Facebook has a gender problem. We want Sheryl Sandberg to fix it.

Facebook has had a gender problem since its beginning. Now, with the publicity around Facebook’s upcoming IPO, business analysts, portfolio managers, potential investors, and feminist businesspeople are calling attention to the most glaring symptom of Facebook’s gender problem:

Facebook has only white men on its Board of Directors. No women, no men of color, no one to represent the 70+% of Facebook users and advertisers who are not white men.

As with all organizations, Facebook’s gender problem has deep roots and will be hard to fix. However, fixing this one thing– getting women on Facebook’s Board — is not only an easy step, it is also a powerful step.  This is one piece of the gender problem that Facebook can fix right away.

And, Facebook has an advantage that most other organizations with gender problems do not. That advantage? A powerful, visible, well-like, self-described feminist as a COO -  Sheryl Sandberg.

Sheryl Sandberg — the not-so-secret feminist businessperson

Sheryl Sandberg is one of the most successful business women of her generation. As the COO of Facebook, she runs a business that grossed $3.7 billion in 2011. In the hierarchy of Facebook, she is second only to Mark Zuckerberg, and significantly ahead of her closest possible peer, Facebook’s chief financial officer, David Ebersman.

Sandberg has set and executed the strategy behind Facebook’s internal and commercial success. She has also lead the way publicly, as Facebook has confronted complaints, burnished its corporate reputation, strengthened its corporate relationships, and worked to position the company for its IPO.

We could write pages and pages about how admirable a leader Sandberg is. Born into a family with a certain level of class, race, and social privilege, Sandberg has worked hard to turn her opportunities into real accomplishments. She has made hard choices, personally and professionally. And, Sandberg has earned her money and her position in ways that capitalism deems fair.

Sandberg is a highly-accomplished business women, a soon-to-be billionaire, and a public figure who’s influential nationally and internationally. And, Sandberg is also considered by many, both female and male, to be a role model for aspiring leaders.

Despite all this well deserved, well earned praise for Sandberg’s leadership, there is one thing that she hasn’t done. This one public action would demonstrate not only Sandberg’s power, but also her authenticity as a leader.

It’s time for Sandberg to put her words into action right at Facebook, and use her power to address Facebook’s gender issue. Starting at the top, with the Board of Directors. 

Aligning Presence, Platform & Power

Leadership requires the leader to use her presence, her platform, and her power to make a difference. And authentic leadership requires a person to align her presence, her platform, and her power to maximize their impact and make her leadership real.

We can give Sandberg high marks for how she’s using her leadership presence.

Sandberg is an inspiring, positive, personable, approachable role model. We know she’s a mom, a wife, and a girlfriend’s girl friend. We know how Sandberg thinks, that she feels, and why. People have a strong sense of who she is, they find her inspiring, and they seek advice in her personal journey.

As a personal presence, Sandberg seems authentic. Her personal life and the story she tells about herself seem aligned- she’s struggled with the demands of being a woman, a mother and a spouse at the same time as an ambitious business person. She’s worked to make a personal link between what she believes and how she presents herself.

As a public presence, Sandberg puts herself everywhere. From Vogue to Bloomberg, Davos to TED, she’s out there being seen as a savvy business woman leading an important company.

We can also give Sandberg high marks for how she’s using her leadership platform.

Sandberg is more than visible– she’s vocal.

Sandberg uses her platform to speak out, whether the message is about Facebook’s resistance to proposed chances in the EU’s data privacy policies or about how women must embrace and protect their ambition. With regard to her analysis of gender dynamics and her advice for women, she’s correct without being complete, and change-oriented without being controversial.

Even those of us who find Sandberg’s advice for change too individualistic and too tied to one kind of woman’s life story appreciate her anyway. Sandberg’s out there talking about feminism and women’s challenges on the road to equality in organizations. She talks about the ambition gap, taking a place at the table, not leaving until you’re ready to leave, and “owning your own power”.

Sandberg is a voice for women, and a voice for gender equality. In the world of business, she’s not only one of the loudest voices, she’s also one of very few advocating for gender equality.

But what about how Sandberg has used her power?

Leadership is not about ‘having’ power; it’s about using power. Anyone who wants to make a change in this world has to use what she’s got. So we ask:

How well has Sandberg used her ability to influence other powerful players at Facebook so that the company addresses and resolves its gender problem?

Specifically, how well has Sandberg used her power to influence Zuckerberg and Facebook’s Board of Directors to demonstrate a commitment to women’s achievement?

If Sandberg were using her power within Facebook, we’d see corporate policies and business results that put her public admonitions into actions.

All those things Sandberg talks about for addressing gender equity? They would be designed into Facebook’s organizational systems. We would see policies designed to get women to the table as well as keep them there.

If Sandberg were using her leadership power within Facebook on behalf of gender equality, we might also see:

• More than one highly visible, highly valued female employee
• More than white, heterosexual women at the top
• A higher percentage of women employees and male employees of color, tracking these group’s representation in the overall paid work force
• Pay equity/ absence of gender-based pay gaps
• Explicit policies & systems for increasing inclusion, that would addressing gender, race/ethnicity, as well as moving toward a work culture/ corporate culture that is free of sexism
• Work life fit policies that help men and women stay connected to their families and their communities while contributing fully at work
• Facebook Site policies that support women (for example, policies that can tell the difference between a photo of a breastfeeding mom and a photo of a topless pron star)

I recognize that these are all relatively big changes for an organization to make.  Certainly, Sandberg has demonstrated Facebook’s support for women by recruiting other prominent women to key positions of responsibility (and hopefully, influence) within Facebook. And, she has demonstrated her support for women on Boards of Directors by recommending women for positions on the Boards of other companies. There are likely to be other efforts by Sandberg that we simply don’t see, because we aren’t privy to the inside of the Facebook organization.

Yet, precisely because Sandberg’s possible internal efforts are invisible to us, it’s all the more important that she demonstrate her leadership by moving Facebook to do something visible to everyone.

Sandberg needs to use her power to get some women on Facebook’s Board of Directors

Sandberg should use her power at Facebook to get talented, competent and inspiring business women — yes, plural, in “at least 2 or 3″ onto Facebook’s Board.  Right now, the board is made up of “rich white guys—not terribly representative of the wide open world Facebook claims to represent“.

Getting women on the Facebook Board would be a public, symbolic, inspirational, functional and financially-responsible demonstration of commitment to gender equity at Facebook.

There are any number of reasons why Facebook should put women on its Board of Directors, right away:

• Women on the Facebook Board will help improve Facebook’s financial effectiveness and strategic thinking
• Women on the Facebook Board will represent Facebook’s largest groups of users
• Women on the Facebook Board will represent Facebook’s most profitable group of users
• Women on the Facebook Board will demonstrate that Facebook is a progressive corporation with enlightened (as in, not sexist, not racist) assumptions about human talent, skill and value
• And, women on the Facebook Board will burnish Facebook’s public image, keeping the stock price high.

