How do women get their voices heard?
It’s an age-old argument amongst
women – how do we get our voices heard? Why is it that a man can say exactly the words that have just left a woman’s mouth and immediately a disregarded idea is taken seriously and forms the centre of a lively debate? And then there’s the interrupting! Think back to the scene at the MTV Video Music Awards in 2009 when Kanye West leapt onto the stage and plucked the microphone out of Taylor Swift’s hand. It was a highly public example of a man interrupting a woman while she was trying to speak, and it happens so often that it’s now been given the tag-line manterruption by those who are conscious of the phenomenon.
The Kanye example is extreme but women will describe similar situations in boardrooms and in meetings
around the world. As Soraya Chemaly wrote in her article 10 words every girl should learn: “A woman, speaking clearly and out loud, can say something that no one appears to hear, only to have a man repeat it minutes, maybe seconds later, to accolades and group discussion. Jessica Bennett states in her article How not to be Manterrupted in meetings : “We speak up in a meeting, only to hear a man’s voice chime in louder. We pitch an idea, perhaps too uncertainly – only to have a dude repeat it with authority. We may possess the skill, but he has the right vocal chords – which means we shut up, losing our confidence (or worse, the credit for the work).”
Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant, a Wharton business school professor, wrote recently in the new York Times about what they describe as the perils of “speaking while female”. Some of their findings have been tabled as follows: male senators speak significantly more than their junior colleagues, while female senators do not; male executives who speak more often than their peers are deemed more competent (by 10%), while female executives who speak up are considered less (14% less); and that in the workplace women speak less and are interrupted more. “We’ve both seen it happen again and again,” Sandberg and Grant write. “When a woman speaks in a professional setting, she walks a tightrope. Either she’s barely heard or she’s judged as too aggressive. When a man says virtually the same thing, heads nod in appreciation for his fine idea.”
A good example can be drawn from scientist Ben Barres who started life as Barbara Barres before having transgender surgery. In Ms Chemaly’s article she describes how Ben Barres wrote publicly about his experiences, first as a woman and, later in life, as a male. As a female student at MIT, Barbara Barres was told by a professor after solving a particularly difficult math problem, “Your boyfriend must have solved it for you.” Several years after, as Ben Barres, he gave a well-received scientific speech and he overhead a member of the audience say, “His work is much better than his sister’s.” Most notably, he concluded that one of the major benefits of being male was that he could now “even complete a whole sentence without being interrupted by a man.”
Ms.Chemaly’s article also highlights the following: “ …male doctors invariably interrupt patients when they speak, especially female patients, but patients rarely interrupt doctors in return. Unless the doctor is a woman. When that is the case, she interrupts far less and is herself interrupted more. This is also true of senior managers in the workplace. Male bosses are not frequently talked over or stopped by those working for them, especially if the employees are women; however, female bosses are routinely interrupted by their male subordinates.” In fact, in male-dominated problem solving groups including boards, committees and legislatures, men speak 75% more than women, with negative effects on decisions reached.
Read More»What role should men play in the gender equality dialogue of business?
It’s becoming evident to many men that the achievement of gender equality should not be delegated to women’s networks and women’s groups in isolation. Men hold overwhelming power in the business world – globally they comprise 95% of CEOs and hold between 83 and 85% of director positions. It follows that if there is to be a more balanced representation of the genders in the workplace, many men will need to be actively involved in initiatives to effect the change needed.
But how should they lead these initiatives and best participate in women’s networks?
It might be easier to answer this by explaining what men should not be doing. Any man who shows up to ‘set the women straight’ and to provide all the answers is perpetuating gender imbalance and is actually making the problem worse. There’s a lot that men need to learn about women, and participating in gender balancing endeavours is an opportunity to open their minds and become better managers of both genders, rather than just being good at leading men. As Joanne Lipman wrote in her recent article, Women at Work: A Guide for Men: “Even the most well-intentioned managers can be clueless when dealing with women in the workforce”.
Being active partners in a network doesn’t mean that men need to dominate the conversation. Instead, it would be most useful if men adopted an attitude of learning and striving to understand. What men (and women) need to be aware of before any useful dialogue can take place is that the business world has been set up along masculine lines of behaviour and values. Everything from recruitment to salary structures to evaluations and promotions favour men and masculine behaviour because that’s the premise that underlies all decision-making. So, there are really only two ways that gender balance can be achieved:
Option 1 : Teach the women how to become more like men
Option 2 : Change the corporate culture so that it embraces the skills and talents of both genders and fosters a work environment where both can thrive.
The 20th Century was all about the former solution – ‘fixing’ the women. The thinking was that if women could just be less emotional, more to the point, more assertive, less caring about customer and staff needs and more focused purely on the bottom line, all would be well and women would naturally rise into senior positions. And many did. Women became adept at assessing how the game was played and learned how to modify their natural behaviour to follow the male-invented rules.
