Colleen Ammerman is Director of the Gender Initiative at Harvard Business School, where she works with the faculty leadership of the Initiative to support a research community and a platform for disseminating practice-relevant insights for advancing equity, diversity, and inclusion in organizations. She oversees the Initiative’s staff, operations, and activities, including student and alumni engagement, programs for companies, and research conferences.
She is a member of the Life & Leadership After HBS research team, an ongoing longitudinal study of Harvard Business School alumni which examines the influence of gender and race on their life and career outcomes. She has authored numerous articles and teaching materials on inequality in the workplace and is coauthor, with Boris Groysberg, of Glass Half-Broken: Shattering the Barriers That Still Hold Women Back at Work (Harvard Business Review Press).
Picture credit: Evgenia Eliseeva
The gender pay gap is still a persistent problem in today's society, reflecting the overall state of gender inequality. It is full of complexity and comprises different facets, making it hard to understand the overall situation. We have covered the topic before, but in this episode, we go into a whole new level of detail. To help us unpack the nuance of this essential topic is Colleen Ammerman, Director of the Gender Initiative at Harvard Business School. She is also the author of Glass Half-Broken, providing readers with hard evidence and detailed analysis of the different drivers of gender inequality in the workplace. We cover the basics of gender inequality, such as how it currently exists, how it manifests in the workplace, and the subtle and less obvious ways it occurs. We also find out whether men are generally aware of the problem, the obstacles that prevent men from taking action, and the power men have to initiate positive change within organizations. Colleen also untangles the intricacies of the topic, explaining why gender equality is still a pervasive problem, how gender inequality extends to promotions, how management explains away the issue, how gender equality is also beneficial for men, and the influence of perceived gender roles in career decisions. Tune in and learn about the intricacies of gender inequality, as well as the possible solutions, with Colleen Ammerman!
Key Points From This Episode:
We start by finding out what the current situation is for women in the workplace. [0:03:22]
How to quantify gender inequality symptoms in the workplace. [0:04:12]
Whether there are similar effects of gender inequality for men of colour. [0:05:03]
Why people might still deny that there is a problem concerning gender inequality. [0:05:35]
An outline of the career obstacles that uniquely affect women. [0:07:18]
Find out if men are aware that women have additional barriers to overcome. [0:12:03]
Reasons why women may leave the workplace before retaining a leadership role. [0:14:05]
Colleen explains how we know from the data that women have less interest in higher-paying technical jobs. [0:16:14]
Learn if the adjusted gender pay gap data diminish the findings of using unadjusted gender pay gap data. [0:18:47]
Ways in which the gender pay gap extends to promotions and compensation. [0:20:34]
Colleen tells us why it is important for society to strive for more women in leadership positions. [0:21:26]
The general response from men to workplace diversity initiatives. [0:22:07]
What men should be doing in the workplace to help reduce inequalities that exist. [0:26:25]
The ways corporate directors explain the underrepresentation of women and people of colour on boards. [0:29:15]
Why we don't see more men taking action to combat gender inequality issues. [0:31:05]
She explains what homophily is and its role in workplace diversity. [0:33:13]
How the language in job descriptions determines who applies for the position. [0:37:04]
Whether there is evidence to support the notion that women prefer a growth-mindset environment to a fixed-mindset environment. [0:40:00]
What men, who are not in leadership positions, can do to overcome gender inequality problems in the workplace. [0:43:02]
What companies need to be aware of regarding hybrid and remote-work models. [0:47:14]
The steps men can take to overcome gender inequality outside of the workplace. [0:50:29]
We learn what managers can do to attract more diverse candidates. [0:52:52]
Whether there is data on the effect that gender has on hiring decisions. [0:54:22]
How gender norms or biases affect employee evaluation. [0:56:01]
Actions that women can take to advance their careers in an unequal environment. [0:59:53]
Colleen explains the issues of negotiations for men and women. [01:04:03]
The role parents can play to combat the issues of gender parity. [01:05:13]
We end the episode by learning how Colleen defines success in her life. [01:06:03]
Read the Transcript:
Ben Felix: This is The Rational Reminder Podcast, a weekly reality check on sensible investing and financial decision making from two Canadians. We're hosted by me, Benjamin Felix, and Cameron Passmore, Portfolio Managers at PWL Capital.
Cameron Passmore: Welcome to Episode 218, and this week it's our conversation with Colleen Ammerman. She wrote the book, "Glass Half-Broken: Shattering the Barriers That Still Hold Women Back at Work," and this was co-authored with Boris Groysberg. Excellent book, provided lots of data around the subject of greater gender equality in the workplace, and this is something, Ben, that we wanted to get more information on and this book did a very good job of providing data behind this subject. Colleen, I found very effective. After we recorded the conversation, she actually applauded us for the efforts in digging into this subject and being comfortable talking about this and learning about this extremely important subject, and it really does help, particularly women, make better financial decisions, which is the mandate of this podcast.
Ben Felix: I don't even know if it is just women. I think it's women and men for the benefit of everybody. I think, most directly, maybe it affects women, although even with that, we did talk with Colleen about the norms or biases that keep men from staying home and doing more parental duties, if that is what they want to do, so it's something that goes both ways. One thing that I wanted to say is why are we talking about this on a podcast about financial decision making, but ultimately, I think it's about the value of women's human capital and the data around how that is being systematically undervalued and then fixing that to the extent that we can is not just good for women. Although most directly it is, but it's also good for companies that they work for and their male colleagues and male spouses if they're in that kind of relationship, so I think it's pretty far-reaching and I think it is directly related to financial decision-making because there are actions that both men and women can take, which is largely what we talked about with Colleen.
Cameron Passmore: Absolutely. She gave very specific action items. Colleen is the Director of the Gender Initiative at Harvard Business School. She works with faculty leadership to support a research community and a platform for disseminating practice-relevant insights for dancing, equity, diversity and inclusion in organizations. Again, the book is Glass Half Broken. Think it's safe to say, Ben, that this book had an impact on both of us.
Ben Felix: Absolutely. It's a resource from a credible source that is full of peer-reviewed literature on a topic that we wanted to learn about, so talking to the author of that book was phenomenal. Colleen has her Masters of English from the University of Chicago, so she fits right into our ... we're basically a promotional channel for the University of Chicago.
Cameron Passmore: Yeah. Anyways, with that, here's our conversation with Colleen Ammerman.
Colleen Ammerman, welcome to The Rational Reminder Podcast.
Thank you. I'm excited to be here.
Colleen, to start off, how do you describe the current state for women in the workplace?
I could call it a stalled revolution maybe is one way to think about it. If we think back to the past 50 or 60 years an enormous amount of change has happened. Things like sex-segregated classified ads where you would literally open up a newspaper and see jobs for men and jobs for women, used to be perfectly legal, so we're a long way from that. But if you look particularly at rates of women, proportion of women in leadership really across any industry or sector or field, that has not really budged since the 90s. We have been in a place where a lot of progress has made the latter half of the 20th century and we've continued to make progress since then, but still at a much slower pace and we're certainly not a gender parity.
Interesting. What are the quantifiable symptoms of gender inequality in the workplace? In other words, how do you really know there is a problem?
