This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - 106 / What Men And Women Need To Know About Working Together with Joanne Lipman

Episode Date: September 21, 2022

I firmly believe that gender expectations damage everyone, and that in order for ALL of us to achieve equity, it’s going to require not just women to fight for what’s right, but everyone. But men often share that they feel like they’re walking on eggshells and are afraid to say and do the wrong things. While I don’t feel sorry for them, I do have empathy. And I’m not talking about the a-holes here, but the men who want to be part of the solution. Which is why I invited Joanne Lipman on the show. Joanne is the author of the national bestseller, That’s What She Said: What Men and Women Need to Know About Working Together, former editor-in-chief at USA Today and Conde Nast, and referral from Adam Grant (who I’m professionally obsessed with). She drops some serious (and well researched) knowledge! We’ll all get where we want to go faster, if we work together. Good men can’t stay silent and a little extra empathy across the board wouldn’t hurt anyone. “Woman’s Work” will be what WE make it, so let's work together to make it something amazing. P.S. This is a great listen for anyone of any gender, especially those who are leading others. To follow Joanne you can visit her website at www.joannelipman.com or on IG @joannelipman. And you can buy her book That’s What She Said on Amazon. Click here to pre-order Validation Is For Parking, which will be released on October 4th! To learn more about what we are up to outside of this podcast, visit us at NicoleKalil.com

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That's 50% off your first month at K-I-W-I-C-O.com promo code WW30. I am Nicole Kalil and you're listening to the This Is Woman's Work podcast, where together we're redefining what it looks like, feels like, what it is to be doing woman's work. I spend a great majority of my time speaking to and coaching women, but I don't do my work of advocating for women at the expense of men. I firmly believe that gender expectations and stereotypes damage everyone, and that in order for all of us to achieve equity and economic parity, it will require not just women fighting for these rights, but men too. I'll also share that in the work I do with large corporations,

men will often tell me that they want to be an ally, but they feel like they're walking on eggshells, afraid to say and do the wrong things. You might be thinking, good, they should be uncomfortable. And for the sexually harassing, discriminating, and condescending a-holes that seem to exist in all companies, I might agree with you. But for the men who want to be part of the solution, want to be allies, want to play their part, this is a problem. Research shows that all the diversity training we've been doing in the last few decades doesn't work. So what will? Here to share her vast knowledge on this complex topic is Joanne Littman, who served as editor-in-chief of USA Today Network, Condé Nast Portfolio, and the Wall Street Journal's Weekend Journal. weekend journal. She's an on-air CNBC contributor, Yale University journalism lecturer,

and author of the best-selling book, That's What She Said, What Men and Women Need to Know About Working Together. I could fill this entire podcast with her impressive accomplishments, but I'll add that she was introduced to me by Adam Grant, and I'll forever be grateful to him for that. Joanne, thank you so much for being here today. Thanks, Nicole. Great to be here. Awesome. Okay. So I read your book and I'm not sure I've ever highlighted or dog-eared more, but I have so many, so many questions. But I want to start by asking, why do men and women need to work together? Why can't women just do this on their own? Right. Well, this is such a great question and it's why I wrote the book. And that's what she

said. Actually, the impetus to write the book was actually for men. And the reason I wrote the book is because women, we talk with one another all the time about the issues that we face at work, about being overlooked, ignored, not promoted, not given stretch opportunities, all of those issues. But what we haven't been doing is talking to men about them. And when women talk to each other, it's a wonderful conversation that makes you feel good and makes you feel like you're not alone. But at the end of the day, it's half a conversation and it can only get us to half of a

solution. We really need men to join us. And there are a lot of men out there who I think are willing, able, and even eager to join us in eliminating gender inequality. But at the same time, they don't necessarily have the tools. They don't have the intuitive understanding. They know some of the facts, which I think we all know, and I'm sure all of your listeners know, that when you have diverse work groups, they are so much more impactful in every measure, right? If you look at share price, profitability, employee retention, customer service, every element increases when you have women as part of your leadership teams and as part of your workforce. So a lot of people sort of hear that and know it sort of

intellectually, but to really understand how women are, what we deal with in the workplace, we really need men and women together in this conversation. Couldn't agree more. And you say this in the book, and it jives with my experience as well, this idea that it's not just the right thing to do. It's also a good, strong business solution. And that is an important part of the messaging. I do want to ask you, why aren't the diversity, equity, inclusion trainings working? You know, I've participated in myself. You say men need to hear from women.

