It always hurts when organizations lie.

Lying hurts the organization, the employees, the organization’s partners, the organization’s prospects, and most importantly, lying hurts the organization’s constituents.

When an organization does something that sparks a”‘reputation crisis”, the absolute worst way to respond is to lie.

As the reputation crisis of the Susan J. Komen Foundation continues, everyone is watching how Komen’s corporate “explanation” is unfolding. Well, it’s actually not unfolding, it’s imploding and exploding at the same time. Each iteration of their explanation is more desperate and more tone deaf than the last, as they embellish their lies.

Some of their “explanations” are so far away from their original claims that you can feel sure that they are on-the-spot fabrications. But I digress.

It’s not the poor quality of the lying, but the fact that Komen continues to lie at all, that is hurting the organization and damaging its reputation.

In a reputation crisis, it never ever helps to lie. Here’s why:

10 Reasons Why The Komen Foundation Should Stop Lying

1. When your organization lies, the lies offend the intelligence of your constituents.

“Whaddya think, we’re stupid? ” they ask. Your audience can read the leaked memos in The Atlantic or the NYT, they can read the reports of people and organizations who’ve been lobbying you to go anti-choice for years, and they can read the public statements of your executives.

Your constituents and the larger audience can actually see the lies, right there in print. To assume they won’t see you contradict yourself treats them as stupid.

2. When your organization lies, it disrespects your constituents’ relationships with you.

By lying, you are telling your constituents that they are not important enough, that your relationship with them is not important enough, and their support is not important enough, to be respected with the truth.

3. When your organization lies, it’s proof positive that your organization is itself profoundly stupid.

What, you can’t find the real explanation for your own behavior? The real criteria for your own decisions? The real values that shape your priorities? If you can’t explain your behavior with a real understanding of their sources, you’re a stupid (as in, dumb) organization.

4. When your organization lies, it makes people wonder what else you’re lying about.

Organizations that lie don’t do it once and a while, just on special occasions. They do it over and over. It’s only a matter of time before your other lies are uncovered.

5.. When your organization lies, it reinforces all the emotional dynamics of denial.

You can’t avoid the anxiety, guilt, embarrassment or shame that are part and parcel of lies. Even if you think no one else sees the lies (see #1, above), you know you’re lying. That eats away at whatever’s left of your organization’s heart, and corrodes what’s left of your integrity.

6. When your organization lies, the activity devoted to lying distracts you from more effective damage control.

You’re too busy lying to acknowledge the pain you’re causing. Even if you are, for a time, unwilling to admit the breadth of your responsibility, the very least you can do is say you’re sorry to the people you’re hurting. But, while you’re busy lying to Andrea Mitchell, you’re wasting the very opportunity you could use to apologize to your constituents.

7. When your organization lies, it embarrasses your employees.

Your employees know the truth. Do you want them all to resign in protest, or even worse, to continue working for a company they can no longer respect? When employees can’t respect your organization, they won’t do anything more than they must. That’s a great way to push your organization to fail.

8. When your organization lies, you block your organization off from any opportunity to learn from the initial mistake.

You and your organization get wrapped up in ‘cognitive distortion’. You don’t hear the truth about others’ reactions to your betrayal, so you miss chances to hear helpful feedback. You don’t learn about your constituents and their concerns, you don’t learn how to handle a crisis, and you won’t learn about yourselves.

9. When your organization lies, your leaders look incompetent.

Because they are.

10. When your organization lies, it makes it hard for you ever to be forgiven, by anyone.

Only those with super-human spirituality can easily rise above a crushing blow of betrayal (see #2, above) to forgive you and give your organization another chance. The rest of your constituents will take a long time to come around, if ever. And in the meantime, they won’t be supporting you.

Finally, there’s a bonus reason why your organization should stop lying.

Bonus Reason #11. When your organization lies, it makes it hard for anyone to ever trust your organization again.