Sure. Well, the one really easy way is to just look at, who's in leadership? Who's in positions of power? That's really ... Lots of indices and metrics will tell you that. You look at marquee things like CEOs on the Fortune 500, S&P 500, FTSE, et cetera, et cetera, women on corporate boards. We have these measures of who is in power in business and in corporate America, and women are still certainly a minority and women of color an even smaller minority. But then there's also lots of other quantitative ways that you can look at it. Compensation, rates of promotion, there's lots of different ways that you can think about how organizations value employees and see ways in which women, I would argue, are not being equally valued in terms of their rewards.
You mentioned women of color and primarily we are talking about gender inequality here, but are there similar effects in the data for men of color?
Yeah, certainly. Race and gender are things that both have their own distinct effects and then interact, and so that's why, for instance, women of color are in these positions of double disadvantage. Men of color certainly face a lot of barriers and when you look at something like more diversity, actually, in a lot of indices, men of color even lag white women. That's not necessarily true every index, but that actually has been true in a lot of places, so there's certainly a lot to do there.
Given this evidence, why do you think people might still deny that there is a problem?
That's a good question. I think there's a couple of different ways to think about that question. One is of denying that there's a problem in the sense that the belief that lack of gender parity or gender inequality in the workplace is basically okay, that it's natural and we can talk about this maybe the results of women's choices or the way things are supposed to be. One kind of denial is to say, "Sure, we don't see women in positions of power equal to men, but that's how it is and there's really nothing wrong with that." That's one type of denial. I would say, the other is I think sometimes when we are looking at our individual teams or experiences, we might see in a micro way, in our own experience, not a huge issue necessarily.
We might say, "Well, I have a woman boss," or "At my company, I do see women getting promoted," and that could very well be true. There are certainly companies that are doing better than others, but I think sometimes it can be hard for us to zoom out and think, "Okay, what's my experience versus what really does the macro data show?" I think there's probably even more that we could get into there, but I think those are some of the reasons that people might resist or not really be convinced that this is as big of a problem as it really is if you do look at a macro level.
Yeah, that's interesting. People's anecdotal experience doesn't necessarily agree with the data, which causes some denial of the issue.
Right, which is true with lots of things. That can just be hard for us as humans sometimes to make sense of what I see every day and then what I'm hearing in the media or reading in research. It can be just hard for us to get our heads around that.
Right. Of course, you're speaking from it. I read your book obviously, and you're speaking from a position of a tremendous amount of data as opposed to anecdote. Can you speak to the career obstacles that uniquely affect women?
Sure. One thing that we did with our book was really try to unpack this in a way that would feel intuitive. There's lots of great research findings out there about, what are these career obstacles and barriers? How do they show up? But in the academic literature, we're talking about that through the lens of a specific phenomenon. What we tried to do with our book, which as you said, we really based on an enormous amount of research not just ours but many, many others, is say, "How would this make sense as someone moves through her career?" Let's take the lens of someone starts off post-college and then makes their way through that early career stage, mid-career stage to late career. Unpacking it that way I think is very telling because it also reminds us that these sorts of things shift and change over time, so the kind of bias or discrimination that one might experience early in career probably is going to look different to what you experience later and that can, just on its own, be a bit confusing or hard to navigate.
Then also, it's accretive. Again, we might read a research paper about a distinct phenomenon and a different one about another phenomenon, and then we have to remember that multiple things can happen, which is one reason why it can be quite demoralizing I think for women. But I would just say briefly what we found in early career is that women, particularly those who, the kinds of people we study, so these are women who went to college, often elite colleges, career-minded, ambitious, they did not necessarily expect to experience a lot of discrimination or bias in the workplace, which makes sense because they've actually generally had a pretty equal experience in education.
They're in a lot of classes, are equal men and women or majority women, women are in positions of leadership in high schools and colleges. Then, they get to the workplace and they start to experience these usually pretty subtle signs that maybe they're not on equal footing. In your early career, it is pretty subtle because often you're being evaluated and assessed on things that are pretty objective. Everybody at the entry level is assessed on just these more clearly-defined performance characteristics like the quality of your slide deck. That's something that we can put them side by side. But women and men are still getting little signals all the time about how much they're valued, are they seen as high potential, and so we got a lot of interesting stories from individual early career women about this who just said, "I start to see after really about a year, so that first year in the full-time workforce, that I don't really feel like I'm on equal footing."
One told us a story about going to a meeting with a senior executive who was a sponsor of a cohort, a rotational cohort she was part of, and they had met the senior executive a year prior when they started, and this was a follow-up meeting sometime later and she said he remembered all of the men's names in the cohort and none of the women's. There's just those little things. That starts to set them up, I think, to feel a little bit uncertain. Oftentimes, and again, it can be a little bit demoralizing even if it's quite subtle, and then in mid-career, what you have are a lot of really sticky barriers that have to do with how women are perceived and what we think about men and women and what they're capable of, and a lot of this has to do with caregiving.
Mid-career tends to be the time when people become parents, which is most people, not everyone, but most people become parents, and so there's a lot to unpack there. But generally-speaking, what we know, at least in terms of highly educated professional women, the experience that they have is not so much one of the classic idea of opting out, it's much more one of feeling pushed out and feeling devalued by their employers once they become parents. That's a big issue in mid-career. Then, you get to later career, for those women who do get to leadership, they are still experiencing being treated and perceived and viewed differently. Lots of research evidence shows that women in positions of leadership are held to a higher standard, experience stricter scrutiny, there's particular ways that this is different and more pernicious for black women in particular, say. There's a lot that goes on.
Again, that makes it hard, oftentimes, for women who've been quite successful to reach their final goal. We talked to a lot of women who were very senior who were wanting to break through to the C-suite or get on a corporate board that final achievement, and a lot of them said, "I've been able to put my head down and just avoid some of this discrimination by being hyper-competent, and now that I'm at this level, it's not really working anymore. I'm the only woman in the room, and it's so much more about, "Do my male colleagues like me? How am I perceived as fitting in with that group of C-suite leaders?" It was something that they confronted, even though I have accomplished so much, I'm at the point where I don't know if I'm going to break through to that final layer of, because again, not so my skill or my track record, but more subtle ways that I'm viewed or perceived or what my colleagues really think I'm capable of.
It's incredible. I read the book, but to hear you talk about it is incredible. In general, are men aware that women have these additional barriers to overcome?
It's a good question. I would say yes and no. I do think it's hard to avoid just in our discourse. I think if you read the business press or the newspaper or turn on the TV, you hear stories and we have things like women's equal pay day, et cetera. It's in the air, this notion that we do have persistent gender inequality in the workplace. I think men generally are aware of it, but I think men sometimes are unsure how to identify it around them, because oftentimes, again, it can be subtle. The outcomes may be very stark and clear and quantifiable, again, when we look at gender pay gaps, when we look up to the highest levels of leadership and don't see women. But those are outcomes of often more subtle phenomena that happen throughout women's careers, and I think that can be harder for all of us, really, not just men, but all of us to observe around us.
