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

Networks of people and organizations are usually either “markets” or “communities”.

It bothers us that networks fit one or the other model of working together, because we envision something more –something both market and community –  in one network.

We are often disappointed when markets don’t exhibit a commitment to any values other than maximizing profits. And, while we treasure communities where we create collective meaning and build relationships, we often shy away from using these relationships to help each other make a living. We ask too much of the market format, and expect too little from the community format.

It’s become easier to see how these two different models, the market focused on economic transactions and the community focused on meaning & social interchange, diverge in both form and feeling.

Ebusiness and social technologies have made it easier for us to buy and sell based on prices alone. At the same time, they’ve made it easier for us to build strong and rich networks of interpersonal and collective relationships that sustain us socially.

In online markets, the ease of finding a lower price or quicker delivery has led us to dis-intermediate the buyer-seller social relationships we relied on before. We’ve learned to sacrifice the comfort, the security, the qualitative connection, and any interpersonal meaning we found in these commercial exchanges in favor of reduced search costs, lower prices, and increased economic efficiency.

Online communities, facilitated by social technologies, have created more meaning for us, as we’ve been able to find and interact with people who are like us (or unlike us in desirable ways), who have similar interests, values, and goals, who can recognize and affirm who we are, and with whom we can pursue a shared social purpose.

Although we often draw on online communities for social support, learning, and collaboration, we have sometimes shied away from using them to sell or buy or earn money. We worry about burdening our relationships with something as crass as pricing or payments, since we fear that these will change the nature of our interactions and deprive the community of its innocence – or its nobility.

These concerns and these hesitations are appropriate, since markets aren’t supposed to be about creating meaning, and communities aren’t supposed to be about extracting excess rents. Markets and Communities are different models for working together.

But what about our vision of markets where relationships matter and communities where we can make a living while we explicitly pursue values beyond profits?

Enter the Community of Commerce.

As I’ve been researching online eMarketplaces like eBay and Etsy, I’ve identified that while the dominant model is a marketplace that’s all about efficiency and economic exchange, an emerging model is a marketplace that combines the exchange of goods and services with the exchange of social meaning. This combination of economic and social exchange is intentional, motivational, and wickedly effective.

Instead of seeing this model as some sort of ‘not-free’, values- constrained market, let’s give it its own category. Let’s call this model a Community of Commerce.

Defining a Community of Commerce

A community of commerce is a network of organizations and individuals that buy, sell, and exchange goods and services within a collectively-defined community culture, a culture that is based on articulated, shared, more-than-economic values.

Back in 2000, Stacy Bressler & Charles Grantham published a book “Communities of Commerce: Building Internet business communities to accelerate growth, minimize risk, and increase customer loyalty.” Their thesis was that businesses should learn how to transcend geography so that they could identify and connect with strategically relevant business partners. Bressler & Grantham’s motivating contrast was between off-line and online business relationships; they used the terms “communities of commerce” and “online business communities” interchangeably.

I want to expand the definition of “communities of commerce” to focus on how the tensions, tradeoffs and opportunities of a commercial network that puts community first will differ in economically and socially important ways. Trying to stack a network for exchanging meaning on top of a network of economic exchange won’t work – it’s not like we can simply add “meaningplace” to “marketplace” and call it a coherent business model.

In the next few weeks, I’ll post my efforts to define what’s distinctive about a community of commerce, to explain how it’s related to other progressive business models, and to begin to unfold the tensions and opportunities that arise when buying & selling are inseparable from and integral to the mutual exchange of meaning.

I’d love your thoughts about the concept and especially your suggestions for defining it.

See also:

Don’t Tell Esty That Authenticity Is Getting “Old” — The Social Dynamic Between Crafters and Buyers is Timeless
Purpose is the Killer App: Why Organizations Need Social Business Tools
7 Ways That Social Business Advice is Wrong for Your Organization
Insights about Authenticity from the Open Community Book Tour

Image: Indian Garden Flowers Some rights reserved by EssjayNZ

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

Here’s a quick response to today’s New York Times article by Emily Weinstein, All That Authenticity May Be Getting Old, about the flood of ‘authentic’, handmade and one-of-a-kind-ish items on the home decor marketplace. The article dances on the line between criticizing mass marketers for faking authenticity, and reminding readers that our desire for ‘authentic’ will never go away.

