SuperManager: Equal Pay and Gender Bias – Part 3 (What’s the Solution?)

Christine: You’re listening to SuperManager, the podcast for people who manage people and business. With ideas, trends, and expert interviews to help you be a super manager.

Amy: Okay, so welcome back to part three of our super manager conversation about equal pay and gender bias. And in this episode we’re going to go around the room and talk about some solutions and you’re going to hear from my totally equal super friends.

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 Emory with Ignite Strategies. I serve as a sales systems architect for small and midsize businesses.

Vicky: Vicky 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.

Amy: And I am Samantha Naes with CN video. We do corporate video production.

Amy: Amy, what do you feel needs to change? What do you feel is the solution?

Amy: For me, it always goes back to invisibility. When Natalie was in the room, she was talking about her husband being referred to instead of her expertise. So just that bias shows up that women’s voices and opinions aren’t as valuable and that’s where we still are as a society. So one of the statistics that might be helpful in order for there to be true parody in a room, for example, a corporate meeting for there to be parody in the room, women need to make up 70% a super majority in the room for women’s voices to be considered as valuable. So there still is that bias. So what she experienced, I guess at that trade show where her husband was perceived as the expert instead of her, she was the expert in that case. So that’s just the reality that we’re dealing with right now. And I’m not sure it’s any one person’s fault, it’s just a lack of awareness that there’s an opportunity to make sure that women’s voices are heard in the room. And that’s valuable for a company too, because whenever you have anybody in an organization feeling minimized, sidelined, or silenced, that’s going to stifle productivity, innovation, profit in any organization. So I think it’s making sure that people feel heard and valued and seen both men and women.

Sam: And here I interrupt you, I’m, I’m part of the statistic.

Vicky: Well actually, we in the United States are a Judeo Christian country, and if so many people adhere to biblical teachings, you have a lot of our religious instruction is by males. And in fact, through the structure of that particular religion or belief pattern, whatever, women cannot hold a role as teacher, leader, pastor, whatever. So you start from some of the very, very kernel of a person’s life that it’s all the way back to our socialization as human beings. Okay. And what happens is you see, and you begin to say, well, I need to have a man that’s in this role to tell me this because this woman, she didn’t know anything. Okay. All right. Yeah. It permeates our society. It permeates throughout the country. I purposely, I just like, I just got in from a doctor’s appointment. I purposely do not go to male doctors anymore.

Amy: Hmm.

Vicky: Why would you take a car into a mechanic that doesn’t know how to drive? So what? I’ve got totally different than what that male doctor has. Okay, so it’s,

Sam: Hey, we chuckle, but for the longest time they were talking about medications. Painkillers were only tested to work for men.

Vicky: Yes.

Amy: It’s still happening.

Sam: It’s still happening.

Amy: It’s still happening. The average time for a woman in the ER…

Gerry: for rats, do they work for rats? It’s.

Sam: male rats

Vicky: It’s just throughout our society and then to change horses so to speak. As you become gainfully employed in the labor market, you’re very basic who you are does not change at that point. It certainly does take a purposeful change.

Amy: Right?

Vicky: Because of who you are. Just like my doctor selection, I’m not going to fall into that trap. Okay.

Gerry: Now, Vicky, you’ve made that conscious decision with doctors since about when

Vicky: I actually start out with when I married my husband.

Gerry: Is he a doctor?

Vicky: No, no. He just had issues. But anyway, that’s another podcast.

Gerry: This is pertinent to the topic for about how long have you been in making that?

Gerry: Let’s see, how old am I? Probably half a century. Okay, really

Gerry: Because what you find though was there was a point in time where there weren’t female doctors and that the,

Vicky: I’m not that old.

Gerry: Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa. I’m a lawyer and I, and I can tell you law school, I can tell you better than medical school. But I think they were on similar patterns and there weren’t women. The medical schools being said they weren’t going. What they were probably getting the women that had the aptitude were probably being steered in the nursing school instead. Okay. But in any case, the medical schools change these male dominated medical schools changed., They were forced to do so by the federal government in title 9. Okay. But we’ll put that aside. Since about 1970 there are now many, many more females in medical school. I would venture a guess and it’s only a guess cause I haven’t looked at the statistics, but there’s probably at least half of the enrollment in medical schools is female. So there are many more choices than there used to be.

Gerry: in law school, it’s probably slightly more female than male.

Amy: We know that more women are going to college now than men.

Gerry: That’s by a fairly big percentage, at least my older daughter, where she graduated from, it was like 62% female, but it was a coed school forever.

Sam: Joel, what do you feel is the solution to the problem?

Joel: I wanted to weigh in on a couple of things, so much of this is unconscious. It’s something that’s ingrained in people’s minds. It’s preexisting, it’s unconscious.

Sam: And not just in the office, but parents and siblings.

Joel: I mean, whether for example, my son’s teacher at daycare told him all little boys, like their moms more than their dads. And so he decided, he liked his mom more than his dads. That’s the way the world works. So it begins manifesting itself. Whether it’s direct of that or less direct from a very early age and people grow up with that perspective. But I think the challenges when drawing it to somebody’s attention that it exists is not doing it in an accusatory manner.

Amy: Right.

Joel: Because it is so unconscious. It’s not intentional. People may even perceive that they’re not doing it. They may even perceive they’re going out of their way to not.

Amy: They’re probably not aware that they’re doing,

Joel: Right, and.

Amy: that’s why it’s called unconscious bias. Yes.

