What Women do to themselves: Training is not Development

Women are over-educated and under-developed. Yup. We think that going to a training class is the solution to our “development needs”.  Thus, more than 50% of both undergraduate and master’s degrees are now granted to women. But women still aren’t attaining senior leadership positions at the same rate as men.

This is a messy problem. There are lots of social and structural reasons that women aren’t rising to the top. Today, I’m going to focus on one of the things that women do to themselves – we mistake training for development.

The other day I spent a long lunch with a dear friend. She has a new boss. He has asked her to create a personal development plan for herself for the next year. She’s in marketing, so she wanted to know what marketing courses she should take. And (ironically, for someone who teaches marketing), I told her not to take any marketing courses. She already knows more about B2B marketing than anyone at her firm, and already knows more practical B2B stuff than most of her would be instructors. What should she do?

Pick one or two really big, challenging, high risk, high budget projects and actually deliver on them.  The only way to demonstrate that you have developed any skills is by actually delivering results using the skills. The folks at Catalyst call this the “hot jobs” theory.  They see that men take significantly more high profile, high risk, “hot jobs” for projects that are very visible within an organization. Successful completion of these high profile assignments leads to promotion and greater leadership responsibility.

So why are women over-educated and under-developed? Partially because it is easier, less scary and less threatening to take more courses than it is to take on highly visibly, highly risky projects. Research by the Catalyst group also suggests that there is some bias in the selection of potential leaders of “hot jobs” – men tend to get these jobs with lower levels of experience, and generally get these jobs more frequently. Even controlling for desired career path, that is controlling for who wants the job, men still get more hot jobs. So part of the problem is risk aversion among women, but also, part of the problem seems to be a bias in selection processes.  It may also be that while men and women both tend to have mentors equally, men’s mentors tend to be higher in the organization.  This means that men have more senior leaders advocating for them to attain these hot jobs.

There is an old saying that men get promoted for potential and women for accomplishment. The data suggests that there is at least some truth to this. My message for women is STOP looking for more training opportunities, and START looking for more stretch jobs, where you can demonstrate your abilities through accomplishment. Here are some tips from the Levo League, to help you land a hot job.

Why Can’t a Woman be More Like a Man?

There is a leadership gap. Women don’t hold as many leadership positions as men. According to Alice Eagly, only 2% of Fortune 500 CEO positions are held by women.There is no clear cause (although there are a whole lot of possible causes). The barriers to women in leadership are cultural, organizational and individual. We hold beliefs about the appropriate behaviour of men and women that limit women. We hold beliefs about ourselves. Organizations develop structures and systems that reward men and limit women. And yes, women make choices that create their own limitations.

Many of the cultural barriers to women’s leadership are derived from implicit beliefs about the appropriateness of certain behaviours that are critical to leadership. For example, powerful women are believed to be unsuited for leadership when they talk more than average, whereas powerful men are believed to be more competent and more suited for leadership. When women get angry in the workplace they are judged as out of control and incompetent, whereas angry men are judged as more competent. Keep in mind that we are not aware of these judgments. In fact if you asked explicitly these same observers would tell you that “of course women make good leaders”. The judgment happens unconsciously.

The comments I received on these more detailed posts were interesting. They highlight the conundrum we face as leaders – do we accept social norms and change our behaviour to more appropriate “female” behaviour, or do we try to enlighten or change the way that culture and organizations see women?

This choice has very real consequences for many women. If we accept social norms, we may achieve some organizational success and acquire lower level leadership positions.  However, it is unlikely that we will break through to more senior leadership positions, as they call for more traditional male behaviour, which women are judged as inappropriate and out of control.

If we choose to behave in a more masculine way, more talkative, engaged and action oriented we can, perhaps, be at the vanguard of changing the way both men and women think about what is “appropriate” behaviour by each of the stereotypes. This choice means that we’re investing in long-term gain for all women.  It likely means that attainment of even moderate leadership roles might be beyond the reach of this less traditional female.

Many women used to say that you need to behave like a man to achieve leadership roles. In fact, the research suggests that you will be judged incompetent if you behave like a woman, (although people will like you), and judged angry, incompetent and unsuited for leadership if you behave like a man. So even if we could “behave like a man”, as Henry Higgins suggested in My Fair Lady, the result is not likely the acquisition of a leadership position.

