How do we get and keep more women in technology-related careers?
How do we increase the number of women creators, makers, designers, and coders?

Why not just add more women to the mix, and go from there? 

When all we do is “add women and stir”, without simultaneously and deliberately changing that system, we aren’t going to succeed. This tactic leaves untouched the cultural and structural parts of the system that continue to sustain gender bias.

“Add Women and Stir”

The “add women and stir” tactic works on the logic that simply adding more women to a particular event, school, company, or profession, will ultimately lead to a higher number of women staying on that career path.

We see this tactic at almost every point of the career “pipeline“. Well-meaning people aim to increase the output of the pipeline by increasing the input to the pipeline.

But the data show, over and over, that “add women and stir” doesn’t change the output of the system.

“Add Women and Stir” at Etsy-Hacker School 

The “add women and stir” tactic is the main element of a joint initiative by Hacker School and Etsy to increase the presence of women in the New York tech community.

Hacker School runs a series of three-month “coders retreats” to accelerate participants’ coding skills.  Hacker School’s summer 2012 session, sponsored and housed at Etsy, aims to create a gender-balanced class of 50% men, 50% women.

The initiative has gotten a lot of positive press, since people inside and outside the tech community are excited to see a concrete commitment to addressing gender bias in the world of software making. This initiative should be praised, since the Hacker School- Etsy goal of a coder class evenly split between male and female coders is a win.

But while the Etsy – Hacker School initiative adds more women to a key professional development process, it doesn’t address the systemic issues that ultimately squeeze women out of tech.

However, with a few significant design tweets and a fuller, more articulated commitment to changing gender bias in the system, the Etsy-Hacker School initiative could dramatically expand its impact.

Here’s how:

Why “Add Women and Stir” is Limited

At face value, there is nothing wrong with  efforts to increase the number of women. We’re simply not going to get an equal number of women and men into any particular career, or even keep the same proportion of women at the end as at the beginning, unless we get more women into professional development opportunities like Hacker School.

But increasing the representation of women in software engineering, or anywhere else, doesn’t really depend on changing the number of women hired, trained, and developed. Getting women to be normal, commonplace, and influential in these careers depends on changing the implicit and explicit gender bias in the events, communities, institutions and professions themselves.

It’s not the number of inputs we need to change. It’s the system.

“But if we get more women into the system, won’t the women change it?”

With the add women and stir tactic, some presume that once women get in the door, these women will be able to fight gender bias and change the system themselves.

To some degree, that’s true. There are always women (like the ones I studied my dissertation) who will take on the extra work — and the extra career risk — of advocating to end gender bias and connected discrimination. These women, and men with a similar commitment, will work to change the system from within.*

“But if we get more women into the system, won’t the system change?”

Unfortunately, individual enlightenment doesn’t automatically transform the system.

And, ‘change from within’ and ‘change from below’ are not enough. We need changes in the system, designed and led by people in charge of the system.

Leaders and Program Designers Can Change the Bias in the System

Leaders, and the people who design the classes, the programs, the businesses, and the professional structures that should be without gender bias are the folks with the greatest leverage to make system change.

It’s a leader’s role and a program designer’s role to eliminate gender bias in the behaviors, processes, and systems under their control that reinforce gender bias. Any initiative to increase the number of women in technology needs leaders and designers who will re-code the system.

How can Etsy & Hacker School Design Their Program to Reduce Gender Bias?

Hacker School and Etsy have already made some program design decisions to address bias. For example,

• Having 50% women and 50% men means that there will be enough women in the class that no one woman will be tokenized as the representative woman. The posse approach for adding minority group members goes beyond the Rule of 3 to ensure that there is a variety of types of “women coders” who can each be more of her individual self.

• Offering a $5,000 housing scholarships to women in the program (the program itself is free to participants) addresses the financial challenge that might keep women from participating. While there’s no reason stated that women (and not men) might need scholarships, scholarships might address the effects of a gender-based wage gap.

2. With participants, Etsy and Hacker School could:

• Ask male and female participants whether they are on board with the anti-gender bias agenda
• Ask participants whether they are willing to contribute to changing gender bias, perhaps by opening themselves up to personal change

3. With their own organizations, Etsy and Hacker School could:

• Ask whether they are open to questioning their own practices, norms and outcomes
• Ask whether they are open to adapting their own culture, to design norms, processes (like meetings) and work structures (like project assignments) that confront, reduce or circumvent gender bias

With the program content, Etsy and Hacker School could:

• Add some explicit learning –analysis, reflection, and skill building – to address negative gender dynamics in the coding community
• Address how gender-bias hurts not only female coders, but also male coders and the coding profession

Perhaps the most important program-design questions are:

• What activities will they design into the three month program to create different and better gender dynamics, to create supportive, nonsexist professional relationships among the men and women, and to build a more inclusive culture?

• Will any of these participants leave having become not only better coders but also better advocates for equality?

If Hacker School delivers the very same program for a group that’s 50% women as they have done in the past for groups that were 95% men, we can expect that the very design of the program will have some (unintentional) gendered issues.

You can’t deliver to women a program designed for men and hope that both men and women will benefit equally. That’s like designing a menu for pescatarians and just assuming that everyone will find it satisfying.