I think sometimes what happens, and again, I think this is true of everyone, is we do observe men and women behaving or reacting or doing different things in one workplace. It's easy for us to attribute that to innate characteristics to say, "Oh, okay, well I see the women in my department tend to do this, the men tend to do this," and thinking that is really about men and women as such, like men call men, women call women. Really, what I think the research shows us is that those men and women are actually not experiencing the same workplace. They're in the same organization, but they are experiencing a different context because of, again, a lot of things that can be very subtle about the ways that men and women are perceived and responded to by peers and superiors.
I think that's what can be difficult, is to really unpack that and understand how that's happening. There are ways to do it, some colleagues I think describe some great ways to do that, but I think that's what can be tricky for everybody, not just men, to understand about what's happening around me that might not really be fair.
How much do we know about what causes women to leave the workplace before retaining a leadership role?
Yeah. Well, we know quite a bit, and again, I would say it tends to be a feeling of being pushed out or devalued. Often, this does happen around caregiving, although it's not exclusive to that. But in the book, we write about this woman that we interviewed. We interviewed a lot of women across a multitude of industries, and one told us about the experience of telling her employer that she was expecting saying, "I'm going to have my first child." She told us, "Look, I was a high-performer. The company had paid for my MBA, I was on a leadership track, everything's great. I tell them I'm pregnant, and I am taken from a team of, I think, 20 people to 6 people. People that were reporting to me were put on my level and she just said, she told us how this played out and she just ended the story by saying, "It was a demotion." Like I was getting the message that I was no longer as valuable an employee and nothing had changed for her except saying, "Hey, I'm going to become a parent."
That's a pretty stark example, but lots of research, particularly research on, again, high-achieving professional women tells that same story of women getting this message that they're not ultimately as valued as employees. It's not just about caregiving. I think that can happen again to women in early career when they start getting these messages. A young woman that we interviewed talked about the experience of, she was in law at a big law firm, had gone to a top law school and said, "I just have started noticing that it's all the women of," and she was a woman of color, "All the women of color like me who are getting pulled off of important projects and asked to do busy work and were not getting the FaceTime with more senior associates and partners," and so these kinds of things, again, add up over the course of someone's career.
I think what often happens is women, when they're at that mid-career stage, have become parents, have struggled with all of this, both can get stymied and blocked, and so they may still be trying to grow and maybe the environment itself is preventing that, but understandably, a lot of them do say it becomes difficult to keep pushing against those barriers.
Interesting. How do we know that women are working lower paying jobs because they might be, say, less ambitious than men or have less aptitude or interest in higher paying technical jobs?
That's a good question. I think there's a couple of answers to it. One is that, there is research on things like characteristics like ambition or risk-taking or confidence, which don't actually tend to show that there are huge differences between the men and women. There's meta analyses that look at something like confidence or risk-taking and they don't actually show big differences. They might show some level of difference that's quite small to the point where, sure, in a statistical analysis it's considered significant, but probably in terms of what we observe in our real world does not have that much of an impact. That's one piece of it, which is to say there are a lot of, what social scientists would call, both prescriptive and descriptive stereotypes. Stereotypes and beliefs about ways that women should be, and then stereotypes and beliefs about ways that women are. Those are just the water that we're swimming in, but when you really try to empirically assess a lot of those, they don't stand up to scrutiny, so it's not clear that there are these innate differences.
The other piece of this, however, is that this notion of women pursuing lower-paying fields, lower-paying jobs, et cetera, out of choice is true only at the most superficial level. Choices don't happen in a vacuum, and I think it's, to be honest, a bit naive to suggest that women are just freely making these choices. They just happen to not want, as a population, to not necessarily want to pursue higher-paying, higher-status jobs. At the individual level, men and women both, it's a mix. Some people want those kinds of jobs, some people don't.
But I think what we see instead with women tending as a population to be tracked into these lower-paying, lower-status deals and jobs is much more, again, about the environment and the signals and the incentives and the externalities that tend to shape and condition that choice. The other thing I would say here is, it's a side note but I think it's important, it's not necessarily clear that women tend to be in fields that we value less. There's actually some research that has demonstrated that when more women enter a field, it starts to pay less. There's also a way in which you might argue that the fields or occupations that women concentrate in, we value less because of that rather than the other way around. That's just another piece of it to think about.
Wow! Does the smaller adjusted pay gap, gender pay gap, I've seen data that adjusts for the job title and experience and hours work and all that stuff. Does that data diminish the importance of the unadjusted gender pay gap?
I don't think so. I think it's important to talk about both. As I was just saying, even when we do control for those things like hours worked, occupation, education, and say all of those are equal, it's important to recognize that, again, the reason that those are unequal and women work few hours or et cetera, it's important to talk about the reasons why, which very much have to do with gender inequality. But yes, there is still this unadjusted pay gap. It's relatively small, so to speak, when you compare it with the unadjusted gap. It's in the single digits, maybe currently 5% or 6%. But when you think about someone's lifetime earnings, that's actually a lot of money. I don't think it diminishes the importance. I think we really should be able to hold those concepts in our minds to say the gap that is because of these choices and tendencies and patterns is important to try to change because underneath those choices and patterns that I would argue is inequality and stereotypes, et cetera.
But also, we should be talking about the fact that there is a portion that we can't explain away, even though we control for all kinds of things, so that probably is just discrimination. While comparatively it's small, again, when you're talking about someone's lifetime earnings, that's can be millions of dollars. That matters for lots of reasons, I would say, not just for individual women, but it's bad for society as a whole in a lot of ways. If again, you zoom out and think about this on a macro level, many, many families in the US have women as the sole earner, so why on Earth would we think it's okay for those families really to be systematically disadvantaged in the marketplace simply because there is this kind of remaining piece of the gender pay gap that's happening because of some level of bias or discrimination that we can't explain away.
I assume this is all the same for promotions, that promotions are linked to compensation, or is there something else going on there?
Yeah. I think you can think about compensation and promotions as two outcomes that are different ways of looking at the same phenomenon of women not being able to advance their careers and get the same rewards as men are. When it comes to promotions, again, lots of research that shows that women are just held to different standards or higher standards that basically, when you have men and women who actually are, by objective measures, performing equally, men are going to reap higher rewards than women, and that compensation is the big one. But that's how the rewards as well. Status and flexibility sometimes, being able to have more autonomy over your own time, there's all kinds of things that come with growing your career and being in a more senior position, so you're missing out on a lot, not just compensation.
Why do you think it's important for society, for everyone to strive for more women in leadership positions?
Well, like I said, I think these kinds of inequalities are bad for everyone. They're not just bad for individual women and individual families. If you think about it, even if we just think about it at the organizational level, so even saying, let's bracket this whole all-of-society question, which can be a bit overwhelming, and there's a lot to unpack there, organizations are not benefiting by systematically, again, undervaluing part of their talent pool. They're not fully leveraging the potential contributions of everyone who does or might work for them, which is just not a smart talent management strategy. Just even at that level, it's not good for organizations, I would argue.
How do men generally respond to workplace diversity initiatives?