Joel: On some level. I’m not saying everybody, anytime you paint with broad strokes, it’s over generalized.

Amy: Right.

Joel: So I think a lot of the time people are not consciously aware that they’re doing it, and whether it’s the last principal at my son’s middle school who just referenced the girls in the office, they talked about the administrative support and the girls. He was 65 years old. This is the way they were doing it for years. It’s just the way it is. What’s wrong with it? It’s just the way it is now.

Vicky: But do you know How many women refer to other women as the girls?

Amy: Yeah. Yeah.

Joel: No, I’m just saying I don’t think he’s even, he’s oblivious to it, like he’s not even aware.

Sam: I have a question though. It might be an objection or maybe a question about what you’re saying Joel because I stated my opinion from the start that I think unconscious bias is the biggest problem right now.

Amy: The culprit.

Sam: Yeah, At the time. The laws, you talked about Gerry, I think they were very necessary at the time and I think now is the time to fix the unconscious bias. But Joel, if I’m hearing you correctly, it sounds like saying because it’s unconscious because they don’t realize they’re doing it. The people that are being affected by it should be kinder and gentler in letting the person know that there is a problem.

Amy: Oh no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Sam: Go ahead.

Amy: It’s just we have to be careful about shaming and blaming people into changing their behavior. That doesn’t work. It’s not helping.

Gerry: Well time out the law is a shame and blame thing and it changes behavior. It forces you and the time has not come and gone for title seven. Title seven is alive and well because discrimination still does occur and it’s necessary, but I think social attitudes have changed quite a bit. There used to be a point in time where it probably was a badge of honor for someone to be called a bigot to some degree, and I don’t think that’s the case anymore. Now people protested. That is such a horrible to be called, so I think that’s all because of this change

Amy: the law. You’re right, I can’t speak to it and perhaps shame and blame is the approach, but I know that when I go into an organization to teach about cultural intelligence, I invite people in and when an HR manager says, well, should we just have the whole leadership group? My answer will be how about we open up my training to who would like to attend because not everybody’s ready to begin to outsmart their unconscious bias. And why Why shame and blame

Sam: But we’re getting to kind of the core of the issue here,

Gerry: but the law is a blunt instrument and it says, we’re drawing a line here and don’t cross the line. Now some people, that’s not a big deal. Other people are going to try and edge up to l

Joel: Legal and ethical are not necessarily the same. All I was trying to suggest is that.

Amy: I’m sorry Joel, I didn’t mean to jump down your throat..

Joel: I didn’t get to answer the question. Just I’m more passive than your average guy. Uh, so, uh, what I was getting at is that when you’re addressing an issue of unconscious bias, if you come at it from an angle of you’re at fault, you’ve done this wrong blame, blame, blame, the people shut down. They’re like, no, I go out of my way. I treat everybody the same. You know, that’s, that’s their response. And they may genuinely perceive that they’re doing that even if they’re not. So it requires a different conversation usually facilitated by somebody outside of that.

Amy: It requires cultural intelligence.

Joel: Yeah, as opposed to between the two, between the two people.

Sam: so you bring in, dr Amy,

Amy: you can shift behaviors in the way people’s.

Joel: I wanted to share a little story real quick too. And anecdote and amusing experience. Number of years ago was that a large parent teacher to IEP meeting for one of my children in elementary school and at the table it was 13 women and me.

Amy: Oh, so parody.

Joel: Yes. To your point, what was really funny about it? I mean it was really clear to me that my opinion was not valued. I mean it was made abundantly clear that.

Amy: A little bit of discrimination going on there?

Amy: Oh look at that.

Vicky: But how did that make you feel?

Joel: What was interesting about it? I walked out I’m like, I bet I bet that’s what women feel like all the time. That was my initial thought.

Vicky: It registered, I’ve negotiated over 80 labor agreements in my career. Okay. So you can imagine a woman with a Southern accent walking in and I had been in certain instances cautioned at the way I present myself at the table or I’ll have shut down city, which is fine, which is fine. But when there is one particular organization in the st Louis area that I do some consulting for that there are some companies they won’t put me in because I’m too direct. Okay.

Sam: Are you an N T also.

Sam: and then Jerry, what do you feel is the solution to the problem?

Gerry: The problem is discrimination and the solution is don’t do it.

Sam: Well, I mean, ideally,

Gerry: but I mean there’s only so much laws can do, right? And you have to have people of Goodwill and even if they’re of good will trying their best, there can still be unconscious bias at play, but they have to be open minded. So that’s the human condition.

Amy: Unconscious bias is still very much at play in the United States. Only one in five corporations have actually trained employees in unconscious bias. So it’s a fairly new concept. We have a new, yeah, we have a new civil rights rights movement afoot in the United States, but still we’re not aware of the bias that’s influencing our words and actions. So even the best of intentions don’t help. If we’re not aware yet, and we’re getting there, it’s happening.

Sam: And Amy, I know you do training on this type of thing. If there’s an organization that is concerned about this or has a problem with it, how do they get ahold of you for help with that?

Amy: They can go to my website, www.empoweringpartners.com and we can talk about workshops on unconscious bias, but even more importantly, after unconscious bias, a lot of folks will feel kind of awkward and being aware that bias is sitting there. So cultural intelligence takes it that step further. And so now what do I do? How do I behave, and how do I talk? Now that I’m a little bit more aware of how I come across to people,

Christine: thanks for listening to super manager by CN video production. Visit our website at cn-video.com for additional episodes and lots of super manager resources, or give us a call at (314) VIDEO ME.