5. Geek Feminists and Women In Technology Allies are Ready To Help

 I hope that Hacker School and Etsy will reach out to the women in tech/ geek feminist community  – if they haven’t already – so that they can draw in more resources and more program ideas designed specific to address gender bias in the software-making community.

For example,

–  Organizations like the Ada Initiative make themselves available to do workshops about addressing sexism in the codersphere. And,

– The Geek Feminism wiki has entries on how to help allies (e.g., men) learn to fight gender-bias.

Of course, we understand that neither Hacker School nor Etsy sees itself as an organization primarily dedicated to gender equality in software engineering. The mission of Hacker School is to build a stronger community of open source coders by helping coders grow their skills. And, Etsy’s focus with this initiative is to boost the skills of the New York coding community, and maybe get its hands on some of up-and-coming coding talent.

Still, they both see a way that their own organizations can make a difference. As Marc Hedlund of Etsy explains:

Last September, three out of 96 employees in Engineering and Operations at Etsy were women, and none of them were managers. Talking this over with others here, we thought that Etsy — which supports the businesses of hundreds of thousands of female entrepreneurs through our marketplace, which sells a majority of all items to women, and which already has many talented and amazing women working for the company — should be one of the single easiest Internet companies at which to correct this problem.

Beyond Adding Women, Leaders Must Change the Biased System

Adding more women to the pipeline, especially by including women in professional development processes, will move women in the coding world forward by a few steps. But, this tactic alone will not change the organizational or professional realities these women (and anti-bias men) face. Focusing on inputs to increase outputs just isn’t enough.

• We can only improve women’s career opportunities by improving women’s and men’s career development systems.
• We can only reduce gender bias by changing gender-biased systems in our professions and organizations.
• We can only get more women into tech, and keep talented women and men in tech, by changing the systems that create the tech community.

The Etsy Hacker School initiative to add more women is a positive contribution to change and a sign of commitment from both organizations. It would be even better to see them take the suggestions above, as well as the recommendations of the Women in Tech & Geek Feminist community, to make a bigger and longer lasting contribution by changing systems too.

See also:

An Interview With Etsy and Hacker School About the Etsy Hacker School Grants, at GeekMom

Why Do Meritocracies Hurt Women?
Why Women DON’T Rule the Internet
Want More Women on Tech & TED Panels? Reject Meritocracy and Embrace Curation

*Note: With both of these assumptions, the burden of making change happen falls on the women participants themselves. I shouldn’t need to mention that it’s wrong to make the subordinated group shoulder the bulk of the change advocacy.

Image: Faucet from StuartD42 , Faucet from Joe Shlabotnik, Faucet from Benurs – Learning and learning… Well….WELL
from MadeOnMercury

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

What is the best, purest way to get more girls interested in tech (and more women employed in tech)?

Get them deeply interested in what tech can do and what problems tech can help us solve.

When girls (and boys) become genuinely interested and genuinely curious, they will pursue careers in tech not because ‘that’s where the jobs are” or because “that’s what smart people do”, but because that’s what they *want* to do.

How can we get girls curious about tech?   

Take them to events where polished, enthusiastic, hip tech evangelists share their world-changing ideas.

Take Our Daughters to Tech Events

My DH and I tried just yesterday evening to do just that: We took our daughters (13 and 11) to a tech event– IgniteNYC.

The set-up of an Ignite event seemed right for introducing the girls to an array of tech-y topics and an assortment of speakers. There were 16 people on the agenda — both female and male, white and people of color. The presentations are short– only 5 minutes — so if any one talk was boring, a new one was on the horizon.

Plus, I knew that some of the speakers would be especially interesting… like my OpEdProject pal and tech entrepreneur Tereza Nemessanyi, who would be talking about her start-up, HonestlyNow.

Finally, the price was right– instead of $800 for a day pass to Web 2.0 conference, I could take them to a live event for $11 dollars each. That plus a trip to Shake Shake. No problem.

Until we showed up at the venue.

It turns out,

No one under 21 was allowed into the tech event.

Ostensibly, this was because there was a cash bar at the cocktail hour before the event.

This was not a worry for me. My girls have been to plenty of wedding and fundraisers with cash bars, and they have never tried to spend their allowances on gin & tonics.

But, even though my tweens looked obviously too young to sneak up to the bar, even though they were accompanied by not one parent but two, and even though they’d brought their kindles to sit in the auditorium and read with me until the presentations started, we could not get around the event coordinator/caterer’s policy.

Turns out, the IgniteNYC organizers were surprised too. (see note, below)    They were unaware of the age restriction, which was part of the larger contract organized by Web2.0. They have had teens speak at previous events, and they are committed to reaching out to the younger tech-curious community.

(What was also distressing was that the catering contract prohibited people under 18 — even though the legal drinking age in NY is 21. What’s up with that? Some inconsistency there, if the point is to prevent ‘underage’ exposure to liquor. But I digress. See correction below.)

Consider that it wasn’t just precocious 13 yr olds who were barred… College students and start-up interns under 21 18 were also not permitted to attend.