Why aren't these working? Yeah, so historically, and there was research done by a Harvard professor on 30 years worth of diversity training. And he found that in terms of women, this diversity training actually made things worse. In other words, with no diversity training at all, we would have had more gains for women than having the diversity training. And there were a number of reasons for that. But one of them was simply that particularly in its early stages, diversity training, men came out of diversity training feeling like they were

getting blamed, right? It just made them resentful. That was one reason. And another reason was a lot of people figure, oh, I went through diversity training, problem solved, all done, and then felt that they actually didn't need to do anything because they had been quote unquote trained. So what's happened in recent years, and by the way, I talked to this veteran diversity training and he said, look, you know, the fault is, is with us in previous years. He said, look, when we started this, we used to basically bang white guys over the head with a two by four and tell them it's your fault. So obviously that was, that was causing resentment, et cetera. In more

recent years, now we have moved on to unconscious bias training, and we can talk more about unconscious bias. And that is actually intended to eliminate that sort of finger wagging kind of aspect of diversity training. And theoretically, it should work better. I think there's a variety of reasons why there has been a backlash against it in some quarters. But also, I think there's a misunderstanding of the unconscious bias training, a deliberate mischaracterization on, of, uh, on, on the part of particularly some men of unconscious bias training where they're still saying, oh, you're all blaming me. Um, which is not the point of the, of the training. Uh, but I will say in the book, um, one of the things I did

is I went out, I spent time at Facebook in Silicon Valley and I actually attended an unconscious bias training session there. So Facebook is overwhelmingly male. It is overwhelmingly male, white, and it is overwhelmingly engineers. The unconscious bias training was optional. When I went to this session, it was women, it was people of color, and it was people who were not engineers. So the people who it was really intended for were just not showing up. Okay. So that leads very nicely into what's the difference with the unconscious bias training

versus what used to be DE&I and how much does it matter that we say we all have unconscious bias so people don't feel blamed or ashamed? Yeah. So I think that when you have an understanding of unconscious bias of what it actually is, you understand that we do all have these biases, men, women, black, white, no matter your ethnicity. And we have unconscious biases against basically people who are othered. So for example, obviously women suffer from unconscious bias, but also people of color, people who are heavy, people who, the older people, right? We sort of have these unconscious biases that are sort of inborn

that you can't do anything about, but you can recognize them. So there are steps that you can take to counter it, to acknowledge it, recognize it, and acknowledge it. One of the most compelling pieces of research, there were a couple of studies I found that show that the unconscious bias actually doesn't start in the workplace. It really starts at home, right? So there's these studies that show that, for example, mothers of infants overestimate the crawling ability of their baby sons, but they underestimate the crawling ability of their baby daughters. And then when these kids hit two years old, Google has actually done the research on this. Google found that parents who type into Google, is my child a genius? About a two-year-old are more than twice as likely to type that in about a boy, two-year-old, as a girl, two-year-old.

And then I'll give you two more quickies as they age up. At six years old, there was research doneold. And then I'll give you two more quickies as they age up. At six years old, there was research done where students took a math test, one set of tests graded by their teachers, one set graded anonymously. Graded anonymously in math, the girls outscored the boys. Graded by their teachers who knew them, same test, the boys suddenly outscored the girls. And what the researchers found is the teachers were just making allowances for the boys that they were not making for the girls. And then by the time they get to college, the research has shown us that a female student needs to have an A average in order to be seen as the equal to a male student of a B average. So these biases are built in and doubled down on exponentially throughout childhood. So by the time you reach the workforce, it's already baked in to all of us, which is one of the reasons why right from the start,

women are sort of behind the eight ball in this situation. And, but that's why it's so important for us to recognize that we all have these hidden biases. I am interrupting my own podcast to share the news that my book validation is for parking is available for pre order on Amazon. It'll be out on October 4th, but you can pre-order your hardcover paperback or Kindle copy today by going to Amazon. And while you're there, why not order a copy for your sister, best friend, or favorite coworker? Please and thank you.