The article is interesting, for sure, and worth a read. But it is also worth some reflection.

What’s missing from this article, and from so many critiques of the explosion in the marketplace for handmade home decor, jewelry, cards, clothing, and more, is a deep understanding of what is actually going on between the artisans who make and sell these products, and the customers who covet, buy, and use them.

This dynamic is the genius that propels businesses like Etsy and the larger crafting movement.

When we make and buy handmade, hand-selected, and artisanal items, we are exchanging:

Recognition, Affirmation, and Connection

Recognition

Recognition comes from both the buyer and the seller having their aesthetic– their taste, their values — expressed in a visible place. For some of us, the first time we saw someone else design their own decal for their laptop was on Etsy. The first time we saw someone else make a bike basket out of a lunchbox was on Etsy. The first time we saw someone else make an apron out of their great aunts’ embroidered handkerchiefs was on Etsy.

All of a sudden, it seemed, one could actually see other people who shared your unique tastes. And, instead of that being disappointing (e.g., I’m no longer unique)  it was heartening — Somebody else gets it! Somebody else recognizes this! Your taste can be discovered, and enjoyed.

Affirmation

Affirmation comes from being told “I see you“. “I see you.”

Affirmation comes when you see a cool tech-dude with a wool iPad sleeve, and you say “Etsy?” and he grins. Somebody else has seen your aesthetic– whether a buyer or a seller– and said “I like that. I agree with that. I think that’s beautiful. I’ll pay money for that.”

Because what that all says is — “Your aesthetic is valuable to me, mine is valuable to you”.

You know that feeling when you find a blog written about exactly that topic that bugs you, with great and useful perspective? That’s what Etsy is like… Blogging is for people to share words, Etsy is for people to share beauty.

Connection

Connection. With these aesthetic exchanges, we create communities of shared beauty, shared vision, and shared self-expression.

Hey, I know I’m not the only Etsy buyer who sends little notes to the sellers I buy from saying “I just put that wreath up in my office. I totally love it. I might not ever give it to my sister as planned. Will you make some bigger ones in the future?” I also know I’m not the only person who feels connected looking at other people’s Pinterest pages.

Not only do we connect through the purchase, and through feedback , but we connect through vendor/artist communities. Group after group after group of people with shared aesthetic interests support each other — Yes, there is indeed a Steampunk Catlovers Quilting Group. You can join it. You can be part of that community.

Recognition, Affirmation, and Connection

In a consumerist culture, we are well-trained to seek out opportunities for recognition, affirmation and connection through purchases. Much of the time, though, we have a hard time imagining that there is another person on the other end of the purchase — a creator who is making something not (only) because it is commercial, but (also) because it expresses who they are.

On Etsy, at the Bust Holiday Craftacular, at any Maker Faire, and at the farmer’s market, we get to experience something closer to a social exchange, something closer to a human exchange, something more than a commercial exchange.

Our sense of beauty, our style, and our sense of self can be seen and celebrated, and we can gather with our own kind.

That’s not a fad. That’s a timeless social exchange that we value.  And that’s what’s going on in this commerce of Authenticity.

Images: Fall Wreath from ItzFitz
iPad sleeve, wool herringbone tweed
Steampunk Hat for Cats

What value is all this talk about gamification?

It’s one thing to deploy game-design tactics to turn your for-profit services (like Foursquare or Hashable) into games. By playing games, folks actually will train themselves to use these products.

More troubling to me is the idea of using gamification to redesign work tasks.

Gamification and Work

It’s true that, when gamification is done well (as in, with a deep understanding of what motivates people), gamification becomes a set of tools and techniques for sustaining intrinsic motivation.

Unfortunately, it’s more likely that businesses will use gamification techniques to turn work into tightly controlled play. Controlled, fake play diminishes both the worker and the work.

