This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - 081 / Glass Half-Broken with Colleen Ammerman

Episode Date: February 16, 2022

Has the glass ceiling been shattered? Well, with only 8% women CEOs in the Fortune 500, approximately 25% women holding the 5 most critical C-suite positions in the thousand largest corporations, and zero women presidents in our nation's 245 year old history…I’d say there’s cracks, but no shattering quite yet. In today’s episode of “This Is Woman’s Work”, Colleen Ammerman - Director of the Harvard Business School Gender Initiative, a researcher with Life and Leadership After HBS, a study of the post MBA alumni that examines how race, gender and other factors shape their life and career experiences - talks about glass ceilings. She’s the co-author of Glass Half-Broken:Shattering the Barriers That Still Hold Women Back at Work, where the pervasive organizational obstacles and managerial actions that create gender imbalances are identified, and solutions and strategies are provided so companies can BECOME glass shattering organizations. There is still much progress to be made and while we’re working on shattering all the glass, I invite you to build your confidence. Don’t let yourself be surrounded by people who diminish, devalue or drain your energy. Confidence may be the most important resource you have. This Is Woman’s Work. To learn more about Colleen you can find her on LinkedIn or Twitter @colleenammerman, or get added to her mailing list by visiting: www.hbs.edu/gender To learn more about what we are up to outside of this podcast, visit us at NicoleKalil.com

Coming up on this episode of This Is Woman's Work. What companies really need to do is think about how can we offer these kinds of accommodations, but set up cultures that don't penalize people for taking them and don't kind of feed into this narrative of women are not cut out for leadership because of parenting. I am Nicole Kalil, and on this episode of This is Woman's Work, we're going to talk about glass ceilings. More specifically, the current state of this invisible yet seemingly unbreachable barrier that prevents women and minorities from rising to the top rungs of the corporate ladder, regardless of their qualifications, experience, or achievements. There has certainly been progress, and we have come a long way, but I'd argue there's still a lot of work to do. Does the glass ceiling still exist? Well, I guess that's for you to decide for yourself, but I believe it does, as I've experienced having my face smacked right up

against it. Have you ever seen someone walk straight into a sliding glass door? Yeah, that's pretty much what it felt like. Has the glass ceiling been shattered? Again, your choice what you believe, but with only 8% women CEOs in the Fortune 500, approximately 25% women holding the five most critical C-suite positions in the thousand largest corporations, and 0% women presidents in our nation's 245-year-old history, I'd say there's cracks, but no shattering quite yet. Maybe the most accurate description is what our guest today titled her book, The Glass is Half Broken. Colleen Ammerman is the director of the Harvard Business School Gender Initiative, a researcher with life and leadership after HBS, a study of

the post-MBA pass of alumni that examines how race, gender, and other factors shape their life and career experiences, as well as being the co-author of Last Half Broken, Shattering the Barriers That Still Hold Women Back at Work, where the pervasive organizational obstacles and managerial actions that create gender imbalances are identified. Things like limited development opportunities, lack of role models, bias in hiring, compensation, and promotion. And my favorite part of the book is that solutions and strategies are provided on how companies can become glass shattering organizations.

And lastly, she was recommended to me by Adam Grant. So I'm extra excited for our conversation today. Colleen, thank you so much for joining me for this very important topic. Thank you, Nicole. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to talk. Yep, me too. Okay. So why do you believe that the glass ceiling is only half broken? Well, I think, you know, you just have to look around, right?

You cited some of the statistics in the intro, right? In terms of very small proportion of, for instance, women CEOs in the Fortune 500. And so kind of any index you look at, you see the underrepresentation of women. And of course, you know, as I'm sure, you know, people listening are aware, even those gains that have been made and kind of the representation of women we do see, it's really disproportionately accruing to white women. So if you think about women of color CEOs in the Fortune 500, you know, it's an even dramatically smaller percentage. And it's really something that's true kind of across every industry or sector. We really have not gotten past about 20% of women in leadership, kind of, again, around any index or

any industry, etc. And so, you know, I think, you know, to look around and see that and then juxtapose that with the knowledge that, you know, women, in fact, have been earning the majority of undergraduate degrees in the U.S. since about the 80s. You know, when women are surveyed and asked about kind of ambitions and aspirations to leadership, they don't tend to espouse lower ambition than men. You know, so women are highly educated, you know, and they've been going into professional careers, the kinds of careers that should lead to positions of leadership really across business and society like law, medicine, you know, professional service