Well, it depends on how they're framed, depends on who the men are, depends on the organizational context. One thing we did in our book was really try to unpack, why is it that men are not more engaged? Not just because it's good for men to support gender equality or to support women being able to attain power at a level that has parity with them, but because, I would argue, gender inequality is actually good for men in all kinds of ways. When we break down some of these stereotypes about who men and women are and who they should be, that actually opens up and frees men as well. It opens up more space for men to be more active caregivers and not feel as though maybe they have to actually diminish or spend less time on that portion of their life, which lots of research suggests that actually men experience that as a problem. They don't like this expectation that they're the breadwinner and not the caregiver.
I think that is an important piece to recognize that men stand to benefit from greater gender equality in all kinds of ways. I think that that is not always clear, so we don't talk about that enough. But also, men sometimes can be penalized for trying to break out of these norms and expectations that we have about men and women. When it comes to caregiving in the book we write about, there have been men who really experience their organization pushing back when they try to take advantage of parental leave benefits or they just try to say, "Hey, I'm going to have some boundaries on my work life, because it's important to me to be an involved caregiver." Men also receive these messages that, I would argue, are quite pernicious, but that can be challenging. That can feel like there's a cost to them to push back against some of these norms, so I think that's one reason that men are not as engaged as they might be.
But another reason is also that there's this concept of psychological standing, like what's my place? What's my role? Men don't always feel as though they have a role or that being active is not the right role for them to play in terms of advocating for gender equity. Often, that's well-intentioned, because they don't want to say, "Oh, I'm putting myself at the center of this conversation that should be about women." However, actually it's really important that they do. Again, there's research here that suggests that when men do advocate for gender equity and for inclusive policies, their words have extra impact because they're not perceived as doing it out of self-interest that almost can have this bonus of it can be taken even more seriously, so it's a huge opportunity, I would argue.
Some of the surveys that we looked at in researching the book show that women often know that men in their workplace support the notion of gender equity, but they are not satisfied with how much they speak up or stand up when, for instance, someone makes an off-color comment or something emerges about, "Hey, maybe our company isn't paying men and women equally," or things that are observed. Surveys that I've seen suggest that women would actually like men to feel like they have more of a role and more of an obligation to speak up. A cool story from the book as an example of this, relatively young guy working in finance told us a story about seeing a list of phone screens for an analyst, I think, entry level position at his firm that was 50 names and all men. He thought, "Huh, this isn't great," and he wasn't in a position of leadership at the firm. He was junior mid-career, I think, probably mid-career, but he realized, I need to speak up.
He went to HR and pointed out, "Hey, there's no women on this list." He got a little bit of a brush off from them, the classic, "Oh, well, we just couldn't find any women to interview." He was not satisfied with that, so he went with a colleague and actually found some women who were strong candidates and said, "Hey, actually, there are women out here who we should be interviewing and screening for these roles." Long story short, there's a happy ending. The firm did absorb this and change some things about the interview process to get more women into the pool, and all of that was done by somebody who wasn't the head of the firm and who wasn't in HR. He just was somebody who saw something that he knew really wasn't okay, and he thought, "This isn't great for the firm, it's also not great for women, and I should speak up," and it had a real impact.
I think, I love to tell that story because I think sometimes the reason men are less engaged is because they're just not sure what to do or how to do or if they should speak up, and I would say, yes, you should.
Are there other things that men you think should be doing in the workplace reduce these observed inequalities?
Yeah, there's all kinds of things. I would put that in the bucket of things that you can do no matter what level, what role, what job you have. When you see something that isn't right, basically, it's this whole see something, say something, it sounds a bit like a platitude, but just remembering that we all have the opportunity to speak up, and that can happen in different ways. It can be something like this guy did and saying, "I see a problem, let me try to help solve it constructively." But there's other ways to do that. That's one bucket, which anyone can be a change agent in that way. Then, there's also things that leaders can do, and that's really important. Again, I think men have such a huge opportunity to have a positive impact on gender equality because they are disproportionately in these positions of leadership, and I think that gives them this enormous opportunity to make a real difference.
If you think about men leaders as role models, for instance, in the book, we tell some stories about men who are in positions of leadership who tried to role model being a caregiver and saying, "This doesn't make me less of a hard charging leader or less effective, the fact that being a father is important to me," and then following through on that in terms of setting up policies and expectations for their own employees, for their own male employees to embrace that role. But then there's also, I think, a really important piece, not just somebody who might be the CEO, but somebody in any leadership position, a really important piece that they can do around just, of course, mentoring and sponsoring, opening doors for women around them. We talked to a lot of men and women who talked about experiences of either being supported that way or being the sponsor, being the person who opened doors. But I'll tell you, it was something that we heard about in almost every interview with senior executive women.
They all would tell a story of early in their career, a boss or a mentor who went to bat for them, who said, "Hey, I'm going to nominate you to run this line of business, et cetera," and they mostly were meant, because mostly, those were the people in leadership positions. That's a huge opportunity that men have, and again, that can be in micro ways, that can be inviting somebody to a meeting and saying, "Hey, I think it would be great for you to sit in on this meeting and get some FaceTime with this group of leaders."
But it can also be, if you're in a position to do so, like one woman we talked to, her boss, the CEO of the company at the time, gave her the opportunity to run a Canadian subsidiary. She was pretty young, a black woman. She said something like, "He thought I could do it. He opened the door and he had to push back on some of his white male colleagues who were skeptical or naysaying giving me this leadership opportunity." That was a real opportunity for him to capacitate her to be a leader and she's gone on to have an incredible career.
How did the existing majority white male, as you talked about earlier, corporate directors, explain the underrepresentation of women and people of color on boards with them?
This is an interesting one because this is something that gets surveyed a lot, both by academics but also by PWC and these consulting firms. My co-author, Boris Groysberg, of the book, he did some research a few years ago actually looking at this, and they surveyed and interviewed a number of corporate directors, both men and women, and there was this big difference in how men and women explained the relative dearth of women on corporate boards. Men generally said, "It's a pipeline problem. There aren't enough women out there who have the right profile, who are qualified, et cetera." That's not specific to boards. That tends to be the explanation for just in general where fields and context where you really don't see very many women, but they're colleagues, their female peers who are also on these boards. It's not just random women off the streets.
They had a very different response, and they generally said, "Well, getting onto boards is still a little bit of an old boys' network. There's a lack of willingness to find the women." They all said, "Look, I do know a lot of women who are the right profile. I'm the right profile. I have a lot of female colleagues who I think would be good for boards and they're not getting the calls, they're not hearing from nomination governance committees," so they have pretty different explanations. There's still that tendency to say, "Well, the women aren't out there." In most cases, if you look at the evidence, that's generally not true. There are certainly fields where we need to get more women at earlier stages of the pipeline, but generally-speaking, it's more an issue of what happens further on, like once women get into companies more so than just the top of the funnel, so to speak. There are a lot of women who are in the pool for lots of kinds of roles, both in leadership and also just in high-paying, high-status fields where women are underrepresented.
I'm curious, can you talk more about why we don't see more men taking more action to combat this issue?
