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June 13 - June 15, 2019
Almost half of women as well as men surveyed in Russia and India believe women to be inferior. And this was a survey done in 2017.
Men worry: “Do I know enough? Do I have the right to talk about this issue? . . . One of the biggest challenges from a guy’s perspective is how do we make these issues discussable.”
plenty of other men would be happy to join in the conversation. They’re just terrified of saying something wrong.
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. The majority of men, meanwhile, report that as far as they’re concerned, discrimination doesn’t exist. Sexism has already been solved.
Women began earning college degrees in equal numbers to men more than three decades ago,
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. A Rockefeller Foundation survey found that 1 in 4 Americans believes we will literally invent time travel before women run half of the Fortune 500 companies.
Research has shown that women’s views are discounted until they make up almost a third of any given group.
Hillary Clinton became the first presidential candidate in recorded history to say “I’m sorry” in her concession speech.
Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that a recent Pew survey found that the majority of men believe obstacles to women’s success “are largely gone,” while the majority of women believe “significant obstacles” are still in the way.
That explains why one study found that 43 percent of women agreed with the statement “Women have fewer opportunities than men”—while only 12 percent of men agreed. The men simply couldn’t quantify what they couldn’t see.
A Yale study found that male executives who spoke more than their peers were viewed as more competent. For the female executives, it was the reverse. If they spoke more than their peers, they were judged 14 percent less competent.
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.
THE AMERICAN ECONOMY is fueled, overwhelmingly, by women. Some 75 percent of America’s gross domestic product—the value of all goods and services, which is generally used as a measure of economic health—derives from consumer purchases. An astonishing 85 percent of those purchases are driven by women.
hit to men’s self-esteem is made worse because men consistently view themselves as smarter and more competent than they actually are. One study found that men routinely overestimate their IQ by five points, while women underestimate theirs by the same amount.
He specifically singled out three situations in which training is doomed to fail: when it’s mandatory, when it so much as mentions the law, or when it is specific to managers, as opposed to being offered to all employees.
COMPLICATING MATTERS IS the culture of silence surrounding salaries. There’s a real taboo that prevents us from having a frank, open conversation about what I make or you make.
There’s a strong argument to be made for transparency not just for women, but for introverted men, minorities, and other underrepresented groups, who face many of the same obstacles.
Research has shown that women won’t raise their hand for a job unless they feel they are 100 percent qualified, while men eagerly raise their hands if they have 60 percent of the required qualifications.
A study by the Families and Work Institute found that just a third of millennial men without kids think they should be primary breadwinners—but that figure spikes to 53 percent for those who have kids.
Yet I’m here because Iceland by some measures is the best place in the world to be a woman. For eight consecutive years, the World Economic Forum has ranked it the number-one country on the planet for gender equality. That puts it ahead of 144 other countries, including the U.S., which came in a disappointing forty-fifth, well behind Rwanda and Burundi.
In the U.S., the stock market doubled from 2003 to 2007. In Iceland it didn’t double or even triple; it multiplied by nine times.
Almost every man I meet shares the same view: it doesn’t matter what some pencil-pushers at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland say about Iceland being number-one in gender equality, Iceland is still not remotely equal enough for women. The men are as fervent believers in this narrative as the women.
My visit now coming to a close, I think I finally understand why Iceland truly is so hospitable to women, even though Icelanders themselves insist it isn’t. The reason this country ranks number one for gender equality, doesn’t, it seem, have much to do with the women at all. It’s all about the men. The men are agitating on behalf of the women.