firms, right, the kind of high status, high paying careers that, you know, are really are where leaders in our society emerge. They've been going into those professions, again, you know, really in equal rates to men for, you know, 2025 years. So you were still not seeing the outcome at the top of the pyramid. So I think that just, you know, if you kind of look at the math, right, something isn't right, there clearly are some barriers, if women are kind of raising their hands, so to speak, in terms of educational attainment and career pursuit and ambition, and yet not, you know, achieving parity with men, clearly there's still something wrong. Yeah. And I, I remember, I don't know if it was in your book or I read it somewhere else, but the idea that women are entering the workforce with the same level of ambition or wanting to be in leadership at the same rate as their male counterparts,

but then something sort of happens. A, is that what you're seeing too? And B, what's happening? This is a great question. Yes. I mean, I think there's lots of different studies that have kind of come out with a version of the finding of, look, there really aren't these differences in terms of ambition and aspiration and desiring to be in leadership, you know, in generally or in your organization, right? Asking people about kind of how high they want to go in their organization is a common, you know, thing that surveys, you know, in generally or in your organization, right? Asking people about kind of how high they want to go in their organization is a common, you know, thing that surveys, you know, that people conduct studying different workplace phenomena ask about, you know, I just have actually been talking with some colleagues about an article that we're there, we're putting together that

looks at data from a global consulting firm and ask this question, you know, and doesn't see that, you know, men and women at the junior level say anything different about their ambitions to kind of rise within that organization. So what happens is that as men and women move through their careers, they actually start to face really different contexts. They actually aren't having the same experience in the same workplace. And I think that's one thing that's really important for people to understand, because I think, you know, when you kind of look back at the past, you know, 50 to 100 years and you see, well, we have made a lot of progress. Right. A lot of gender discrimination used to be perfectly legal. Right. It was, you know, normal to have classified ads for jobs that were jobs for women and jobs for men. Literally, that's what you'd open up the newspaper and find. Right. It was legal to, you know, fire women after they got married or became parents, like all

kinds of stuff we don't do anymore. If we think that that's all that needed to happen and, you know, why haven't we achieved parity, right? It can sort of start to seem like, well, what's going on? We've kind of addressed all of these barriers. You know, is there something wrong with women that they're not, you know, that they're not attaining leadership and they're not, they're falling behind male peers. But actually, even though we have addressed a lot of those kind of formal barriers, you know,

and change laws and policies, what happens today is more subtle, but women in fact aren't, still aren't facing the same set of conditions that their male peers are. And we really saw this in our research when we talked to women early in their careers. So in the first part of the book, we talk about a study we conducted with college seniors. We interviewed a group of college seniors, both men and women, as they were about to start their first job. So this was like end of their senior year. They knew, you know, what career field they were going into. And we asked them, you know, among other things about what they anticipated in terms of, you know, potential gender bias or gender discrimination. And the women all basically said nothing. You know, they sort of looked at us like, why are you asking us this, you know, look around, you know, we're half of the class at, you know, our college, you know, you, you know, are all of

our different like clubs and student activities, women are very well represented leadership there. I mean, they acknowledge, you know, yes, gender discrimination has been a problem, I can look to the leadership ranks of the field I'm going into, you know, law, or I'm joining this consulting firm, or, you know, whatever industry they're going into a variety of fields. And they sort of said, look, you know, it's unfortunate that women had such a hard time in earlier generations. But I think, you know, our generation, 20 years from now, that leadership level, those top ranks of this industry I'm going into is going to look very different as I and my cohort kind of come into the field, right? And they were, you know, excited about it. So unfortunately, what happened is that when we interviewed them again,

about a year later, they started saying something very different. And they did not have that kind of belief that, you know, they were going to have this, you know, smooth, unencumbered advancement up their career ladder. In fact, even after, again, a year, maybe even a little less, you know, in some cases, into that first job, they were experiencing, you know, some subtle gender biases, right, and some ways that they just didn't feel they were on a level playing field. And it surprised them, right? I mean, it was kind of, you know, unnerving. And in fact, you know, some of the men we interviewed also said, you know, said that they observed this, they said, wow, I'm seeing that I kind of am treated a little bit differently in a way that advantages me, like, this does not feel like everyone is on the same footing. And then we