Yeah. Well, like I said, it's multi-faceted, because there is the issue of men not being sure what their place is and how to do it. It's like, "I want to support this. Of course, I want my," often they'll say, "I want my daughters and my partner, et cetera, to have these opportunities, but I'm just not really sure what to do." I think that's understandable. I don't think that necessarily comes from a place of uncaring. I think often it really is just uncertainty. You all might have heard of this book that came out, I think last year called Good Guys. Brad Johnson and David Smith, who are too academics, who write a lot about this issue of how men can participate in the movement for gender equality in the workplace. There's some good stuff out there, some good advice, but I think that's a big piece of it.
For a lot of men, they endorse the idea, they want to be on the right side of history, so to speak, and they're not really sure what to do. Then, I think of course, there are, unfortunately, and I don't think this is a lot of people, but for some men, I think there is the fixed pie, what I would call an error. The notion that women's gain might be their loss, this idea of it's a zero sum game. If we do things that provide a more level playing field for women, that's in some sense going to disadvantage me. Again, I don't think that's really the case. If we really look at all of the ways that gender stereotypes and gender inequality are harmful to all of us in different ways.
I don't think it's the case that creating companies and societies where women have more opportunities and more access and get to be in more positions of power, I do think that ultimately that redounds to everyone's benefit. But I think that's something that can, for lots of reasons, some people do think that, and I think we just have to educate folks about it's not a zero sum game. I think that's the piece of it. I think those are the two buckets. I think there's certainly ways, again, there's a lot of practical, tactical ways that you can help people understand A, why it's not a zero sum game, and B, what it is that you can do to be a change agent.
Can you talk about homophily, which is a word that I learned from your book and how it affects diversity in the workplace?
Yeah. I think it's homophily and it is just a fancy word for saying that we all tend to gravitate toward people who are similar to us, which I think we all know intuitively, those people that you click with. We tend to do that on the basis of characteristics that are really salient in our society, and race and gender among others are two of the most salient characteristics or things that we notice about other people, there are ways that we distribute power, so we tend to gravitate toward people who are similar to us. That's a natural thing that everybody does. There's nothing inherently malevolent about that. We're not doing that on purpose to exclude others. But what's important is that we are aware of that and that we're mindful of it, and that we don't actually let it determine our professional networks because that's when it can have really negative effects.
Particularly, again, when we're talking about people who are more advantaged, who are in positions of power. If they're only building those relationships with people who are just like them, you are going to get this mini-me homogeneity reproduction of leaders coming up after the current leader all look like him. It's really important just to have that awareness. This is what we argue as part of good management too, is really being thoughtful about how you build relationships. Again, it's not a good use of your team and not a good way to leverage talent. If you find yourself thinking about the person who looks like you, who went to your same school, who's your same gender and/or race, if that's always the go-to person or the person that you always think is the one to hand off a big project to or represent, it's all of these things, like that's my protege, so to speak.
If you're doing that in an unconscious reflexive way and you're not actually stepping back and thinking more objectively and in a more nuanced way about the capabilities of your team and how can I make sure I'm providing opportunities, what you're going to have is a team where one person's getting a lot of opportunities and that may be great for them and other people are not, so they're probably unhappy, and they're also probably less engaged, and you actually may be unaware of things that they are good at. You may actually just be cheating yourself out of information that's helpful to you. Another colleague of ours at the Business School, Robyn Ely, she depends on a lot of work with professional service firms and with leaders trying to help them understand how they can develop this competency to not just be mentoring and supporting and cultivating the next generation that looks just like them.
She tells a story about a senior leader at a firm who had a junior employee and associate who was a person of color. I don't recall what race specifically, but he, the leader, had written that person off and said like, "Ah, he don't seem very good to me." He just did this experiment of saying, "What if I treat that person as though they actually were a high potential and the way I am inclined to treat this other person over here who looks like me?" Spent time with them, gave them insight, basically developed a professional relationship and found out they were amazing. They ended up being a star.
It was really him understanding that that initial assessment that we make, which is getting back to him off, it's that just that, "Oh, I naturally want to be around this person." That not only can be exclusionary or can create these racial or gender disadvantages, but it's also often just not totally accurate. You're not giving yourself full information. All that's to say the thing about homophily to know is that it's natural and normal, but you've got to make sure that you're not letting that drive how you show up in your professional network and who you form relationships with.
Another part of your book that I found very impactful was the part on hiring and doing job applications. Can you talk about how the language in job descriptions affects who applies?
Yeah, this is an interesting one. In our book, what we tried to do, again, with an eye toward writing something that would be intuitive and understandable and actionable for people who are actually in companies. Thinking about this is not just something that where we're going to describe research in an interesting way, but we're going to say, "Here's what to do about it." What we decided to do was unpack a bunch of processes that employers use to hire and train and develop and retain people, and so just getting people into your candidate pool is step one. You've got to find the people out there who might be good at this job. There's actually quite a bit of interesting evidence that just the language you use can really shape that pool and how you write a job description, which is again, not something that you might have thought of.
No.
Again, not intentional. You're not writing your job description to say, "I hope that this way it'll be 75% men." There's a few different things, obviously, in the book you can dig into the findings. One that's interesting is that there's this notion in the literature called growth mindset versus fixed mindset that you may have heard of. Carol Wack wrote a great book about it. It's great, a tool for all of us in all kinds of settings. But there's some findings that show that job postings that talk about the job in more of a fixed mindset are the company and more of a fixed mindset as though what we need to do is just get the best people, the smartest people, and that's who we're looking for. It's like the scholars have written about this, talk about is, like the Enron approach. They were all about, "We're just going to get the smartest people and then we're going to hire them and they're going to do great work," which is maybe is a little bit of an extreme example.
But that's very different than writing a job description that talks about your company as someplace where people are going to learn and grow and get better, and this, again, growth mindset. Interestingly, the findings that I've seen suggest that the fixed mindset really is of unappealing to women or makes them less likely to apply. They don't see those companies as a place where they're necessarily going to have equal opportunities. There's probably a lot that you could unpack there, but that's an intriguing one because that's not about gender per se. It's not simply writing a job description with words that are very hyper masculine. It's just how you articulate what your company is about.
There's some interesting things like that and there's tools out there online. There's software that can help you look at a job description and look for words that actually do have maybe a gender connotation that is not as clear. Again, I think it's about, at the end of the day, stepping back and thinking about what is it that we can do to make sure we are accessing the true talent pool that's out there in a thoughtful way and not just assuming that we're going naturally to get the best people, because unfortunately, there are a lot of messages that we send without realizing it. The more that we can try to send the message that what we're looking for are people who are interested in this job, who have these skills and strip away some of the signals that can cause women to be less likely to apply, just the better pool of potential candidates we're going to have.
Just a follow up on that, that's so interesting to me, are you saying that there's evidence that women prefer a growth mindset environment?
I don't know that I would say specifically that from these findings. I don't think the researchers would ... that's probably a little too strongly stated. But what they found is generally that women did feel as though the growth mindset workplace is one where they would have more opportunity or it's likely to be a more supportive environment. That may or may not have to do with gender in terms of they think that that's more supportive of women per se, but they did have a more positive impression of that, so it's interesting. I think, and perhaps just speculating, you could tie it back to some of the ways that we talk about, leadership and achievement. This fixed mindset is very much this idea that some people are just the best, some people just have this innate, they are brilliant geniuses.