Even if your organization reverses the decision that caused exposed the problem in the first place,

Nothing gets fixed until you tell the truth, to your constituents and to yourselves.

images:
Waling into walls, on Flickr. Some rights reserved by marc dalio
Life’s a bitch, on Flickr. Some rights reserved by pfala

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

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

[One of the special joys of blogging and tweeting about progressive movements in organizations and leadership is the relationships we make as we find kindred souls. These kindred souls are often tucked into niches other than our own, but because their approaches share the our fundamental values and because they are working with a shared purpose, we discover them as allies and friends.

Fran Melmed, who writes the blog free-range [communication], is one of those kindred souls. In one of our econversations about work+life+meaning, striving to be authentic to our full selves, and making a difference in the world, Fran offered to put pen to paper to try and capture that acute set of contradictions. I’m delighted to share it with you all as a guest post from Fran.]

The Stress of Not Having It All

Welcome to my confessional: I’m feeling the stress of not having it all.

What should be amusing about this is that I don’t even believe in the notion of having it all. But let me tell you, I’m not amused. I know that I don’t have it. And I want it.

A little background

About two years ago, my kids hit their tweens and were no longer the suction cups they once were. At the same time, I began hitting my stride in my chosen line of work: helping companies better engage their employees and their families in healthier living. Should be cause for celebration, right? Wahoo! My kids are growing up; they don’t need me. Away I go, soaring ever higher into the never-never land of wondrous, satisfying work.

Not so fast. Many moons ago, I made the personal decision to contain my career while I had kids in the house. (It’s based on my emotional baggage, to be sure, so don’t take this as my way of saying my choice is the choice.) When I became a mother while working at Hewitt, I worked part-time and then full-time, but flextime. When I left Hewitt, I started my own company to maintain, if not expand, the work-life balance Hewitt so generously supported.

I’m ready. Depression.*

And it’s wonderful. I have all that I want…except. Except for the ambitious, competitive and adventurous career side of me that aspires to growing my independent consulting firm tenfold. To implanting myself on the speaker circuit. Or taking that tantalizing mega-job at a start-up that’s nailing health engagement. Of my own choosing, these exciting paths beckon but are barred. I can’t have it all.

And so I feel like a part of me is untended and underdeveloped. I feel torn and stressed. And sometimes angry. After speaking with several friends, I realized I’m not alone. Our backgrounds and our choices may differ, as does what we’re missing or pining for. But to a person, we all felt the frustration of not having it all.

A false choice

Generally speaking, the notion of having it all is something women have embraced because for too long we couldn’t even have what we wanted, let alone it all. Perhaps, initially, having it all meant having the right to choose, as would have benefited my mother, who was told by her father that he’d financially support only nursing or education studies—studies suitable for a woman destined for marriage. With time, having it all became the Holy Grail, and just as elusive and mystical.

I think it’s time women recognize that we’re never going to have it all. We’re not going to have it all if we do fewer dishes. We’re not going to have it all when men wipe more babies’ bottoms than we do. And we’re not going to have it all when we storm the C-suite, like they stormed the Bastille, and rout the place.

I think it’s time men recognize that they, too, are never going to have it all. Not when a man pushing a baby in a swing at the neighborhood playground gathers no accolades. Not when more companies “man up” and supply paternity leave, either.

None of us—men or women—are going to have it all. Because we can’t. The entire concept is a farce—a snow job.

Is it the terminology or the elusiveness?

Every one of us has to make decisions that deny us elsewhere. Sometimes we’re forced to. Sometimes we choose to. Every one of us longs to have it all. Most of us know that it’s an impossibility. So, why does having it all have such a stranglehold on our consciousness?

Since communication is what I do, I can’t help but examine whether it’s the terminology. Are we stressed by the choice of words: “have it all”? Does our continued use of the phrase lead us to believe it is, in fact, possible and we’re the only ones who haven’t cracked the code? Or is the allure of having it all so strong that it blinds our reasoning?