When it comes right down to it, if Sandberg is really to be considered a ‘powerful’ woman, or a real leader, she needs to demonstrate that she has power, by tackling the ultimate leadership challenge– directing her influence upward, to get her boss(es) to do the right thing.

Sandberg herself has said that, to achieve gender equity, we need more women at the top of corporations.

Citing gender inequality as “this generation’s central moral problem”, Sandberg told Barnard graduates last Spring,

We need women at all levels, including the top, to change the dynamic, reshape the conversation, to make sure women’s voices are heard and heeded, not overlooked and ignored.

If, as Sandberg claims, there’s a “stalled revolution especially with women at the top”, Sheryl Sandberg herself can jump start it. Not with her presence or her platform alone, but with her power.

What We Want — What We Need — From Sheryl Sandberg

We don’t need Sheryl Sandberg to resign, as contrition for some kind of leadership failure.

We don’t need her stalled one step from the top, to remind us that women haven’t quite “made it”.

We DO need Sandberg to publicly  “own her own power”.

We DO need Sheryl Sandberg to put her own advice into action right there in the organization she leads.

We need Sandberg to make gender equality happen — starting at the top, at Facebook.

 There are a whole lot of us out here, rooting for you, Sheryl. You’ve told us what to do. Now, show us how it’s done.

See also:
The Horrible Work-Life Truth I Learned at the Harvard Business School Reunion
Recognizing “Women” On The Far Side of Complexity
The (Feminist) Business Bloggers’ Lament

No Women on Facebook Board Shows White Male Influence , by Carol Hymowitz, Bloomberg, Feb. 2., 2012
Sheryl Sandberg: What She Saw At The Revolution, by Kevin Conley, Vogue

Heather A. Haveman and Lauren S. Beresford, (2012) If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You the Boss? Explaining the Persistent Vertical Gender Gap in Management, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 639: 114

The Path to More Women in Senior Leadership: A User’s Guide By Anne Perschel, PhD, and Jane Perdue Summarized at Forbes.com

When it comes to discriminating against women, you’d think that only sexist organizations would be involved.   But did you ever imagine that meritocracies would encourage managers to discriminate against women?

Research conducted by Emilio Castilla and Stephen Benard, published last year in Administrative Science Quarterly, documents a disturbing dynamic that the authors call “The Paradox Of Meritocracy”. In their rigorous set of empirical studies, they found that

When an organization is explicitly presented as meritocratic, individuals in managerial positions favor a male employee over an equally qualified female employee by awarding him a larger monetary reward. (p 543)

Although these meritocratic organizations aren’t explicitly encouraging managers to discriminate, they seem to be inadvertently freeing managers to demonstrate gender bias when they award raises and bonuses.

This discovery is distressing. The Paradox of Meritocracy casts doubt on a range of efforts that organizations are using to try to reduce gender discrimination.

Meritocracies and Why We Love Them

We love meritocracies. We love the idea that organizations will link members’ career success to their actual performance.  We love meritocracies because we think that merit is the fairest, most objective way to reward some people (meritorious ones) over others. After all, meritocracies explicitly reject the idea that a member’s gender, race, sexual orientation, age, or other social category should influence how that member is evaluated and rewarded.

Managers, leaders and HR experts especially love meritocracies. They enthusiastically advocate for merit-based systems because they believe that tying rewards to performance evaluation motivates people to work harder. Not only that, but linking merit and pay also increases employees’ satisfaction with their work-reward ratio and with the organization itself.

Linking Organizational Rewards to Individual Merit

As organizations have tried to increase fairness and decrease discrimination, they have emphasized practices that create a formal link between evidence-based performance evaluations and  promotions / pay increases.

One strategy has been to shift to ‘pay for performance’, where there is an explicit link between performance rating and pay increases. A second strategy has been to decouple the performance evaluation conversation from the salary decision, so that a manager is not unintentionally thinking about both of these when considering a candidate.

Unfortunately, merit-based rewards in organizations don’t seem to do what we’ve hoped.

Merit Pay Does Not Reduce Gender-based Pay Discrimination.

Despite the intent behind them, there is a consistent problem with merit-based practices: Women and minority men in the same organization, in the same job, and with the same supervisor, are found to receive lower salary increases than white men, even after same performance evaluation score (Castilla 2008).

Let me repeat that: It has been empirically demonstrated that:

Women and minority men in the same organization, in the same job, and with the same supervisor, received lower salary increases than white men, even after same scores on their performance evaluations (Castilla 2008).

Research on merit-based pay practices has consistently demonstrated that merit-based practices do not achieve gender- or race-neutral outcomes.

Is it the practices themselves, or something else that allows for bias? In their research, Castilla and Benard shifted focus to consider the role of organizational context. They aimed to compare what happens in organizations that strive to be meritocratic versus those that do not.

Most people would expect that organizations that strive to be meritocratic would do better at reducing gender-based pay gaps. But what Castilla and Benard discovered was exactly the opposite.

Highlighting the organization’s commitment to being meritocratic actually made gender-based pay discrimination worse.

The question is — why? Why do these merit oriented practices, meant to increase fairness, end up increasing discrimination?

The Role of The Organization in Supporting Biased Actions by Individuals

Castilla and Banard propose that there is something about the organization’s intent to focus on merit that leads organization members not to focus on merit.  Their interpretation is, essentially, that when people are primed or reminded to feel unbiased, fair or objective by the organization itself, they feel freed to express the bias that they personally hold.

“Managers embedded in meritocratic contexts may experience higher confidence that their decisions are impartial, leading them to feel less motivated or to invest less effort in avoiding the application of stereotypes.” (p. 568)

“Moral Credentialing”

Castilla and Benard propose that one mechanism that explains the paradox of meritocracy is “moral credentials”. When people have established their moral credential as an unbiased person, they are more prone to express biased attitudes. It’s as though they’ve already proven to themselves – and others- that they aren’t unbiased.  However, when these supposedly unbiased people act, they reveal real bias and discriminate against others. (Monin & Miller, 2001)

In addition to the straightforward credentialing mechanism that Castilla & Benard suggest, there are two other mechanisms that work in similar ways that also might be letting managers feel free to express bias in their decisions.

Moral Credentialing by Association  

The ‘My Best Friend is X’ Effect. We know that individuals often feel that they have achieved their ‘I’m not prejudiced‘ bona fides by claiming to have relationships with the (potential) target group of discrimination. Some individuals even claim that they are not discriminatory (e.g., not racist, not sexist) because they obviously have a close association with specific members of the target group.

I like to call this the “My Best Friend is X” effect, after the most common statement people make to claim Moral Credential by Association.

Vicarious Moral Credentialing

We give ourselves moral credentials for being unbiased not only through actual relationships with others, but also through vicarious relationships with others. A study just published by Maryam Kouchaki demonstrates that individuals license or credential themselves vicariously, through identification with others who have “established non-prejudiced credentials”. Both the mechanism of association and the mechanism of identification might give managers the cover of moral credentials.