Unfortunately, I think we've seen, if you think back to even just media coverage in the last two years, some ways in which that mythology of the genius or the person who just is the star is not always helpful to companies. Just thinking of examples of where we've had these scandals of these very successful male leaders who may have engaged in sexual harassment, or not just that, but other kinds of bad behaviors. The issue is not just them as individuals, the issue is the way that sometimes organizations will excuse for behavior because of this belief that, "Oh, we just need to have this person. This person is the key. They are so brilliant that we have to let them get away with whatever." That's not a new phenomenon, but I think we've seen recently some ways in which we're realizing that's probably not true, because what that does is create a toxic culture in your workplace and it can drive other people away.
There's some interesting findings that show that cultures that do subscribe to this, "It's okay to be a jerk if you're producing results," that have these hyper masculine, dog eat dog, win-at-all-costs cultures. There's some actually strong evidence that those cultures lead to people, just in general, not just women, but people in general being disengaged, more likely to quit, less trust in leadership, or it can make sense that those are not environments really anybody would want to be in.
That's one way to think about it. What are the messages we're sending about who is valued in our culture? If we're saying, "At the end of the day, we're valuing this jerk," so to speak just to use the mild language, "who's engaging in behavior that's actually really harmful for other people, but at the end of the day, that's what we want," that does send a message to everybody about who's important in the organization and that's probably going to particularly impact people who are in the minority in some way. That's just speculation. That's a long-winded response, but I think that's part of what I might connect it to.
You told a story earlier about the men that you had interviewed who had pushed to get more women candidates in their hiring pool. What else can men who aren't necessarily leaders of companies be doing in the workplace to reduce the observed inequalities that we see?
Yeah. There's a lot. I think, again, it's not about needing to be a CEO who can set up all of these policies from on high. It's about, what can you do from where you sit to be a change agent? There's lots of ways to think about this. If you're a manager, just thinking about how you can be inclusive and equitable and how you manage is really important, and that has a lot of components. One story we go into in some detail in the book is actually from the early 1990s on Wall Street, so not a time or a place where we would think is a great place for women. There was a guy named Jack Rivkin, who ran an equity research department at a big firm, and he had a pretty revolutionary approach to talent, and he actually really saw women as an underutilized resource in the field.
He did lots of things like have more flexibility in how you work in working hours. He had a very developed, going back to our previous conversation, a very developmental approach. He didn't just think, "Okay, there's one model of how to be a really good research analyst." He thought, "Okay, what my job is to unleash people's talent, give them an environment where the things that are unique and special things that they bring to this job make them really able to go all the way with that."
He also would make sure that women interview women, so they got a sense of, "Yes, this is a place where women can be successful," a lots of things that he did. What's really cool about this story is that he cornered the market on female talent at this time, so pretty much all the best, and this is an industry where you actually can objectively measure performance. All the best women analysts basically went to work for this firm because it was a place where they could be successful and could be themselves. They didn't feel like they had to fit this cookie-cutter, at that time, very hyper masculine model. The cool thing about it is that he also had really high performance. They went from 15th to 1st in the institutional investor rankings in three years.
He did a lot, and that's something I would argue. He headed a big department, but really, anybody who's managing any size of team can think about what is it that I can do to create an environment where everybody has opportunities, where everybody feels dignity and is valued. That's something that you can do as a man, no matter what ... Everybody can do that, but certainly, it's a way for men to think about their role, like as a manager, whatever size team, what am I doing to make sure that this is an environment where women actually do have the opportunity to succeed?
A lot of times that requires reflecting on your own biases and beliefs and how you relate to people. Again, thinking about who are my employees that I'm closer to or who do I see is a high performer? Let me make sure I'm thinking about that objectively. That's one bucket, it's just the inclusive management bucket. The other, I think, is just similar to the story I told earlier. It's about raising your hand and trying things when you see that there's either a problem or an opportunity. We also tell the story of this guy, Ros Atkins at the BBC, who was a news anchor. He was not in charge of the BBC, but he was troubled by the gender disparity in terms of his own show and other shows, who they were bringing on-air as experts and speakers and pundits.
He said, "You know what? I wonder if we just start tracking this and taking a look at it on a weekly basis, that will motivate us to make more of an effort to bring gender parity into who were bringing on the news. He started doing it on his own show. It had a pretty immediate impact, and so he started just socializing it and bringing this process to other teams to say, "Hey, why don't you try this?" He had no, again, statutory authority to do this. It was very much just like as a colleague, "Hey, this has helped us. I know you care about this issue, here's something to try." It eventually snowballed into really a movement across the BBC, the head of the BBC heard about it and did institutionalize it as a process, but all of that was just him trying something and then socializing it and being willing to be a champion among his colleagues. There's all kinds of ways that you can do that without necessarily needing to be the leader of the entity.
Many companies now are trying to figure out this whole working model. Do we go back to the office? Do we do hybrid? Do we work from home? What insights from your research should companies be aware of as they solve this?
Yeah. This is a big one, and it's something that a lot of people are thinking about for a lot of reasons right now when it comes to the potential effects on equity in the workplace. I think, from what we know about gender in particular, I think what's really important is going to be for companies to be thoughtful in not just how they roll out remote or hybrid work or how they make it possible, but also for how they are managing in a remote or hybrid context. We've known for a long time that remote employees do tend to suffer a promotion penalty. There is a little bit of this out-of-sight, out-of-mind problem, and that's been reflected in the research for a long time. I think people are getting more aware of that, and now that remote and hybrid is much more common, I think realizing that we need to make sure we're not doing that is becoming a little bit more top of mind.
But it is, again, a natural human tendency to see the people that you see or have more contact with to think about them as harder workers or higher performing. Even if maybe that's not objectively true, it's just this classic FaceTime thing. "Well, I saw Ben in the office at 8AM and then he was still there at 7PM, so I guess he's probably the most dedicated person on the team." I think what's important is for companies to help managers evaluate people's performance objectively, and put in some guardrails to make sure that that's not happening, because we know that for all the reasons that we talked about earlier, when it comes to caregiving and what we expect men and women to do, women are going to be more likely to take advantage of remote work and hybrid work.
We want to make sure that that's not setting up a two tier system, where the people that are taking advantage of remote and hybrid work are second class citizens in a way. They're not necessarily getting those, and again, it can be subtle. It's not necessarily that they're getting dinged on their performance review, but maybe they're just, the manager's not thinking, "Oh, I should make sure they get invited to this special meeting," or "Oh, maybe I should ask if they want to take on this client." With all of the possibility that remote work brings, it's got great potential for increasing equity because it enables people to manage their lives more autonomously. I'm sure you all might have seen, there's been some articles, I don't know if there's been a lot of academic research yet, but certainly anecdotal reports that employees of color find it to be helpful for their well-being, because often if they're in-person in a predominantly white environment, they feel like they're experiencing a lot of microaggressions or just.