Do you have to be over 21 18 to be interested in Tech? One would hope not, because by then it’s too late.

The Ignite Coordinator was genuinely distressed at having to turn away the girls.  She quickly refunded our tickets and apologized for the constraint, and my kids went off to hang out with their cousins while I stayed for the (fun) event.  I understood later that the cocktail hour of mingling was a big part of how the event was framed  — more like a party than a TEDx.  But still, it made me think:

If these tech events exist to get people excited about and involved in tech, why not make room for people under 21?

Inspiring Tech Curiosity While Girls Are Young

We have to Take Our Daughters to Tech Events, because we have to catch their interest while they are young.

We have to catch them young, before they’ve set their sights on becoming the next Taylor Swift.

We have to catch them young, so that they can see tech stars and rising stars — people like Caterina Fake, Joanne Wilson, Carlota Perez, Sekai Ferai, Kanika Gupta, Tara Hunt, Birame Sock, Annie Chang, Selma Zafar, and Adria Richards — and imagine themselves becoming like these dynamic tech-y change agents.

These kids need to see more than a fancy software site in beta when they look over their parents’ shoulders at the computer. They need to “see it to be it”, as @SCJoson reminds me.  These kids need to be inspired, by seeing a bit of the real thing – the real people — powering our tech revolution.

We need to expose our kids to tech events and rising tech stars so that we can catch them while they are young.

So, I’d like to propose that we do two things –

• Take Our Daughters to Tech Events.
  Let it be(come) normal, and not a surprise, to see teenage girls in the tech event audience, all hepped up to see the latest change-the-world digital product. And,

• Make it easier for teens to attend tech events, by creating room for them.

For example,
– Create a seating space with no access to alcohol (e.g., a small side section of the seating area, with an entryway that doesn’t take them past the bar).
– Clarify policies, so that teens can attend with adult chaperones.
– Identify age limits. Make it clear whether or not people under 21 are welcome.
– Rethink catering contracts– if it’s underage drinking that’s the fear, address this in other ways.
– Check your contracts w/ venues, caterers and event planners. Ask them to find ways to include teens lawfully, sensibly, and with a genuine welcome.

Not too young though. I’m not recommending that we set aside places for toddlers in strollers, or put out coloring books for kindergartners who are up past their bedtimes. And, I’m not recommending that there be childcare at these events, although that is an appropriate step too.

Nobody really wants to bring her or his child to professional event where the kid would disrupt the scene. BUT some of us want opportunities to bring well-behaved, interested kids to events where they can see tech as a solution, tech as an opportunity, tech as an option for them.

Let’s make it easier to inspire our kids. Let’s make it possible, and normal, to

Take Our Daughters to Tech Events

[** I forwarded this post to one of the IgniteNTC's coordinators, to make sure I had the facts right, and IgniteNYC's Director, Tikva Moriwati reached out to me to clarify a few bits. This led to a few edits, above. Tikva shared that they too were concerned and disappointed that IngiteNYC couldn't be a family event-- at least not this particular night. The no-kid policy was established by the contract of the larger event (Web 2.0), and wasn't discovered by IgniteNYC until that evening. The exclusion of teens was not something igniteNYC wanted, and they will be more deliberate when they plan and publicize future events. I appreciate that  Tikva and her team of volunteers are committed to reaching out to the whole community, not just grown-ups. My girls and I are looking forward to their Spring event -- but planning to skip the Dec.1st cocktail party.  --  Oct 13]

I bet you don’t think it does.

I bet you think that your social media policy, and your ‘create a blog for our business using other people’s user-generated content’- approach, is impervious to racism masked as business advice, as research findings, or as interesting content.

I bet that’s exactly what PsychologyToday.com thought, too.

They’ve got a stable of bloggers, most of them PhD psychologists and social psychologists, who supposedly are “qualified” to write for their site. These scientists generate content for them, so that PsychologyToday.com can draw traffic and sell advertising space.

But not all of these scientists practice a high quality of “science”. And one of these scientists, already notorious for the social bias in his “research” “findings”, recently published a post that was decidedly not scientific.

Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist who styles himself as “The Scientific Fundamentalist” published a post entitled “Why Are Black Women Rated Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?

This content was decidedly “off brand” for Psychology Today. It was a clear display of racism, masquerading as science.

Readers were offended, and the post was taken down by PsychololgyToday.com’s editors — but not until after a lot of damage was done.

Damaged were Psychology Today’s reputation, the reputations of PsychologyToday.com ‘s other contributors, the trust of PsychologyToday.com readers, and the support of social media influences who drive traffic to PsychologyToday.com.

Damaged were the Black community, people of color and white people who are working against racism.

Also damaged were the Black women whose beauty and social value was “scientifically” deemed inadequate.

Indeed, it’s hard to see that anyone benefited from PsychologyToday.com’s social media policy.

Except, of course, racists.

But PsychologyToday.com has some form of social media policy –

Someone over at PsychologyToday.com organized the post contribution system, where bloggers get access to PsychologyToday’s audience in exchange for publishing their individual content. Someone set up the digitized and interpersonal processes for gathering and vetting contributors. Someone permitted this particular “scientist “, a scientist with a suspect reputation, to publish his posts on PsychologyToday.com.

