I am just back from the round table event for Lord Davies ….me and a few people who have been sitting around tables for the past 10 years!
One of the things that is really puzzling me is this ….despite there being pressure on us from Europe re quotas and despite there being only 3.8 percent women directors in the FTSE 250 ….diversity professionals will not engage on the http://www.genderiq.tv/ project
I have been told
- It wont work for senior women
- It wont engage the men
- It’s not professional enough
- We don’t want to focus on gender
What do you think? Here is s a link to one of the modules. Check out the resources tab as well as the Q&A function and the chapter functionality in the power point.
Gender IQ in negotiating
Please do let me have your opinion as it will really help me to understand how useful this tool might be and what our strategy might be re raising awareness if big organisations dont want to engage.
With passion, as always
Having been both a successful business executive and athlete, I have found that teamwork is important – working together as a cohesive like-minded entity – but businesses headed to mediocrity fail to understand that teamwork requires both diversity and conformity.
It's now the 21st century, the second millennium. Diversity is going to happen. Our economy is rapidly embracing diversity through the rising power of China, India, and others. Gender diversity is following suit, and the companies that embrace gender diversity will be the companies of the 21st century. Diversity will come in on the footsteps of companies like Gender IQ that offer professional, well thought-out training programmes and the backing of industry leader SME's. Some will take their 20th century brooms and sweep Gender IQ into the arms of the 21st century companies. Will you?
Ken Olsen, who was the "king" of the computer industry in the early 1980's declared that "Home computers will never become popular", and he said that while Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were just getting started. Which are you, Ken or Steve?
Carolyn, thank you for taking the time to do this. We ALL badly need to have this conversation
It might be that watching a module in isolation isnt getting the full message across, which is this:
1.There are societal influences and biological differences that (generally) produce different behaviours in men and women
Men can have feminine behaviours and women can have masculine behaviours and everybody sits somewhere on the masculine to feminine scale.
2.We are overly focused on the masculine paradigm and need to widen the acceptable range of leadership styles to include, understand and work with the feminine too.
3.Is there anything else we need to understand? My view is that everybody has something to learn here …men, women, gay, different cultures, black, transsexual …there is nobody that this subject doesn’t touch
Thanks again
Carolyn has given me permission to post this (email)
I had a look at your presentation on negotiation and have the
following comments:
It seems the prevalent model of achieving women's success is still
'women would be more successful if they adopted traditionally masculine behaviours'. We know what the problems are with this model:It is rooted in the idea that men and masculinity are the default human type. It puts the blame for women's lack of success, and the responsibility for their success, solely on the behaviour of women. It's a big ask, that every woman undergo a 'total personality transplant',
Women who adopt masculine behaviours in the workplace may be rewarded in some ways, but are typically penalised in other ways both in and outside of the workplace; John Donovan was a great interviewee, but he's clearly incorrect when he says that if women were more 'courageous' they
would be rewarded for the behaviour.
Your work is starting to point in another direction, which is already a step forward. You're focusing on what men in the workplace can do to understand gender difference and take advantage of abilities they don't typically develop themselves.
I find your use of the idea of 'biological differences' disturbing. If societal expectations and rewards and punishments both in childhood and continually as adults are such powerful shapers of behaviour, why is it necessary to include something else to explain the resulting gender-based behaviour?
Also, whether you intend this or not, using the expression 'biological differences' makes you sound like you're in the 'biology is destiny'camp, and everyone knows they want to avoid that. It's more helpful to focus on how these differences arise from training, e.g. women grow up being expected to 'read men's minds' in social and family situations,and have thus been trained to pick up indirect cues (Western men who grew up with abusive parents, and men who grow up in cultures where consensus is socially important, have also developed this same set of'reading' skills). Finally, talking about 'biological differences'makes it much more difficult to explain outliers and those who don't fit
the gender-norm pattern, and puts such people in a very difficult
position. Have you thought of the effect your statements about
'biological differences' may have on women, or men, who don't fit the
pattern you describe? Are you really implying there's something
biologically wrong with them, rather than that they learned different
behaviours from growing up in non-typical environments or having
non-typical experiences?
Focusing on the idea that what you do isn't just the way it's done is useful for everyone, and can help everyone, dominant and nondominant alike.
With respect to helping to change both women's and men's behaviour to
create an environment more supportive of women's success, I think the next step here is to help men see that they're projecting their own expectations onto the women they work with -women who don't ask, for
example, are not very ambitious, but women who do ask are castrating
bitches. Men like Donovan (and women as well! I've found myself guilty of just such judgments and expectations) need to consciously identify that they, or their colleagues, despite what they say, look at 'courageous' women negatively even if they don't look on men who do the same thing negatively-then address why that may be and make an effort to change.Carolyn Dougherty