That's What She Said: What Men Need to Know (and Women Need to Tell Them) About Working Together

by Joanne Lipman

In one survey, 79 percent of male supervisors reported worrying about giving women candid feedback, and said they felt they had to provide guidance carefully and indirectly. The irony is that by self-censoring, the men don’t give women the feedback necessary for the women to advance.

No wonder almost 30 percent of women say they still endure bias at work, half a century after John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act. In the male-dominated technology industry, that figure soars to 80 percent, with 60 percent also reporting sexual harassment.

Ugh. I assume this varies wildly by company, but still ugh.

Women began earning college degrees in equal numbers to men more than three decades ago, and now earn more than half, so there’s been plenty of time to fill the “pipeline” that leads to management jobs.

My college friends and I are in some ways a microcosm of what’s happened in the wider world. Even though women earn almost 60 percent of college degrees and more than half of graduate-school degrees, they represent just 5.6 percent of S&P 500 chief executives and 18 percent of board members of Fortune 1000 firms. They are only 19 percent of law partners.

According to a McKinsey/WSJ analysis, at the rate we’re going, it will take a hundred years to reach parity in the executive suite. Globally, the situation is worse. The World Economic Forum estimates it will take 170 years to reach economic parity for women and men worldwide.

At least eight European countries have passed quotas requiring 30 percent of board seats or more to be held by women—including Germany, Norway, Italy, Spain, and France. In the U.K., new legislation will require big companies to publicly report the pay gap between men and women, a chasm that currently tops £300,000 over the course of a woman’s working life.

the 30% Club, an organization founded by British finance executive Helena Morrissey that encourages companies to strive for 30 percent female representation on corporate boards. Research has shown that women’s views are discounted until they make up almost a third of any given group.

Does this hold for other underrepresented groups? Does it hold for groups in which men are the minority?

“But I confess tonight I’m a little nervous. Here I am in front of a room full of women, and that’s very unusual . . . I have to say it’s a bit intimidating.” The irony wasn’t lost on the room, or on me, either. Every woman there knew what it was like to be the lone female in a room full of men.

So let’s stop hearing about how uncomfortable (or even how brave?) men are for speaking up in front of a majority women audience? Feel like I’ve heard that theme a few too many times. But reminding those of us in the majority what it feels like to be (regularly/constantly) in the minority is really healthy. Later she says, “It isn’t just him. His one-liner is a common trope among men.” So this was her point too, and here I am trying to take credit for it. ;)

Imagine any businesswoman taking a podium and starting her speech by saying, “Wow, here I am in a room full of men, and it’s terrifying!” That would be absurd. Only a powerful man could trot out that line as a conversational icebreaker.

Exactly!

Depending on where you work, the costs can be even steeper. The fashion, advertising, and hospitality industries are particularly brutal for women. When I was an editor at Condé Nast, a publisher known for magazines like Vogue and Glamour, every item of clothing, pocketbook, and pair of shoes I wore was scrutinized, even though I worked at a business publication and didn’t share the same elevator bank as the fashion editors. Walking into the company cafeteria, with a sea of eyes staring you up and down, could turn into an exercise of doubt and self-flagellation.

Aren’t these orgs filled with women though? Is this pressure all coming ultimately from men (male social dominance fuels the fashion industry as a whole and the workplaces within the industry are concentrations of that pressure?). I guess I would hope that organizations largely run by women would be free of most of this nonsense. Or wait, they’re not actually run by men, are they?

When men succeed, they attribute it to their own grit and intelligence. Women attribute it to luck. It’s hard for us to own our accomplishments. We diminish them, or refuse to talk about them, or give the credit to somebody else.

Was it in Built to Last (or Good to Great?) that they found that leaders of great companies tend not to take credit for success and instead redirect praise and credit to their wonderful teams/organizations?

Some female executives keep a “Sorry Jar” on their desks, contributing a dollar each time they find themselves uttering the word. Google even offers a gmail plug-in for women called “Just Not Sorry.” It highlights those undermining words and phrases with a red underline, as if they are misspelled. It is a reminder to women to stop sabotaging ourselves in your eyes.

