Episode 14: International Women’s Day

Nadine Habib:

From the corner of Bay and Dundas in downtown Toronto, this is Like Nobody's Business, a podcast of thought leadership and business innovation. I'm your host Nadine Habib. As groups around the world celebrate International Women's Day I sat down with Professor Kristyn Scott to talk about women in the workplace. Scott is an associate professor of human resource management and organizational behavior at the Ted Rogers School of management. She's an expert on leadership and social cognition with a specific focus on gender bias. We discuss challenges facing women in the workplace, how organizations can really help advance them in their careers and the ways implicit biases are still creating barriers for women today.

First off, happy International Women's Day.

Kristyn Scott:

Thank you. Same to you.

Nadine Habib:

Thank you. Thank you very much. So this year's campaign is all about balance and their slogan is a Better the Balance, Better the World. So maybe we can start with what your idea of a better balanced world, what it looks like and what that means to you.

Kristyn Scott:

Sure. So that's a really large question and balance itself is a huge topic. We could talk about it in so many different ways. I think as a leadership researcher for me, I'll take it back to leadership and work and more balance, especially in leadership makes me think of balancing work and life and how challenging that is for anybody. But I also think that that's still one major hindrance when we're talking about women in leadership. And so what I see, or what I think is important is a true modeling of what balance looks like.

I was thinking back to a project I had worked on years ago where we were interviewing people in an industry that sort of had a very heavy face time requirement and so you were expected to be in the office at all times and if you weren't in the office you were expected to be available at all times. And so balance was pretty nonexistent. And when you started to look at the higher levels in the organization, it was really evident that the scales were tipped in favor of men. There were many more men who were advancing in the organization in positions of leadership. And so that culture just persisted because there was nobody modeling what it might look like to create a more favorable balance. Recognizing that everybody has a life outside of work and for women still, that may include more responsibilities at home and with children.

Nadine Habib:

And maybe that leads into our second question or my second question, which is how can companies and organizations help support women in a more fulsome, balanced way? Right. You know, if a woman has certain responsibilities outside of work, how do organizations address those responsibilities and make women feel more welcome and more comfortable in their own companies.

Kristyn Scott:

Again, I think it ties back a little bit to modeling of behaviors, but it also ties back to the culture of the organization and what the culture values. And you think if it comes down to valuing inclusion and a place where everybody feels like there is a place for them and they can excel and they can show their work. I think that's a valuable thing.

Thinking about how to support women and what a woman might look to in terms of trying to figure out if an organization really is going to support advancement, I think that one of the things that you need to do is look at the top of the organization. What does it look like? That might speak a lot to the culture because you want to look for a match between what the organization says they value, and what they actually show that they value. So we want to know that sort of the visible artifacts of culture, what we see in embedded in an organization actually matches what an organization is telling you, right? So if they are saying, you know, we value women in the organization, that means that then you can look to their policies and practices and see that in fact they have policies that are designed for advancing everyone in the organization. For example, if you don't have experience on the line, you'll never advance. Or if you haven't had an opportunity to go overseas that you won't advance, right?

So that they're making sure that the structural barriers, there aren't structural barriers that exist to prevent women's advancement. I think that's one sort of key that women can look to.

Nadine Habib:

Right. Okay. There's been a lot of diversity and inclusion initiatives. You know a lot of companies, Fortune 500 companies have come out with new initiatives to help with women and diversity, even you hear of new positions like chief diversity officer, so do those types of programs actually help women? What are your thoughts on that type of, I guess like buzzword almost now that it's become? Let me get your thoughts on that.

Kristyn Scott:

I mean obviously I think they're are good step. The challenge is what we know about the research on diversity training is that a lot of it just doesn't work, in part because it just doesn't go far enough to address some of the real systemic issues. So, you know, I'll take it back to culture. Some of my colleagues and I have done some work on diversity and organizations and what it might really take to truly transform organizations and the organizations who do it really well tie everything back to a culture of valuing diversity. So for example, if you show somebody recruitment materials and in your recruitment materials, you know you have pictures of diverse others, there's lots of women, that sends a signal, you know, look, this is what we value. If you walk into an interview and the individuals who are presented to you in that interview don't match the materials you were given at recruitment, that might be a signal. Well, wait a minute. There's something missing here in terms of a match between what the organization says they're doing and what they actually are doing.

