies that reflect an adult frat-house culture where they receive subtle messages that they do not belong. And the messages are not always subtle. Two different women in the gaming industry in Boston recently received, at different times, online rape and death threats telling them to get out of the gaming world. Not all women in technology feel this way, of course, or have these negative experiences, but the low numbers of women in technology probably reflect a number of factors, which include subtle messages, pervasive stereotypes about women not being capable in math and science, few role models, and pervasive unconscious discrimination. Here are some statistics:

  • 15–17 percent of technology employees in most Silicon Valley companies, which includes Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google, are women.
  • 26 percent of computer science professionals nationwide are female, while 8 percent are black and 6 percent are Hispanic.
  • 3 percent of venture-backed technology start-ups nationwide have a female chief executive.
Technology organizations can attract and retain women if they make an effort. Here are some suggestions:
  1. Invite women to pitch ideas inside the company to overcome a tendency for women to hesitate until they feel their idea is perfectly developed.
  2. Form gender-balanced panels to interview applicants for open positions or to consider promotions to overcome unconscious bias that results in women not being hired or promoted at the same rate as men.
  3. Establish a private room for breast pumping to help attract the best young female talent, and develop family-friendly policies. Women pay attention to these details when deciding where they want to work.
  4. Establish mentoring, sponsorship, and support programs for women within the company.
  5. Fund scholarships for women to study math and science, and sponsor competitions that include lots of women.
  6. Create networking events during work hours or that families can attend (instead of golf outings or after-hours drinking and cigar parties—yes, these still occur).
  7. Encourage men to be allies and redirect attention to women’s ideas when women are ignored in meetings.
  8. Raise awareness of the double binds that women face in the workplace and how women and men can work together to overcome them.
These are just some ideas for how technology companies can increase the diversity of their workforces. Kudos to a number of the big companies, such as Intel, Google, and Facebook, that now admit they have a problem and are starting many of the efforts described above to correct the imbalances they have created. It’s not too late! Women are good at math and science and will pursue those interests if they get the message that they belong in technology professions.]]>

Next Steps for Strengthening Relationship Skills

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  • Practice your listening skills.
    1. Listen to someone else without interrupting for five minutes while she talks about something she cares about that she is either dealing with or is frustrated by. You can use nonverbal behaviors, such as nodding or raising your eyebrows, to show that you are listening, but you cannot say anything. Notice what gets in the way of fully listening, and bring your attention back to the speaker. Notice how quickly you may want to interrupt and interject your opinions or your own experiences—but don’t interrupt.
    2. Now it’s your turn. Ask the listener to let you talk for five minutes about something you care about that you are dealing with or are frustrated by. Notice your reaction to having five minutes to talk without interruption. Is this situation unusual? Do you like it? Do you dislike it? Just notice.
  • Distinguish gossip from transknitting. Share the definition of “transknitting” with two other women, one at work and one outside of work whom you talk with regularly. During your conversations, when discussing another person, ask each other, “Is this gossip or transknitting? What do you think?”
  • If you have a relationship that has recently become strained or has come to an end for reasons that you may or may not understand, consider asking for help with using the relational resilience tool described above.
    • An excerpt from my book, New Rules for Women, available at Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/dp/0982056982/).]]>

    What’s Different about Leading Women?

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    New Rules for Women, shows—that women often have different relationship expectations of their female colleagues than they do of males. I call these expectations women’s friendship rules. We begin to develop friendship rules at a very young age, but by the time we are adults our friendship rules have become unconscious. Men have friendship rules, too, but because of differences in our gender socialization, theirs are not the same. Women’s friendship rules tend to be much more egalitarian and relational, while men’s expectations, reflected in most workplace cultures as “the right way to be,” are more transactional and hierarchical. Women expect female colleagues and team members to be friendly, to share personal information, and to be collaborative. In fact, the coach in our opening story seems to be reflecting men’s friendship rules when she asks how to get the women to “just focus on the task” of winning games. I told the coach she was asking the women to be men—and they are not men—which would not work. As their leader, her task is to help them build the strong relationships they need for effective teamwork and to be motivated to win. I also suggested that she was another factor in the motivation equation. Not only do our friendship rules create expectations of peers and colleagues, but my research shows that female subordinates often expect different leadership behaviors from their female managers or leaders as well, needing them to be more relational, too. They do not have this expectation of male leaders. This means the female coach may need to spend more time chatting and getting to know her team members than she’s accustomed to motivate them. Here are five tips for leading women in the office and on the playing field:

    1. Create a shared vision, or picture, of a high-performing team. What is happening? How does it feel to be a team member? How are team members working together? Facilitate a conversation among the team members to help them create a shared vision of what it means to them to be a high-performing team.
    2. Make team agreements, or explicit friendship rules, about how team members will behave to support each other, be friendly, handle disagreements, compete, and have different roles and styles. We are not all the same, and we need to make our expectations clear to each other and find common ground about what to expect.
    3. Tend to relationships, and do not push hurt feelings or misunderstandings under the rug. Create regular spaces to clean the relational field, or take time to talk about interactions that have not gone well and create new agreements about how to handle them next time.
    4. Celebrate successful teamwork.
    5. Encourage friendships, but discourage cliques, for the good of the team.
    Women’s gender socialization means that for many women being team players and collaborating comes easily. We need to be intentional, though, about making our unconscious expectations of each other explicit so that we can both work hard as individuals to reach our individual potential and be authentic and caring as friends and teammates who maintain strong and supportive relationships. We can do both.  ]]>