The Downtown Women's Club womensDISH blog

More reasons why women's magazines are dumb

An astute reader of my earlier post Why do women's magazines do dumb things?, wrote in about this clip from Australian comedian Adam Hill.  Have to admit the guy makes some good points!

The Evolving Manager Stereotype: Do More Women Managers Make For Less Stereotypes?

A study in an upcoming issue of Psychology of Women Quarterly (PWQ) looks at how men and women leaders are evaluated differently based on the the gender-typing of the industry in which they work.  The results show that expectations are higher for team performance when led by a someone of the same gender as the gender typing of that industry.  However, the expectations for the leader do not change regardless of gender in relation to the industry.

From these results, the journal implies that as more women enter leadership roles, stereotypes will fail.  The press release asserts:

as more women move into management positions within a handful of industries, these industries are becoming more gender-neutral and stereotypes of leaders as men may be changing. . . The study shows that as more women assume leadership roles in the workforce, the management stereotype will in turn evolve, resulting in changes in the relative expectations for performance by men and women in management positions. The notion that male leaders will outperform women leaders is no longer applicable in all situations since this is largely linked to the current gender typing environment at a given firm.

But is it a stretch to say that more women managers in putatively female based careers such as teaching or nursing makes those professions gender neutral?  Wouldn't gender neutrality result from the addition of male leaders in those fields? 

Perhaps the more appropriate conclusion is that as the definition of gender typed industries expand, more women will be accepted as leaders. What do you think?

Beating the boys - filly style

It was another tough week for women, we (and our daughters) have been once again put in the position of sacrificing our rights for the good of others. But, I'm not going to write about that - other than to say that if we had more women represented on both sides of the aisle in the House and Senate, we might not be having these debates, or making these sacrifices that future generations are going to have to undo. 

Instead, I'd like to talk about Zenyatta and Rachel Alexandra.

Zenyatta and Rachel Alexandra are two race horses (fillies).  Fillies are female horses that are too young to be called mares. Rachel Alexandra won the Preakness Stakes in 2009, making her only the 11th filly to do so in over 100 years of racing.  Just last weekend Zenyatta became the first filly/mare to win the Breeder's Cup in 25 years.  Both fillies are in the running to be Horse of the Year.

Now I had to do a bit of research on this story as I'm not up on my horse racing lore.  After all, my first reaction when my dad said "the Filly won" last weekend, was to wonder if he missed the final game of the World Series.  But, then I became intrigued as to why this was such big news.  I hadn't realized that the winner's circle in horseracing was mostly an old boy's club.  And, here were some of the reasons I found explaining why fillies don't make good race horses:

• Fillies are naturally slower than the boys.
• Fillies get intimidated racing against the boys
• There isn't a pipeline of fillies as less fillies are born in every generation.

Well, now we have two fillies up for Horse of the Year.  Guess I'm not buying those arguments anymore on the horse track, in politics, or in the office.

Fun Fact:  Zenyatta was named after The Police Album, Zenyatta Mondatta (Zenyatta's owner Jerry Moss was the co-founder of A&M Records and helped launch the band, The Police). For more on Zenyatta's victory, click here.

Virtual glass floor? Gender & social networks

This week a fascinating set of data was released that shows women dominating social media.  Apparently, women outnumber men on Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, Flickr, Classmates, MySpace, Hi5 and del.icio.us.  Women tie men on LinkedIn, YouTube and Bebo.  The boys, however, do rule on Digg.

Here's a link to the full demographic breakdown of social networks: http://www.briansolis.com/2009/10/revealing-the-people-defining-social-networks/

And, here's a great visual: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2009/who-rules-the-social-web/

While this data is based on sheer numbers of people using the systems (not who is in charge, making money or has power and influence), it shouldn't be surprising.  After all, social media is all about facilitating communication and women are known communicators.

As I wrote the title to this post, I realized that a virtual glass floor is not the best visual.  First of all, some of the men I know probably wouldn't mind the view from down there (joking!!!). However, as pointed out above, it's not really a floor. We're just talking numbers, not power or influence.  Yet ... shouldn't numbers eventually equal power and influence????  It will be interesting to see how this unfolds. 

This is why it's not enough for women to just post a profile on LinkedIn.  We need women to use social networking platforms to voice their opinion and build their businesses.

To be honest, I was a bit hesitant about this post because I don't believe there should be glass floors or ceilings - it shouldn't be about gender at all - but talent, skill and capability.  Yet, we're not at equality yet in the places that count (the C-Suite) - despite more college graduates, more grad school graduates and now more social media participation.  But, perhaps demographics + social media will help us get there!

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If you let me play sports ... I won't end up like Rihanna

When I read this article in the NYTimes about how teenage girls are supporting Rihanna standing by the man who beat her, my heart fell.  Earlier in the week I had been lamenting how girls my son’s age seem to be participating less in sports than their older sisters. Volunteering as a recess monitor last year, I only saw one or two girls ever play with the boys.  Yet, I witnessed more than one crying when they tripped and fell, and not because they skinned their knees, but because they got grass stains on their new designer jeans or mud on their Uggs.  Huh?  That's not the playground I grew up on.