And because employee health is what I encourage, I have to ask how not having it all plays into our work performance, our feelings of engagement and our health?

I’m left with more questions than answers.

Notes:
* If you saw The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, this phrase needs no explanation. If not, watch this.
You might also enjoy this post by Fran: no predictions, no resolutions. only courage.
See also: Work-Life Initiatives Are the Foundation of Authentic Organizations

Images: Blue + green from dichohecho , photo11_7A – Green + Blue from dichohecho, Green and blue from Raoul Pop

Personal branding is inescapable.¹

A person simply cannot participate in online forums, much less in their full career, without deliberately or unintentionally crafting and framing the way that they are seen by others.

However, while personal branding is inescapable, it isn’t easy to make it work in our favor.

Personal branding is fraught with choices and tensions, and these challenges are different for girls.

For women of every race, ethnicity, and orientation, each personal branding decision requires us to navigate the crosscurrents of societal pressures and personal authenticity. Each woman needs to negotiate which social expectations she’ll meet, and which ones she will resist, as she strives to create and defend a personal brand that expresses her unique identity.

Every social media platform constrains the ways that you can represent ‘who you are’.

Personal Branding starts with presenting yourself online, in public spaces, on public platforms, for other people to see you. Most professional social media platforms–those internal to the organization, those connected to particular communities, and even those where you might participate as your own “self” – select and constrain the information you are able to display.

Software platforms are built to reflect value-laden decisions about what sorts of information matters, how much information is important, how that information with be displayed, and to what degree the presentation of this information can be personalized. These choices reflect what’s best for the software platform, not what’s best for your personal brand.

On these social platforms, we craft our personal brands though a series of decisions about – naming, - claiming, – displaying, and - disclosing ‘who we are’.

For women, each of these decisions requires us to navigate that gray space between buying into or resisting social expectations for what she is allowed to be and how she is allowed to claim her unique identity.

Naming

Let’s start with a really easy personal branding decision: What name are you going to use?

• Will you use a formal name, a nickname or a handle? Will you choose a name that reflects your life-partnership status, or one that is independent of your relationship status?

• If you are married, are you going to use your birth name or your married name? Are you going to hold on to your pre-marital online history by retaining your name? Will you try to keep your professional and personal lives separate online by using different surnames?

• If you are in a relationship that is not recognized by the laws in your state, will you try to signal with your name that you have a life partner? Or, will you use a name that helps you keep this part of your life?  Are you going to try to hyphenate your last name, and then hope that the software platforms you need to use will actually accommodate a name with more than 16 characters, that includes a hyphen?

Along with the decision itself, are you ready to negotiate the expectations about your career commitment and your priorities that people infer from the decision you make around your name choice?

Claiming

Online, we need to claim what we know, how we know it, and what we can do so that people know how to categorize us. We need to describe ourselves with terms that represent our defining characteristics, our experience, our accomplishments, and our abilities. For women, claiming presents three challenges– claiming our expertise, finding labels  that fit that expertise, and finding labels that don’t invite the ‘wrong’ interpretation.

When you label your attributes, your skills, and your accomplishments, your goal is to establish credibility. Taking credit may or may not be harder for women, but certainly appearing credible by striking an acceptable tone as you describe your achievements and accomplishments is harder for women.

• What terms feel accurate and comfortable for you to use to describe yourself and your expertise? How do you choose terms that strike the right note without seeming presumptuous? What words and phrases are appropriate for women?

• Are you ready to deal with the ways that some people will respond if you emphasize a particular credential, or when you take credit for an accomplishment in a way that they think is inappropriate for women?

Formal titles and credentials can often be received differently when they are offered by a woman and not a man.