interviewed a subset of those young people, again, about five years later, so even further into their careers, and it had only kind of intensified for women, they were only, you know, able to list more examples of kind of, you know, often subtle, but kind of powerful moments. One that we cite in the book is a woman who got a really, you know, cool position, this kind of, you know, competitive rotational first interviewed her, you know, again, she was at a, you know, a meeting of the cohort and noticed, you know, all the like senior executives that were meeting with them were pretty much all men. And she thought, you know, in, you know, 10 years, that's going to look different, you know, in 20 years, it's going to look very different as, you know, my generation comes into this organization. But then in that second interview, you know, she talked about having a meeting of the cohort with one of the executive sponsors who remembered all of the, all of her male peers names and none of the women's names, right? And so, again, that seems like a small thing, but it starts to kind of chip away and undermine, you know, their, you know,

aspirations and their, you know, belief in how high they can rise in their field of organization. And then it only sort of starts to add up, you know, we can talk about that over time, and then it just more and more adds up. And so it leads, you know, leads to them really not being on the same, the same playing field and having the same kind of set of circumstances as their male peers. Yeah. Someone described it once to me and it resonated completely as death by a thousand paper cuts. It's like small individually, but when you add all those experiences together, you know, to a certain extent, it can be career death or career

leadership death or moving away from an organization. So let's talk about a few of the examples. A couple of them made perfect sense to me and I kind of already had in my head and a couple of them really surprised me. One of them being maternity leave. You know, I've always been very pro family leave and, and it was interesting in the book, how you use this as an example of a structure and a mindset that perpetuates inequities. Talk us through that. Yeah, this is a tough one, right? And we, we of course are not saying companies should not have, you know, maternity and paternity leave, like parental leave is actually very important, right? For, and all kinds of kind of caregiving accommodations and flexibility, which of course, you know, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, we've seen even more how

crucial that is for everyone, parents and really everyone to be able to have their workplace allow them to show up in the other parts of their lives that are so important. So we're certainly not saying we don't need that, we do. But what we do need to change is kind of the stories that we tell around that and some of the norms and ways that organizations approach and view and value people who use these kinds of accommodations, right? So the issue is not people taking time away from work for parenting or anything else. The issue is how employers treat them when they do that. And they don't treat men and women the same, right? So researchers have identified something that they call flexibility stigma, which is what

it sounds like. If you're somebody that takes advantage of those options in a lot of organizations, that does get you branded as less committed, less competent, and you kind of become stigmatized and become a little bit of a second class citizen. And this is totally, you know, divorced from your performance, right? This is not about your output being any different. This is just about kind of beliefs that people often not even consciously, but sometimes consciously have about people who use, you know, again, maternity leave or flex time,

you know, flex their schedule to pick kids up from school, et cetera, right? Kind of activating these beliefs about those people are not as committed to work. They're not as good as their jobs, even if we're not actually taking a look at whether that's true, which most of the time, you know, companies are not. So this is something that's really harmful to women because what it does is really sends the message to women and to men, to everyone in the organization, right, that there is this kind of two-tier system, you know, and that people who have significant caregiving responsibilities, and in our society where women shoulder a disproportionate amount of caregiving, those people get sort of branded as not cut out for leadership. And so it's very kind of pernicious way that we tell the story about women ultimately not being suited for leadership. And, you know, people who have studied kind of highly educated, you know, career oriented women who step away from the workforce or kind of significantly ratchet back their careers,

what they find is it's very much not a story of opting out and them saying, you know, I'd prefer to, you know, be less invested in my career. It's really a story for those women of feeling pushed out and having this experience of once they become parents being viewed very differently, not being valued anymore. I mean, we have a story in the book about someone who told us that as soon as she told her employer that she was pregnant, so she actually hadn't even become a parent yet. As soon as she just said, Hey, I'm expecting, she was basically demoted. She said, you know, I was moved from supervising, you know, multiple people that were reporting to me were moved to my level. I was taken from a team of 30 people to a team of six people. Like it was very clear. I was getting the message that I was

no longer, you know, considered a high performer again, just because I'd kind of shifted into this status. So, you know, what companies really need to do is think about how can we offer these kinds of accommodations, but set up cultures that don't penalize people for taking them and don't kind of feed into this narrative of women are not cut out for leadership because of parenting. So I guess my question is, if we make the flexibility and the parental leave equal to everybody, do you think that lowers the stigma or do you think men then struggle with that? Like, oh, if I, if I use it, I'm less committed or there's going to be a stigma or is it both? Well, it is, it is a little bit of both and that's because we, so to the first