I’ve also noticed that the only role models young girls have these days are pop singers – Taylor Swift, High School Musical, Hannah Montana, and even my favorite, iCarly ,has a catchy single.  Where are the girls who play sports on Disney or Nickelodeon? 

Admittedly, with no women’s soccer capturing the headlines, and the demise in popularity of women’s tennis and the Olympics, our daughters are seeing less female athletes than I did growing up in the Seventies.  Fortunately, we can still find movies like A League of their Own, Bend it like Beckham, Gracie, The Longshots, and She's the Man. All should be required viewing for young girls ... and boys.

But, I’d really like Nike to bring back the commercial “If you let me play sports.”  Because that basically said it all, didn't it?

If you let me play.
If you let me play sports,
I will like myself more.
I will have more self-confidence.
If you let me play sports.
If you let me play.
If you let me play I’ll be 60% less likely to get breast cancer.
I will suffer less depression.
If you let me play sports,
I will be more likely to leave a man who beats me.
If you let me play,
I’ll be less likely to get pregnant before I want to.
I will learn what it means to be strong.
If you let me play.
If you let me play sports.

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Political glass ceilings due to women still tied to glass slippers?

A new article in the Washington Post asks if we are creating our own glass ceilings when it comes to politics:

... a new report from the Brookings Institution suggests an unexpected reason for the relative paucity of women elsewhere in political office and the dearth of credible female presidential candidates: an ambition gap.

"Somewhat surprisingly," write political scientists Jennifer Lawless of Brown University and Richard Fox of Loyola Marymount, women's underrepresentation "is not because of discrimination against women candidates. In fact, women perform as well as men when they do run for office. In terms of fundraising and vote totals, the consensus among researchers is the complete absence of overt gender bias."

Rather, the "fundamental reason for women's underrepresentation is that they do not run for office. There is a substantial gender gap in political ambition; men tend to have it, and women don't."

I'm glad the writer, Ruth Marcus, spotlights the issue. My only problem with it is that she (and the study) didn't distinguish between having ambition and acting on it.

Ambition is defined as:  An eager or strong desire to achieve something, such as fame or power.  Perhaps they are correct that less women run for office because they aren't interested or don't have any ambition.  I have to admit, I haven't run for any office since law school.  However, I think that there are women out there who might have the ambition or desire, but may just be too darn tired to do anything about it.  It's the old, women are still the main family/child care givers who may have the desire or interest to run for politics but are instead stuck being Cinderella, having to get all the chores done first.  The article also notes that:

The women in the survey were far less likely to be married or have children than the men were, and those who did had their hands full: 60 percent of the women, compared with 4 percent of the men, said they were responsible for the majority of child care.

As Beloit College political scientist Georgia Duerst-Lahti put it, "Women may now think about running for office, but they probably think about it while they are making the bed." Chugging down the Mommy Track may leave little time for pursuing a third, often all-consuming career.

O.k. So now we've surveyed:

• men, the majority of whom were married and only 4 percent have childcare responsibility, and
• women who from what I can tell were for the most part single; and those who were married, 60% had the childcare responsiblity. 

Now to me, that seems a bit like comparing apples to oranges.  Single women who may be more transient and married women who have childcare responsibility v. married men with presumably stay at home wives.

I realize it's difficult to compare genders without making gross generalizations.  I've run into the issue myself.  Although I do prefer when they break the comparisons down to marital status/generations, etc. as that makes for better comparisons.  Regardless, I think demographics are changing as breadwinner roles change and gen Y rebels against what has been the standard culture.  Unfortunately, as more people remain single and transient in a global market, it may be of less interest to anyone to be involved in politics, especially on a local scale.      

However, I will agree with the author in that there are women out there still culturally ingrained to not want to put themselves in the spotlight. Again, it's the passive Cinderella idea.  But we need to ask ourselves and other women -- can you really break through a glass ceiling if you're wearing glass slippers?

Life in the locker room: study shows sexism still exists

Let's face it.  Sexism and racism still exist in America.  All we have to do is read the front page of the newspaper where the Democrats are duking it out to show which is worse, or ... for many people, simply going into the office is proof enough.

I'm not going to tackle racism here, as it's nothing I've ever experienced except through friends and colleagues.  But, it's something I think we need to hear more about from women/men who have been discriminated against (so please, tell us your stories below!).  In fact, I had the opposite issue with race - employers who would jump for joy when, after they hired me, they discovered that they could count me as a "token minority" because my mother hails from a Pacific Island. (She's from Guam - a small island where soap opera writers send characters off to when they really, really don't expect them to ever come back ... ). 

While troubling, I guess this is still typical in many of our non-diverse workplaces especially at an executive level.  I had a colleague once who said that our employer at the time nearly did backflips when they found out he was not only black, but gay, and a single dad. While we joked about it, we both recognized how lame it was, as diversity is not accomplished by having one or two "diverse" employees within a company of hundreds.

As for sexism, been there done that, and more on my thoughts below.  However, I wanted to highlight Lisa Belkin's article in the NYTimes about the new women in engineering/sciences/technology study by Sylvia Ann Hewlett that shows .... surprise ... sexism still exists.