Now, of course it's going to take time for organizations to get there, but really making sure that you know, for example, if we're thinking about communication, there's a lot of research that talks about how communication styles of women and men are different. Diversity in communication is important to understand. It's one thing to say, you know what? Everybody communicates differently and leave it at that. It's something completely different to say, you know what? We all have different communication styles. Let's sit down and figure out how we can work together to make sure that everybody is heard and everybody is understood and that we are communicating in a way that sort of advances the teamwork, advances you individually at work. Those small things are really important and they're, that's the hard work that's harder to do.

Nadine Habib:

Right. And I was actually at a presentation and somebody had said companies measure their quarterly earnings, they measure their profits, they measure their sales and all that can be measured in numbers, right? But inclusion, the actual feeling is so much harder to quantify because, because it can't be measured in numbers. And so trying to develop that or I guess nurture that in a company is really difficult.

Kristyn Scott:

Yeah, it is. No question. It is. And I think also the organizations who sort of do diversity really well and with their commitment to advancing women are measuring their progress, right? So they are tracking, they're creating initiatives intended to change. And then they also track whether or not changes actually occurred. And some of that might be around, employee metrics, satisfaction, engagement's a big one these days. But it's also, are we actually retaining women? Are we advancing women? That's a cue that the initiative is actually working.

Nadine Habib:

Right. Is there any company that you can think of that is doing that really well that you can point to that they've really hit the nail on the head?

Kristyn Scott:

I think there's a lot of organizations that are committed to it and doing it and are doing it well. I think Canadian banks are a good example of this. A lot of them for many years have had really strong diversity initiatives, commitments demonstrated movement towards diversity. I think they're a good example to look to in the US there's some examples. The one that comes to mind most readily because in this paper I'm referencing, we actually cited them was Campbell's Soup company.

Nadine Habib:

That's a surprising one.

Kristyn Scott:

A surprising one, but really a good example of how they embedded diversity initiatives into every aspect of their business practice. So they're treating it like just another facet of business, not something that gets sort of tacked on at the end. That really does help culture change.

Nadine Habib:

 Right. And I think we had an earlier discussion and about implicit bias and the ways that implicit bias still has a significant impact in the way that we think and the way that we live day to day. So I was wondering if you could just talk about what implicit bias is, why it's different from other biases and also how it could impact women and their advancement in work and in other relations in their life.

Kristyn Scott:

Sure. So often when we think of biases, we think of somebody you know being told, you know what, we are not going to hire you because of x, because you know, you don't fit the mold that we want here because you look different or you sound different. That's an overt bias. Implicit bias is much more subtle and often we refer to it as unconscious bias. So it's biases that perhaps aren't intentional. They're more subtle and they sort of creep in to our everyday lives. So, for example, in terms of structure, in an organization, these barriers wouldn't be be based in this overt bias. It's not that we're intending, organizations are not intending to create some sort of structural bias to advancement, but it's subtle.

The policy or practice that is designed just subtly favors men. You know, I gave the example earlier of sort of having like experience on the line or requiring that, so requiring that you're an operations or you're in sales. Well, statistics show that those lines are dominated more frequently by men. So if you're requiring people to have that experience, that means you're pulling from a pool of people that is already not balanced. Sometimes, and I alluded to this earlier as well, sometimes organizations require that leaders gain international experience before they advance. So again, it might not be an intentional bias, but very often it poses a barrier that affects women more than men. There's a presumption that women don't want to leave for family reasons. That may or may not be true.

Nadine Habib:

What does that mean? The trailing spouse.

Kristyn Scott:

So it means that so that you're the individual in the relationship who is required to just follow, right? So it may mean that they're disrupting their own career.

Nadine Habib:

Got you.

Kristyn Scott:

To meet the challenges involved with, you know, being an expatriate family, right. Expatriate's assignments also maybe more likely to be awarded based on informal networks. And again, those networks maybe something that women tend to be excluded from. So although the policy isn't designed to exclude anybody, sort of implicitly the bias, the process can be biased. So those are some structural ways that you might see it.

