Anne-Marie Slaughter, care, and men

October 31st, 2013

"Care is socialized out of men. We don't value men as caregivers. We value them for the amount of money they make." - Anne-Marie Slaughter

I just got back from a panel on women and work held at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. It starred three big names in this arena, the biggest, in the US at least, being Anne-Marie Slaughter of Why Women Still Can't Have It All fame, accompanied by Alison Wolf, who appeared in my penultimate show, author of The XX Factor: How Working Women Have Created a Far Less Equal World, and Debora Spar, president of Barnard College and author of Wonder Women: Sex, Power, and the Quest for Perfection. If you come here at all you'll either have heard the podcast featuring Alison or read about her, so I'm not going to repeat her points here, although I do recommend her book - it's a fascinating read. I haven't read Debora Spar's yet but I'm keen to interview her.

L to R, Merit Janow of Columbia University, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Alison Wolf, Debora Spar

It was Anne-Marie Slaughter whose ideas I found most compelling today. She talked about how the response to that piece in The Atlantic in 2012 took her completely by surprise. "I did not choose to devote my life to this issue," she said. But as a result she was flung into the world of gender politics, and has come out the other side with a completely different view than the one she went in with. (One audience member called her "the chief gender strategist", to which Slaughter responded half-jokingly, "I'm going back to foreign policy." "It would probably be easier," said the woman.) Anyway, she's come away from her "130 talks" to various types of women's group with the firm belief that American society doesn't value care. 

"I now see this [whole issue of trying to balance work and family] as a problem of not valuing care. We as feminsits were taught to de-value that." She said her generation of highly educated women would never have given up a top job, like her old one in the State Department, just because they had kids who had to live in a different town. No way. (Slaughter eventually did just that, as she famously described in the article.) She now spends a huge amount of time thinking and writing about our caregiving culture in the US, and particularly how men play into it. She talked about the pretty pathetic family policies that exist here, and the fact that maternity leave is barely existent here, let alone paternity leave. Yet in Norway, where men get two months' leave, Norwegian company heads are starting to look on men who don't opt to take their leave as the kinds of people they may not even want at the company. There is pressure to take that leave. Here, as The Wall Street Journal described fairly recently, it's quite the opposite. Take it from someone who moved here in her twenties: American culture values work above all else while giving much lip service to family. Or, as I sometimes think of it, the US still thinks of family as the thing from the 1950s, run entirely by the woman while the man went out to work. It hasn't yet come to terms with the fact that's not the way things are any more.

Slaughter talked about how great her husband is with their two boys and how close they are to him. She's written elsewhere about this too. And she made an excellent point that can sometimes get forgotten in all the focus on women's progress, or lack of it. 

"If I had daughters I would be raising them with more choices than my sons," she said, i.e. in today's culture women are told they can be anything, stay-at-home mom, professional woman without kids, professional woman with kids. "I'm basically raising my sons to be breadwinners. In terms of social norms it used to be girls who couldn't have choices, but now it's boys who are only socialized that way."

Men are always approaching her saying, basically, "this conversation is all about women, but we [men] feel we can't see our families", because, essentially, their role in society is to work, work, work. Caring? To many, including plenty of women, men who do it are slightly suspect - not quite man enough. Jennifer Siebel Newsome, who made Miss Representation, is making a film about attitudes to masculinity and the pressure to be macho. It's called The Mask You Live In. 

Both it and Anne-Marie Slaughter's book on America's work and family dynamic come out next year.

In search of executive presence

October 31, 2013

Joanna Barsh fought perceptions of being 'young and bouncy'

"I tried for many years to be taller, more serious, having gravitas as if I’d just come from a funeral…but that’s just not who I am.” - Joanna Barsh

Last week at the Working Mother conference, I was in a session on women in leadership and found myself in a small group discussing the idea of ‘executive presence’. We’d just heard a lively presentation by Dana Vandecoevering of Intel. She mentioned that Intel has a program in place for its women employees to essentially coach them so they stay on an advancement track and don’t ‘fall out of the pipeline’ as so many women do, leaving us with the sparse population of women at the top we’re all so used to hearing about. I was fascinated to hear that one of the things Intel coaches its women on is how to develop executive presence, that elusive quality you need to convince others you’re ready to lead – that you’ve got the goods in the form of your persona, your bearing, your appearance, and so on.

Executive presence, though, can be subjective. It’s something other people see in you, and it’s a lot harder for women to be seen to have than men, simply because as a society we default to seeing men – usually white men – as leaders. One woman at my table told the story of someone she knows who went grey early, in her twenties. The woman’s mother begged her to dye her hair but the woman, who was ambitious, refused, as she was on the fast track at work and felt that as she was young, she very much needed that grey hair to be taken seriously. We then got into a conversation about how you develop executive presence (see this Harvard Business Review piece for one author’s take) and how you even start that conversation with someone in whom you see potential.

One of my favorite interviewees on The Broad Experience was Joanna Barsh, a long time senior partner at McKinsey and Company and an author of much of their respected research on women in the workplace. What I loved about talking to Joanna last year was that she was open and willing to talk about herself and how she’d either been let down at work or let herself down. Going back over my notes, and my tape, I found a part I didn’t use during the show she appeared in, where she talks about ‘senior presence’:

“I happen to be incredibly short…I’m also an incredibly bouncy, energetic person and despite my old age I don’t have any grey hair…so here I am bouncing through as a senior consultant and there were many, many times where the organization in evaluation meetings said, ‘Does she have…senior presence?’…I tried for many years to be taller, more serious, having gravitas as if I’d just come from a funeral…but that’s just not who I am.”