Do Organizations Provide Managers with “Vicarious Moral Credentialing”?

The idea of moral credentials influencing behavior has previously only been discussed as an individual phenomenon– something that a person does for him- or herself.

What’s new with the Paradox of Meritocracy studies is the idea that the organization itself can provide a halo of moral credentials for its managers.

The managers don’t need to think of themselves as being unbiased — they just have to think of their organization as unbiased or meritocratic. Then, the organization creates a halo for managers through three slightly different but distinct psychological tricks, when managers can:

1. Think of their organization as being meritocratic and thus assume that bias has already been removed,
2. Think that they are meritocratic because they are part of an organization that is meritocratic, and
3. Think that they are like their organization, so that if it’s meritocratic, so are they.

In all three cases, managers no longer have any motivation to avoid applying biased stereotypes or to monitor their own expressions of bias. They are off the hook.

What can organizations do about the paradox of meritocracy?

Castilla and Benard suggest that organizations can try to counter the paradoxical dynamics of meritocracy by (1) increasing transparency around evaluations and salaries, (2) by increasing accountability, and (3) by reducing managerial discretion. While I’m not a fan of reducing discretion, it makes sense to have managers be more accountable for their decisions about other people’s merit and the appropriate award for that merit.

1. Organizations should report out historical patterns of evaluation and pay increase data, for each individual manager.

Managers need to become more accountable for knowing and monitoring their own personal patterns of behavior regarding evaluating and rewarding others. Organizations can help individuals to hold themselves accountable by providing each manager with an historical summary and analysis of pay and evaluation decisions, broken out by gender, race and other diversity criteria of the persons evaluated. This way, managers can see their decisions over time, and note whether their pattern of behavior is unbiased or not.

2. Organizations can examine pay and promotion practices for design issues that make decision patterns more transparent while evaluations and awards are being made.

I can’t put my fingers on an old and useful study contrasting two methods of evaluating performers and the different effects on decision making, but… The study examined the evaluations of male and female managers, and varied whether the evaluations were made one at a time (i.e., single processing) or in groups (i.e., batch processing).

When people were evaluated one at a time, gender bias was demonstrated more often in the evaluation and reward decision. In contrast, when people were evaluated in groups, discrimination was significantly reduced. The researchers explained that in the ‘batch process’ scenario, decision-makers could actually see their gender bias in action (e.g., they could see that in 6 decisions out of 7, they were favoring the male over the female). In contrast, when decisions were made one at a time, decision managers forgot how often they rewarded a man over a woman. Batch processing might create a useful kind of real-time transparency, letting people see, evaluate and interrupt their own trend of bias.

3. Organizations can teach managers to be more mindful when they evaluate merit and rewards.

By mindful, I mean in the strictest sense, where ‘mindful’ is understood to as being not only active but also analytical about the way that they are processing information– but as seeking out and making novel distinctions. “Mindfulness is expressed in active (versus automatic) information processing, characterized by cognitive differentiation.” (Langer, 1989) What this means is that managers need triggers that interrupt automatic thinking and that force them to consider their decision criteria critically.

4. Organizations should investigate the degree to which they are actually meritocratic.

Do organizations that are actually meritocratic have managers that consistently make decisions that damage women and minority men? No. So organizations need to be transparent and hold themselves responsible for the effectiveness of programs intended to create a meritocratic organization. Organizations need to display their ‘diversity data’ internally (i.e., be transparent) and monitor to correct any patterns of bias (e.g., hold themselves responsible) in organization-wide decisions. They need to teach managers what it means to be meritocratic, and how to make decision based on merit while excluding irrelevant data. Organizations need to monitor the degree to which their claims of meritocracy map onto the outcomes of supposedly merit-based decisions.

The Paradox of Meritocracy shows that the link between an organization claiming to be a meritocracy and actually being a meritocracy contradicts reality.

Meritocracies hurt women because claims that decisions are based on merit can hide decisions that are gender-biased.

These claims of being non-sexist, non-racist, and non-discriminatory are not only false, but they can also increase bias by letting managers think that vigilance is not longer necessary.

The opposite is true –

Any organization claiming to be a meritocracy has to sustain and validate that claim by holding itself and its members accountable for unbiased, merit-based decisions, or risk being hypocritical and inauthentic.

See also:

Want More Women on Tech & TED Panels? Reject Meritocracy and Embrace Curation

References

Castilla, Emilio J., and Benard, Stephen. (2010). “The Paradox of Meritocracy in Organizations. Administrative Science Quarterly, 55: 543-576.

Monin, B. & Miller, D. T. (2001). Moral credentials and the expression of prejudice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 33-43.

Bradley-Geist, J.C., King, E.B., Skorinko, J., Hebl, M.R., & McKenna, C. (2010). Moral credentialing by association: The importance of choice and relationship closeness. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 36, 1564-1575.

Kouchaki M, (2011). Vicarious moral licensing: the influence of others’ past moral actions on moral behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101(4): 702-15.

Also, this discussion focuses on gender-based discrimination because that’s what was directly tested in the study’s experiments. However, the logic holds for other forms of social prejudice, such as prejudices against people of a given race, sexual orientation, gender performance, physical ability, and so on, that have no actual effect on an individual’s performance.

Images:
–  Figure 4, The Paradox of Meritocracy, with updated non-meritocratic condition vs. meritocratic condition, p. 566.
– Stephen Colbert, with his “Best Black friend” Alan, claims moral credentialing by association.
– Nerd Merit Badges from– you guessed it– Nerd Merit Badges

To craft a corporate reputation that seems authentic, claims about the organization’s character must be anchored in real features of the organization.

It’s the organization’s job to demonstrate a link between reputation claims and real features, and it’s the PR professional’s job to explain a link between claims and real features.

(This post is drawn from recent conversation with students in the class, “Introduction to PR Strategies & Tactics”, part of the Integrated Marketing Communications Program at the Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University.)

Any PR professional knows that his or her #1 job is to craft a strong, positive reputation for the organization. A strong, positive reputation creates value for all stakeholders, including the organization, its partners, clients, investors, employees, and customers.

The challenge for Public Relations professionals seems to be all about coordinating the efforts of different influencers – all the stakeholders that make claims about an organization.

The corporate entity and its divisions, individual members, product related marketing activities, and the chatter of the larger interested community (formerly known as ‘audiences’) all have something to say about “who” the organization is. It often seems that the focus for a PR professional is to coordinate and organize all these messages from all these influencers so that the sum total conveys the desired image of the organization.

The Real Challenge of the Public Relations Professional

The real challenge of a PR professional is something different. The real challenge is literally to explain how the reputation is real.

Why? Any organization’s stakeholders all know that the PR department is out there intentionally trying to make the organization look good. Stakeholders know that the PR professional’s job is to promote desirable images of an organization. And, they know that these desirable images are not necessary real.

Thus, the more important job of a PR professional is helping to craft an organizational reputation that is real — a reputation that is coherent, coordinated, and positive, yes, and also — a reputation that directly reflects who the organization really is.