Someone did all of this without the help of a fully-considered social media policy.

Do you have a “someone” at your organization who’s in charge of putting content on your blogs? On your Facebook page? In your online community? On Twitter?

Does this “someone” use guidelines that specify who your business or organization brand is, what it believes in, and how it should be represented through this content? Does this someone have programs to teach contributors to uphold your standards?

Does your social media policy let contributors and your community know what you stand for, and what you won’t stand for?

Action Step: Sign this petition at Change.org Psychology Today: Stop Publishing Racist & Sexist Articles
The petition’s focus:

We demand that the Psychology Today editorial board publicly account for how and why this racist and sexist article was allowed to be published on the Psychology Today website, and take transparent steps to prevent this from happening in the future.

For great insights on the original article and reactions to it, see:

Why Black Women Rock! My Thoughts That Crazy Psychology Today Article By Dr. Phoenyx Austin on Curlynikki.com
A ‘Wow. Just. Wow’ article: ‘Why Are Black Women Rated Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women? by Pam Spaulding at PamsHouseBlend
Beauty May Be In Eye of Beholder But Eyes See What Culture Socializes by Mikhail Lyubansky, Ph.D. at PsychologyToday.com

Voices: The Satoshi Kanazawa Study & Repeat Offender: Satoshi Kanazawa’s Other Greatest Misses by Arturo R. Garcia at Racialicious

See also:

What Authenticity? Design Homophobia Out of the Organization

I’m getting a bit weary of talking about “women” and having some people assume that I’m only talking about “women”.

Recognize that when I use the term “women”, I am consciously talking about “women” on the far side of complexity.

The Far Side of Complexity

The “far side of complexity” is one of my favorite concepts. Contrasting “simplicity” with “simplicity on the far side of complexity” helps us recognize how we often use the same word to label two very different understandings of a category, variable, element, or system. And, it helps us recognize how easy it is to assume – wrongly – that someone is being simplistic and not complex in her thinking.

I find this problem of assuming the wrong side of complexity coming up again and again as I participate in online and face-to-face conversations about applying feminism to the business and social world.

Who do you assume “women” are?

Sometimes, when I use the word “women” on this blog, on other blogs, and in conversation, some people assume that I’m referring only to “women” who are white, able bodied, cisgendered, US-based, and upper-middle class. They assume that I am ignoring the racioethnic, class, orientation, ability, and other dimensions of human difference that also compose a sexist system.

Worse, when someone assumes that I’m using the term “women” simplistically, they also assume that I am coming from a blind, unacknowledged, place of unearned social privilege. They assume I am only in the feminist conversation to help myself and women just like me. Then, they pounce on me for being inauthentically feminist, and tell me to stop talking. At which point I want to say, WTF?

Was that feminist?

This dynamic is not just happening to me; I see it happening to other conversants too. But here let me just talk about my own experience. And, let me note that this doesn’t happen often– but when it does happen, it can be profoundly painful.

Presumptions and Assumptions

I expect that this assumption is made because I “present” as (or “look like”) a white, cis-gendered, upper middle class, able bodied woman. A woman with this kind of social & economic profile is just the type of woman who’d supposedly make the categorical mistake of taking her own experience as a woman to be representative of all women’s experience. (Indeed, this type of woman is the kind of woman who historically did make that mistake.)

But, if we assume that a woman, any woman or a woman of a certain type, is automatically sexist in a certain way simply because of the categories she seems to inhabit, that’s actually a form of (anti-feminist) stereotyping. And, it engenders a dynamic that stops feminist conversation and social change in its tracks.

“Gotcha” Feminism

Anti-feminist stereotyping of other women, and the presumption of their lack of feminist enlightenment, inspires a dynamic in feminist conversations that I think of as “gotcha feminism”.

Gotcha feminism is a conversational posture that’s focused on catching someone being wrong and then turning the conversation to focus on her wrongness and her lack of adequate feminist consciousness. It’s a conversational posture that is rarely instructive but always punitive. It is a dynamic that prevents connection, thwarts alliance building, and stops our collective progress.

Gotcha feminism is a ‘holier than thou’ dynamic that aims to tell some women that they are not good enough to participate in the feminist conversation.

“Not feminist enough”

The idea that someone is not feminist enough suggests two other assumptions that inhibit social change. The first assumption is that there are defined levels of feminism -- that there is some progression where you are a better person and more valuable to the conversation if you are somehow further along on your journey.

While there may be different “stages” of feminist consciousness, there is no single path through them that is more valid than other paths.

The second assumption is that everyone is starting from the same place. Each person starts from her or his own place in the world (or standpoint), and branches out from there. Some people will begin their journeys from concerns that aren’t explicitly about gender dynamics and sex-based distinctions. They may frame their social justice understanding in terms of racial injustice, ableism, colonialism, social class, or hetero-”normativity”, just to name a few.

However, it doesn’t matter where you begin, or where you are. It matters that you’ve begun and that you are still on the journey.

If we believe that a feminist perspective is something we learn, we must expect that different people will be at different places in their own authentic journeys.

Commitment, not category, is what matters.