Here’s an example from my own experience. I’ve noticed that a few times when I’ve commented on other blogs and mentioned my PhD, or referred to my scholarship (as in, research published in peer-reviewed scientific journals), men who disagree with me have challenged my academic bona fides by making snarky references to my PhD or putting the work “scholarship” in ironic quotation marks. I haven’t seen men dismiss other men in the same way.

The credential ‘bounces’ differently when offered by a woman than when offered by a man. Just ask Senator Boxer, or Dr. Jill Biden.

Displaying

Peole consume online information visually, so “optics” matter a lot. What kind of visual design and images will you offer to establish people’s first impressions?

Head shots, profile pictures, and twitter avatars capture one particular visual image of who you are. The picture you choose not only (usually) reveals your gender, but also reveals your age, ‘attractiveness‘, and gender performance. So, choosing your headshot is a big deal.

• Will you wear makeup or not? Will you have your hair natural or will you get your hair processed? Will you retouch your photo or leave the wrinkles blemishes visible? Will you try to look older or younger? What will you wear?

• Will you have a professional take your head shots or will you just crop an informal snapshot? What gaze will you choose? Will you smile or look serious?

• (Note: Regardless of your sex, unless your screen name or handle includes the word ‘diva’, I don’t think your avatar should project a ‘come hither’ vibe. Just sayin’.)

Are you trying to look competent or warm? Personable or professional? Claim or avoid the ‘feminine’? These choices matter.

You also create your brand through the visual appearance of your online space, with fonts, themes and colors.

• Will you chose fonts, colors and themes that communicate that you are female? Will you present a conventional expression of femininity with a pink or purple website with curvy fonts? Or, will your site be red & black, blue & grey, sans serif and androgynous?

All Cover, Not Much Book

The first three steps of personal branding — naming, claiming, and displaying– focus on creating a first impression. These steps of personal branding emphasize the simple surface more that the complex depth of a person.

Coincidentally, these steps heighten two ongoing tensions that many women struggle with:
1) being subject to the scrutiny of the male gaze, and
2) being valued for how she looks rather than who she really is.
Consider that simply being told that men are observing her can prompt a woman to “narrow her social presence” and to say less about herself.

Just as women experience pressure to meet external, often unrealistic (and usually performance-irrelevant) appearance standards in physical work spaces, they also experience that pressure online. This pressure is not imaginary or all in their heads; women actually get unsolicited feedback on their pictures and self-descriptions based on whether and how their appearance conforms to some people’s standards. All you have to do is read the comments on blog post by an outspoken woman, and without even scrolling a third of the way down, you’ll see some reference to her appearance. It won’t be complimentary.

Personal disclosure

To craft an appealing brand, we’re told to share more personal information about ourselves– to tell personal stories, to share emotions, to be honest about our opinions. Personal disclosure helps people “get to know who we really are”.

However, personal disclosure can also make us vulnerable.

Online, personal disclosures are interpreted differently and are often less safe for women than for men. For example, when a man mentions on Twitter or Facebook that he’s home for the day with a sick child, people send him pats on the back. In contrast, many women won’t even mention if this is happening for them, since the very bit of disclosure that gets a man applause for being a good dad garners for a woman the concern that she’s less professional or less committed to her work.

Some people take the opportunity to offer unsolicited feedback on whether, why and how a person’s disclosure is valuable, and to pass judgment on that person publicly, through blog comments, “likes”, and responses.

Personal disclosure opens us up to other people’s scrutiny, where they can evaluate us on dimensions that are unrelated to our professional ability.

For many of us women who’ve been working in the professional world for while, much of our effort to develop our reputations and to build our “personal brands” has meant breaking free of the templates created by stereotypes. Most of us have been creating our reputations over time, through multimodal interactions, histories of action & reaction, long-standing professional relationships, and more. These are overstuffed with information about us and offering people experiences of us from which they can infer and construe who we are, and get a fuller sense of our authentic selves.

But even so, seemingly superficial choices about how we present ourselves online still seem to matter. We women have to create a place for ourselves and each other in a professional world that is not excited about having us participate as professionals – especially not in our most authentic, anti-stereotypical, self- expressions.