Authentic reputations come from actual organizational features.

Stakeholders need to believe that claims about the organization come not from the mind of some clever spinmeister (aka you, the PR professional), but instead from the organization itself.

So, the PR professional’s effort should focus on explaining how the organization’s reputation is anchored in the organization’s features.

To anchor a reputation claim, the PR professional need to explain and share a cause & effect relationship between the claim and its organizational source.

Cause – Effect explanations should address questions like:

When a reputation can be traced back to the organization’s actual features, stakeholders have a reason to believe that the reputation is real.

Action Branding is the concept that brands are the sum of their actions.

– Extending this concept to personal brands and organizational brands, action branding helps individuals and organizations demonstrate, and thus authenticate, the character, values and purpose they claim to have.

– Social media creates opportunities for individuals and organizations to track, organize and display their ‘activity streams’ so that others can construe the person or organization’s identity from their actual behaviors.

Too much of what constitutes a “brand” is fake.

Most of a product’s brand is a fiction. It’s a social construction. You learned that in Marketing 101.

Brands are claims built on top of a product’s material features and attributes. Brands are claims that marketers want us to believe; when we believe these claims we make the claims and the brands they compose more or less “real”.

Still, in a consumerist culture, we’re generally aware and okay with the idea that our product brands are created largely to sell products, and not so much to reflect the inherent qualities of the product itself.

Personal Brands and Organizational Brands

When we apply the concept of “brand” to individuals and to organizations, we can run into trouble. When we replace concepts like “reputation” and “image” with “brand”, we highlight the question of whether the claims that compose these brands are authentic or not.

We know that people and organizations are “real”, but we are left to wonder whether their brands — their claims about “who they are” — actually represent what defines them. This question of how ‘real’ these brands are gets raised over and over on social media.

Social media provides individuals and organizations with a huge array of places and formats for telling us who they are. On Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and more, we use profile pictures, self-descriptions, “likes” and dislikes, and other forms of self-presentation to claim and declare who we are.

How do we know whether these declared personal brands and organizational brands are real?

To figure out whether claims and declarations are real, we try to authenticate and substantiate these claims.

Authenticating is the process of establishing the origin or ownership of a quality to confirm that this quality exists. We want to know where that quality comes from, as a way to make sure that it is inherent in the person or organization, rather than just pasted on it.

Substantiating is the process of finding the substance, the material support, behind a claim about identity. We want proof that this quality exists.

We prove who we are by what we do.

When we want to authenticate or substantiate an individual or organization’s identity claims, we look at their actions. And, when individuals and organizations want to make their claims real, they turn to behavior to show us.

Just think of the words that social psychologists use to describe how we create and substantiate our individual identities: We express. We demonstrate. We perform. We enact.

In short, we behave like the people we say we are.

Social Media => Activity Streams

Social media creates new opportunities for us to demonstrate, track, aggregate, and display these actions, through our online “activity streams”.

A person’s activity stream, technically, is the confluence of many different sequences of activity-related data that a person publishes on an assortment of different work, social and personal platforms. When/if aggregated, either formally by a service or informally by someone simply paying attention to that individual, that activity stream tells us what you’re doing, often with whom, and often why, giving us a sense who you are based on what you do.

Activity Streams => Action Branding

Using activity streams made visible on social media, individuals and organizations can engage in “action branding.” They can create a more substantiated, authentic ‘brand’ by building a sense of who they are that is crafted as much by actions as by declarations and claims.

The actions people see on our activity streams, as captured by different media platforms, provide information for substantiating and authenticating identity claims.

• On platforms like Twitter, individuals can share what they’re thinking, offer their reactions, recommend resources, and engage in conversations with others in ways that demonstrate what they are paying attention to and even what they’re doing.

• On platforms like Hashable, individuals can track and then display who they’re meeting with, what they’re doing, and why, using activity hashtags (e.g., #meeting) as well as project hashtags (e.g., #morevoices).

• On other platforms like IfWeRanTheWorld and MyImpact.org , individuals can direct, organize and display project-related micro-actions where they are actively contributing support for cause they care about. Both of these sites are intentionally designed to allow individuals and organizations to display their actions to others with a composite personal profile as an as an activity stream.

Action Branding Defined & Demonstrated

Action branding as a business tool is the brainchild of Cindy Gallop, CEO & Founder of IfWeRanTheWorld. Cindy drew on her insights about what’s missing from traditional approaches to branding to build a social media platform that aggregates individual and organizational actions that advance values-driven projects,   IfWeRanTheWorld creates a place where individuals and brands (and the organizations that own the brands) can demonstrate the attributes and values that they claim to have, by organizing, recording and displaying the actions that they take to make these claims real.

As Gallop describes action branding:

“It’s not about saying but doing. It’s not about telling but being. It’s communication by demonstration.”

This business insight is supported not only by basic social science about identity and image creation, but also by our common experience of presentation and authentication.

• An organization’s “brand” or identity or image is anchored in the human attributes of organization members, in the organization’s collective values & goals, and in that organization’s routines and practices.
• An individual’s “brand” or reputation or image is anchored in his or her human attributes, values & goals, ways of being, and actions.

For individuals and organizations, the authenticity challenge is to demonstrate that your claims about who you are are borne out by the actions that you take.

Action branding holds us to a higher level of accountability, and brings along with it a firmer sense of authenticity.

See also:
Activity Streams: Moving Beyond Event Aggregation by Mike Gotta
Datum iPhone App turns your daily routines into visual report cards FastCompany

Authentic From the Start-Up: 4 Tips from Cindy Gallop and IfWeRanTheWorld
Authentic Student Entrepreneurs: Embedding Personal, Product and Organizational Brand
When the Organization Wears its Brand

MyImpact.org IfWeRanTheWorld

Images: Tracks from Doug McG. Fingerprints (page 12-13) -…from atibens Prints from qmnonic

Can an organization be too different?

I spend a lot of time with organizations that are trying to strengthen the perception that they are different, so that they can distinguish themselves from their competition. They want their customers to see that they offer something that no other organization can.

Because being different is critical to competitive advantage, it was surprising for me to spend time with an organization that is concerned about being too different.

This organization has an unconventional approach to creating their product, and some potential customers feel uncomfortable with the company.

Potential customers wonder:

• Can we trust this organization?
• Do they really know what they’re doing?
• Can they repeat their results next year too, or were this year’s accomplishments just a fluke?

At the heart of the customers’ questions is a business decision: Should they hire this company, or should they choose instead to do business with an organization that is more conventional?

The organization works in a conservative industry, where both customer and supplier organizations are risk averse. Innovators are looked upon with suspicion. Given a choice, customers prefer safe, conventional firms with decent products to innovative firms with more promising products. (I said it was a conservative industry!)

The Wrong Way to Manage ‘Being Different’

The organization, in its efforts to manage clients’ uncertainty, presents itself as much like the other successful firms in the industry. They tell potential customers:  ”Yeah, we’re a little different but it doesn’t matter.”