I also notice that the people making this assumption, that a white, able-bodied, cisgendered, upper-middle class woman only thinks of “women” as including people like herself, are more often than not relatively new to their own feminist journey, and are also more likely than not younger than me. No offense intended to my younger, super-aware and firmly committed colleagues — it’s just a correlation, not a cause.

Personally, where the age thing matters is not where you are coming from but instead where you think I’m coming from. Don’t you think that after 40 plus years of identifying as a feminist, I might have learned a thing or two about feminism in general and my own privilege in particular? Or about who “women” are, in all our complexity?

At the very least, if I’m going to be stereotyped by what I look like or how I present, the visible indication of my age should trigger a different assumption about where I might be on my journey of social consciousness.

More importantly, though, is that we take each person’s entry into the conversation as an indication of their interest in – and maybe their commitment to – learning more about making our work, home and world more just.

• Instead of getting ready to pounce, we should be ready to support.
• Instead of being primed to criticize, we should be prepared to learn.

We should encourage everyone who genuinely wants to participate, not act like self-appointed arbiters of who’s good enough to play.

The Feminist Conversation is Changing

At one point in our US feminist history, the idea that “women” should refer to more than one subset of “women” was an ‘aha’ for a large & influential group of active self-identified feminists. These days, though, if you’ve spent any time in the feminist conversation, one of the first things you learn is that “women” is not just some small group of women who are all alike (and all like you or not like you). You get this lesson in Women Studies 101, by week two if not sooner.

I wonder if too many feminist conversants are mired in the past, taking our analysis of the wrongs of “first and second wave” feminism and re-inscribing these dynamics on a different current world. Even before the term “intersectionality” was coined in the late 1980s, the feminist conversation was moving to embrace the complexity of “women” — how women are different and what “women” share.

Now, we should enter our conversations with each other understanding that ‘women’ is a broad, meta-category — a category on a farther side of complexity.

This is not to say that everyone ‘gets it’ and uses the term “women” intentionally to refer to all “women”. And, it is not to say that we no longer need to learn how our own experience is neither universal nor exclusive. But it is to say–

Let’s put the Gotcha Feminism aside. Let’s start from a different place.

Extend a generous interpretation. Wait until some other (feminist) actually demonstrates racism, classism, parochialism, or some other form of blind or claimed privilege before you impute it to her.

There’s simplicity. And there’s simplicity of the far side of complexity.

Let’s stop assuming that “women” is used in a simplistic way. Let’s start giving each other credit for understanding the complexity of the work we are doing together.

“I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the far side of complexity.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes

See also: The (Feminist) Business Bloggers’ Lament

TechCruch’s recent post Why Women Rule The Internet by Aileen Lee, and the interwebz response to it, is an exercise in wish fulfillment and diversion. With all due respect to Ms. Lee and her advocacy for women, social networking and shopping are not displays of power.

I hate to break it to you, girlfriends, but we women do not “rule” the internet.

As much as I would like to believe that women’s larger use of the internet meant that women actually controlled a proportionate amount of the internet, it does not. Women, as consumers and users, are a large and largely subordinate group of internet participants. As participants, women are more plentiful than men. But women do not “rule”¹ the internet.

Ruling means having power.

Power means having the ability:

• To create what you want to create
• To set the standards for participation
• To set the vision
• To set the priorities
• To choose the goals
• To be the designers of platforms and services
• To be the norm to which designers design unconsciously
• To always feel welcomed, acknowledged, respected and safe
• To make an amount of money commensurate to the contributions of their work
• To own companies
• To decide who gets the venture capital to create a company
• To get the capital to create her company
• To create value– financial value, social value, personal value — for oneself, as an agent and not as subject or ‘target market’

What about the argument that women, as consumers, have power?

Consumers don’t really have “power”. And consumers don’t have “real” power.

Consumers do not have the kinds of power listed above, that would constitute ‘ruling’ the internet.

• Consumers have the “power” to buy, but not to decide what will be sold.
• Consumers have “power” to respond, but not the power to create.
• Consumers have the “power” to select from available options what they’ll support, but they don’t have the power to make.

Consumers are not citizens, consumers are not owners, consumers are not inventors, consumers are not makers.

Purchasing, buying, and spending are reactive behaviors, not initiating behaviors.

Influence is Not Real Power

Contrary to the assumptions behind Why Women Rule The Internet, consumer influence is not power. Being the larger share of any particular marketplace doesn’t mean that a group “rules” that marketplace. Certainly, “buying” and “not buying” are forms of influence (maybe you could call it “power” in qutation marks). Influence is not nothing, but influence is not the same as power.

When we really acknowledge what it means to have power, we recognize when and where we do not have it. We will also recognize when and where to create an internet where women are more than participants, where women have real power.

To be sure, there are pockets of women-created spaces, women-designed platforms, women-owned companies, women thought leaders, women change advocates, and women visionaries on the internet. We’re all out here.

But do we “rule” the internet?

No. Not yet.

———————————————————-

Props to the women of GeekFeminism, and to Terri for her post “DO women rule the internet?”, for always keeping us honest about the place of women, and the opportunties for justice, on the interwebz.