All of this is simply to fit in with you, to be as unobtrusive as possible so that we can be recognized for our work,

I still don’t see how makeup fits into this. How does that help a woman fit into a man’s world? And I agree it’s terribly wasteful to spend so much money on it, especially when there’re probably huge markups on it (much like clothing, though I guess in that case if workers were paid decent wages, they gap might close considerably). I don’t think women should have to or should believe they have to wear heels or makeup, speak deferentially or self-deprecatingly etc in order to achieve their goals. Men acknowledging this extra effort to ‘fit in’ is nowhere near enough to resolve. Should we work in VR? Wear blindfolds? Sad commentary that in women-filled workplaces like vogue, cosmo, women apply these pressures on one another, with few men in sight. Kind of hard to blame men for this case at least, right?

They’ve grown up with the concept that “equal” at work has meant “the same”—a notion that has done us all a disservice. It doesn’t allow for the many differences that may inadvertently reward men while penalizing women.

It also probably means things only changing for women, rather than some things changing for men (eg taking equal parental leave when adding to their families)

The same goes for sexist behavior, which men consistently underestimate. While the majority of women in a nationwide poll said they had been touched inappropriately by a man, only a third of men thought their partners had experienced that kind of harassment.

Majority? Ugh. Only consolation is that this is over a career span, so it’s not that most women have experienced this in each of her workplaces / her current one. But still ugh.

Decades of research has shown that their perceptions are common: men tend to overestimate not only women’s progress, but their presence.

Interesting. Don’t men notice the difference vs say their high school class?

The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media found that on average, only 17 percent of the people in film crowd scenes are female, but the perception among men is that 50 percent are women.

Wow. Given all the union rules and such, seems like this ratio would need to be deliberate?

Mazzara’s realization that the women were being shut down may have been news to him—but it’s familiar to women everywhere. Visit any meeting, at any company, anywhere in the world, on any given day, and you’ll find the same scenario. Men dominate.

Took me a while to see it, but once you do, you realize it’s pervasive. And it takes either majority female discussion or men explicitly making room for women’s voices to be heard (asking for opinions directly, calling out interrupters, acknowledging credit for original raiser of a point etc)

Kieran Snyder, a tech executive with a Ph.D. in linguistics, calculated interruptions in meetings at her own company, and found that men were three times more likely to interrupt women than other men. Perhaps even more dispiriting, though, the very few women who did interrupt others overwhelmingly cut in on other women—a stunning 87 percent of the time. They almost never interrupted men.

Ugh. But this is at least actionable immediately, and changes can be made rather quickly.

Not even the Supreme Court is immune. A Northwestern University analysis of Supreme Court arguments over a dozen years found that the three female justices were interrupted three times more frequently than their male counterparts. As powerful as these women are, they “are just like other women,” the researchers wrote, “talked over by their male colleagues.” Interestingly, though, the longer the female justices sat on the court, the more they adopted speaking patterns similar to those of the men, using fewer polite qualifiers like “excuse me” or “sorry,” and speaking in a more aggressive, declaratory style.

RBG, baby.

But there are far more serious consequences. A 2011 study found that airbags and seat belts are designed primarily for male bodies—meaning women wearing seat belts are 47 percent more likely to sustain injuries in a crash.

This may be lowest common denominator though? Choosing airbag injuries for women over more serious crash injuries for larger men? They’re also biased for people not wearing seatbelts I’ve heard, even though doing that increases airbag-induced injury rates as well.

overdoses of the sleeping pill Ambien. The FDA cut the recommended dosage in half after finding that at prescribed levels, women risked dangerous side effects, including impaired driving. How did the dosage go so wrong? Because medical testing of Ambien, as with most testing historically, used men—and men metabolize the drug differently than women.

Doh

One survey of 7,280 leaders found that women ranked higher than men in 12 out of 16 competencies, including stereotypically male traits like taking initiative, driving results, and championing change. The researchers found that women were more effective precisely because of the perception that they aren’t as good as men; they believed they needed to work harder than men to prove themselves.

She quickly identified an obvious flaw that fifty years’ worth of male designers and retailers had missed: when a bucket is full, it’s too heavy for most women to lift. The design team then went into the field, observing real people as they used buckets to wash windows or mop floors. Sure enough, they observed women awkwardly trying to carry full buckets with two hands, or drag them along the floor.

Thanks to Brownie and her team, Earl surpassed even his wildest goals, selling millions of pieces of Tupperware. He became unfathomably rich, a millionaire many times over.

I hope she did too!