Also, being the only person of color can be a stressor, so there's anecdotal evidence that people of color may also be more likely to take advantage of the remote options, so we just want to make sure. Which again, people can manage some of this stuff in ways that can be helpful for equity, but we want to make sure we're not setting up a system where certain groups of people who tend to be remote and then they're not getting the same opportunities and rewards that people who tend to be in the office more are, because those groups probably are going to look different at a lot of companies.
That is super interesting.
Yeah. Well, to see how this unfolds over the next few years, because we're certainly in a new era with regards to how we work and what that will mean for all kinds of forms of inequality in the workplace.
You talked a bit earlier about what men can do in the workplace to help with inequalities, is there anything men can be thinking about outside of the workplace like in the home?
Sure. There's a famous moment, a very senior colleague here at Harvard Business School, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, wrote a book years ago called Men and Women of the Corporation, which was a seminal book on gender in the workplace, still cited today, came out in 1977 and she's moved on. She actually studies lots of other things, but some number of years ago someone asked this question, "What is it that men can do to support women in the workplace?" She just said, "How about some laundry?" Which is a very pithy way to say it, but it's actually really an important point, is that there is a role for men to play if they're in, especially a dual career household with a woman, to actually participate more fully at home as a way to support and enable their spouses to show up for their career in the way they'd like to.
A few years ago we did some research with our own alums here at the business school, and we actually continue to do this research as a launch journal setting. One thing we ask them is, "What did you expect when you left business school for how you and your spouse would divvy up career priority? Would your careers be of equal importance or would your career take precedence or your spouse? What did you expect in terms of childcare and housework? Did you think you'd share equally or did you think you'd do more? Spouse would do more?" We say, "What did you expect when you left business school?" You're 28, and then what has happened? What's the reality today?
What we found is that women, particularly those of the Gen X and Baby Boom generations, who at that time they analyzed this data were kind of in their 40s, 50s, so had been in the workplace for a while, they expected a lot more egalitarianism and equal career priority, equal childcare than they got. There was this big gap between what they experienced and they said, "Yeah, I thought that my spouse and I, our careers were equally important and that would be great," and then that's not what happened. I think it's important to realize that that is a place that men really can intervene because, one reason, it's really hard for couples to do that is that women take on the lion share of caregiving. Absolutely, I think, just thinking about how you divide up labor in the home is an important piece of this equation and it's something that, for men, if they feel like this is something that's important to them, it's a very practical thing that they can do. Taking on more of that domestic load is really impactful.
Back to that hiring topic, what can managers do to attract more diverse candidates?
There's a lot. There is certainly thinking about the language that you use, how are you talking about these roles. But then, there's also how you are getting the word out too. Again, going back to homophily, oftentimes, roles are filled through our personal networks and word-of-mouth and calling somebody and saying, "Hey, I need a person like this. Who do you know?", all of that thing. There's a lot of great things about that, because when you get a recommendation from somebody that you trust who says, "Oh, my former employee or my friend would be really great," that can be helpful to have that in addition to the resume and the interview, it's more information. It's totally understandable why we do that, but if our networks tend to be, again, people who look like us, who share our race and gender, who went to the same schools, et cetera, again, it's going to be hard for us to get a more diverse pool.
There's being proactive in terms of making sure that you are reaching people who do actually have those skills and capabilities, but who may not be part of your network. There's lots of ways to do that. Of course, there's professional associations, there's obviously working with your HR department to post it on different job boards, but also, there's just the ongoing work yourself of making sure that you are cultivating relationships with people who aren't like you. That's something that you have to do. That's a long term commitment to say, "I am going to do what I can to make sure that the people that I really connect with and maintain and put time into those relationships aren't just people who are just like me."
Is there data on the effect that gender has on hiring decisions?
That's a good question. I don't know that there's data that necessarily suggests men are more likely to hire men or women more likely to hire women. I think there probably are some findings out there like that, but that's probably very context-dependent. But I do think that what we know is that the interview panel, who's interviewing, gender can be very impactful there because it sends message to the interviewee about who's at that company. As I was saying, this guy at the Wall Street firm, he made a conscious effort to make sure there were women who were interviewing women so that they understood. Again, he's trying to send a message, like this is a place where women can really have careers. I think that's one way in which we know that it's important. Just think about, and this doesn't have to be just gender, but if you show up for an interview and there's three or four people who are all, look like each other and not like you on some salient dimension, that's sending a certain message.
Now, this, of course, can be hard to do if you don't have a lot of women or you don't have a lot of people of color in your department or your company, but it's not just something you can snap your fingers and do. To the extent that you can think about diversifying interview panels, that certainly has been shown to have a positive impact. Of course, also not just in terms of the candidate's experience and the message they feel like they're getting, but also just in terms of harnessing that diverse group and making sure that you have a little bit of diversity of perspectives, people might interpret things differently, sometimes based on their own experiences link to their identity. It definitely can be helpful to the extent that it's possible in your company, bring some diversity to your interview panel just as a tactical thing to do.
Right. How do gender norms or biases affect how employees are evaluated?
Well, this is a big one, and this is why I said earlier, we talk a lot about the pipeline as if the issue is we're just not getting enough women into that funnel. But really, what we see is that the real problem is getting people in and then they get stuck or they fall out. That's why you have things like pyramids or pipelines or ladders that you have these entry level cohorts that actually, in a lot of fields, have been gender-balanced for a really long time. Those big consulting firms have had pretty gender-balanced cohorts since the 90s. If it really was just a pipeline problem, all of them today would have equal men and women in leadership, and they definitely do not. Promotion and evaluation and assessment are what happened. That's what happens to have women tend to get stuck or fall out of the pipeline.
What we see is that lots and lots of findings that show that basically, men and women are just not evaluated equally for the same performance, and this can happen in lots of different ways. One study that I talk about a lot comes from some colleagues at Stanford looking at a big tech company and the tech company was finding men and women are getting similar numeric ratings, but their promotion rates are not even, so what's going on there? Researchers came in and worked with them to unpack what was happening in the qualitative piece of the review at how people were spoken about, and they found these very distinct gender patterns where women tended to be described with this language more around communality and teamwork and collaboration and men tended to be described with this, what they called agentic language, which we tend to associate more with leadership.
There are ways that gender stereotypes were showing up in the evaluations that were not really linked to their performance. This was much more about, again, just what managers are probably unconsciously bringing to the table when they think about men's and women's capabilities. What's cool is that they unpacked this with the company and said, "Okay, we're seeing some gender patterns here that suggest that you're struggling to objectively evaluate everybody, that the water we swim in, and when it comes to gender beliefs and stereotypes, is shaping some of how we're thinking about how we evaluate people." What they did was they actually worked with the company to come up with a rubric to help minimize that, to make sure that people were actually being evaluated quantitatively and qualitatively on the right criteria. I think the headline here is that not just the study, but many, many other studies demonstrate that a real issue for women is getting feedback and evaluations that are not job-relevant, not objective and basically not helpful.