With that concern, I didn’t see much reason for promoting gamification at work, until some research on entitlement caught my attention.

Psychologists O’Brien, Anastasio, and Bushman have been studying the way a sense of entitlement influences how people perceive the value of their time. Entitled people feel like their time is very valuable, and they resent having to waste their time.

Entitlement makes us resent mundane tasks

Take this observation into the world of work, where we have many dull tasks that are absolutely necessary. For everyone, the duller the task the longer that task seems to take, and the more quickly we want to scoot away when it’s over.

Now thing about people with a strong sense of entitlement. For them, this link between dull tasks, time dragging, and time wasting is even worse. For dull tasks that took the same finite amount of time, participants who were primed to feel entitled rated them as taking longer. And, they were more likely to characterize that time as being ‘wasted‘ versus having been a necessary cost of getting the job done.

While the authors don’t make this next link in their study, it’s just a short walk from feeling like you are wasting your time to feeling resentful of the organization or manager who is making you waste it. Workers with a sense of entitlement can easily come to resent an organization that “wastes” their time. That’s understandable if the work is fetching coffee, but not as understandable when it’s routine, dull, but necessary work.

We can’t resent necessary work, we just need to get it done.

If entitlement makes people feel more negatively about mundane but necessary work, we’ve got some problems ahead. If it’s true that new entrants to the workforce, a group otherwise known as Millennials, feel more sense of entitlement than previous generations, we might see resentment growing within organizations, especially among entry-level or routine jobs with lots of necessary but dull work.

Oh, so no wonder people are into gamification…. the whole problem of dull work is getting worse!

Entitlement ramps up the problem of boring work

Organizationally, we used to address this kind of challenge with programs for redesigning work systems to enrich jobs. (Old-school job enrichment is the same thing as well-done gamification, just without the leaderboard stuff.) Individually, we worked on ‘job crafting’ to reshape the job to fit our own personal preferences.

Gamification gives us an additional way to make work less dull.

But, maybe a new tactic is not what we need. Maybe we just need to do the old stuff– better.

As far as making work into games…. Using gamification to ‘gussy up’ routine and necessary tasks might make them more palatable to workers with a heightened sense of entitlement. But, at the same time, the motivational power of many games wears off after time, so any positive effect is hard to sustain. So, while gamification candy-coats necessary work,  the fun flavor quickly wears off.

Worse, efforts to gamify might just serve to distract us from redesigning the work itself, and from creating a more salient, more purpose-oriented context.

There is so much more that we can do to improve how we organize and structure work. We might not be able to make all work less dull, but we can make it more meaningful.

Is gamification itself a waste of time?

It doesn’t need to be.    Gamification could be a way into a discussion about how to make work tasks meaningful.

However, gamification will only be effective if and when it supports a larger conversation about why we’re here, what we aim to do, and how we each can contribute.

Gamification must be designed to create meaning, not ‘flair‘, and to pursue purpose, not leader board points.

Addressing entitlement at its root 

As it happens, gamification that links dull work to contributions and to collective meaning will also address the root issue of entitlement.

Entitlement, at its root, is self-centeredness. The best way to counter any tendency to locate all importance and all meaning in oneself is to connect the self to others, and to a collective purpose that exists…wait for it… outside the self.

Sure, I’ll take a few cute badges, become the mayor of the conference room, and win a t-shirt by scaling the leader board. But truly, I’d just rather have my work contribute to a greater purpose.

Wouldn’t everyone?

O’Brien, E. H., Anastasio, P. A., & Bushman, B. J. (2011). Time crawls when you’re not having fun: Feeling entitled makes dull tasks drag on. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 37, 1287-1296.

See also:

How Job Crafting Can Get You Closer to Authentic Work
How to Design Social Business Systems For Engaged, Social Organizations
How Social Media Create Organizational Meaning

Images: Gamification of Life Some rights reserved by VFS Digital Design, Gamification at its best All rights reserved by LenKendal

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]

What’s up with the word “new” in the phrase “meaning is the new motivator”?