part of the question, yes, we do need to do that because until we kind of do that really on a kind of broad fundamental way, you know, shift into more egalitarian caregiving models and make it normal for men to kind of shoulder, you know, an equal share of the burden, we are still going to perpetuate these, you know, these norms. And what that does mean, unfortunately, for a lot of men today, when they do step up in caregiving, right, that can penalize them at work, right? So they can sort of suffer some of these same effects. You know, we cited in the book, even some lawsuits that men have brought just actually trying to take advantage of leave that was formally available to them. So, right,

in, you know, sort of officially, you know, they were doing what was sanctioned, but yet they experienced these career penalties, or even sometimes we're told, well, you can't take that leave. Like, yes, it's parental leave, but really that's for women. You know, why do you even want to take, you know, take this much time off? But the answer to that is not for men not to do it. The answer really is for more men to do it, right. For everyone to kind of really step up and say, it's, you know, this sort of situation where women really are shouldering a massive amount of caregiving and having that be detrimental to their careers, you know, isn't good for anyone. Right? And we argue in the book, it's actually not good for men either. So it's not, this is not just about helping women. This is about also shifting our

norms so that men also are able to kind of show up fully in different parts of their lives, right? There's lots of research on, you know, men who really feel actually, you know, really quite unhappy in their jobs, you know, because of not being able to be fully present at home, just as women often do, the difference is not in the experience, the difference is in how they manage it, right, because of our gender norms. So men manage it differently than women do because of kind of the expectations that are placed on them, you know, again, by gender norms in our society. But really, the research is very clear that kind of not being able to spend the time with your family and fulfill your caregiving responsibilities is no one that's not good for anyone. Right. So the answer really is for individuals and organizations

and institutions to enable men to do that in a more, you know, a more full-throated way. Yeah. Okay. So that one, I think was an example of one that had me thinking differently than I had prior to reading the book. One that aligned with my experience is that these characteristics associated with leadership are in conflict with characteristics associated with femininity and how, you know, this can really do damage to the opportunities available to women, the assumptions that are made about our abilities, even if our natural tendencies are more masculine in nature. And also that I think a lot of companies are seeing that some of these more feminine characteristics like empathy and collaboration are necessary for their

growth and productivity. How is this playing a part in the gender imbalances that exist? Yeah, this is an important one. I mean, this is the classic, you know, competence versus likability is usually how it's phrased, like this double bind that women get into, which really it's a no-win situation. And it affects women all throughout their career. So even women who do, you know, kind of persist and navigate these barriers and overcome challenges, you know, around gender bias and all other kinds of things and get to very senior levels still face this, right? You know, are still kind of in this double bind of, you know, if I am perceived as really competent and good at my job and show up with these traditional leaderly characteristics like authoritativeness, decisiveness, et cetera, that, you know, we just associate with men and

masculinity culturally. If I do that, you know, I'll probably get a lot done. People will respect me. People probably won't like me very much. And that actually matters a lot. The higher and higher you get in your career, right. It actually can be a real barrier to like breaking through to, you know, the C-suite or a board or kind of those, those top echelons of leadership. On the flip side, if I kind of embrace characteristics that are traditionally associated with women and femininity that people expect me to display, like, you know, orientation toward other people and warmth and empathy, they'll probably really like me, right, and want to be around me, but those characteristics we also oppose to leadership, right, so they will not see me as highly competent, and they will not see me

as a leader, right, so it's a real tightrope that women have to walk, and it does kind of, again, put them in this position of kind of having to navigate that, and, you know, puts them at a real disadvantage compared to male peers who, you know, displaying those leaderly characteristics aligns with what people expect of men, right? So it's kind of seamless. So they're not having to kind of do that, that balancing act. And what we found in our research with senior women, and again, these are women who've been very successful, it was a pretty big, like cognitive burden for them to manage, right? Their kind of image and their self-presentation and how they were being perceived. And I think we don't always realize like how much work women are doing around managing this trade-off over and above like very demanding, you know, jobs, right? And so I think, you know,