See also:
Facebook for Women vs. Facebook Designed by Feminists: Different vs. Revolutionary
When Will “Social Business” Become Social Change Business?
Want More Women on Tech & TED Panels? Reject Meritocracy and Embrace Curation
¹ We will save for another day the conversation about “ruling” not being the goal of feminists or women.

The idea that CEO Daddies of Daughters will help us close the gender wage gap is completely misleading. This idea encourages us to buy into CEO Daddy “Feminism”, which is just another way to allow business men (and women) to avoid taking responsibility for gender equity in the workplace.

When solid but small bits of research get big buzz about nothing actionable, my inner curmudgeon comes out. Given the play that a recent study is getting, all about how having a daughter makes a male CEO deal with the gender wage gap, the curmudgeon must speak:

The unpublished working paper has been blogged, featured on Yahoo news, and discussed in the Wall Street Journal Review Section (the ‘thinking’ section of the WSJ), all because of this finding:

A new, not-yet-published study that tracked 12 years of wage data in Denmark finds that when male CEOs had daughters, their female employees’ wages went up 1.3 percent while their male employees only gained .8 percent raises. So the birth of a daughter effectively shrunk the male-female wage gap by .5 percent on average. (emphasis mine)

And the takeaway is supposed to be this:

When a daughter is born to a CEO, the male-female wage gap at his company is reduced.

Ergo, having a daughter makes a man more likely to use his professional power to make the world of work a better place for women. Having a baby girl makes a CEO Daddy a Feminist.

Interesting spin, isn’t it. Let’s investigate.

Does having a baby girl really make a difference? A real difference?

Let’s look closely at the study itself.  The spin starts with the way that the finding is presented.  Although the finding is statistically significant, the size of the effect is small. Said another way, the relationship between Daddy CEO having a Girl and reduction in the gender wage gap is not a function of chance.  And, it  doesn’t make much of a real world difference.

On average, the decrease was .5%  (yes, half of one percent). In the best case scenario, in a small company (less than 50 employees) where the CEO’s first born child is a girl, the impact of her birth on that CEO Daddy’s actions towards women’s pay is very small — a decrease in the wage gap of 2.8%. In real dollars, this means that in a company where a man has been paid $100 and a woman has been paid $82, her wages would go up a whopping $2.80.

Post-daughter, post-CEO Feminist enlightenment, the woman makes only $15.20 less than the man who makes $100.

And, if we depend on CEO Daddys, it will take a long time to reach pay equity. To close an 18% wage gap, it would take a company 7 CEOs, (avg. CEO tenure 7 years), each with a first-born daughter, each improving the wage gap by 2.8% per CEO, a full 49 years.

The Research itself isn’t the Problem.

On the plus side, this research does demonstrate empirically that the change in attitudes towards women by new fathers of daughters, already documented in social psychological studies, is likely to exist in the business world as well.

The quality of the data set allowed the researchers to eliminate several kinds of statistical and research design-related challenges to any findings. The assumptions built into their empirical analysis are also quite conservative which increases our confidence that the effect is real.

And, the data are from the real world (not in the laboratory), demonstrating that the effect exists in business settings– in Denmark, anyway.

On the down side, the study offers us no actionable insight. There’s not much we can to to increase the number of daughters born to the female partners of male CEOs.

The Real Problem is the idea of CEO Daddy Feminism.

The real problem with the way this study has been ‘spun’. What’s been promoted is the idea that having a daughter leads a business man to be less sexist in his business decisions. Somehow, all we need to do is wait for powerful men to have daughters, and sexism at work will get fixed.

But that’s not true.

(Certainly some large portion of Fortune 500 (male) CEOs have daughters, but gender wage gaps exist in all of these firms. George Bush had a first-born daughter, and so did Rupert Murdoch. Has either man taken a leadership role for gender equity? No.)

This study is being sold to us so that we’ll believe in the idea of CEO Daddy “Feminism” — a special kind of paternalistic (dare I say, patriarchical) form of concern for women. Like the stealth discrimination promoted by so-called ‘benevolent sexism’, CEO Daddy Feminism discriminates more than it liberates.

CEO Daddy Feminism depends on him caring about “his” daughter — rather than asking him to care about everyone’s daughters.

CEO Daddy Feminism depends on him acting paternalistically towards someone beneath him — rather than asking him to address the discrimination that his wife, his sister, his mother, his colleagues, and his age peers have experienced and continue to experience.

CEO Daddy Feminism depends on him caring about someone he individually identifies with — rather than asking him to be empathic regarding all women.

CEO Daddy Feminism allows him to wait until he has little to lose — rather than asking him to examine his own privilege in the here and how.

CEO Daddy Feminism allows him to do only a little bit, for some gains in the long term, rather than to use his power to eliminate gender discrimination at work right now.

The problem of focusing on CEO Daddy Feminism as a possible solution is that it suggests that it’s okay only to act on your own child’s behalf, and only in small increments that never really effect the CEO himself.

This is not to dismiss the role that having a daughter or a son, or a wife or a sister, or a mother or a grandmother can play in bringing a man to become aware of sexism.