From all corners of the interwebz conversation about ‘business’, I see mention of this idea that meaning at work is something new, something that we have just begun to desire.

Seriously. It seems to come as a surprise, or as a new development, that maximizing shareholder value isn’t motivating to most employees. Wow. Where have these people been since, oh, the dawn of the industrial revolution?

Folks have been talking about meaning at work, and looking for meaning at work, long before this recent ‘crisis of meaning’.  

True, we’ve used different terms over time.

• We’ve talked about alienation and estrangement to describe being cut off from meaningful work.

• We’ve talked about commitment and engagement, as attitudes towards organizations that ought to have meaning but usually don’t.

• We’ve talked about “leadership” as the process of creating meaning, even if only through charisma, from the top of the organization’s food chain.

• And, we’ve talked about vision and mission, knowing that meaning was in there, somewhere, among all the BHAGs.

There is nothing ‘new’ about the desire for meaning at work.

Just yesterday, Luis Suarez wrote a great post about meaning, in which he shared a vlog from Roger Martin, Dean at Rotman School, about “The Crisis of Meaning in the Millennial Workforce“. Luis unpacks why any of us, knowledge workers especially, might feel a lack of meaning. He clarifies that meaning is an issue for every generation of workers, and that each of us needs to do something about refocusing business so that it meets human, social needs. (Read his whole post, it’s great.)

So my question is not whether we need meaning. The question is:

Why is our desire for meaning positioned this way?

Why do so many (like Dan Pink) position “meaning” as something “new”?

• Are we trying to avoid recognizing that meaning is something we’ve always wanted, but perhaps never felt permitted to ask for in polite business company?

Why do so many (like Roger Martin) position “meaning” as something others desire, but not us? Or that we desire for others, but not for ourselves?

• Are we talking about “Millenials” and “their” needs for meaning so that we can take care of ‘them’ while avoiding taking responsibility for ourselves?

• Are we trying to look ‘objective’ so that we don’t look demanding, or ungrateful? Do we have to make meaning a ‘business problem’ so that we can take meaning seriously?

I recognize that for many, it’s become a “crisis of meaning” because there is so little left to promise workers, in terms of job security, career development, gain-sharing, and ownership rights. Maybe after all these other kinds of ‘motivations’ have been eroded by the twin beasts of corporate profit-taking and work intensification, there is nothing left that we can truly count on to take our minds of the paycheck, and so we turn to meaning.

In good times and bad times, people have always wanted meaningful work. People have always wanted – and still want–to work in organizations that serve a larger purpose, where individual and collective efforts create meaningful products, meaningful services, and meaningful experiences.

Why do we treat this as a surprising truth?

See also:
The Pursuit of (Organizational) Purpose by Deb Lavoy

Social Media for Social Change — Inside the Organization?
Is your organization flourishing or withering?
How Social Media Create Organizational Meaning

Technology has a way of sucking the humanity right out of us.

Consider how we describe, design and deploy ‘enterprise 2.0′ and work system technologies in our organizations:

– When we talk about technology systems, we talk about machines, platforms, inputs and outputs.  We forget about values, emotion, flourishing, meaning and purpose.

– When we design technology systems, we think about control, architecture, scripts, modularity, and proxies. We forget about comfort, warmth, touch, and beauty.

– When we use technology, we automate, codify, record and retrieve. We forget about expressing, feeling, creating, and giving.

Too many work technologies are systems of extraction.

We keep upgrading to technology systems that extract more work from us, while giving back less and less to us.

So who can blame us if we’re not all enthusiastic about Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business initiatives? Once the shine wears off the new tools, we’re left wondering — What’s in this for me? What’s in this for you? What’s in this for us?

You’ve heard me say before that the Enterprise 2.0- digital- social- business- system- industry-complex seems to be running on the wrong rails. Too many technology products are designed, positioned, and ‘sold’ to us as ways to streamline and enhance collective tasks so that we improve bottom line business results.

There’s nothing wrong with that goal, except that it’s so narrow, so limiting, and so shareholder-centered. It’s just not about being human.

We need to talk about how digital social media enterprise business systems can help us, the users, be more of who we are individually and together.