The firm tries to manage the uncertainty created by being different by saying that differences don’t matter.

But that’s not true.

This firm is different, it is different in meaningful ways, and its difference is what explains how it gets superior results.

Rather than deny that they are different, this firm needs to establish their “optimal distinctiveness“. 

Optimal Distinctiveness

Optimal distinctiveness is a concept from individual psychology that addresses our personal balancing act when it comes to being similar to and different from each another. Establishing our optimal distinctiveness in each particular social context helps individuals maintain a sense of being  special while also allowing us the comfort of being part of a larger group.

For organizations, optimal distinctiveness is strategic balance– a secure place within the field, but with a distinctive hook that creates the organization’s competitive advantage.

Similarity => Perceived Legitimacy

Every organization needs to strike a balance between being different from and being like other organizations in its industry. Being like everyone else makes an organization recognizable — we know what ‘kind’ of organization it is and we know what to expect from it. Similarity makes the firm look “normal” and legitimate.

Difference => Perceived Advantage

Every organization needs to be different enough to stand out from the competition, so that people know that the organization has something different (and perhaps better) to offer them. Differentiation enhances a firm’s competitiveness by suggesting that it has no equivalents or substitutes.

When a firm tells potential clients that it doesn’t matter that the firm is different, the firm is telling clients that the firm isn’t distinctive. They are telling clients that the firm has no special skills or insights, and that there is no real reason to pick their firm over another firm.

They are dismissing their source of distinctiveness and their claim to real competitive advantage.

Manage ‘Being Different’ by becoming Distinctive

Instead of backing away from their different-ness, the firm needs to embrace it. The firm needs to establish its optimal distinctiveness, by:

• Clarifying what makes the organization different, so that they can represent themselves accurately

• Recognizing that this difference is meaningful, so that they can understand how to use it to their advantage

• Understanding this difference as something inherent to who the organization is, something based on the firm itself (e.g., not just relative to other firms), so that they can own and use this difference

• Linking this difference to their business processes and results, so that they can explain why this difference is valuable

When an organization can name, claim and explain how it is different from other firms, and when it can link these differences to skills, knowledge, and processes that make a difference, the firm can shift from being merely different to being optimally distinctive.

The ways that a firm differs from similar firms are the source of its competitive advantage. So why deny that your firm is different? Instead, find your optimal distinctiveness.

See also:
Is Authenticity the key to being “Meaningfully Different”?
Measuring Meaningful Differences: College Rankings and Identity

How can your organization claim to be making the world better, when your business model depends on making the world worse?

This question about corporate social responsibility efforts has bugged me for decades — pretty much since I learned what capitalism was.

The question came up again for me Tuesday during the conversation at the hopping Social Media Week 11 NYC event Let Them Eat Tweets: Online Organizing for Real World Change. The conversation centered on the panelists’ experiences with using social media (and online engagement in general) to influence offline/real world behavior towards change.

The conversation didn’t conclude with a definitive answer, and I’ve found no third position between pragmatism and idealism. But I do have a new perspective on the problem/solution that is somewhat comforting, that I want to share and get your thoughts on.

“Social Change” can be driven by many players — not all of them are players with a simple, inherently positive impact on the world.

In an ideal world, no organization would create more damage than it could correct, use more resources than it could renew, or influence the world in anything but a net positive way. In an ideal world, organizations would not feel the conflict between the business they are in and the social good they want to support in the world.

In the real world, we find many organizations taking from society with one hand, and giving back to society with the other. [Note that not all organizations in this position are for-profit businesses. However...] Many corporations have this kind of relationship between their business and their corporate social responsibility efforts. When your organization is in this position, it has a rather compromised role in social change.

The Let Them Eat Tweets panel had representatives from five very kinds of organizations, each with its own change agency role. The panelists included a social media-for-good consulting firm principle, a political performance artist, a non-profit’s social media marketer, a corporation’s public relations/outreach manager, and a global governmental communications/public affairs director.

Each of the panelists had a different perspective on the value of corporate involvement in social change– seeing corporations as clients, as enemies, as funder-philanthropists, as direct and positive forces, and as one of many partners in a global effort. The audience participants also ranged from pro-corporate to anti-business, with some of us straddling that divide on a daily basis.

Raising the Challenge

A participant challenged the corporate representative, from MTV, with a sincere question (which I paraphrase):

How could MTV, a corporation that thrived on increasing consumerism, superficial celebrity, hyper-sexualization, etc. claim to be doing any real ‘good’ in the world with their social media campaigns against relationship violence, sexually-transmitted diseases testing, and rocking the vote?

In essence the participant asked– How can you claim to be making the world better, when your business model depends on making the world worse?

That’s the kind of question that usually either stops the conversation dead or starts a fight. The participant audience moved to take sides, but the MTV representative stepped in to keep the conversation open. He acknowledged the participant’s position as one worth discussing and not dismissing, and he asked the participant to consider whether his characterization (taken perhaps at one moment in time, or built on a simplified perception of the organization) really reflected “the richness of MTVs programming and activism”. So far, so good. He went on to explain that MTV was really making a difference — a measurable difference — in young adults’ social behavior. MTV’s social media-based change initiatives were achieving real results. MTV was using online social media to influence offline behavior for social good.

I’m not quite sure what was said next, because I got too busy writing down my own thoughts. [You can watch the session online here.] I have so ‘been there’ myself, asking organization members how they can reconcile the damage they do in and with their businesses with the contributions they make, and how they can tip the balance towards the positive side.

We believe that the best kinds of CSR are related to the identity of the organization – Good CSR extends the values of the organization, benefits from the organization’s core competencies, and/or supports and serves the organization’s customers. This is CSR that is “aligned” and “authentic”.

We also wish that want organizations to just focus their CSR on cleaning up the problems that they themselves create. Sometimes, corporations  can and will blend CSR and ‘process improvement’ because it ultimately helps the bottom line. Then, it’s a win-win-win. The CSR fixes the system so that the damage that the organization itself creates is reduced, or eliminated. This is efficient, sensible, and ideal.

Most of the time, though, we can’t get organizations to do this, and we don’t really try to. We don’t think we can convince corporations to promote social change that directly conflicts with their business model. We’re pragmatic.

Really, who are we kidding to think that oil companies will help us reduce our dependence on oil?

If we put all our energies towards trying to get corporations to bite the hands they feed on, change will take a really long time, because so few organizations will be willing to do this. So, with regard to MTV, as long as Viacom’s business is sustained by advertising, we’re unlikely to get a senior employee of MTV to decide to put MTV’s CSR efforts into reducing consumerism.

Does that mean that MTV’s efforts are hypocritical? Or inauthentic? Or worthy of our disdain?

I don’t think an organization’s efforts are hypocritical, even when they focus on fixing problems they aren’t causing, if they are fixing problems where they can uniquely make a difference.

In this particular case, MTV has the voice, the attention, the engagement, and the tools to reach their audience and to influence their audiences’ behavior. And, in this case, the corporation is using these capacities for good.