Don’t read this as a dismissal of the enlightenment, empathy, and action that can come from a man (or woman) finally realizing how sexism and other injustices are hurting people he loves.

And, don’t read this as a dismissal of the role that a feminist awakening can play in leading any man (or woman) with power to start to use that power to create equity.

Instead, see it as making a larger point –

A really enlightened CEO – Daddy or not — would institute policies and programs to eliminate gender wage gaps altogether.

See Also:  Imagine She’s Your 12 Year Old Daughter by Marion Chapsal
Images from Flickr:
Dad holds the girl 2008-06-03 008 from hansgrim Subway Dad & Daughter from Kevin H. You are my hero!!! from Fabiana Zonca

The @SheTalksTED Twitter account has been busy this week, nominating over 350 influential women (and counting!) as possible speakers for future TED conferences. In addition to lots of suggestions, and support, we’ve also gotten some questions about the @SheTalksTED campaign. We hope that our answers, below, fill in the blanks.

Please tweet us or send a message on the Facebook page, if you have more questions, suggestions and nominations!

• What is the goal behind SheShouldTalkAtTED?
• What has @SheTalksTED achieved so far?
• How did @SheTalksTED identify women to nominate?
• Are you worried that the list of nominees is skewed one way or another, and that the list is missing women whose ideas also have merit?
• How can additional women (and men) be added to the list of @SheTalksTED nominees?
• Who are the people behind behind SheShouldTalkAtTED?
• What’s been surprising about @SheTalksTED effort so far?
• Where did the descriptions of nominees come from?
• Has there been any response to @SheTalksTED from the official TED organization or from @TEDChris or Kelley Stoetzel?
• What’s next for SheShouldTalkAtTED?
• What can we do to support SheShouldTalkAtTED?

Q: What is the goal behind SheShouldTalkAtTED?

It’s really simple: Women have at least half the big ideas in this world, though this is not generally recognized. We think that women’s voices and ideas should be represented equally, along with men’s voices and ideas, in our cultural conversation.

Our long-term goal is parity between male and female speakers on the stage at TED’s annual conferences (TED in Long Beach and TEDGlobal).

Our first step is to engage the Curators of TED, Chris Anderson and Kelley Stoetzel, in a conversation about how TED can get an equal number of women and men in the TED speaker lineup. And, because real gender parity is more than just adding a few more women to the line up ( –or, for that matter, having an occasional TEDWomen conference that’s just “about” women) we believe TED would also be enriched by getting down into the DNA of the TED organization to root out sexism and build in inclusivity.

We are sure that TED does not intend for either conscious or unconscious sexism to get in the way of finding and presenting “ideas worth spreading”.

Our immediate goal, with the @SheTalksTED Twitter activity, is to raise awareness of the need for gender parity at TED, and to raise awareness of the huge –really huge– number of women with terrific ideas that TED should be considering as speakers.

Q: What has @SheTalksTED achieved so far?

One immediate benefit of the @SheTalksTED activity is that we now have a great group of followers, each of whom is now learning about this growing collection of interesting and important women. The women we’re nominating are thinkers and doers whose work she should pay attention to and whose ideas we should follow on Twitter.

A second immediate benefitis that our running list of nominees demonstrates just how many influential women are out there! This should counteract any possible excuse that there is not enough female talent to support gender parity on the TED stage. Like #womaninnovator, #ChangeTheRatio, and other Twitter campaigns, @SheTalksTED increases the visibility of women changemakers who could be invited to TED as speakers.

Q: How did @SheTalksTED identify women to nominate?

We started with what social scientists call a “convenience sample”. We went to our own Twitter lists of feministas, amazing women, and women with great ideas, and created nominations from these lists of fascinating women.

On the plus side, this tactic created an eclectic group of women that we each had put on a list for one reason or another. As different as they are, the women in this group have one thing in common (beyond being mostly women) – The ideas and contributions of these nominees have gotten our attention because they are interesting. They have great ideas, great insights, great wisdom. They are funny and thoughtful.

On the downside, we know that our list of nominees is limited—there are certainly more women, different women that we aren’t aware of yet, who have ideas worth sharing. It’s exciting that people are responding to our invitation to nominate women that they think are interesting— on the SheShouldTalkAtTED Facebook page and in the Twitter stream too.

Q: Are you worried that your list of nominees is skewed one way or another, and that you are missing women whose ideas also have merit?

No, we’re not terribly worried. Since the nomination process is open, it’s easy to include anyone. We’re all invited to nominate more women. If you think we’ve missed someone so far, you can nominate her and make sure she’s included.

Also, we feel pretty confident about the ‘quality’ of the women who we all are nominating. We see the @SheTalksTED effort as crowdsourced curation. We’re curating a list based on what we collectively believe and understand to be ideas worth sharing.

We are not setting ourselves up as arbiters of some quote unquote objective standard of quality or relevance.

Q: How can additional women (and men) be added to the list of  @SheTalksTED nominees?

There are two ways to nominate women (and men) for SheShouldTalkAtTED:

1. Send a nomination via twitter, to @SheTalksTED, with her twitter name, a brief description of why her ideas are worth sharing, and anything else you can fit.