All this is not to dismiss the ways that personal branding is a challenge for boys, but rather to help us appreciate that:

Given the demands of presenting oneself in a socially-approved way versus as our most authentic selves, it’s different for girls.

See also:
Don’t Let Personal Branding Stifle your Authentic Voice
Defend Your Personal Brand. Barbara Boxer shows how.
Authentic Twitter: Are exclamation points unprofessional?
¹ Note, I’m not a wholehearted fan of personal branding.

Mystery and the Modern Woman,
Confessions of a 36 year-old woman, by Tara Hunt on horsepigcow

Images:
Hello My Name Is silver pendant, by pollysimon on Etsy
Princess Silhouette Cameo Vinyl Decal tweetheartwallart on Etsy
Girl Name Definition Adjectives PlanetWallArt on Etsy
Handmade paper flower by danamazing on Etsy
Stamp of Approval, by Circa Ceramics on Etsy

I’m troubled by a trend in the conversation about ‘diversity and inclusion’ in organizations.

Some Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) consultants and conversations are beginning to treat all forms of difference as equally important.

For example, differences in the gender, orientation, physical ability, or ethnicity of organization members are presented along with differences in cognitive styles, behavioral preferences, and value hierarchies, as if there were no significant, qualitative differences between these types of diversity. However, these types of ‘diversity’ are different in important ways.

Treating all types of difference as though they were the same is damaging both to individual organizational members and to an organization’s progress towards inclusivity.

We need to understand and assert the important differences between these types of ‘diversity’ and recognize that one type of difference — identity-based difference – has a central and enduring place in the diversity conversation.

Different Types of Diversity

Depending on whom you read or talk to, there are different ways to categorize types of diversity. Consider these four loosely defined, different types of diversity:

These four types of diversity are related, in that a person’s social category will influence his or her life experience, and thus influence his or her values, cognitive preferences, and behavioral preferences. These types are not independent, and at the same time the relationships between them are not hard-wired.

Key Ways That These Types of Diversity are Different

There are qualitative differences in the reasons why identity-based differences affect how a person is included in or excluded from full participation in an organization, and why value, cognitive and behavioral differences affect how a person is included in or excluded from an organization.

Why is treating all types of difference the same a bad “Diversity” practice?

1. Treating all difference as the same ignores important categorical differences in the history of exclusion, rationalization of exclusion, arguments against exclusion, and benefits of inclusion of people with these different types of difference.

The perceived and actual causes, effects and solutions for discrimination against individuals with social identity-based differences are categorically different from those involved in the limited inclusion of people with cognitive, behavioral or value diversity.

Moreover, there are important differences in the causes, effects and solutions for discrimination across different forms of identity-based discrimination. For example, practices of discrimination and inclusion of people of color (i.e., anti-racism) are different from those of LGBTQ individuals (e.g., anti-heteronormativity).

2. Treating all types of difference as the same insures that we’ll make only partial progress towards equal inclusion of all organization members.

Treating all types of differences as the same means that they all have the same causes, and the same solutions. Which of course they don’t. The programs and learning that end racist practices in an organization are not the same as what would increase the inclusion of people with uncommon work habits, or people who value concreteness over ambiguity. People have been taught to hate, resent, fear, loathe, and dismiss as less valuable persons from different identity categories. People don’t apply the same level of animus towards individuals with unconventional work practices or less common personality styles.

We can’t change racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. with the same kinds of understanding, team building and training that we use to make way for action learners in an organization filled with auditory learners.

If we pursue a path where we teach about diversity and treat identity-based, cognitive, behavioral and value differences as “the same”, we will continue to hurt those who experience identity based discrimination, because we will not address their more serious issues.

3. Equating these different categories of differences trivializes the real costs of the discrimination faced by individuals with social category based differences.