I don’t think an organization’s efforts are inauthentic, even when they focus on fixing problems they aren’t causing, if they are addressing the same social issues inside their organization as they are outside with their audience.

At MTV, for example, their CSR could be authentic if they held employee workshops on cyberbullying. And, MTV could send employees information about sexual health, encourage everyone to get tested for STDs, and give them everyone who earned one a Foursquare badge.

[I didn't get details from the MTV rep, but he did tell me that they push their initiatives inside MTV to their own employees as well as to their audience.]

Anticipating the mention of “the real world” and the value of a pragmatic approach, the audience participant quoted Henry David Thoreau:

For every thousand hacking at the leaves of evil, there is one striking at the root.

That’s a powerful image, and it does describe the real world ratio of pragmatic/incremental vs. idealistic/profound social change approaches. We know that striking at the root is more efficient, and if we could get every organization to change its business model to eliminate the damage that it causes, we’d do that.

At the same time, though, I’ve spent enough time in my garden to know that if you hack away at the leaves of an invasive plant for long enough, with purpose, intention and precision, you can eventually kill it prune it into a size and shape that adds to the garden rather than damages the garden.

Pragmatic can seem boring. Mine isn’t a very heroic image, all of us out there with our hedge clippers whacking away at invasive branches. But pragmatic action, purposeful, deliberate and precise, actually can — and will– make a difference.

See also:
Authentic CSR: Should Dawn publicize its involvement in Oiled Bird Rescue?
Balancing Profit and Purpose at Whole Foods: Red Fish Blue Fish
When Will “Social Business” Become Social Change Business?
MAC’s Apology for Juarez Makeup Line: Effective and Authentic
Want Authenticity? Design Homophobia Out of the Organization

Social Media helps us get work done. And, Social Media has a unique ability to show us something about how we get work done that we often overlook. It allows us to see both conventional work and “invisible work”.

What is invisible work?

Invisible work includes all kinds of energy and tasks that contribute to achieving organizational goals but that happen offstage, are done by people who we don’t pay attention to, or aren’t recognized as ‘work’.

When work is invisible, we don’t see how it contributes to results, how much effort it takes to perform, or how much skill it takes to do this invisible work well. We fail to appreciate what this invisible work contributes, and we fail to value it. And yet, without this invisible work, the effort behind it, and the people who perform it, we’d be hard-pressed to achieve much at all.

Social Media Reveals Relational Work

One of the most common forms of invisible work is ‘relational work‘ — all that effort we put into creating, sustaining and transforming relationships. This social, psychological, interpersonal, and emotional work is critical to our ability to contribute to the bottom line in an organization.

[Consider how, when it comes to performance reviews, we're rarely able to provide examples of this kind of work. We have examples of “concrete” task-y work that we've got done–wire frames, spreadsheets, sales calls–but we are less able to show a track record of the invisible work that made this other work possible.]

Now that social media — tools like Twitter, Yammer, SocialCast, Hashable– lets us see and track interactions between people, we can also see what’s going on in these relationships. These tools show us when a person is reaching out to someone, making introductions, recognizing others, affirming them, and more.

Social Media shows us not only who is connecting with whom, but also what they’re sending across that connection. We can see if people are sharing links, offering suggestions, making introductions, or offering positive words.

Beyond basic relationship-building actions, we can see people engaging in the absolute best and most difficult kinds of relational work. We can see them creating work relationships that foster the growth of the individuals in the relationship, the growth of the relational network, and the flourishing of the organization itself.

Relational Work Takes Effort and Skill

Growth-oriented relationships require real skill to build and to maintain. With social media, we can watch as people demonstrate skills like listening closely, acknowledging vulnerability, experiencing and expressing emotion, participating in the development of another, and managing mutual expectations.

Social Media brings into the light the invisible work that goes into nurturing, supporting, encouraging and facilitating the behavior of others.

Once we see this relational work, we can begin

• To see the value of this work,
• To see those who do so this work, and
• To value those who do this work.

Even better, we can learn from the people who contribute relational work to make our own work relationships stronger, more productive and more generative.

Social media itself doesn’t build relationships; we do. However, social media builds our ability to appreciate relationships and the skill the require.

Social Media helps us see the amount, the qualities, and the source of strong relationships, helping us value the work and the people who do it.

See also:

• Be Your Own Hashtag
• How Social Media Create Organizational Meaning
• Is your organization flourishing or withering?

Images: Invisible from Daniel*1977, Je suis toujours invisible from Perfesser

References:
Daniels, A. K. (1987) Invisible Work, Social Problems, 34 (5).
Fletcher, J. (1999) Disappearing Acts: Gender, Power, and Relational Practice at Work. The MIT Press.

As I was gearing up this morning to look over the past year’s blog posts, I found myself being pulled down by that feeling that I was “late again”.

It seems as though I missed another key seasonal window … while other bloggers spent the time between Cristmas and New Year’s crafting recaps of the past year and making plans for 2011, I was putting snowsuits and mittens in the dryer. Over and over.

As working moms go, I know I’m not alone in this feeling that I’m often behind. But I am starting to see that it’s not the management of work, but rather the management of family, that explains my experience of being behind schedule.

When you are the primary child-caring, working parent (as I am) your first responsibility is to make sure that things flow smoothly for your children. When holidays and ‘breaks’ arrive, these are almost never down time.

Sure, I had my ‘out of office’ auto-reply set so that colleagues wouldn’t expect prompt email replies from me, but it wasn’t because I was vacationing. Instead of being “at work” doing work work, I was at home doing family work — hosting relatives, wrapping gifts, cooking, packing, unpacking, driving, shoveling, and doing all that extra stuff that needs to be done when kids are off school and families are celebrating. I was the person working to make the holidays happen for the rest of my family.

And while I genuinely loved the holidays for the family time that they are, the holidays just aren’t a time off. They aren’t time to catch up on work. They aren’t time to step back. The holidays are a time for me to be fully there, in the family, so that there is a family.

For me, the holiday break actually began yesterday, with my kids’ first day back at school, and my own first day back at work work. What I’ll have is not really a break in my work so much as a comparative reduction in work-life chaos.

I will go to my office, and it will be quiet. I will spread papers out on my desk, and they will not get mixed up with receipts from Amazon. I will organize ideas on my notepads without the second running column of a grocery list. I will look at my computer screen, and it will not show me my progress on Pokemon Platinum.

There will be reflection, there will be a consulting proposal, there will be a fun conference. And there will be peace. Briefly.

I will aim to nurture that peace by hushing the nagging voice in my head that says I’m late, that tells me I’ve missed the window, that suggests that by the second week of January no one will care to look back on 2010.

I aim to nurture that peace by embracing (okay, maybe just adjusting to) the fact that my own work schedule is lagged two weeks behind most everyone else’s for a reason that has nothing to do with my desire to get my work work done. When my break arrives two weeks after most other peoples’, it won’t be because I am late, but rather because I have been there, the whole time, with and for my family.