2. Send a nomination via Facebook, by joining the discussion page: Nominations Open! SheShouldTalkAtTED.

We’ll take these nominations and add them to our Twitter feed, Twitter list, and Facebook Page list.

Q: Who are the people behind behind SheShouldTalkAtTED?

On the @SheTalksTED twitter account, the main tweeter is @CVHarquail, of AuthenticOrganizations, in NYC/NJ, along with Susan Macaulay, of AmazingWomenRock, in Dubai.

The larger, emergent SheShouldTalkAtTED initiative is supported by energy from:

• @GloriaFeldt activist and author of No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Feel About Power
• @DebraCondren consultant and author of Ambition is Not a Dirty Word
• Susan Macaulay, Founder of AmazingWomenRock
• Natalia Oberti Noguera (@nakisnakis), #socent CEO and Founder of @PipelineFund
• @MichelleTripp, marketing strategist and author of BrandForward,
• Liza Sabater (@BlogDiva) activist and author of CultureKitchen, and
• @PrithaRaySircar, change agent, #socent CEO  and Founder of theMAKE (@theMAKE411)

We’ve also been joined by a number of women and some men who’ve volunteered to participate in whatever kind of activity we do next. We’re looking forward to growing the movement towards gender parity at TED – and beyond.

Q: What’s been surprising about @SheTalksTED effort so far?

Personally (cvh specifically), I’ve been surprised (and also gratified) by the number of people who are RT-ing the nominations, who are replying to us on Twitter, and who have reached out to offer support via email. It’s exciting to see how many different people are appreciating the growing list, and telling us why.

Of course, it’s nice to see people reply with surprise, and gratitude, because we have nominated them. It is really fun to be able to tell someone that her work matters to us. But it goes beyond people being thankful for individual recognition. People seem really jazzed to recognize that there is a large group of women with great ideas–many of whom are new to them and will really contribute to their world.

Another thing that has surprised me is that dozens of folks have told us that they appreciate the “content” of the tweets. I hadn’t really thought about it a priori, but people enjoy and appreciate the descriptions we’ve given of the nominees. We were really just trying to explain why someone was nominated—and now we’ve realized that this content is helping people find and follow nominees with interests that mesh with their own interests.

Q: Where did the descriptions of nominees come from?

Well, really it was just by asking ourselves the question–“Why do I follow this woman on Twitter?” and then quickly typing out the answer.

(cvh, who wrote most of them, adds) This has led to some idiosyncratic explanations—for example, we nominated a few women because they are ‘kickass” activists (which is clearly my characterization of them, not really their individual idea ‘content’) So, the nominations might convey more about a person’s attitude & approach than her wisdom.

Q: Have there been any response to @SheTalksTED from the official TED organization or from @TEDChris or Kelley Stoetzel?

We haven’t heard anything from them or from TED staff through Twitter – We had wondered if they might tweet us back, since we’ve added hundreds of tweets to the #TED2011 stream over the past week. And, we haven’t heard anything on any of our public blog posts or the Facebook page.

Of course, all three of these channels (Twitter, blogs, Facebook) are social media, and it may be that the best way to communicate with TED as an organization is through more direct, private channels like email, or even a formal hard copy letter. We haven’t reached out to Chris Anderson or Kelley Stoetzel specifically and directly in either of those ways yet. And we will, in the next few weeks.

Q: What’s next for SheShouldTalkAtTED?

We’ve got a bunch of initiatives, on different levels.

On Twitter with @SheTalksTED, we’ll continue to nominate women via Twitter and our Facebook page, and we’ll put together a Twitter list and a page of all the nominees so that people can find and follow them easily.

On Facebook at SheShouldTalkAtTED, we’ll be expanding and organizing our presence there so that people who aren’t on Twitter but who are on Facebook can find us and so we can find them, and so that people can join in the effort.

With regard to the TED organization, we’ll be inviting them to meet with a group of us in April. And, we’ll be starting an official ‘nomination-a-thon’ campaign, so that people can officially nominate women with ideas worth sharing, using TED’s official nomination form.

And, in physical space, we’re organizing our first SheTalks MeetUp in NYC, where women (and men) with ideas worth sharing can come and present their work to each other. Although we want TED to include women and men equally, we don’t need to wait for TED … we can continue to share our ideas with each other.

Q: What can we do to support SheShouldTalkAtTED?

• Follow us on Twitter at @SheTalksTED, retweet nominations you like, offer new nominations, and contribute relevant blog posts (and other content) that we can share to the larger group.

• Like and join our page on Facebook (SheShouldTalkAtTED). Participate in the conversations/discussions, offer nominations, tell your friends about the initiative, and join in wherever.

• Tell us if you have connections to folks at the TED organization, so that we can connect with them in a friendly and warm way to offer our support.

• Write about the SheShouldTalkAtTED initiative on your own blog – adding your own ideas, concerns, and suggestions. Let us know so that we can promote your post by sharing it with the @SheTalksTED followers

• Email and Tweet us with your ideas on how to keep the initiative growing, and how we might make it more effective.

• Start your own #GenderParity & #MoreVoices -related initiative. Let us know about it so that we can support you too.