BACK in the bad old days, the workplace was a battleground, where sexist jokes and assumptions were the norm.

Women were shut off from promotion by an old boys’ network that favored its own. They went to meetings and were often the only women in the room.

All that has changed in the last three decades, except where it has not. In the worlds of science, engineering and technology, it seems, the past is still very much present.

“It’s almost a time warp,” said Sylvia Ann Hewlett, the founder of the Center for Work-Life Policy, a nonprofit organization that studies women and work. “All the predatory and demeaning and discriminatory stuff that went on in workplaces 20, 30 years ago is alive and well in these professions.”

My favorite part of the column/study was the following story at the end of Belkin's column which just says it all:

Josephine, a computer programmer whose boss at a start-up a decade ago nicknamed her Finn, stands out among the accounts.

“It turned out to be really useful to allow some of my colleagues to imagine I was a man,” the worker is quoted as saying. The e-mail messages Finn received were strikingly different than those received by Josephine. Not only did they contain “brutal locker room stuff, that was hard to take,” but also important information shared by colleagues who wanted to keep each other in the loop. Josephine got none of that, making the advantage of being a man in a male world quite clear.

Earlier this week, I had some great back and forth with one of my favorite bloggers, Yvonne DiVita over at www.lipsticking.com.  She posted a very fair critique of my critique of Christopher Flett's book, What Men Don't Tell Women About Business: Opening Up The Heavily Guarded Male Playbook.  Josephine's story above underscores the point of our conversation -- that as disturbing as the information may be, it's better to know what's going on in order for us to make changes.  We can't change what we don't know!

Diane K. Danielson
ceo, www.DowntownWomensclub.com

Beware of bossy women

According to the Telegraph, a recent study showed that men want their manliness back:

Men said they "felt handcuffed" by political correctness - only 33 per cent felt they could speak freely and say what they thought, whereas two thirds found it safer and to conceal their opinions.

Harvey Mansfield, a Harvard professor and America's best known political philosopher, who tackles the topic in his book Manliness, says the issue is ignored.

"A man has to be embarrassed about being a man. I am trying to bring back the word manliness. It's not respected," he said.

According to the survey, men hold other men who speak their mind in high regard - the likes of Jeremy Clarkson, Jeremy Paxman, Bob Geldof and Gordon Ramsay. Their biggest hero is Churchill.

But four out of 10 are frightened of heights and spiders while a third are frightened of bossy women.

Hmmmmm.  Do they hold women who speak their mind in high regard?  Methinks the gentlemen doth protest too much.  But, I suppose that it's nice to know that I just need to get me some spiders and a penthouse apartment and I'll be able to frighten away most men.

Despite these fears, women don't always have the upper hand. For example, when it comes to careers, the Journal reports today that pregnancy discrimination is on the rise.

*** Addendum****

Seems there may be another explanation for the rise in pregnancy discrimination which was not covered by the journal:  www.malepregnancy.com.

We're cougars at night and piranhas during the day?

I caught this bit on Feministing about the Telegraph and the Daily Mail running stories about how women only want good jobs to meet and marry rich men.  Feministing makes a good point that the stories were rehashes of a Financial Times story that ran last year.  But, here's an excerpt from the Daily Mail:

Male bosses who unexpectedly hit it off with a female employee over the festive season were given a stern warning yesterday.

You might have caught yourself an office piranha.

The name of the man-eating South American fish has been borrowed by lawyer Diane Benussi to describe women who use the office party to snap up a high-flying colleague, whether he is married or not.

****

She said piranhas "want a highearning, high-flying, high-virility man" who will place a ring on their finger.

The mere fact that such a candidate might already be married merely confirms those characteristics.

"Office parties are a brilliant opportunity for them to lead a colleague astray. The alcohol is flowing, they can wear sexier clothes and they just generally loosen up.

"There are women who join companies with large amounts of male employees with the sole intention of looking for a partner, and by that I mean an equity partner - one of the owners of the business."

She said that for such women, joining a large firm of accountants or solicitors can be more advantageous than signing up with a dating agency.

She warned: "A piranha will hang on for the kill and will rip any man to shreds."

Click here to read the full Daily Mail story.

Oh dear.  First we want their jobs, now we want their sperm and their money.  And if we go for a younger, less wealthy man, then we are cougars.   Did I miss something here?  When did men become such helpless victims?

Ding Dong the Queen Bee's dead

At least that's what today's Wall Street Journal proclaims in one of the first "uplifting" columns I've read about women networking their way to the top.

Successful female executives used to be seen as loners who shunned helping other women and dutifully stuck to entrenched rules to succeed.

No one would make that charge today. A women's network has emerged in the corporate world that is working to counter the old boy's club. Its members, who include a fresh crop of female executives as well as corporate veterans, are helping one another advance and succeed -- and on their own terms.

The "queen bee syndrome" -- the belief that ambitious women strive for the most powerful position in the workplace while excluding all rivals -- is outdated, executives say. Equally outdated is the notion that women can't have both powerful jobs and fulfilling personal lives.

It would be really nice if the queen bee phase was over.  So what do you all think?

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