As I read this over, it sounds a little like an apology, or some kind of over-emotive ratiocination of a variant of procrastination. But it isn’t.

It’s just work and life, and finding ways to understand how they fit me.

See also:
Why Walking The Talk Can Be Harder Than We Plan, by Chrysula Winegar at Work. Life. Balance.
Another World From Which We Came, by Julie Daley at unabashedly female

Images: The ‘Let It Snowman’ recording snowfall in our yard, the Joy-Peace-Love banner my girls made for me this year.

Do you ever have a good idea, but find yourself unable to execute it fully because the technology simply isn’t available? And, then, just a few short years later the technology appears and you squeal “Where Have You Been All My LIFE!”?

I’ve been having that relationship with the concept of hashtags.

A hashtag is a keyword, indicated by a hash symbol # that anchors the keyword to other information (in the manner of a bookmark) and allows that information to be searched and found by other people. Hashtags are metadata — data about data– that help us recall, locate, filter, and aggregate more granular data. The hashtag #favoritejaneaustenquotes helps you find any tweet in which someone mentions– you guessed it– her favorite Jane Austen quote.

With hashtags, you can find blog posts, tweets, and all manner of online data related to the idea captured by the hashtag. You can see who’s talking about something, what they are saying, and what it means to them.

Hashtags make conversations searchable — in real time, and historically. Hashtags also help us find other people who are interested in the same ideas.

Hashtags cohere conversations on social networks (like twitter) since people can locate, watch, and contribute to conversations by using the relevant hashtag(s). (A great example of the is #prstudchat – a weekly conversation for students of public relations.)

What are Hashtags really for?

Back in November of 2009, Baratunde Thurston shared a funny and provocative presentation at the Web 2.0 NY Expo: “There’s a #Hashtag for That.” Baratunde was riffing on the fun people have creating satirical hashtags and corresponding Twitter accounts (e.g., @swineflu, #swineflu) and using these as memes to provoke creativity,  commentary and conversation across Twitter.

When I watched Baratunde’s talk, I wondered:

– What if we each had our own hashtag? Not a satirical one, but an authentic hashtag?
– What if we created and routinely used a hashtags to capture and communicate who we were, and what we cared about?
– What if we intentionally used these hashtags to communicate not only to other people, but also back to ourselves?

In addition to being meta-data that tell us what’s going on where, hashtags can also work at the personal, cognitive level.   Online in the digital world, hashtags can work like mantras — like those words we choose each January to help us focus our goals for the year. As simple short reminders, hashtags can help us focus our efforts. Hashtags can help our selves pay attention. Hashtags can remind us what is important.

How can we use hashtags as tools for our “selves”?

We can also use hashtags as more than reminders of features, ideas, topics, attributes, sentiments and/or actions. We can actually use hashtags to create meaning, individually and collectively. Here’s how.

Hashtags Help Us Name “It”.
When you give a feature, idea, topic, attribute, sentiment and/or action an name, you make that thing visible to yourself and others. You show yourself and others that the concept exists. You create meaning by naming something previously unnamed.

For example, there’s an experience/sentiment that I have often, that doesn’t have a name. I’m currently on the hunt for a descriptive & evocative hashtag to capture it.
“It”, right now, is “ the experience of having linked/pinged/interacted digitally with ____, so that I now have an energy surge of purpose and support. “ Now that I’ve described this experience, you can recognize it. But if I could name it by hashtagging it, we could do even more with the concept.

Hashtags Help Us Claim It.
When we use a hashtag, we can make that thing our own. We can use the hashtag to note for ourselves (and others) every time that we’re feeling it, doing it, sending it, verbing it. And, when we attach a hashtag to our communications and our actions, we help people understand what we are experiencing, what we are trying to convey, and that this matters to us.

Hashtags Help Us Fame It.
When we use a hashtag, we not only name (capture) and claim (attach to us) a concept, we are also then able to promote that idea. We can share the idea, we can propagate the idea, and we can meme the idea.

You may not have thought of “the experience of having linked/pinged/interacted digitally with ____, so that I now have an energy surge of purpose and support” but as soon as I have a good hashtag and use it, you can spread that idea wherever you want. Because we’ll all be able to recognize it and share it.

Being a Hashtag

Naming, claiming and faming are all good — but they do not quite make the idea a part of you. To do that you actually have to “be” the hashtag. You have to take the whole idea one step further into your self.

To “Be” a Hashtag you have to activate it– you have to make that idea real in your words and your actions.

We may actively try to be or do something that’s important to us, without getting the kind of response we hope for. Even though we think actions speak louder than words, those actions aren’t always easy to interpret. When you use a hashtag next to an action, you give other people the meta-data to understand what you are doing.

• Why do you keep tweeting about getting women on tech panels?
  Because you are all about #morevoices.
• What are these ten quotes about honesty?
  You are reminding yourself (and us) that you’re working to be your #trueself.
• Why have you just sent a #ThursdayTxs to that follower?
  Because you care about being @thoughtful, and you are showing this in your action.

In your relationships with others, being a hashtag makes your actions easier to interpret. You are more effective (especially with people who don’t know you well), because people know how to see you. You are more trustworthy, because people can see what you do and what you mean, and they know they can count on you for this.

Even more important, being a hashtag helps you enact that quality, that idea, more often. And the more often you enact it, the more it becomes a part of you. The more you “be” it, the more you become it.

I had a very busy session online this afternoon between a school play and a conference call, where for forty minutes or so I was tweeting and emailing four different tweeple about three different projects. With each interaction, I was _having_ “it”:   “the experience of having linked/pinged/interacted digitally with ____, so that I now have an energy surge of purpose and support”.

But even better I was _being_ “it” — I was giving it back. I was intentionally responding to my colleagues in a way that sent “the energy of purpose and support” out to them and right back to me. And it was great.

And it was “me” — doing what’s important to me.

Now, if only I could find a hashtag for that.

Images:What the Heck is a #Hashtag & 3 Steps to Set Up Your Own Hashtag, Hashtag Heart by Drew Olanoff on Flickr

Are there enough women¹ being included in public lineups of remarkable business people?

Are enough women being selected for conference panels on Technology & Entrepreneurship, for the roster of the annual TED conferences, or even for the Silicon Alley Daily’s 100 Coolest New York Tech people?

No. There are not enough² women being chosen for these prime lineups and speaking gigs.

The under-representation of women on these panels doesn’t seem right. This under-representation excludes women from the the benefits of these spotlights. And the paucity of women panelists reinforces stereotypes that too few women are smart enough or accomplished enough to have valuable views to share. The absence of women even prevents many great ideas, ideas promoted by women, from being shared with audiences that would find them interesting and useful.

We want to get more women onto Tech panels and TED lineups, and to do this we have to dispense with the myth that these lineups are created though meritocracy.

Meritocracy

Meritocracy is a selection process where people & their ideas are advanced on the basis of their ability, performance, achievement, or merit. In a process that is meritocratic, the cream rises to the top, just like in the cappuccino on the left.