So what’s a girl to do? Pick the pragmatic “behave like a girl” option, achieve moderate success and enjoy being liked? Or pick the more idealistic option to try to change how people see these stereotypes, fight through the challenges, take the risk that you might accomplish more, or you might be relegated to the category of “loose cannon”.  That answer is personal to each individual.  Maybe the question should be “Why Should a Woman be More Like a Man?”

#Leadership: Emotions, Anger and Gender

Men can get angry at work, but women can’t. Really. A recent study from Victoria Brescoll and Eric Luis Uhlmann supports this fact.

Adult men and women were shown videotapes of both men and women who were being interviewed for a job. In the interviews they described a situation in which they lost a major client to a colleague. The interviewee was either sad or angry as a result of this situation.

Angry men were assigned more status, salary and competence than sad men by both men and women observing the interviews. The angry men were also assigned more status, salary and competence than the angry women.

Respondents were asked whether the anger was due to the person (“she/he became angry because of his/her personality” or “she/he is an angry person”) or if it was due to the situation (“she/he became angry because of the situation” or “her/his colleague’s behaviour caused her/his anger”).  Participants were more likely to believe that women’s anger was due to her personality, while men’s anger was due to the situation.Thus, women were incompetent and out of control when angry, while men were competent and justified in their anger.

So does it matter what occupational rank the woman holds? Rank (e.g. CEO as compared to trainee) did not change participants assessment that angry women were less competent, deserved a lower salary or had lower status.  If anything, higher ranking women who expressed anger were judged more harshly in terms of competence.

If women provided a reason for her anger, she received  higher status, was attributed a higher salary, but it did not “influence perceptions of her competence” as compared to a women who did not provide a reason for her anger. She was still perceived as being less competent than an angry man.

Interestingly, if a man provided a reason for his anger, his attributed status and salary were LOWER than a man who did not provide a reason for his anger. In other words, we don’t expect men to explain or justify their anger.

The authors suggest that these results fit with the theory of “emotional display rules”. In other words, there are certain emotions that men are allowed to display, and certain emotions that women are allowed to display. If these rules are violated, both men and women seem to be judged harshly. Men are not allowed to be sad, or to apologize.  Women are not allowed to be angry.

As sad as this makes me, this is what it is. It’s way beyond my pay grade to try to change eons of history. It means that, whether I like it or not, this is the world in which I live. While I want to bemoan the unfairness of it all, to quote my dad, “life is not fair”.

Source:

Brescoll, Victoria L., and Eric Luis Uhlmann. “Can an Angry Woman Get Ahead? Status Conferral, Gender, and Expression of Emotion in the Workplace.” Psychological Science (Wiley-Blackwell) 19, no. 3 (March 2008): 268–275.

Institutional Housekeeping or Leadership

At long last, I thought, the City of London, Ontario is finally getting caught up with the times.  They finally promoted a woman to the rank of police inspector. And then I read the article a little more closely.

Yes, she is now an inspector.  They created a new position for her. And guess what. She is now responsible for media, paperwork and diversity programs.  “Historically the pervue of the chief and his deputies”.  I translated that as the institutional housekeeping that the boys didn’t want to be bothered with. This new inspector didn’t get any of the work that “really counts”, i.e. the stuff that gets noticed, which would position her for senior leadership in the police force.  She gets to clean up after the boys.

So yet again, it appears like women are making strides, but we still get stuck doing the institutional housework.  The unglamorous stuff that keeps the organization going, but doesn’t get recognized as valuable. In universities, women get promoted on average two years after men do.  Why? Women do more service on committees and spend more time running the organization than men do.  Research is what determines whether someone gets promoted at a university.  Since the women are busy running the place, they don’t get published as much, and therefore tend to get promoted later.

According to my friend the Accountant, women run local Roman Catholic parishes, while the priests take the “leadership roles”. 

Even in corporate life there are examples of this behaviour.  My favourite fact is that female CEOs are over-represented in companies that are in dire financial situations.  This is called the Glass Cliff.  It’s almost as if the board says, “It can’t get any worse, so let’s see if she can pull this one out of the flames”.

In family owned businesses more than 50% of the women who work in the business that their husband owns are unpaid.  Even when they are paid, they tend to do clerical and accounting tasks, and have little input into the decision-making process.

It’s clear that women have made progress in the past 45 years. But let’s not kid ourselves. We’re often promoted into positions that are dead ends, that are the organizational version of housekeeping.