Researchers have found that, just as with the Tupperware duo, when women are added to all-male teams, solutions are more creative than those of single-sex teams of either gender.

What about vice versa? Or has that still not happened yet?

More than half a century ago, men like Earl Tupper proved it first.

Um. Earl Tupper *and Brownie Wise* proved....though it actually sounds like her sales organization was all female? So it wasn’t so much a mixed-gender team as much as one kick-butt sales force leader.

Afterward, the researchers measured each participant’s self-esteem. Astonishingly, the men who were told their girlfriends scored at the top felt worse about themselves; their self-esteem took a hit. But if their girlfriends scored poorly, it actually boosted the men’s self-esteem. (Women’s self-esteem, meanwhile, didn’t change regardless of how their boyfriends scored.)

Good for the women. But for this to make the point in the text, it should need to hold for random pairings of men and women, not just those dating one another. The dating relationship weighs heavily on this result I’m guessing, as many men want to be providers etc. But do men lose self-esteem whenever any woman performs better? Quite possible this is true too, but why not find that study?

One study found that men routinely overestimate their IQ by five points, while women underestimate theirs by the same amount. In another experiment, after men and women each took a math test, men overestimated their performance by 30 percent, twice as much as women did.

Some men respond by lashing out. Researchers have found that when a woman outearns her husband, her husband is more likely to cheat. Worse, the more the woman earns, the more likely it is her husband will have an affair.

That’s so weird. (Or maybe with more power and means, the high-earning men are less likely to be caught?)

Yet the reverse is true for women: when she outearns her husband she is less likely to cheat.

No, this is the same as for men according to your data: whoever earns more is less likely to cheat!

Falk openly admits he didn’t hire and promote more women to be politically correct. “It was about getting the best talent,” he told me. So what ultimately happened to the men of Kimberly-Clark? Well, for one thing, they got richer: Kotex sales surged, and the company’s stock price more than doubled since Falk embarked on his initiative in 2009—a boon for the men working there as well as the women.

And so Earl did what he needed to do. He fired Brownie Wise. After almost eight years working together, he cut her off. He instructed his staff to bury every copy of her book in a pit in back of Tupperware’s headquarters. He had never given her stock in the company, nor did she have a severance agreement. After she sued him, he reluctantly gave her one year’s salary, about $30,000. A few months later, he sold the company for $16 million—the equivalent of $132 million today.

Doh. I was afraid of this. She should’ve owned a big chunk of Tupperware! :(

Similarly, even though women make up more than half of all doctoral students in biological fields, they’re severely underrepresented on science faculties, because the most elite male (though not female) biologists train more men. Top male biologists train up to 40 percent fewer women compared to average scientists.

Doh re: sexism in “top biologists’” labs

Once children hit school age, teachers—even female teachers—subconsciously believe boys are better at math than girls. In one study, when a group of teachers graded math tests with no names on them, the girls outscored the boys. But when another group of teachers graded the same tests with names, the results were reversed: they gave higher grades to the boys than the girls. All of the teachers, by the way, were female.

This is frustrating and scary. And I’ve already seen it happen!

The plight of female coders—that their code is considered superior when they are anonymous, but inferior when they are identified—reflects the same paradigm in the rest of the world. Remember the experiment that found teachers gave girls better math grades than boys, but only when the papers were anonymous? The same holds true here. In coding, as in school math—as in life—women are marked down simply for being female.

Ugh (But also: find it hard to blame github for this bias as it’s the bias of its users that are at play, not necessarily that of its employees—sexism scandals aside)

It’s an intriguing question. You could conceivably argue for either one. Though if I woke up in the middle of the night to hear a burglar rummaging around in my living room, I know which one I’d want. I’d care much more about whether the police chief is a good shot, and whether he or she can chase down a suspect, than whether he or she got straight As in school. I’d go for street smarts every time.

Does police chief do much shooting and chasing?

Flummoxed by women’s hesitation to raise their hands for promotion, one senior Google engineer jury-rigged his own solution. He began sending out regular “nudge” notes—an email to all technical employees explaining the research and urging women to nominate themselves. We “tell them for God’s sake, nominate yourself for a promotion, because you’re holding yourself back!” as Bock put it. The nudge notes have proven to be remarkably effective. When they go out every six months, the number of women nominating themselves for promotions soars. Once, when the engineer forgot to send the note before a promotion cycle, the numbers plummeted into the basement again.