In a meritocratic process, potential selections are evaluated against a set of “objective”, fixed standards. Those who meet these standards are “qualified”, and they advance. Those who do not meet these standards are “not qualified” and they do not advance.

When a panel or lineup of speakers is selected through meritocracy, all of the panelists have surpassed the standards, met the qualification criteria, and thus earned a place on the panel. Those who are not selected are understood to be below the standard, to be unqualified, and to be unworthy of a place.

In a meritocratic process, those selected are selected because -and only because- they meet the standardized criteria.

Meritocracy: Selecting all, or selecting at random

When meritocracy is the process being used, a meritocratic panel, conference, “best of” list, or other group includes any person who meets the criteria for selection. If the program or panel has fewer spaces than qualified speakers, and the subset of speakers is chosen at random from the group of qualified people, this is a meritocracy.

However, any program, panel, or exhibit that has fewer spaces than qualified speakers, where the speakers are chosen any other way than at random, is decidedly not a meritocracy. It is a curation.

Curation

Curation is a selection process where people, ideas and things are advanced on the basis of meeting both a merit standard and a pedagogical/ educational standard. Curation creates a subgroup of speakers and ideas that together make a point. The composition of the subgroup is not random, it is meaningful.

Curators are trying to make a point, to tell a story, to demonstrate a set of relationships, and to make a statement.

Curators identify a goal that they want the panel, conference, or list to fulfill. Curators establish selection criteria that go beyond merit, and they apply this criteria as they select from the pool of qualified speakers the smaller set of speakers that help their panel, their conference, and their “best of” list make a point.

Curators actively exercise their judgment to create an end product, an intentional sum of the parts. As Maria Popova, noted curator of BrainPickings, explains in this interview at NeboBlog:

The art of curation isn’t about the individual pieces of content, but about how these pieces fit together, what story they tell by being placed next to each other, and what statement the context they create makes about culture and the world at large.

Meritocracy  is a mechanical selection process. Curation is an artistic, pedagogical, judgment process.

The problem with the TED Lineup and Tech Panel conversations is that these selections claim to be meritocracies, when in fact they are curations.

Whether the people making the selection see it or not, the people choosing these panels are applying criteria that goes beyond simple merit. When you have an assortment of men and women who are qualified to be on panels, to speak on stage, to share their “Ideas worth sharing”, but you turn out panels that routinely feature white men in positions of power (see VY’s comment, below) – lots of them– and rarely include women of color or white women, or men of color, you are likely using curation criteria that favors white men.

The criteria that leads TED curators and Tech Conference organizers to put mostly white men on stage can reflect outright gender bias (e.g., we prefer men, we think men are smarter) or indirect gender bias (e.g., theories that women promote are less interesting than the ones men promote), but in the end, it’s gender bias. It is criteria that goes beyond merit, and reflects the curators’ judgments.

Why Rejecting Meritocracy Matters

When you presume that meritocracy is the desired process, you “change the ratio” using tactics that increase the number of women in the pool of potential speakers so that, in a random selection process, women are as likely as men to be selected.

These tactics for creating gender balance on a panel using meritocracy include:

• Filling the pipeline to grow more qualified women,
• Ramping up the ‘needle-in-the-haystack’ search for qualified women,
• Oversampling (e.g., raising the odds for) the same few qualified women, selecting them over and over, and/or
• Developing additional skills to raise the ability of nearly-qualified women.

Notice that none of these steps asks us to consider the criteria we are using to select the actual speakers from the pool of qualified speakers.

It’s important to reject meritocracy as the central principle for selecting speakers and lineups, because the actions that gender balance a meritocracy won’t get more women on panels. We already have a lot of women who are qualified, and a lot of women who are available, to be on these panels and appear in these lineups. Increasing the number of qualified women does little to change the selection of panels when the underlying curation criteria remains biased (intentionally or not) towards men.

We have to accept that panel selection is never about “merit”. Panel selection is always about creating a group, program, or event that intentionally makes a point. It is always a process of curation.

Why Embracing Curation Matters

We need to embrace the idea that curation is the actual process currently being used. And, we need to embrace the idea that curation is a desirable and appropriate process that we should use more consciously. Only by embracing the process of curation can we consciously examine the real goals behind these panels, conferences and lists, and evaluate whether we are using the right criteria to judge who is selected and who is not.

Embracing curation means that we need to pay attention to the actual reasons why we are creating the panels, the conferences, and the “best of” lists in the first place.

When we embrace the reality that speaker lineups are created by curation, we address the absence of women from conference stages by:

1. Clarifying the point we want to make, the story we want to tell, and the meaning we want to create with the panel, conference or list,
2. Establishing the curatorial criteria that will guide our judgment as we craft a subgroup that will raise or make our point,
3. Confirming that we are not trying to make a point about gendered preferences,
4. Identifying the set of men and women who meet the baseline objective criteria of being ‘qualified’ and
5. Selecting from among this set the subset of women and men whose talks will also meet our curatorial criteria.

To be sure…

… there are ways to challenge the claim that curation, not meritocracy, is the appropriate selection process. You can start by trying to prove that meritocracy is working and that women are underrepresented because, in fact, there are not any ‘qualified women’ with ideas worth sharing or with experience worth drawing upon. With resources like GeekSpeaker, #ChangeTheRatio, Women Who Tech, and the Field Guide to the Female Founders, Influencers & Deal Makers, that’s a pretty hard thing to prove in the tech space specifically, but also more broadly.

You could also try arguing that we use meritocracy to select these panels because we rank the potential candidates and take only the top 4, or the top 33, or the top 100. But, you know that ‘ranking’ is rarely scientific and/or completely merit based. At a certain level (say, among the top 100 people with interesting ideas), the difference between a person ranked #8 and a person ranked #10 is so minimal as to be insignificant, or so subjective that it’s a matter of taste. Think about it, is the Sexiest Man Alive in 2009 really Johnny Depp? Or is it Robert Pattinson?

Recommending action steps that treat the under-representation of women as a problem related to meritocracy is misguided. Better we should acknowledge that we curate these lists, panels and conferences to make a point.

Then we should ask ourselves quite clearly, what is the point we are trying to make?

Notes:
¹ The issue of representation on panels and TED is not exclusive to women (women of color and white women). Men of color are also under-represented, and the arguments above apply to the under-representation of men of color.  I’m focusing on women in this post.

2 What is “enough” or “underrepresented”? If the population of the USA is 51% female, and assuming that the ratio of women with good ideas to men with good ideas in anywhere between 1:1 and 1: 2, “enough” would be anything from 50% to 33% of the speakers in the lineup. Consider that at 33%, ‘enough’ remains a qualified term.

See also:
Too Few Women in Tech: There’s More Than You Think

Images:
where the plain – topped cappuccino represents meritocracy and the one with the explicit design represents curation:
Modena Cappucino from eblaser
Cappucino Art from kerryj.com
Barista Fair Trade Coffee, Götgatan… from vargklo