Another, I think, a challenge with bias is implicit bias is also become part of our lexicon. People talk about it now more outside of sort of the academic world than they used to, which is great that organizations and people within organizations are recognizing that. And so I'm highlighting this just because it's sort of very of the moment in a lot of organizations. And that's implicit bias training. Again, great initiative. The challenge is that making employees aware that everybody has biases and stereotypes because that's really what we're talking about with implicit bias. We all know the content of stereotypes. Overt stereotyping is when we act on it intentionally. Implicit bias or subtle bias occurs when we're not aware of it, but it sort of creeps in just because everybody has the knowledge of the stereotypes.

So a lot of this training focuses on the fact that it's just letting people know, hey, guess what? We all have, we all know the content of stereotypes and biases. And what happens is employees sometimes hear, oh, everybody uses stereotypes, or everybody is biased, which of course isn't the intention of the training. So then they perceive it to be normative. Well, wait a minute, we all have these. Okay. This is so everybody does it. It's what happens. And the challenges that research has demonstrated that people actually start to perceive women differently.

Nadine Habib:

After such training?

Kristyn Scott:

After this training when they receive the message that everybody's biased. It can effect our evaluations, it can affect our impressions, try not to stereotype. So if we stop there, it can have the opposite effect. If you give a message that, you know what, we all know the content of stereotyping, but the reality is that very few people engage in stereotyping or the majority of people really try not to stereotype, we see a difference. That's when we see that that sort of training actually does have a positive impact. So that means that really training and intervention needs to be designed really carefully. So it doesn't unintentionally lead to greater biases.

And this research is kind of in its infancy, but I think it's really interesting and potentially has a lot of promise for how we might reduce some of these subtle biases at work.

Nadine Habib:

Because it's having the totally opposite effect than what people are intending it to.

Kristyn Scott:

That's right. Yeah.

Nadine Habib:

So let's talk a little bit about the Me Too movement and some of the questions that have arisen recently about it. And so I've heard and I've seen and I've read a lot of anecdotal stories about male dominated industries, whether it's on Wall Street and whether it's, you know, Bay Street or other industries that feel that to avoid entirely the situations that have come out of the Me Too movement in the scenarios that have come out of the Me Too movement, to avoid that entirely, they're just going to avoid hiring women or interacting with women or having any dealings with women. Many people have felt like, okay, now this is having the totally, totally opposite effect and actually taking opportunities away from women. Maybe can you speak to that issue and how women should deal with a scenario like that?

Kristyn Scott:

So sort of anecdotally, I've heard that as a reaction as well, but you know, in response to exceptionally horrific behavior, the response should be, well then let's just remove any possibility that anybody could engage in that behavior, which is an extreme and kind of horrific response sort of as I see it. That's not the answer. The answer is not make sure that nobody can do it by not hiring women. The answer is what's going on in the culture of these workplaces, in these industries that make people think it's okay to behave that way.

That's really the crux of the issue. Sort of, you know, in terms of leadership research, there's been a resurgence of, maybe resurgence isn't even the right word, but there's quite a lot of research looking at sort of abusive supervision. Not to the extreme of what's necessarily been publicized around Me Too. But you know, leaders who are in civil, uncivil to their employees who treat them rudely and badly and belittle them, require them to engage in small types of deviant behaviors at work that become normative. And although it's a fairly low base rate behavior, it's not occurring. Most people can think of a time when their manager maybe wasn't quite nice to them or when they felt pressured to do something even small that they wouldn't have normally done. So this, the issues around Me Too are a huge, huge exaggeration of those small behaviors that occur that shouldn't be normative, but somehow in some industries become that way.

So how do we tackle it? I mean immediately it's, I feel it's removing the people who are responsible for that in the first place. So sort of trying to clear out the toxicity because that shouldn't be acceptable for anybody in the workplace. And then it's a matter of rebuilding the culture. How you start that in an organization that's experiencing that is going to be very hard. Culture change happens slowly. But I think that that's sort of where you have to start. It's a really hard look at the conditions in your organization that have allowed that to flourish.

Nadine Habib:

Right. It's funny how people resort to or we're just not going to interact with women.

Kristyn Scott:

Let's just shot down.

Nadine Habib:

Yeah. Versus actually let's-

Kristyn Scott:

Let's see what the issue is here. Understand where things went wrong., where we went wrong that we've allowed this to happen.