A person of color has faced lifelong exclusion based on racism in a world where whites are in power. A woman has faced lifelong sexism, a person who uses a wheelchair has faced a long history of dis-ableism. As members of these social groups, they have experienced not only categorical discrimination in organizations, but also real personal pain and significant personal costs.

Why do some D & I advocates treat all types of differences as the same?

Some D & I advocates address all types of differences as the same, because they are trying to be comprehensive and include every kind of difference that might matter to an organization’s healthy flourishing. While it is true that inclusion of other types of difference, beyond identity based difference, may well be important to an organization’s improvement, it is important not to overlook critical differences too.

Also, some D & I advocates treat non-identity based differences as equally important, because teaching people to understand exclusion and inclusion on these other types of difference is a relatively “safe” and non-confrontational approach to teaching about ‘diversity’. If you’re just talking about personality differences, no one gets really hurt.

People who are members of social categories that give them social power and privilege often find it difficult to understand what it’s like not to be included, not to be at the center or the top. However, if they experience less-than-full inclusion due to one or another personal differences in cognition, behavior, and values, they get a peek at what it might be like to actually be the discriminated against and/ or not fully included.

But make no mistake:

The marginality someone might feel being an ISFP in an ENTJ corporate culture is nothing like being an African-American women in an all white male organization.

These are not comparable experiences, and they are not comparable bases for exclusion or inclusion.

Is it ever helpful to treat all forms of difference as though they were equivalent?

There are two legitimate reasons to “bundle” qualitatively different types of diversity into one package.

1. The first reason is related to Intersectionality – the idea that we are never just one identity category , but instead are members of many categories at the same time.

Intersectionality helps us understand that women of color face challenges related to racism, to sexism, and to the ways that sexism and racism play into each other. Similarly, white lesbians will face challenges sexism and heterosexism that white, cisgendered women will not experience, while women in both identity groups with experience some race-based privilege.

We can’t change racism without also attacking sexism and other forms of identity-based discrimination at the same time, because no one is only one identity.  A piecemeal approach doesn’t work; a holistic approach is necessary.

2. The second legitimate reason to ‘bundle’ qualitatively different types of diversity is to make the point that organizations need to revise their approach to differences as a concept.

For example, organizations need to understand that social coherence, “fit” and alignment can turn into rigidity, and that organization members individually and collectively need ways to assess when and how differences matter, and which differences matter.

Treating all types of differences as the same will not get all types of people to equal levels of inclusion in an organization.

Differences based in social identity, and discrimination based on sex, race, ability, and orientation, should be understood as distinct from differences based on cognition, behavior and values.

• Identity-based discrimination is fundamentally illegitimate, business irrelevant, immoral, and unethical.

• Efforts to increase the inclusion of people with cognitive, behavioral and value diversity will not eliminate identity-based discrimination.

Therefore, Diversity & Inclusion advocates should discriminate among types of difference, and keep identity-based difference as the core focus of diversity programs.

See also:
Work-Life Solutions and Important Differences: Let’s get inclusive
A Psychological Benefit of a “Black” Organization?

Image:  The Color Wheel Some rights reserved by Great Beyond
Sorted By Color Some rights reserved by Mr. T in DC
Smarties vs M&Ms Some rights reserved by fritish

Smarts. Fire. Audacity. Technical chops. Focus. Strong network. Innovative product ideas. That’s what venture capitalists look for when they are selecting which entrepreneurs to support and which businesses to fund.

Unfortunately, VCs tend to see these characteristics most often when the entrepreneurs themselves are “white, male, under 30, nerds, with no social life who dropped out of Harvard or Stanford).”

VCs look for shortcuts to sift through too many entrepreneurs with too many ideas. They want fast ways to identify and pounce on the next big things, the next Foursquare, Twitter or Boxee.