One of the chapters in your book that was just painfully relevant to me is the chapter she's pretty sure you don't respect her. And I feel like some of these biases that you're saying are happening at a very young age and in the home are playing out in this way in a lot of our work environments. So basically what you found or share in the book is that women get less respect, but more blame in the workforce. So you shared an example of a nurse in your book. Would you mind sharing that and maybe some other things that reinforce this idea that we're generally just getting less respect and more blame in the workforce? Yes. Yes. And I'm really

glad you brought up the respect gap, that chapter, every single study, every interview that I conducted for that chapter, I was like, oh my God, I'm not alone. I will tell you, there were so many things as I was doing the research for this book where they'd been happening to me my entire career. And I always thought it was just me. And interestingly, I think all women, this is one of the reasons I wrote the book as well, is because we all experience this and we all think it's our problem. And we don't realize that this is actually writ large. This is the way society unfortunately is working. But, but yeah, so, so the respect gap is actually, it's funny you said centered on a nurse, it's actually centered on a surgeon. Yeah. That's so funny. The minute it flew out of my mouth, I was like, what was that? They thought she was a nurse. Yeah. Anyway. Exactly. It focused on a female

surgeon who is always mistaken for a nurse. And I have great respect for nurses. And I don't mean to demean nurses at all. I mean, it's an unbelievably difficult, demanding profession. At the same time, this female surgeon would walk in and people would want her to change their bedpan, right? And this is something that is extremely common. In fact, I gave a talk last week at Yale University's business school, and one of the women in the business school class was a doctor. And she came up to me after class to tell me exactly the same story. She said, you know, she is an emergency room physician. And she said, she wants, she cares for her patients, but it gets very frustrating that every time she walks in, they want her to, you know, change the bedpan. And she said, look,

I don't mind like doing things to make them comfortable, but then they don't listen to my medical advice and, and they need to understand the medical advice and they just want to talk to a guy. So this is something, unfortunately, across professions, there was research done that if you put a man and a woman in the same job, same responsibility, that the man will get more respect in that job than the woman will. And that goes across professions. So again, something that is, I see it everywhere. I see it today. You know, it's, it's the kind of thing, it's, it's one of the reasons behind one of the most common things that happens to women, frankly, to anyone who's a minority in the room.

If you've ever been in a meeting, and I wish we could ask for a show of hands among your listeners. If you've ever been in a meeting, right, where you say something and nobody seems to hear it, right, it's crickets. And then two minutes later, some guy repeats exactly what you just said. And everybody turns to him and they're like, Bob, great idea. You had Bob. And he gets all the credit. And that happened to me a million times. And I couldn't figure it out.

I'm like, am I not clear in how I'm speaking? I literally thought it was my fault, but it turns out it happens to all women. And when I do these talks in a live audience, I ask for a show of hands and every hand goes up. I have literally hired coaches to help me communicate more clearly because I thought in those instances

that I was doing a bad, I must've been doing a bad job communicating. Exactly. Yes. Crazy. Yes. And it happens to all women. And I have heard that the research tells us actually it happens to the person who's the minority in the room. So it can happen to the person of color or the person with the physical disability, whoever's in a minority in the room, very often experiences this. It's interesting. When I give live talks, afterward, I will almost always hear from people, not women. I will hear from people of color. Interestingly, I very often hear from men who

are introverts who say everything you're talking about applies to me because we live in this world that so values the extrovert that I feel like I'm the one who is passed over and underestimated. That makes sense too. I can think of a couple introverted men that I've worked with and that wouldn't surprise me in the least. My background is in financial services. and so I know a lot of the listeners are in that industry. You share the example of how very few women there are at the executive levels of finance firms, and then the dichotomy of that compared to the research that shows how well they do. Can you share a little bit about that? Sure, sure. So if you look at industries, finance and technology are the ones that have really had the hardest problem with women. And in finance, what they found is the financial firms have been resistant to any kind

of closing the gender gap kind of conversation because they claim, they say, well, all of our, you know, we only go by the metrics. So if you bring in more money, get promoted, we don't really care, black, white, green, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if you're a man, woman, whatever, we don't care. It's all about the metrics. But then if you dig into that, what you find is the metrics, the how much money you're, how valuable you are to the firm, let's say. What that depends on are the opportunities that you have, the clients that you have, the exposure that you are given from the firm. And what they are finding is that men are getting the mentoring, but they're also getting the stretch assignments. They're getting put on the better accounts. And so therefore, of course, they're going to be

