Equal Pay and Gender Bias – Part 1 (Unconscious Bias)
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Christine: You’re listening to SuperManager, the podcast for people who manage people and business with ideas, friends and expert interviews to help you be a SuperManager.
Sam: Welcome back everyone. This week for SuperManager, we are talking about gender bias and equal pay. I have my regular group of superheroes with me today. I have,
Gerry: I’m Gerry Richardson. I’m a lawyer at Evans and Dixon. I work with employers. I help them manage their relationships through the courtship, the marriage and the divorce.
Joel: Joel Emery with Ignite Strategies. I serve as a sales system architect for small and midsized businesses.
Natalie: Natalie Meyer with HooPayz and we are your benefits concierge, helping people to understand and maximize the benefits that they have in their package.
Vicki: Vicki Wors, Wors Consulting. I am a human resources consultant for small to midsize businesses, helping them maneuver through some of the uncomfortable issues they face.
Amy: I’m Amy Narishkin. I’m a cultural intelligence strategist with Empowering Partners, which is actually my business. So I’m a consultant as well and I help organizations reach broader markets by hiring people that they think are different.
Sam: And I am Samantha Naes was CN video. We do corporate video production.
Sam: I don’t really want to mention the name of the company, but I was a systems programmer for a very large organization at one time and it was my first day of work there. They’re showing me around the department and I noticed that the computer programmers were mostly women. And I thought, Ooh, I’m going to like working here. They’re very progressive. It’s 80% women in the department. And I was talking to my supervisor, he was showing me around and I said, this is great. It looks like you’ve got mostly women working here. And he goes, yeah, yeah, we’re on a budget.
Natalie: Wow, okay…
Amy: That’s really cute.
Sam: And so it didn’t stop there. I looked at him because I didn’t know what to make of it. When you know, when somebody makes a comment that’s just so outrageous that you like.
Natalie: If that’s a joke, or if he’s real.
Sam: Did you really just say that?
Amy: That’s pretty off base.
Sam: And I just stared at him and I could tell there was an awkwardness there. So he continued to explain. He said, no, no, it’s just, it’s a really good deal for us because they’re great programmers, very talented, but you don’t have to pay them as much.
Amy: Ouch.
Sam: And I was like, Oh, he did just say what I thought he just said.
Natalie: Wow, thank you, good to know
Sam: Now this was several years ago, and I don’t know if this is really still going on as much as it did back then because this was 20 years ago. But…
Amy: Yes
Natalie: I think things like that absolutely still happen. And I think sometimes too, women don’t get the opportunity to fight for, I mean, part of it is women need to be more willing to speak up and say, okay, that’s not fair, or here’s what I want and be more pushy. But there’s also part of it too that they shouldn’t be passed over for certain things. And I work in an industry that’s mostly in health care and a lot of insurance benefits. It’s very much of a male dominated industry. So those kinds of things do come up. And so
Sam: Two things that I always say to interns, we used to do internships a lot in the summertime. One when comes to full time employment, when you’re interviewing people and one of the questions that I ask is what kind of salary are you looking for because I want to get a feel for.
Natalie: Sure.
Sam: what do you feel your value is? Men always ask for a higher salary than women do. When I ask that question and I’m going to give them the salary that.
Natalie: that you have to offer, right.
Sam: Based on, yeah, that I have to offer based on experience, but it’s something that I’ve noticed and then I do have this conversation with female interns because when we do internships, if it’s all female, it’s not a problem. They work very well together. When you have some male and some female and I say, okay, we’ve got this project that needs to be done. The male intern almost always, and I don’t want to give a blanket statement,
Natalie: Sure.
Sam: but just from what I’ve seen, almost always says, I’ll take that. I can do it. They step up whether they have any experience or not. They’ll say, me, I got it. I got this. I can do this. They have that confidence. In fact a little bit overly confident because oftentimes they can’t, but they’ve stepped up and volunteered and then the female intern will say, I’ll help.
Amy: Uh-huh. So there’s actually research to support that. The, I’ve just finished a book called, well actually in the spring by Soraya Chemaly called Rage Becomes Her and chalk full of statistics and tough read took me about three months, couple three inch book.
Sam: Oh wow.
Amy: But one of the things that we talk about is that parents and teachers interrupt our female students and our girls twice as much as we interrupt our boys. And so in a sense we’re all complicit.
Sam: Interesting…
Amy: and to both of you all made that that same point, women are complicit. I’m an educator, I’m a mom. And now ever since I’ve read that statistic, I’ll definitely put my hand gently on my husband’s arm and say, let her finish. We have three daughters and a son and it wasn’t something that we were ever conscious of.
Natalie: Sure.
Sam: Right.
Amy: But now both of us go, wait, let her finish. Because by interrupting women inadvertently or intentionally, you’re communicating the, what you have to share isn’t quite worth hearing. Both of you all brought up the fact that women are complicit in our own oppression in a sense. But one of the things that we have to be careful is we can say that women need to speak up, but if their survival depends on them being silent, minimizing who they are so that they can keep their job.
Sam: Yeah.
Amy: We can’t just kind of across the board say women need to speak up.