Nadine Habib:

Yeah, exactly.

Kristyn Scott:

 And also I think that goes along with that there's the two pieces, what went wrong and then what in the culture of the organization has made women feel like they can't speak out.

Nadine Habib:

Right. Yeah.

Kristyn Scott:

Right. So those cultural challenges I think go both ways.

Nadine Habib:

Yeah. Because it's what went wrong and then how did we allow that to fester?

Kristyn Scott:

That's right. Who's not listening? Where are the policies and procedures in place to protect employees when they do feel like they've been treated even in an unsafe manner or when they have been harassed or when they have been pressured into engaging in workplace practices that they wouldn't normally engage in that they feel are wrong. Like objectively, ethically wrong. Right. Where are the workplace practices that protect them?

Nadine Habib:

Right. So what are some of the challenges with culture change?

Kristyn Scott:

You know, I think one big one, culture changes slowly. So thinking about what organizational culture is, because I don't think we've said that, but it's kind of, you know, it's a mission, vision, values of the organization. It's who we, who we, using the royal we, are around here. And changing the culture has to mean that everybody buys into the culture change. They understand why culture change has to happen and that everybody has an opportunity to participate in the change. So this means that men are just as important to the process of culture change when we're thinking about gender balance as are women. And there's actually some recent research by Scherf and colleagues and they suggest that men may actually not participate in the process of advancing women because they don't feel like they have what's called psychological standing or the right to have a voice in a certain area.

So you could have men who absolutely believe that there should be more women in senior leadership roles, but they don't speak up or get involved because they don't feel like it's their right to do so, that they don't have the position, they shouldn't say it. So affirming psychological standing by emphasizing that everybody has a role to play in gender parity may actually help to improve the perceived psychological standing of men. And that could help with the culture change.

Nadine Habib:

Do you think it's the role of women to kind of encourage men to say, hey, you can speak up about this, you know. I see that you're here rooting for us. But you know, encouraging that psychological standing.

Kristyn Scott:

Yeah, maybe a little bit. I don't think, I certainly think that would help. But whenever you're talking about culture change, it has to come from the top of the organization. It has to have commitment from the most senior people in the organization. And that may mean that the most senior people of the organization, if there isn't a woman on that team, they do bring some of the more senior women in to start to convey that message. But it still does need to come from the top.

Nadine Habib:

Right. So we received a question from Instagram from our user @Pauline.Marcio So thank you Pauline for this question. She's asking how do you empower women? And maybe we can talk about this in the context of a workplace. How do organizations empower women and what can they do to further women in leadership or just in workplace in general?

Kristyn Scott:

Sure. I mean I think here I'd like to emphasize the importance of leader development. So if and how an organization engages in leader development may also signal sort of a commitment to allowing or not allowing, allowing is the wrong word, to encouraging women to rise in the organizational hierarchy. And so they're taking on more and more senior roles and more and more responsibility. And there's been some really interesting work by a researcher, last name Aberra and colleagues, and they've developed training protocols for women and they suggest in part that training be offered to women in women only groups. In addition to the training offered to leaders and potential leaders. So they argue that if you offer training in women only groups, it can help offset some of the biases that are associated with things like networking. So research shows that women are more reluctant to engage in traditional networking activities. They may have smaller networks. This gets around some of that.

Some of the issues around sort of what we refer to in the leadership literature as agentic and communal behaviors. We can think of them as more stereotypically masculine behaviors versus more stereotypically feminine behaviors. Right? So being dominant and assertive versus kind and caring. We know research shows that even when women engage in agentic sort of more assertive type behaviors, they may not be perceived the same way as a male leader, a man who's engaged in sort of similar behaviors. And ultimately sort of what happens when we start to develop and train women leaders, especially, is they may unconsciously interpret that they need to suppress any communal behaviors. The thing is those behaviors are still really important for leadership. So the suppression of that, you know, not wanting to appear kind and sympathetic and caring and you know, concern for subordinates, it's because they're worried they're going to be perceived as less leader like. So if we really focus on the training, empower women to realize communality, those stereotypically feminine behaviors, they really are important for leadership.

So I think allowing everybody to sort of develop their own style in a setting that is safe, that is encouraging, that's also a real strong learning opportunity I think could be very powerful.