VCs look for trends. Much like entrepreneurs, who use pattern recognition to identify business opportunities, VCs need to spot trends in complex, seemingly unrelated areas and uncover links between them. Unfortunately, it seems that many VCs overuse the pattern of ‘young, white, male dropout nerds‘ and fail to see other important trends that would actually help them identify new opportunities that are presented by female entrepreneurs.

Female entrepreneurs, especially in the digital space, don’t fit the traditional pattern of what a “digital entrepreneur” looks like. Instead, female digital entrepreneurs have their own patterns.

Here’s a pattern that I just noticed last week:

1. A female entrepreneur,
2. Working in partnership with another female entrepreneur,
3. Where they both have MBAs from Harvard, and
4. Are developing a digitalized product/service in the fashion industry.

Four pairs of entrepreneurs who establish this pattern are:

• Laura Kofoid and Grace Tsao-Woo of Laudi Vidni
• Hayley Barna and Katia Beauchamp of BirchBox
• Alexis Maybank and Alexandra Wilkis Wilson of Gilt Groupe
• Jennifer Hyman and Jennifer Fleiss of Rent the Runway

Two Women + Two Harvard MBAs + Digital Fashion = Great Investment Opportunity

All four businesses are consumer oriented, web based, fashion retailing, giving busy women (and men) the chance to buy fashionable, stylish, of the minute items easily. Not coincidentally, all four pairs met during their MBA programs at Harvard Business School.

Although I’ve known about Laudi Vidni and  Gilt Groupe for a while, I didn’t notice a pattern until I saw a story on BirchBox and that same day had a friend recommend Rent the Runway. It may be that you have to be a woman of a certain age with a soupcon of interest in fashion to be involved in the potential consumer space and thus notice these trends. If that’s true, then it’s another data point suggesting that we need more women in VC firms. VC firms need people who are likely note these trends because they are living the same lives as the potential customers.

Three data points is a trend… and four data points suggest an opportunity to me. I wonder, is anyone seeing what I’m seeing?

Patterns aren’t perfect proxies.

Even if VCs were to use this new pattern of Two Women + Two Harvard MBAs + Digital Fashion = Great Investment Opportunity, they’d still miss some compelling women entrepreneurs working solo on their start-ups without another (female or male) partner. VCs would miss entrepreneurs like Tereza Nemessanyi, founder and CEO of Honestly Now Inc. Nemessanyi has an MBA from Wharton, and her start-up touches on but is not focused on fashion. These VCs would also miss entrepreneurs like Michelle Madhok of SheFinds.com and MomFinds.com. Madhok got her masters’ from Northwestern, and comes from a print media background.

There are many audacious entrepreneurs with compelling business ideas who, as persons, don’t fit the pattern of being ‘young, white, male dropout nerds’. Truly sharp venture capitalists strive to be ahead of the pack, and they need to recognize trends sooner than anyone else.

So, while the “two-white-guys-in-a-garage stereotype remains the romantic ideal”, it’s time to open up what we’re looking for so that we can recognize new patterns.

Maybe the new ideal should be “Two Women + Two Harvard MBAs + Digital Fashion.”

You can start by looking for “Two well dressed women in Section B.”

See also:

Doerr and Moritz Stir VCs in One-On-One Showdown, WSJ (source of Doerr’s now-legendary white male nerd quote)
Lack of female entrepreneurs – a VC gender problem, by Vivek Wadhwa
How to Find a Tech Cofounder from 12MonthsToLaunch
Authentic From the Start-Up: 4 Tips from Cindy Gallop and IfWeRanTheWorld

Note: Pattern recognition is not the same as stereotyping. “Pattern recognition is the process through which specific persons perceive complex and seemingly unrelated events as constituting identifiable patterns… recognizing links between apparently unrelated trends, changes and events” to identify a business idea. (R. A. Baron, 2006. Opportunity Recognition as Pattern Recognition: How entrepreneurs connect the dots to identify new business opportunities, Academy of Management Perspectives, pp. 104-119.)

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