Sam: Well if they’re going to get interrupted twice as often.
Amy: Right. And, and if they need that job and they’re a single parent.
Sam: Right.
Amy: And their livelihood and food on the table the next day depends on it, they are not going to speak up. Particularly with a male boss that doesn’t want…
Gerry: And that’s why Me Too exists.
Natalie: Right.
Sam: Yeah.
Natalie: Well, and I, she brought up a good point. It’s sometimes that it’s the females they maybe have, they might be a single mom and they may know that they may need to duck out early one day or something comes up with a child and so they feel like I’d rather be able to have that little bit of flexibility and doesn’t mean that they don’t go home that night and finish their work.
Amy: Right.
Natalie: I mean, I don’t ever,
Amy: Right.
Natalie: I’ve never seen a woman that
Amy: Right.
Natalie: fails to complete a job because of that, but the fact of the matter is they feel a little bit apologetic for that.
Gerry: But my daughter, she works in the workplace and it’s roughly equal positions three females. My daughter is really industrious and very conscientious and the others aren’t and it just grates her. I just hear and it’s not a male female thing. There are individuals that if supervision is loose, they’re out of there.
Natalie: Absolutely.
Gerry: come in late.
Amy: Yeah.
Natalie: Oh yeah, absolutely.
Gerry: And it just drives my daughter nuts.
Amy: Broad brush strokes about.
Gerry: It has nothing to do with gender.
Amy: Any group of people isn’t necessarily helpful, but yeah, it’s going to depend on the individual.
Sam: Amy, you were talking earlier about how people can have certain perceptions and not even realize it about interrupting more often when it’s a a woman speaking rather than a man. It reminded me of a story. I have a much younger brother. He was born when I was in college and so he’s much younger than me and I was out visiting with my parents and we were at an electronic store and my younger brother had a question about a video game and he saw an employee and it was a female employee and he said, Oh, let me ask her. And my dad, without even thinking about it said, Oh, she’s not going to know what she’s talking about. Ask him.
Amy: Interesting.
Sam: And my brother looked at him kind of confused and my mom said, Ave, how do you know that? And he just kind of went, huh? I don’t know. And scrummed his way out of it. The funny thing is my brother went and asked the guy and he said, I don’t know, let me ask her. And he went back to.
Amy: What a riot.
Sam: Yeah.
Amy: What a riot.
Natalie: That kind of reminds me of a situation I had. I was working in event down in Tennessee and my husband actually came to help me because the person who was supposed to help me out was gone that day, and so he came to help me and I was talking to mostly a lot of male doctors. This event had specifically a lot of doctors and they kept coming up and asking questions and they would go straight to him and he’d say, actually, she’s the one that you need to ask. She’s the one, and they would look and go and they would continue to go to him.
Sam: Oh, wow…
Natalie: and think, he’s the one that they needed to ask. I found it really interesting how many people time and time again it, I don’t know if it was maybe just more of a Southern atmosphere if it had something to do with that, but or if it was, these are older doctors and things of that sort, so.
Joel: There’s definitely an age.
Sam: Vicki’s here! She’s joined the party!
Joel: Hello Vicki!
Sam: Come on in. Let’s welcome Vicky into the conversation.
Vicki: Hello!
Sam: So we were just kind of telling some stories.
Amy: I think the influencer there with Natalie’s husband being approached with your dad, correcting your son to go talk to the guy instead. That would be something in my world as a cultural intelligence strategist, called unconscious bias.
Sam: Right.
Amy: It’s not something intentional. It’s not something malicious. More often than not, people just have a bias based on the way they’ve been enculturated. So if you are raised in a male dominated environment where men have the expertise, you might inadvertently think that men have the expertise that they may not have it all. So that’s where kind of unconscious bias training comes in because then just becoming aware that you have bias sitting back there makes you go, Hm, is that actually true? The way I’m thinking and I’m acting.
Sam: So I think this is a good stopping point for today. We can continue this conversation in our next episode, but for now, does anybody have a good horror story?
Sam: Vicki?
Vicki: An assignment that I received one time an employee was so disgruntled,
Sam: Uh-Oh…
Vicki: And remember I’m human resources. So I was brought in to help rebuild the HR department. She destroyed. She shredded all their I-9s and Oh yeah. This was a company that obviously did not bond with employees and especially the HR manager.
Sam: There’s gotta be something illegal about that.
Speaker 1: I was going to say there should be legal, yeah.
Sam: Couldn’t she be arrested for that?
Speaker 2: Well, I’m quite sure this particular employer wouldn’t want the feds in there anyway for their own. Let me put it this way. Since the beginning of this year, eight women have left their employee.
Sam: Oh…
Vicki: Okay. How many men have left? As far as we’re talking professional managerial positions, maybe one.
Sam: And if you’re interested in any custom onboarding or training videos about your company culture, give me a call at (314) 843-3663 that’s (314) VIDEO ME, or reach out to me via email sam@cn-video.com.
Christine: Thanks for listening to super manager by CN Video Production. Visit our website at cn-video.com for additional episodes and lots of SuperManager resources, or give us a call at (314) VIDEO ME.