We need to figure out how to transform these systems of extraction these digital-social-media-enterprise-business systems into systems of engagement. We need to build technology systems that help us to be more fully social human as we work together.

5 Needs for Full, Social, Human-ness

When we human people work with other human people, there are five human needs that have to be met in order for us to be our full social selves.

These are our needs for:

1. Identity
2. Voice
3. Agency
4. Community
5. Purpose

Currently, in too many organizations, we are controlled, constrained, muted, forbidden, or discouraged from being fully human, because the work systems  make it hard for us to meet these 5 needs.

However, as work systems for enterprise coordination, knowledge management, work process flow, and customer relationship management become more social, they are also creating new opportunities for us to be more human while we work together.

5 Ways That Systems of Engagement Bring Out Our Full Social Selves

1. Systems of Engagement Enable Identity

We humans want to be who we are. We want to bring our full selves to work and into our interactions with colleagues, while we are are making and doing things. When we are able to be who we are in specific, descriptive, textured, multiple ways, we can be ‘more fully there’ at work.

Systems of engagement let us define who we are, help us be seen for who we are, and help us be known for who we are allow us to contribute our full selves. They help us connect who we are, what we have to offer, and what needs to be done, helping us find and create personal meaning.

2. Systems of Engagement Foster Voice

Voice is our ability to say in our own way what we think needs to be said and to be heard when we say it. Voice is the full expression of who we are, what we think, and how we feel. When we have voice, we are able to offer ideas, share insights, and offer feedback.

Systems of engagement create ways for us to speak, to spread our words, to be heard by others, and to be listened to by others. They allow us to use our voice to collaborate and to contribute.

3. Systems of Engagement Activate Agency

Agency is our ability to act, to get things done, and to cause things to happen. Agency is our ability to make choices and to enact those choices. When we have agency we are makers, doers, creators, innovators. We get stuff done.

Systems of engagement create opportunities for agency because they give us more places in which we can act. Systems of engagement also give us the autonomy, responsibility and accountability that agency requires. We are able to decide, to engage, and to act.

4. Systems of Engagement Cohere Communities

Communities are our connections with other people — not just dyadic connections, but also networked connections. We yearn to be connected with people who know us, who like us, and who need us. When we have  a community, we have a slew of direct and indirect relationships in which we can be supportive, helpful, and influential. We matter to others.

Systems of engagement help us find the people we need and who need us. These systems help us create and sustain connections through which we and others form collectives, collectives that have capability beyond the sum of members’ individual ability.

5. Systems of Engagement Catalyze Purpose

Purpose is our reason for being. Purpose is the cause outside ourselves that focuses our contributions to our community. When we have a purpose we can have commitment, vision, motivation, collaboration, and accomplishment. Our (work) lives have meaning.

Systems of engagement help us channel our attention and our efforts towards our purpose. They link us and our work to important tasks, and link our individual work to the work of others. They accumulate, organize, synthesize, and amplify our individual and collective efforts to help us achieve our purpose.

Identity, Voice, Agency, Community, and Purpose are not focus of social media technologies in organizations, but they should be.

Systems of engagement can certainly help us meet business needs. And they can do so much more. Systems of engagement can help us transform how we work together, by enabling identity, fostering voice, activating agency, cohering communities and catalyzing purpose so that we meet our human needs as much if not more than business needs.

We don’t need “social business” technology to suck less of the humanity out of us.

We need technology-enabled social systems that invite us to engage our full selves in our work together.

We need systems of engagement.

How do we create systems of engagement that bring out our full selves?
See my related post: How to Design Social Business Systems For Engaged, Social Organizations

See also:

Social Organizations Care About Personal Development by Jamie Notter, SocialFish

How Social Media Create Organizational Meaning
Your Authentic Social Network: The Identity Graph
Make Distinctiveness Matter by Linking It To Organizational Purpose
Images from Flickr:
Blue from bartb_pt
Machine à répandre la chimie… from ‘ m x b c h r
Blue Network from ringwell

Does it really matter if an organization is “distinctive”?