If you get feedback that's just about you not being the right person, that's like "You're too this or you're not enough that," that's not very actionable and it's not very clear how it relates to your performance. Sometimes this is actually something managers do trying not necessarily out of ill intention, managers can be hesitant to give women, particularly women of color, direct, specific feedback, because they're worried about how it's coming across negatively or they have some of these, again, probably unconscious beliefs about how women might receive. They're anxious or not forthright enough about giving concrete, direct, actionable feedback. They tend to give that to men, like "Here's what you need to do. You need to get your numbers here, you need to talk to this team," it's much more useful.
That's actually, a lot of research shows that that's where the big gap is, and so what happens is not just that the evaluations themselves can be skewed, which definitely, there's a lot of evidence there, but men and women are not getting equal levels of information to help them improve. If you're not getting feedback that you're like, "I can take this and now know what I need to do to improve and get to that next level," well then, you're at a disadvantage compared to somebody who is getting that actionable clear feedback.
Given the obstacles that women face, what can they be doing to improve their career outcomes?
Well, I think there's a number of things, and I think one way to think about it is the evaluating who you might work for and then what you can do within a company that you already are working for. I definitely would encourage women to really think about vetting employers, because unfortunately, we just know that women need to do that more. My co-author actually has some interesting research, again, in the finance industry, and one of the things he found is that women in that industry, the analyst he was looking at, did tend to vet potential employers more, did tend to spend more time finding out if it was a firm where they could be successful and be supported, and that was related to them being better performers when they change jobs often in their male peers, so it is really important. I would say, absolutely, do what you can to gather information, which again, can be difficult.
It's not like you can necessarily call up the HR department and say, "Hey, are you a place where women are really treated equitably and we have equal opportunity and we're going to get good feedback?" That's not how it works. But I definitely would say do what you can to get as much information as you can about the employer and about what it is like to work there. I think that's particularly important for women. It's important for everybody, but it's really important for women.
I always think of this quote from one of the senior executives we interviewed who said, I think when we asked her about advice to women, she said, "Look, the most important thing that I think you can do is make sure that you are in a place that supports you and where you are not feeling diminished." She said something like, "At the end of the day, your belief in your own trajectory and capacity is all you have, so if you're in a place that really tears you down and where you are hitting these obstacles and you feel like you're not being treated with respect and dignity, you really should get out."
I think that's in that vein of do what you can to put yourself in a context, where you actually are going to be supported to succeed. Of course, we all often already have jobs and it's not always easy to leave them or for a lot of reasons we might not feel that we can, so I think for women who are thinking about their current employer, there's A, just having conversations with both men and women and finding your allies, people who you think share values around gender equality and who seem interested to be changing, so it means it's an opportunity going back to men, it's an opportunity for you if there's men that are your colleagues that you know through conversation that they support this notion of gender equality.
It's an opportunity for you to say, "Hey, here's something that you can do." Maybe it's tell me your salary or can you get me invited to this meeting? Of course, this is idiosyncratic. You've got to do this in a way that makes sense for your context, but I think that's, of course, another piece to do. I think the other thing I would say is just think about the research on negotiation. We negotiate, usually, when we take a job. We negotiate for title and compensation and all of that. There's a lot of research on gender and negotiation and the ways that women can sometimes be disadvantaged there. But I want to remind women that even when you're in a company, lots of things are still up for negotiation, so you can think about how do you negotiate for your own career success in an ongoing way.
Think about, again, assignments, promotion opportunities, raises, et cetera. Think about what it is that you can do to take a mindset of lots of things are upper negotiation. Maybe if I know I'm not going to get this raise, is there a project that I really like to work on that I think that could position me to get to X level in the future? Think about bringing a lot of things to the table.
The headline finding about gender negotiation is that generally speaking, gender differences diminish or go away when everyone has more information about what's up for negotiation and what's on the table and what the terms are. For women, again, I think that can be seeking out that information. When you're going into maybe a promotion discussion or something that's more formal, see what you can do to find out about what the terms are. Again, this is where maybe going to your allies, like finding somebody who sits in that level now, or who recently went through a promotion. Find out what their process was, maybe they'll tell you something about what they received in the negotiation, so just getting more information is generally going to benefit you. Those are some tactical things that I would suggest.
Can you talk more about the negotiation issue for women and men?
Yeah. Like I said, there are a lot of research on this, and generally speaking, women will tend to have poor outcomes in negotiation, but what it really seems to be driven by is lack of transparency. When we have less information, that's when gender biases or beliefs can fill in those gaps consciously or unconsciously. The headline, again, is the more that the parties know what's on the table and what the parameters are, the better positioned women are.
There's other interesting findings such as when women are negotiating on behalf of others, they can tend to be more successful, which is probably linked to some of our beliefs about women as being more communal, more oriented toward others. There's interesting findings that I think women can leverage, but I think for companies, one way that you can address gender parity in hiring and promotion is to be more transparent about what's up for negotiation. Be more transparent about your pay ranges, be more transparent about their process, make sure that people actually are on equal footing in terms of what they know when they're coming to the table.
What can parents be doing as they raise their children to combat these issues that we've been talking about?
Oh, that's a good question, and I don't study children, so take whatever I say with a grain of salt. I think it goes back to a little of what we talked about earlier when it comes to men doing more at home. This gender gaps, there's the two ends. There's what happens in the workplace and then what happens at home, and those are related. When women are doing the lion share of caregiving at home, that can really diminish their ability to show up at work. I think families can do a lot by role modeling, like when men really do have an equal role at home that sends a message to kids.
There's some interesting research from a different colleague here at HBS, Kathleen McGinn, who has a study that finds that people whose mothers worked outside that worked for pay when they were children, both men and women tend to have some, what I would call, great outcomes in terms of women, daughters having higher positions at work, being paid more, like they have good workplace outcomes, but sons tend to do more at home. She calls it this closing the gender gap at both ends, so there's a role-modeling piece there that I would say is important for both men and women. I think it's just the messages that you're sending, not so much what you say, but what you do that probably has the biggest impact.
Interesting. Colleen, our final question for you. How do you define success in your own life?
Oh, that is a good question. I think I, like anyone, want to feel fairly compensated and recognized for what I do, and I am very lucky to work at HBS where that's the case. But I think, for me, it's really about feeling like I'm having some kind of impact on the world, particularly around issues that I care about and this is one of them. I think, for me, just having opportunity to have conversations like this and share what we found in the book and help people understand what is the nature of gender inequality at work today, because as we started out by saying, things are much better than they once were. We're at a point where we don't have gender parity, so what's going on? It's not as simple as, again, women getting fired when they get pregnant, which, again, used to be perfectly legal.
I am very heartened by conversations like this where I get to help people understand what the research says about why we're in the place we are, and then, perhaps more importantly in some ways, what it is that we can do about it. What we wanted to do with the book is, again, really take research and tell people in companies, individuals and managers and leaders, what is it that you can do? If this is something you care about, you want to be part of working toward greater gender equity in the workplace in whatever small way that is for you, like here are some tactical things that you can do. For me, just being able to share what my co-author and I hope is some really useful information, to me, I'm really happy with that.
I enjoyed your book very much, you had a great impact on me, thank you for the book and thanks so much for this time together.
Thank you for having me.
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Glass Half-Broken: Shattering the Barriers That Still Hold Women Back at Work — https://amzn.to/3xbp2CG
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