more financially successful because they are being put in the position to being more financially successful right from the start. And the women are sort of blocked out, sidelined, put on the lesser accounts, put on the parts of the business that are not as profitable, and therefore don't have the same opportunities as the men have. And so it's sort of a false claim to say that they simply aren't cutting it on the metrics and that that's all we're looking for because they're not given that opportunity. Right. And isn't there research that shows, for example, fund managers, funds that are managed by women

are actually outperforming, generally speaking, those that are managed by men, but yet those women aren't making it into the executive levels. Am I misinterpreting that? No, no, no. You're 100% correct that the funds with female management, they do better, but the women are not getting the recognition. They're not

getting the opportunities. Also funds, companies that have female CFOs also tend to do better financially and take on less risk. There was a really, really interesting situation. I believe it was in London where they did the research where they found that the more testosterone these guys had, the traders had, the more and more and more they would trade and they would keep trading until they were losing. It was like this gambling thing. And there was even a lawsuit that revolved around this case of this, this excess of testosterone that led to losses. Okay. So we could go on for days on the respect gap, but talk a little bit about the increased blame that women are experiencing? Yeah. So this is, again, a serious issue that women see. So first of all, women who are in leadership positions, there's been research done on this,

and it shows that a company's in trouble and has a female CEO, something like 85% of the news stories will blame her personally. Think about like Maritza Mayer and Yahoo, for example, which was a disaster when she came in. She didn't make it any better, but she got all the blame, not her male predecessors. Related to that and also to her is there's a phenomenon that these British academics have named the glass cliff, which says that women who get the top job tend to get it only when a company is in trouble and if it's in crisis. And then she gets put in the top slot. It's a job that's sort of a can't win position. And then when she fails to turn it around, she then gets the blame for the failure. So, you know, it's this really, really difficult situation. By the way, the glass cliff more

recently has been shown, there was a, they looked at NCAA coaches, and they actually found black men also have a glass cliff problem where they get the top coaching job when a teen has a losing record and they are given less time than their white male colleagues to turn it around into a winning record before they are fired. So again, the person who is in a marginalized group is just facing these barriers that for most of our male colleagues are completely invisible to them. And very often, because they feel like they are judged on their metrics, they don't see the barriers that are thrown up in front of women and others in

marginalized groups. It's incredible. And one of the things in this chapter that was mind blowing to me, because I know myself, and I'm sure a lot of other women have experienced that, like, you're just being too sensitive, or, you know, that was just a one time thing, or that's not related to your sex or your gender. The stories of the transgender people in your book, this being a great example of somebody who, same person, only difference was the change of gender and what they experienced in their own lives and in their professions based on that. Could you share a little bit about that? Yeah, absolutely. There was a scientist by the name of Ben Barris, who was incredibly accomplished, brilliant academic.

So Ben Barris had transitioned in middle age. Ben actually had been born as Barbara Barris. And Ben, after his transition, went to a scientific conference and delivered a paper. And in the audience, one scientist turns to another scientist and says, wow, that's Ben Barris. He is so much smarter than his sister, Barbara, which is just mind blowing. The reverse was also true. There is a transgender mathematician

by the name of Joan Roughgarden, brilliant mathematician, his transgender was born as Jonathan. And Joan has spoken about this. And what Joan said is that after her transition, suddenly, if she questioned somebody on one of their mathematical precepts, they just looked at her and said, oh, you don't understand the math. And it was something that she said had never happened in her earlier life before her transition. And it was just a shock that suddenly her abilities, which had been unquestioned for her entire life,

were suddenly questioned right after her transition. It's incredible. I want to move to solution or I know there's not one simple solution. I wish there were. But in your book, you reference really great examples like Samantha Bee's show and the Chicago Symphony and with your trip to Iceland. What can we learn from situations and places like that? And maybe the bigger question is, what does work? What should we be thinking, doing, and working on? Right. So the beauty is there are strategies that do work.