we're sort of not realizing how much of a drag that is just on women's kind of bandwidth, right, to have to always be managing that. And you can see how, again, it's one of these things, as you said before, it just kind of, the death by a these things, as you said before, it just kind of the death by a thousand cuts, as you said, like it just kind of adds up, you know, all these, these different challenges and settings that kind of chip away at, at their success. Yeah. It can be a huge energy drain and, you know, we're already working hard enough and balancing life outside of work and all of that. So one of the things I said this earlier that I love and appreciate about your book is it was solution oriented, laid out a lot of the problems, some of which we discussed, but also offered how leaders and companies can become glass shattering

organizations. So I'd love to talk a little bit about some of those. You talked about more effective talent management. Can you give some examples of how companies and leaders could be more conscious about effective talent management, the hiring, developing side of the business? Yes. Right. Which is again, as you're alluding to, like that's a whole set of things, right? Like a whole bunch of practices that happen over kind of the life cycle of an employee, right? How, how they get managed, you know, by the organization and by their direct supervisors. And I mean, one thing I think that's important is just baseline. It is kind of a mindset shift or kind of a paradigm to say, you know, if we don't have kind of systems and

processes in place that are mitigating or preventing systematic disadvantage for, you know, one huge part of our talent pool and our employee base, then we're not effectively leveraging our talent, right? If we're doing things that kind of undervalue women systematically, well, then it's just not good in general for our effectiveness or really truly thinking about it as, you know, part of effectively managing your talent and making sure you're not missing out on, you know, on what women have to offer, right. And their potential contributions, you know, going back to, you know, this phenomenon of women who are like highly educated and really good at their jobs, you know, kind of stepping out of the workforce or, you know,

maybe, you know, staying at a certain level, you know, that's a talent drain, right? That's a leadership drain. So, I mean, that's the first thing I would say just for companies and leaders to really, you know, be thinking about it that way rather than, oh, we need to help women, right? Because it's actually something that you need to do to be effective. And in the book, we do, you know, I won't like start going into every detail here, but we do try to take kind of that life cycle approach of like, okay, going back all the way back to when you're, you know, advertising for a job and trying to tell people about the position

all the way through to retention, you know, kind of in each of these processes, there actually is some good social science about how the bias comes in and what to do about it. So for example, in, you know, going back to that earliest stage in terms of recruiting, the language that you use just in your job postings, right, can potentially skew the pool. So again, you may be missing out on a whole chunk of talent that's qualified and will be interested in this job just because of some of the language that you use, right? And there's some, actually, there's some software out there, there's some tips about kind of simple things to just make sure you're not using terminology that is even subtly, you may not realize it kind of has this masculine typing to it that may send a message to women that, oh, this is not a job for me. Right. So there's things like that. And then again, competitive, decisive, you know, if your

job description says only those things that might not attract. Exactly. Like, right. Exactly. So right. Some of these terms, you know, that call to mind, right. These sort of masculine stereotypes, and it's not to say, maybe not good to have somebody decisive in that role, but unfortunately, you know, you know, using some of those terms may again skew your pool, right, and may not give you access to women who actually have those qualities, right, but are getting this, you know, subtle message from the description that, oh, maybe this is not the job for me. So exactly, Like, you know, just some of the language that you use. And there's even, you know, obviously we go into more of this in the book, but that's, that's, you know, kind of an easy one companies can start off with. Yeah. And, and in that example, decision-making is a key part of the role. There are other aspects of decision-making. So maybe thinking about having that balance in the. Yes, exactly. Right. Making. Yeah, absolutely.

That's exactly right. Thinking about, okay, how can I step back and kind of holistically look at kind of what are the qualities needed in this job? And, you know, how are, you know, what are those objectively, right? What are those objective qualities, right? It's again, decision-making, it might be like, yes, being able to like, you know, make calls, but also, you know, part of that is making, being able to take input, right, from different stakeholders, you know, and I think, you know, the other, so another example, you know, kind of to segue, you know, around this idea of objectivity, right, how can you sort of, as much as you can, like mitigate or strip away subtle biases that produce these skews, you know, another one, of course, when people get into an organization, another kind of inequality that happens sometimes

systematically is through kind of the performance assessment process, right, and how people are evaluated. Because often, those either are kind of a little squishy, right, they're not that well defined, you know, there may be like, you know, there's a review period, you know, we do an annual review every year. But it's pretty subjective in terms of what it is that managers are supposed to be evaluating. And we're even sometimes when there's more formal processes that are set up, again, there's not necessarily attention to how can we make sure that kind of the criteria that we're using, the rubric that we're using is not, again, inadvertently producing, right, kind of this, you know, these disparate outcomes, you know, based again on gender rather than on people's output. So, you know, some colleagues of ours at Stanford did a project with a large tech company

where they kind of audited the results of their performance review process and found that women were kind of disproportionately being described with certain characteristics. And that was associated with, you know, they were not receiving kind of the commensurate rankings, you know, in the process that sort of should be mapping to their performance. So there was kind of this, you know, this disadvantage that was being produced just through the process and kind of the language people were using and how they were doing the evaluating. And so what they did was, you know, they kind of had this audit. The company was able to look at it and say, oh, wow, right. We're kind of not assessing people accurately.