Wow, cool that just a reminder email erases much (most/all?) of the hesitation that women feel about making their own promotion case. I had heard that google saw much lower rate of promotion of women with the self-directed promotion approach, but did this equalize?

For Google, as for others, the key incentive came in the form of family leave. In 2011, Google sweetened its leave policy, extending paid parental leave to five months from three. The result was immediate. Attrition rates for women who had babies plunged by 50 percent.

Amazon take note. Did they try the same for men too? We’re there enough bi-google couples to see drop in attrition among new mothers whose partners had more time off?

As a World Economic Forum report noted, “There are 11 male hedge fund managers named John, James, William or Robert for every one female hedge fund manager of any name.”

There are more Jeffs than women who report to Jeff Bezos.

And woe to the woman who gets angry at work. Three separate studies found that when professional men get angry in a work context, they are accorded greater respect by others. But when women get angry, they receive less respect.

Does getting angry really help the organization anyway? But I can believe it can help some (men) gain respect, so in some ways it’s encouraged, even if it doesn’t actually help achieve business objectives better.

The study found that for every 1 percent decline in a company’s value, female top executives’ pay is reduced by 63 percent, almost twice the percentage decline for that of male top executives. Yet if a company’s value increases by 1 percent, male executives get more credit—triple the percentage pay boost versus that for women leaders.

What’s more, when Fortune magazine tracked down female executives who had lost their positions and fallen off its annual Most Powerful Women list, it found that only 13 percent of them had found top jobs at other companies, despite stellar careers and track records, and a determination to get back in the game. As the publication noted, “there is something wrong if so many all-star women at the peak of their careers, with decades of top-level management experience, can’t land the ultimate job.”

Part of the issue is that women are more likely to get the top job if the enterprise is failing in the first place.

I was wondering if this was the case. Is it deliberate to search for a women when things are failing?

Women are marched right off the dreaded “glass cliff,” a phrase coined by University of Exeter researchers Michelle K. Ryan and S. Alexander Haslam, who found that women are overrepresented in leadership when companies are in “precarious” shape and thus more likely to implode.

Another emerging tactic is to prohibit companies from asking job candidates about their previous salary, in order to break the cycle of underpaying women when they switch employers. Massachusetts, New York City, and Philadelphia have all passed legislation doing just that.

Not sure how much this will change though because the candidate knows how much she makes, which is a huge input to next salary. Also guessing that it doesn’t prevent candidates from disclosing their compensation, which is an effective negotiating technique.

Still, she made sure to keep up her grades: after they skipped class a few too many times, she persuaded the boyfriend to smash her hand with a rock so she could be excused from final exams, thus preserving her grade point average.

Totally unrelated to the book, but this is about comedian Samantha Bee. (Boyfriend was bad influence on otherwise squeaky clean childhood and adolescence, or so claimed)

The results were striking. When Full Frontal launched in February 2016, its writing staff was split evenly between men and women, and about 25 percent of its writers were minorities. Some were already experienced professional writers, but others most definitely weren’t; one came from a job at Maryland’s Department of Motor Vehicles. “I have literally filled my office with people who have been underestimated their entire careers,” Bee said.

This was as a result of making their writer interview process blind by it not being tied to in-person interviews, echoing the results in auditions for musicians in orchestras.

Women in emails tend to be chattier, friendlier, and far more likely to apologize for troubling you, or to thank you multiple times for doing something you were supposed to do anyway. When I write emails myself, I find myself double-checking them before I send them, to make sure I’m not completely debasing myself. Usually I force myself to at least erase an extraneous exclamation point or two.

Hm. Find myself more in this category than a) the overly terse angry email and b) I’m comfortable with. I “email like a girl”? ;) This comes from some analysis of the emails seized in the Enron scandal. Great fodder for sociologists studying email communication.

Even after the Austrian government reduced its funding in protest in 2011, the orchestra still resisted. Almost as if to spite the government for meddling in its sexist ways, at the philharmonic’s first concert of January 2012, only two female musicians sat aside their male colleagues. Every year since, it’s been something of a sport at the annual New Year’s Day concert for regular concertgoers to count the few women onstage.

Didn’t know this about Vienna Symphony. Defiantly biased in their selection process. Sounds like they just don’t like being told what to do.