Andrea S. Kramer and Alton B. Harris* say employers need to do a lot more than provide diversity training to get more women leaders into the workplace.
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Women frequently say to us, “The women I work with are just plain nasty,” or “The senior women act like queen bees; they only care about protecting their positions.”
But there’s plenty of evidence that shows the “queen bee” syndrome is a myth.
When we conducted research for our new book, It’s Not You, It’s the Workplace: Women’s Conflict at Work and the Bias That Built It , we discovered that women’s often fraught relationships with the women they work with have nothing to do with women being predisposed to be antagonistic to or competitive with other women.
To the contrary, we became convinced that women often find it difficult to achieve satisfying, positive same-gender workplace relationships because of the nature of those workplaces.
The gendered nature of workplaces
By and large, workplaces are highly gendered, by which we mean that they are dominated by men and steeped in masculine norms, values, and expectations.
In such workplaces, women have fewer career advancement opportunities than men.
As a result, women frequently see career advancement as a zero-sum contest with other women to gain access to limited resources, opportunities, and the visibility needed to get ahead.
They often feel a need to identify with the men leading their organisations and to distance themselves from other women.
As a result, they can come to believe they must adopt a masculine management style that can be highly offputting to other women.
But if gendered workplaces are a principal cause of women’s same-gender interpersonal difficulties, how do we “de-gender” these workplaces?
In our view, we can only do this by having a critical mass of senior women leaders who can influence organisational policies and procedures.
Of course, this has been the goal of the ubiquitous diversity and inclusion efforts undertaken by business and professional organisations over the past 30 years — often with little or no effect.
Today, many employers pay lip-service to diversity but don’t go very far in taking meaningful actions.
The problem is that gendered workplaces are gendered cultures, and cultures don’t change just because of a new policy or a series of diversity workshops.
Cultures change when conditions change, and the gendered perceptions of our workplaces are unlikely to change until more women share the power to shape and direct these workplaces.
Of course, this means we have a chicken-or-egg dilemma.
To de-gender our workplaces, we need more women in senior leadership.
To get more women into senior leadership, we need to de-gender the workplace.
Here are some ideas on how we can move forward.
- Education
A significant impediment to increasing gender diversity is that many of the men leading our major organisations believe their organisations are true meritocracies.
But this is a false and dangerous belief.
Until everyone acknowledges the hurtful reality of gender bias and the structural impediments to women’s career advancement, we’re not going to move forward.
- Interrupting bias
Gender bias is not going to be “eliminated”.
It’s like the Müller-Lyer optical illusion of two equal parallel lines looking unequal because one has arrows pointing out and the other has arrows pointing in.
It doesn’t matter that we know the lines are equal in length; we still don’t “see” them as equal.
Gender bias works in the same way.
It doesn’t matter that we consciously believe women are just as competent, ambitious, and competitive as men.
Our implicit stereotypes don’t let us “see” them as equal.
That’s why we need to prevent stereotypes from having a discriminatory effect on assignments, training, evaluations, compensation, and promotion.
We can do this by employing (and designing) systems that take as much subjectivity out of these processes as possible.
- Flexibility
Women are not going to move up as fast (or as far) as men if their workplaces continue to operate as though work and home were separate, nonintersecting life spheres.
Men may be able to thrive in such workplaces, but women — who still bear most of the burden when it comes to domestic responsibilities — cannot.
Workplaces need to be flexible and open to new arrangements, which allow both men and women to balance their home demands with their work responsibilities.
- Celebrating the small wins
We won’t get a critical mass of women in leadership positions overnight.
That’s why we need to approach diversity like we approach programs for carbon dioxide emissions.
Employers need to set a long-term goal and commit to taking incremental (but consistent) steps to get there.
- Stop seeing it as a zero-sum game
Diversity isn’t a zero-sum game that requires men to lose for women to gain.
True diversity improves creativity, productivity, and profitability for everyone.
Once men become convinced this is true, they are typically prepared to participate in the effort to make diverse leadership a reality.
It’s only fair that we expect men to take responsibility.
After all, they have a lot to gain when we see more women in leadership positions.
* Andrea S. Kramer and Alton B. Harris are the authors of It’s Not You, It’s the Workplace: Women’s Conflict at Work and the Bias That Built It (Nicholas Brealey/Hachette 2019).
This article first appeared at www.fastcompany.com.