So it's not fair to women. And it's, you know, then it's kind of, you know, keeping them at levels that they should be progressing past faster. It's not good for our pipeline. And so they kind of sat down, the researchers and the company, and kind of co-created a rubric that managers could use, right, to make sure that they were, again, using objective job-related criteria to really evaluate people and kind of taking away, right, some of those kind of squishier moments where people's

often unconscious biases come in, right? And so bringing objectivity is always helpful. And with that, though, what's important is also creating a culture where it's okay to talk about it, right? So part of that process was that everybody was talking about, okay, how do we make sure we're not bringing those biases to bear? How can we kind of collectively invest in this process of being objective and fair, right? And so that's part of it, too. It's kind of having the process and then having the culture that supports people really being bought in and being comfortable talking about these issues. And I would imagine having there be a combination of different things that are being evaluated. So I've experienced and

frankly done some bad performance reviews in the past where basically what I was telling people was my opinion of their work or my opinion of their performance, where there should be some data metrics, you know, there probably is clear job duties. And then there's my subjective opinion. So like having more meat on the bone, so to speak, on the performance review. Is that, am I on the right track with what you're saying? Okay. Yeah, yes, definitely. I think, right, it's making sure that, you know, you as, you know, and certainly as an individual manager, you can, you know, you can do, but ideally, right, a department, a company would invest in is exactly what you're saying, articulating, like, what are those competencies, right? So not this vague notion of, well, they just, you know, seem like a go-getter, right? Or they just,

you know, it seems like they work really hard, or I find them very convincing and dynamic. You know, those are, you know, if it's a role where somebody needs to, right, be very engaging, say, to customers or stakeholders, like, those are things you can actually break down and articulate objectively, right? Rather than this amorphous sense of, do they just seem like a star or not, right? And there's also an important piece of that that goes to development where if you can kind of articulate those competencies and qualities and have concrete conversations with people about them, then they can get the feedback they need to cultivate those, right? It doesn't become just this like sort of vague, some people have the it factor and some

people don't, right? Because in organizations that kind of manage that way, as you can guess, you know, you can probably guess what happens is that the people who are seen as having the it factor just look exactly like people who are already in leadership, right? You know, it's not actually objective. It's just they, you know, Jim reminds me of myself, right? And he just kind of has that. And I'm awesome. So he must be awesome too. Right. And so, you know, actually saying, okay, what is the it factor? Like what are, what makes that up? And then, you know, not only can you evaluate people fairly, but you can have developmental conversations where you can tell people like, you know, here's what I need you to

do. Or right. Here's kind of the three things that, you know, I need to see in you to, for you to get this project opportunity or advance this level. And then people can actually use that to, um, to grow, right? Which at the end of the day, as an employer, you want your people to grow and develop and get better and better. Right. Um, Colleen, thank you so much for your time. I have a bazillion other questions we didn't get to, but, uh, if you're listening, make sure to buy the book. It's glass half broken. You can find it on Amazon or wherever you buy books. And I would add that it is a must read for every CEO or leader of an organization that's out there. And if you want to check out more of the work that Colleen is doing, you can

go to the website, hbs.edu forward slash gender and add yourself to the mailing list. There's lots of information through that. And of course you could find Colleen on LinkedIn or Twitter at Colleen Ammerman, and we'll put that information in show notes. Again, Colleen, thank you so much for your time and for your very important work. Thank you, Nicole. This has been a lot of fun. Okay. In the book, one of the executives interviewed described her feelings about gender equity as we're at the base camp of Mount Everest. And that rang so true for me. There is still so much progress to be made. And while we're working on shattering all the glass, I invite you to build your confidence and don't let yourself be surrounded by people who diminish, devalue, or drain your energy.

This is not the answer to all of our problems, but it is something you have power and choice over. Confidence is the most important resource you have. And we deserve to be at the top because this is woman's work.