Nadine Habib:

I feel like I've heard a lot of stories, especially from CEOs, female CEOs where they feel like they have to put on this exterior, especially of being a little more aggressive or a little more, you know, qualities that you would associate with a male leader. And so they put on that attitude because they feel like that's the way that they'll be heard. So I wonder if it's more about people now understanding that leadership comes in all different forms, all different personality trait and accepting that a woman could be whatever she wants to be, whether she wants to be kind and nurturing or she wants to be aggressive or both.

Kristyn Scott:

I think, I mean this was actually research that I did for my doctoral dissertation way back when focusing on the perception of men and women when they're engaged in agentic and communal behaviors. And do people actually recognize that the man is being a kind and caring leader and the woman is being assertive and determined and surprisingly actually where the real bias was was for the woman who was being assertive and determined not for the man who was being caring and concerned. Because we still want our leaders to be caring and concerned, right? If I come to work and I'm having a bad day, I still want my leader to say, "Oh, you know what? I get it. We all have those bad days." So that's the real challenge. Getting people to recognize that anybody can be engaged in agency, that it is not just the purview of leaders and it's not just the purview of male leaders in particular.

And so hearing you say about, talk about, you know, even anecdotally, people who feel like they need to sort of mask who they are kind of reminds me of, we had this discussion earlier of authenticity and authenticity is a huge buzzword in leadership these days. There's theories of authenticity. You can Google it and there's tons of practitioners offering to train people to be authentic leaders. And on the face of it, you know, it seems like they're saying like just always be yourself, which is true. We should be ourselves and we should feel comfortable being ourselves at work. But there's a sort of, I think there also has to be a recognition that it's being ourselves in context and sometimes we need to learn how to sort of be ourselves in context, if that makes sense. Right. So you need to figure out in terms of, we sort of go back to that developing and empowering and training.

How do you train people? How do you help leaders develop skills around being assertive and asking for what you want and being forthright if that doesn't come naturally to you? Because you know, again, I'm just saying this anecdotally, I don't know, maybe that's part of the issue that people feel uncomfortable engaging in those behaviors and that comes across being uncomfortable. So then from that perspective it is about sort of learning and training and practicing. So organizations need to provide the opportunity.

Nadine Habib:

Yeah.

Kristyn Scott:

Well I sat on this really interesting panel at a conference last year with, it was a mix of academics and practitioners, and one of the practitioners made a really, I thought, interesting point about what women who aspire to leadership positions should be aware of. And she said, you know, don't necessarily assume that good work will be recognized and rewarded.

Be proactive, right. Seek out opportunities, make your work known. And I think sometimes that that's, again, this is falling under the bubble of stereotype, but sometimes that doesn't happen because we women assume that somebody will recognize that and so we're not out there trumpeting our successes. And sometimes that doesn't need to happen. You need to make your work visible. Like it's a kind of a show your work moment.

Nadine Habib:

As I was graduating from school and applying to jobs, I had read or I'd seen a stat that said, even if men don't meet half the requirements of a job posting, they will usually apply to that job even though women won't. Right. And so I wonder if there's something to talk about in terms of women discounting themselves, even if they feel like they don't have, they hit every single mark. Right. And so they kind of take themselves out of the running in certain situations and if that impacts their advancement in leadership.

Kristyn Scott:

I think it actually could, and I sort of anecdotally, I've heard that as well. Yeah. And I think research does bear that out, that men are more likely to just step up and say, you know, I don't fit entirely, but I'm going to try. And women may tend to look and say, well I don't have everything so I might not get it. So then maybe I should wait. Yeah. And that sort of goes back, I think to that stepping up, showing your work, speaking up and not just about, it's not just about showing your work, it's also about actively seeking out opportunities. So sort of going back to that, you know, don't assume that you're going to be, we're going to be recognized, actively seek out those opportunities. You may not have all of the skills and experiences necessary for a specific position, but the only way you may get those skills and experiences is by having the role, right? So make it clear that, make it clear what you bring and how a specific role could help you develop for future advancement.

Nadine Habib:

Right.

Like Nobody's Business is a presentation of Toronto Metropolitan University's, Ted Rogers School of Management. For more information about TRSM, visit ryerson.ca/tedrogersschool. Thank you for listening.