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Whenever you include a group that’s been excluded, you benefit everyone. And when you’re working globally to include women and girls, who are half of every population, you’re working to benefit all members of every community. Gender equity lifts everyone.
If you want to lift up humanity, empower women. It is the most comprehensive, pervasive, high-leverage investment you can make in human beings.
But then the vice president of applications marketing came in to talk, and as he was presenting, the guy sitting next to me, the same young age I was and fresh out of Stanford Business School, got in an all-out debate with this VP. This wasn’t just a spirited exchange; it was a brash, escalating face-off, almost a brawl, and I was thinking, Wow, is this how you have to be to do well here?! It took me a few years to get my answer.
If you didn’t argue strenuously, then either you didn’t know your numbers or you weren’t smart or you weren’t passionate. You had to prove you were strong, and this is how you did it. We didn’t thank each other. We didn’t compliment each other.
From the beginning, instead of being myself, I had been acting in the style of men I perceived were doing well in the company.
“It’s not okay for women to cry at work, but it’s okay for men to YELL at work. Which is the more mature emotional response?”)
Men also face cultural obstacles in the workforce that keep them from being who they are. So anytime women can be ourselves at work, we’re improving the culture for both men and women.
Being yourself sounds like a saccharine prescription for how to make it in an aggressive culture. But it’s not as sweet as it sounds. It means not acting in a way that’s false just to fit in. It’s expressing your talents, values, and opinions in your style, defending your rights, and never sacrificing your self-respect. That is power.
For so many women in the workplace, “being yourself” is a much tougher challenge than what I faced at Microsoft.
But then, because her new manager needed to keep some token women on his team, he began adding hidden negative performance reviews so Susan couldn’t get promoted out of his group. She asked about the negative reviews, and no one would explain them.
When she asked what was being done about the plunging number of women, she was told that the women of Uber needed “to step up and be better engineers.”
In workplaces around the world, women are made to feel that we aren’t good enough or smart enough. Women get paid less than men do. Women of color get paid even less. We get raises and promotions more slowly than men do. We don’t get trained and mentored and sponsored for jobs as much as men do. And we get isolated from one another more than men do—so it can take women a long time to realize that the bad fit we’re feeling is not our fault but a fact of the culture.
In other words, “If we don’t have many women engineers here, it’s because women are not good engineers.”
Opportunities have to be equal before you can know if abilities are equal. And opportunities for women have never been equal.
When people see the effects of poor nurture and call it nature, they discourage the training of women for key positions, and that strengthens the view that the disparity is due to biology. What makes the biology assertion so insidious is that it sabotages the development of women, and it relieves men of any responsibility for examining their motives and practices. That’s how gender bias “plants the evidence” that leads some people to see the effects of their own bias and call it biology. And that perpetuates a culture that women don’t want to join.
One is that when personal computers made their way into American households, they were often marketed as gaming devices for boys, so boys spent more time on them and it gave boys exposure to computers that girls didn’t get. When the computer gaming industry emerged, many developers started creating violent war games featuring automatic weapons and explosives that many women didn’t want to play, creating a closed cycle of men creating games for men. Another likely cause is the early view of the ideal computer coder as someone with no social skills or outside interests. This view was so
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when software engineering was seen as more clerical in nature and much easier than the hardware side, managers hired and trained women to do the work. But when software programming came to be understood as less clerical and more complex, managers began to seek out men to train as computer programmers—instead of continuing to hire and train women.
If societies are going to elevate women to equality with men—and declare that people of any race or religion have the same rights as anyone else—then we have to have men and women and every racial and religious group together writing the code.
Diversity is the best way to defend equality. If people from diverse groups are not making the decisions, the burdens and benefits of society will be divided unequally and unfairly—with the people writing the rules ensuring themselves a greater share of the benefits and a lesser share of the burdens of any society.
All you have to do is pause and reflect on the various meanings of the word “recognize” to shudder at the idea that the software is slow to recognize people who don’t look like the programmers.
I am not saying that women should be given positions in tech that they haven’t earned. I’m saying women have earned them and should be hired for them.
A 2010 academic study on group intelligence found that the collective intelligence of a workgroup is correlated to three factors: the average social sensitivity of the group members, the group’s ability to take turns contributing, and the proportion of females in the group. Groups that included at least one woman outperformed all-male groups in collective intelligence tests, and group intelligence was more strongly correlated to gender diversity than to the IQs of the individual team members. Gender diversity is not just good for women; it’s good for anyone who wants results.
A 2018 Atlantic article cites a study that says women with self-confidence gained influence “only when they also displayed … the motivation to benefit others.” If women showed confidence without empathy or altruism, they faced a “‘backlash effect’—social and professional sanctions for failing to conform to gender norms.” It’s fear of this backlash, according to another study, that keeps women from asserting themselves.
I want to create a workplace where everyone can bring their most human, most authentic selves—where we all expect and respect each other’s quirks and flaws, and all the energy wasted in the pursuit of “perfection” is saved and channeled into the creativity we need for the work. That is a culture where we release impossible burdens and lift everyone up.
The lack of paid leave in the US is symptomatic of a workplace culture that also struggles with sexual harassment, gender bias, and a general indifference to family life. All these issues are aggravated by one reality: fewer women in positions of power. A male-dominated culture is more likely to emphasize paid leave’s near-term costs and minimize its long-term benefits.
Love is what lifts us up. When we come together, we rise. And in the world we’re building together, everyone rises. No one is exploited because they’re poor or excluded because they’re weak. There is no stigma and no shame and no mark of inferiority because you’re sick, or because you’re old, or because you’re not the “right” race, or because you’re the “wrong” religion, or because you’re a girl or a woman. There is no wrong race or religion or gender. We have shed our false boundaries. We can love without limits. We see ourselves in others. We see ourselves as others. That is the moment of
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it occurred to me in a moment of private embarrassment that the rich American lady who was here to help had some gender equity issues of her own she needed to face, had a culture of her own she needed to change.