When an organization’s distinctiveness (identity) is linked with the organization’s purpose (greater social goal), the organization’s unique qualities provide the unique resources needed to achieve that purpose.

Organizational Distinctiveness is more than Positioning

Managers often dismiss the concept of organizational “distinctiveness”, thinking that distinctiveness is only relevant to “positioning” in the marketplace. Valuing distinctiveness in the marketplace isn’t wrong, but it is incomplete.

Distinctiveness is important inside the organization, because distinctiveness is half of what makes collective work meaningful.

Distinctiveness: How does “who we are” really matter?

Collectively, we are who we are. We have enduring, distinctive characteristics that create our collective organizational self-definition. That self-definition can resolve a generic existential crisis about “who we are”, but it doesn’t necessarily give ‘who we are’ a greater meaning.

What can give ‘who we are’ a greater meaning is the organization’s purpose. When the organizations’ distinctive features, talents, skills, positions, history, and members are linked to a collective purpose, the organization’s distinctiveness becomes meaningful.

Defining Organizational Purpose

Every organization was created to achieve some purpose. Some organizations define their purpose in narrow, rather generic ways, seeing their purpose as “making a profit” or “producing a service efficiently”.

But purpose is really something beyond the organization’s generic goals — a purpose is how the organization aims to contribute to the larger world, in a qualitative way.

For example, while all financial institutions want to make money, the purpose of CFCU Community Credit Union is to encourage thrift, savings and the wise use of credit, so that members can establish financial well-being. The purpose of Etsy, beyond making money for itself and for its member vendors, is to help reconnect makers with buyers, so that artisans and users can affirm and share each other’s creativity.

Purpose is how the organization’s collective activity can add qualitative value to members and to society.

The Problem with Purpose: Why “us”?

The problem with purpose, though, is often that there is no well-articulated reason why a particular organization ought to take on that purpose.

Why should CFCU, and not some other organization, help people establish financial well being? Why should Etsy help artists and customers affirm each others’ creativity? Can’t artists enter competitions to get affirmation? Can’t customers buy branded products to affirm their good taste?

Distinctiveness answers the question of “Why us?”

Distinctiveness explains why we, and not some other organization, should pursue this purpose — because “who we are” makes us better qualified than any other organization to pursue this purpose.

Because we are who we are, we as an organization have the talent, the ability, the qualities necessary, to pursue this purpose. We can do it better than others, achieve what others cannot, because of who we are.

Distinctive qualities are innate strengths waiting to be used. So, while any other organization might have the time, the money, and the determination to pursue this purpose, only our organization can contribute the skills, talents, values, and members who can contribute what this purpose really needs.

Why did Etsy set its purpose to support creativity? Because Etsy is an artful, creative company, full of crafters, artisans, artists, creatives, aesthetes. They can create this kind of support because they know (themselves) what is needed by their community.

Purpose makes distinctiveness useful; distinctiveness makes purpose achievable.

Linking our organizational distinctiveness to our organizational purpose helps us broaden, deepen and amplify our contributions to that purpose.

Organizational distinctiveness can lead to competitive advantage for the same reason that distinctiveness can help organizations achieve their larger purpose – the advantage comes from a link between what the organization has to offer (its unique qualities) and what is needed to achieve the purpose.

For both organizations and individuals, when “who you are” is linked to “what you’re trying to contribute to this world”, your work is meaningful. Work is meaningful because it draws on something you uniquely have to offer, and contributes to something that uniquely needs what you have to offer.

–  By itself, your organization’s defining features are interesting but not necessarily relevant.

— By itself, your organization’s purpose may be noble but not necessarily achievable.

Linked together, your organization’s distinctiveness and purpose serve each other, making your work and your organization more meaningful

See also:

Beyond Positioning: Establishing Authentic Optimal Distinctiveness
Their Need or Your Ability: Why does your organization exist?
Can an organization be too different?: The Strategic Value of Optimal Distinctiveness
B Corporation Identity: An Opportunity for Organizational Authenticity

Images from Naccarato on Flickr

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