The problem was that this made many women very unhappy – they were one person in the office and another person at home. Women are generally not able to compartmentalize different parts of their lives as successfully as men can. Men brag about driving to work and mentally opening ‘the office box’; followed by a trip home when they close the office box and open ‘the home box’. Most women are connected to what is happening in their personal lives while at work – this doesn’t mean that they can’t concentrate on the task at hand, but they’re still able to make the odd phone call to check in, or make plans for children or housekeeping issues in-between attending to deadlines.
If the world hadn’t changed, this male-dominated system could probably keep continuing. Training women to become more like men in the workplace could simply continue as it has done for a few decades now and programmes that help women become more assertive, more confident, more to-the-point and unilaterally decisive would keep flourishing.
But the world has changed – quite dramatically as it turns out.
Read More»Why is ‘being beautiful’ still the dominant measure for women?
A few years ago, there was an upheaval in the media about the new girlfriend of a famous sportsman. The reason for her vilification in the press was simply that she wasn’t good looking enough – because, after all, the sportsman in question was rich and famous and ‘could do so much better’. In fact, she was extremely attractive, but just not traffic-stoppingly beautiful enough to pacify her detractors. Not for a moment did anyone consider her character, her intelligence, her sense of humour, the values the two might share or the foundation of life goals that they might have had in common. It was just based on her appearance – and in the eyes of the media, she didn’t make the grade. A similar standard is almost never applied to men, which is why the array of beautiful wives and girlfriends associated with Donald Trump or Hugh Hefner, for example, are never questioned as to their choice. That’s considered to be how the world works: rich and famous men = beautiful women as the reward.
We’ve completed the first decade of the 21st Century and the feminist movement is accelerating into its 
third wave, and yet it seems that the more things change, the more they stay the same. There has been some progress in the way that women are viewed and view themselves. This shift is based on the reality that women now comprise the greatest talent pool in the world and are largely better educated than men, that they control about 75% of the global spend, and that the wealth in the hands of women is increasing dramatically. But, in other ways, the perception of women has remained static or has even gone backwards.
Perhaps the best way to assess our current situation would be to look at the media, particularly the advertising industry, which is where most of us receive and are shaped by social messages. The media industry remains staggeringly under the control of a single demographic – men – which largely explains why the social changes and education we need for progress are slow to be achieved.
How far have we actually come?
In the 1950’s the media institutionalized sexism – wives were completely controlled and influenced by their husbands. Most references to women revolved around the kitchen and creating a beautiful home, and products designed for women were marketed as being necessary if they wanted to impress these husbands. It was in 1963 that Betty Frieden (The Feminine Mystique) started to urge women to seek new roles and responsibilities. She encouraged women to find their own personal and professional identities, rather than being defined by the outside, male-dominated society. It started the second wave of feminism, and certainly great gains have been made, but still the tyranny of the media is holding women hostage. While the image of the Stepford Wife is now laughable to many and the over-riding message to women is to find their own identity, there persists an even greater focus on being beautiful at the same time. Looking great and being desirable to men is still portrayed as your fast-forward to a happy and successful life.
Women’s Day Celebration
The 9th August is designated ‘Women’s Day’ in South Africa. Even more significantly, for several years now, the entire month of August has been deemed ‘Women’s Month’. There’s a powerful reason why the holiday came about. It commemorates the march that took place in 1956 when about 20 000 women took to the streets of Pretoria to protest the special identification documents (the ‘pass’) that all black South Africans were forced to carry. It was an astounding demonstration of the power of women to stand-up against injustice. The group of women comprised all race groups – they were mothers, wives, sisters and daughters – joined in a show of peaceful protest, of female solidarity and inner fortitude against the tyranny of apartheid. It was inspiring and something to which we have been paying homage since 1994. As the women sang on that day: ‘Now you have touched the women, you have struck a rock’.
Where are we today?
The good news is that South Africa has one of the best constitutions in the world, and the ruling party seems serious about creating equality of the genders. As a result, according to the Global Gender Gap, we rank 7th in the world with respect to women’s representation in the public sector, which is not a bad achievement. This is where the good news ends. When it comes to education, we rank at 87th position; with regard to health and survival, we drop to 103rd place.
Over and above this comes the really bad news, which is part of the reason that an entire month has been introduced to put as much emphasis as possible on considering and addressing the plight of women. South Africa has almost the worst rape statistics in the world. Here is the chilling breakdown.
- An estimated 500,000 rape cases take place in the country every year.
- In 2000, the United Nations Office on Crimes and Drugs ranked South Africa first for rapes per capita. Of the 4 000 women questioned in Johannesburg, 1 in 3 had been raped.
- There are conflicting stats as to whether a woman is raped every 26 or 36 seconds, but either way it’s an appalling situation.