Joanna let herself age into her gravitas, and it worked. She recently retired but is still very outspoken on women in leadership.

Of course this entire conversation gets us back to a question many women ask all the time: why should women have to be anything other than themselves? Why should they have to change their voices, their posture, their hair, anything, in order to fit in? Why can’t the corporation meet women where they are instead?

All I know is that because we still live in a world, and particularly a work world, that defaults to ‘male’, women still need to fit into that world to get anything done. Only when more women are running things will we skew more female in our thinking. But to get there, those women rising up the ranks today still need to work with largely male groups, and that means going at least some way to communicating in a way men understand. 

Women, identity, and valuing ourselves

October 28, 2013

Britain's new ten pound note, featuring Jane Austen

The other week I wrote a post I called When Women Work For Free. It was inspired by Tess Vigeland's post Me, Work For Free At This Point In My Career? and today I was alerted to this New York Times piece by Tim Kreider (for which he was actually paid), Slaves of the Internet, Unite! I'm going off on a slight tangent here, especially as Kreider, obviously, is male, and yet has himself agreed to work for nothing on what sounds like multiple occasions. But the way women value themselves - and how their sense of identity messes with their ability to get more money - played into a talk I attended last week at a conference put on by Working Mother Media. Columbia Business School professor Michael Morris talked about his, and former student, Emily Amanatullah's, research into women and negotiating. I'm slightly obsessed with this topic, as some of you may know. I've reported two stories on negotiating for Marketplace in the past, and episode 13 of The Broad Experience was about what happens when women ask women for a raise. I'm always banging on about the bookAsk For It, which I recommend to any woman who'll listen.

Morris presented us with a graph showing that when women in the Columbia experiment had to negotiate for themselves, they lowballed themselves. As a result, they ended up with a far lower salary offer than the men in the experiment, who, after receiving a relatively low offer, countered with a much higher one, and got something in the middle. He said the women were notably "much less assertive" and that this is because "they anticipate a backlash" from the interviewer. They're trying to manage society's expectations for their behavior, he said. We all know what he's talking about: that idea that you have to be nice at all times and if you're not, you'll suffer for it. Sadly, other experiments have borne this out. Both male and female interviewers do view women with distaste when they negotiate aggressively. When men do so, neither sex bats an eyelid (read Ask For It to find out more).

(I should say here that I approached Morris after the talk and he doesn't seem to agree with me that part of the issue for women when negotiating for ourselves is that many women just don't think we deserve things, period. Maybe it would take a different experiment to prove that theory.)

But women aren't hampered by some innate inability to negotiate. Morris and Amanatullah found that when women are charged with negotiating on behalf of someone else, there's no difference in what they manage to get. Men and women, in other words, when negotiating for another person, aim high and get the same amount. What stymies women is juggling their sense of self and society's view of them with securing more money for themselves. These elements are at odds with one another. Morris went on to talk about women's sense of identity, and how that plays out in the workplace. I'll quote him: "People whose 'woman' identity was well integrated...they were more likely to negotiate better and be warm." Basically, it all comes down to your company culture, which, as we know, tends to default to 'male'. Morris says if you're a woman who feels comfortable in your corporate setting, you're more likely to be yourself, and thus do a better job of negotiating for yourself, than if you're having to put on a mask every day to go to work. 

"Shape an organizational culture so your employees don't feel they have to check their identity at the door," said Morris. "They can then negotiate better. Life is more comfortable when you have an integrated identity." 

Quite.

"I'm too crazed" (or managing your time)

October 25, 2013

Last month I tweeted this Harvard Business Review blog post, Please Stop Complaining About How Busy You Are. It was a fun read and rang true for me - a lot of what the author writes about in the piece is what we all hear coming out of our own mouths and those of friends and colleagues. I thought about it again earlier this week when I was at the Work Life Congress 2013, put on by Working Mother Media in midtown Manhattan.

The first speaker was Cali Williams Yost - maybe some of you know her. She's a big name in the work/life balance arena, although she hates using that phrase. She's pioneered the phrase work/life fit. Which brings me back to over-busyness. During her talk, Yost pointed out that today, we live in a 24/7 working world, communicating about work around the clock. So, she argues, there really is no 'work' (which you used to do within certain hours) and then 'life' (after work), like there used to be. There's a combo - work + life. And that means making some adjustments about the way you spend your time, and how you prioritize.

"We are responsible for our careers in ways we were not before," she said (certainly true for me and anyone else doing their own thing). But "now the boundaries [between work and life] are down people have no idea what to do," said Yost, citing examples of people who claim they're so crazed they "can't even walk the dog". She urges us to try to think of all our responsibilities - at work and at home - as one big platter that must be picked at. "We have to re-frame all these to-dos and think of it as a buffet of possibilities." You can't eat every dish on the buffet, but you have to see all those responsibilities as deserving of attention regardless of whether they're home related (dog-walking, dentist-appointment-planning) or work-related (getting that spreadsheet done). She says attacking your to-do list this way isn't hard - it just requires making small tweaks to your everyday thinking and actions. 

Here are a few traits of people she called "naturals" at managing their work and life:

• They keep work and personal together (see above).
• The regularly reflect, and when they see a gap, something they're not doing, they take regular small steps to close it.
• They collaborate, communicate, and coordinate (for instance, to a colleague, "I'd like to take Friday off - can you cover for me? I'll do the same for you another day.") 
• They celebrate success - i.e. they focus on the stuff they do get done, rather than beating themselves up for the things that remain on their list.

Each attendee got a copy of Yost's book Tweak It: Make What Matters to You Happen Every Day. I haven't had time to delve into it yet.

Which probably means I should make it a priority.