You mentioned Samantha Bee's show. One of the things that she did, and you mentioned the symphony as well, this is something symphonies do, they do what are called blind auditions. Symphony orchestras back in the day were all male. And in the 80s, they began, late 70s, 80s, the major symphonies began doing blind auditions, which means that you're behind a curtain and there's even a carpet on the floor so that you can't hear the person's footsteps. And when they

did that, all of a sudden women started winning auditions. So now if you look at the major symphonies, they're pretty much close to 50-50 male, female. And Samantha Bee did something similar where most of the late night comedy shows, those talk shows, had all male writers rooms. And so what Samantha Bee did when she started her show is she realized that the men, they knew each other. They had the same contacts. They also knew how to put together the right kind of application that's with the wink that kind of gets you in the door. And so rather than do it the old way, they came up with sort of a template that every person had to just go by the template. And as a result, and it was blind, right? So you didn't know who was who. As a result, they had like a

much more diverse writing staff, including somebody, a woman whose previous job had been at the, you know, DMV, Department of Motor Vehicles, who just turned out to be super funny. Who knew? Who knew, right? But she knew because of the way that she chose her writers. But we could talk about some strategies as well that I think have been effective for both men and women to sort of interrupt the biases. And I'll just mention my three top favorites,

if that's okay. That's great. The first is, I call it interrupt the interrupters. Now, we know from the research, women are interrupted three times more frequently than men. Northwestern actually studied the Supreme Court of the United States and found that the female Supreme Court justices are interrupted three times more frequently than the male justices. So the interrupt the interrupters, I feel like anyone in the room

should be empowered and particularly the boss, but anyone should be empowered to listen for who's getting interrupted and then coming in as an ally. So let's say, you're speaking and I say, you're cut off. I say, Nicole was making a really interesting point. I would love to hear her finish. Anybody can do that. Man, woman, boss, underling, whoever. That's number one. Number two is a strategy called amplification, which again, love this. This was actually developed initially by the women in the Obama administration, who he had more women than previous administrations, but they still felt bulldozed, right, in meetings. So this amplification idea is that whoever, when that marginalized person is speaking, somebody else will come and repeat

what they are saying and give them credit for it. This short circuits that situation we were talking about a couple of minutes ago, where you say something, nobody hears it, then Bob repeats it and gets the credit. So in other words, Nicole says something and then I jump in and I say, Nicole, that was such an interesting idea you had to do X, Y, Z, right? That's amplification. Third is brag buddies.

Brag buddies is, I love, love this strategy. I have adopted this strategy. So brag buddies, the research shows us that say men who talk about themselves are given a lot of credit. Like if they talk about their accomplishments, we like them better. Women do the exact same thing, exact same words. We don't like them. We think they're pushy and ambitious and aggressive and all of these abrasive, all of these female coded words, which is unfortunate. But until we fix that problem, what women or men can do is brag buddies, which is, let's say you and I work together.

You tell me your awesome accomplishments. I tell you my awesome accomplishments. And then we each go to our boss and brag about the other. And that gives sort of the credibility factor. It alerts the bosses to know what you are achieving, but it also gives that credibility factor that other people are noticing how you are doing. And so again, all these strategies are easy. A man can do them. A man can be your brag buddy. A woman can do them. We can do them for one another. And they are just a way to sort of interrupt this endless cycle of women being ignored, overlooked, not given credit for their accomplishments and their ideas. What I love about the brag buddies too is it doesn't necessarily need to be peer to

peer like an employee or, or like manager. So like I could go brag about what a great leader I work with and the leader could go and brag about what a great team member I am. So. Exactly. Exactly. Yes. Okay. Joanne, I wish I had more time to ask you so many more questions, but thank you. Thank you so much for being here today. I really appreciate your book and all the great work that you're doing. My pleasure. It was a great conversation. Thanks for the work that you are doing.

Thanks. All right. If you're listening and you want to learn more about Joanne and her work, first, go get her book for yourself and the other leaders in your company. The book is called That's What She Said, and go to your local bookstore or get it on Amazon. You can also find Joanne at her website, joannelittman.com, or on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter at Joanne Littman. We'll put all this in show notes.

So go get your hands on the book. We'll all get where we want to go faster if we work together. It doesn't work for good men to stay silent. And it's not just the right thing to do. It's also a phenomenal business strategy. And a little extra empathy wouldn't hurt any of us. So I invite you all, women and men alike, all genders, to not only reinvent and redefine women's work, but to value, encourage, and do it

too. Women's work will be what we make it. So let's work to make it something great.