- More than 25% of a sample of 1,738 South African men from the Kwa-Zulu Natal and Eastern Cape Provinces admitted to raping someone when anonymously questioned; of these, nearly half said they had raped more than one person, according to a non-peer reviewed policy brief issued by the Medical Research Council (MRC).
- Nearly three out of four men who admitted rape stated they had first forced a woman or girl into sex before the age of 20, and nearly one in ten admitted to doing so before the age of 10.
- It is estimated that over 50% of South African women will be raped in their lifetime and that only 1 in 9 rapes are reported.
- It is also estimated that 14% of perpetrators of rape are convicted in South Africa.
- In 1997, violence against women was added as one of the priority crimes under the National Crime Prevention Strategy; nevertheless, the rates of reported rape, sexual abuse of children and domestic violence continue to rise.
Outrage over the panel of men at the Global Summit of Women!
The picture to the right seems relatively benign doesn’t it? But it has drawn a storm of outrage from women across the globe, 
being re-tweeted endlessly with angry captions such as: “A picture speaks a thousand words”, and “mansplaining”. To put it in context, as can be seen by the background posters, the photograph was taken at this year’s Global Summit of Women. Thus, the underlying sentiment is that men have no place in discussing women’s issues; that their mere presence elicits indignation. I couldn’t disagree more strongly, so let me explain why.
To start with, the horrified tweets brought to mind an analogy of my own distress some 20 years ago on a different but somehow related matter. My company was involved in conducting an in-depth strategic plan and, as one of the executives, my task was to do scenario planning of the political future of the country – to look at the best, worst and most likely case scenarios for the next 5 to 10 years. Now I am a South African, and this was during the late 80’s, so we were living through a fascinating time of dramatic possibilities, but also through a period of enormous uncertainty. Clarity for a 5 to 10 year period was something only to be dreamt of.
Nevertheless, I consulted the most prominent political expert I could find; someone who was as objective as he could be under the circumstances. There was only one certainty he could offer, and that was that change in the country would not come through 
the opposition party. His best-case scenario was that the then President would retire through ill health, that FW de Klerk would come to power and that he, along with the ruling Nationalist Party, would willingly hand over power to the majority of South Africans (as opposed to the white minority) led by Nelson Mandela. This was not what I wanted to hear. As a staunch opponent of apartheid and as a then political activist I wanted to hear only that the opposition party would somehow sweep into power (something they’d failed to do for 48 years) and would bring an end to a loathed system. I hated the thought that the ruling party might be given any credit for bringing about change. I was even prepared to accept the worst case scenario that the country would collapse into a civil war and that change would come about that way, rather than to accept that those in power should be allowed any part in effecting a transformation. Why should they be given any glory, I argued? – they were the ones who’d put the system in place and had derived the benefits.
Save the Planet – put more women in charge!
“The day has finally come – a critical landmark in the saga of global climate change has just occurred, and hardly anyone has noticed. The Carteret Islanders of Papua New Guinea have become the world’s first entire community to be displaced by climate change. They’re the first official refugees of global warming and they’re packing up their lives to move out of the way of ever-rising waters that threaten to overtake their homes and crops. The island they call home will be completely underwater by 2015.” So writes Brian Merchant in response to the story that first broke a few years ago, suggesting that these islanders could be the first who’d be forced out of their homes.
Ironically, even though the evacuation has taken place, the story passed with barely a murmur in the press. While only about 
2,000 people have been affected, the loss of their homes and way of life is still a tragic occurrence. “And this is certain to be merely the first such community to be forced into such action—with sea levels continuing their steady rise, and a distinct lack of meaningful action from governments of rich, polluting nations, more helpless communities are sure to be displaced.”
How does climate change link in with gender balance?
An overview of any social or business approach in the world today can be defined by the 4 Ps – People, Planet, Profits and Purpose (purpose is a newly added ‘P’ – typical of a 21st century change of approach). 
Throughout the world, if we look at the main thrust of business to-date, it is clear that profits to shareholders have overwhelmingly taken preference over the other 3 Ps. There’s much lip-service on every company website about community service initiatives, but there is also enough evidence to show that many corporations put aside their scruples to deliver these profits. As Plan B writes: “We read about short cuts that lead to oil spills, overworked and overtired employees that cost societies trillions of dollars in fatigue related accidents, cheap toys that cause sickness in children, poorly built schools that collapse, greed in the executive suites – on and on and on.”
Traditionally, corporations have always been headed by men – even in 2014, 95% of CEOs are male, along with 85% of directors. The strong emphasis on profits before people and the planet is a cornerstone of the alpha-male construct that has driven business. Consequently, corporate greed and the lack of concern for the environment in the pursuit of profits have led to the present parlous state of our planet. When a leading country like the US will not ratify the Kyoko Protocol (Canada did but then withdrew) for fear of the damage it might do to the country’s economy, we can see that priorities are completely out of line.
Read More»