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

The most promising feature of a community of commerce is the way that members in the community work to ensure each other’s success, even if doing that costs them something.

When members in a community help each other, we often don’t notice that there is a real cost in giving that help. Instead, because we are so trained to presume that any business-related action has a profit motive, we mis-interpret the cost of helping a customer as treat is as an “investment”.

It isn’t. It’s a give of support, with no expectation of return. This gifting is what distinguishes a human community from an impersonal marketplace. What these gifts from different members create, in aggregate, is a different experience and a different quality of participation in commerce.

Community of Commerce, in Action

Just today, I’ve been watching the Etsy Community of Commerce operating in real time, as Etsy Inc. delivers its springtime Etsy Success Symposium.

There are about 120+ Etsy merchants in person in the Etsy Inc lab/workshop space in Brooklyn. With them are perhaps 20 presenters leading the workshops. Some of the presenters are from Etsy Inc., some are Etsy merchants, and others are from the larger Etsy Community. A few are independent consultants there to teach a specific business skill, and some independent consultants have come just to help out.

Then, online, there are about 3000 Etsy merchants watching a LiveStream of the workshops, running a simultaneous chat, using the Etsy Success Symposium workbook they downloaded from the Etsy site, and offering each other suggestions and encouragements while the presentations unfold.

Before I can describe the community dynamic, let me identify the different sets of participants:

Etsy Inc.: The legal entity, the site, and the people who create and run it

Etsy Merchants (also known as Sellers): Individuals and small business that have a store or shop in the Etsy site, where they display for sale items that they make and/or what they curate

Etsy B2B Partners: Businesses that don’t sell wares on Etsy to ‘retail’ customers, but instead who provide a third party service that helps Etsy Inc. serve the Merchants or that helps the Merchants run their business back offices more effectively

Etsy Customers: People like me who troll the site endlessly, looking at and buying all the beautiful things

The community also has members such as Etsy-related blogs that feature craft techniques, business building tactics, or tools that help merchants with their businesses, and software/digital development companies that are using Etsy’s API to create third-party applications that help sellers do extra things like manage their taxes more effectively. And this is without even discussing Etsy Inc.’s contributions to the software developer community and startup communities in NYC. Or the effect that all of this interactive commercial and community activity has on the ultimate experience of the end consumer.

What is actually going on here at the Etsy Success Symposium.?

It looks straightforward on the surface:

Etsy Inc. is running a training/outreach event for some nice PR, and ultimately to improve merchants’ performance on the site. Etsy Inc. is paying for the day, the speakers, the media accessibility. The merchants are there to build their skills so that they can grow their businesses. And, Etsy Inc. is going to benefit with increased revenues from listings and transactions.

But wait, there’s more…

Although the Merchants at this event irl and online will all improve their businesses as a result of the workshops, Etsy Inc. won’t necessarily get a piece of their increased business. Often, as merchants get better at what they do and how they sell it, they branch out beyond the Etsy site. They go off to craft shows, retail shops, and other online sites like FAB.com and Refinery29, and sell their stuff elsewhere. Some even create online, stand-alone shops. They take their business away from Etsy Inc.

Going the other direction, Etsy merchants are participating not only to learn how to build their business but also to participate in the merchant community. Online and offline, merchants help each other out in ways that cost them time and energy and don’t increase their individual profits. For example, many merchants put together “Treasuries” — 16-image pages of items curated around a theme. These Treasuries get used on Etsy’s homepage as an advertisement of what’s available on the site. But the merchants who curate the Treasuries don’t (and can’t) use them to promote their own items. They create these to promote other merchants’ wares that they love.

There is a complex network of helping behaviors circulating within the community of commerce.

The complete list of

• What Etsy Inc does for Merchants
• What Merchants do for Etsy Inc.
• What Etsy Partners do for Etsy Inc.
• What Etsy Inc. does for Etsy Partners
• What Etsy Partners do for Etsy Merchants
• What Etsy Merchants do for Etsy Partners

is very long. I won’t do it justice here. But, let me point out what all these actions have in common.

Features of these Success Sharing actions

• Actions are intended to help the other member do better.

• There is no quid pro quo expected.

• Members refrain from taking each other’s business even when they could.

• Members put their own interests next to or behind, but never always in front of, the interests of the other members.

A cynical person could look at at the relationship between Etsy Inc., Etsy merchants, and Etsy- related businesses and say that what they are doing is merely “investing” in these other parties. That cynical person would find something that looked like pay-back, and negate the idea of a gift.

An economist could find a way to assign a ‘utility’ to a non-monetary element and connect that metric to a profit or cost. They’d find a way to create a balance of costs and benefits.  But just because economists find ways do that doesn’t mean that they are in fact adequately capturing what’s going on and how it all works.

There is something else going on in a Community of Commerce.

Listening to the conversation at the Etsy Success Symposium and watching the comments streaming online, you can feel any energy that is about the community, that emphasizes sharing, and that isn’t selfish. There’s a very different ethos, one where each member puts the community’s interests on par with her or his own interests.

I can’t begin to do it justice here— maybe you can capture it?

See also:

Communities of Commerce: Where the Marketplace is also the Meaning Place
Connecting to the Company Story: Coding is Crafting for Etsy’s Engineers

image: Etsy Symposium Logo from The Etsy Blog

Social Technologies — all those different tools we talk about as ‘social media’ — are creating the opportunity for
a social change trifecta.

Social technologies are making it possible for us to transform how individuals, organizations and economics interact with each other, in ways that can help all three thrive.

Social technologies make rich, complex, widespread, accessible communication possible. That’s exactly the kind of communication we need to really free ourselves of the constraints of previous models of organizing and working together.

We often forget that the constraints we pushing up against now, constraints like disengagement, organizational silos, and competition without cooperation, all result from ‘obstructed’ communication.

When communication is obstructed, people and organizations have unequal access to the knowledge, the allies and the influence they need to make sure they thrive.

Individuals can’t share themselves fully, organizations can’t coordinate effectively, and commercial communities can’t negotiate fairly because we can’t get everyone to the table, get everyone talking, and get everyone listening well enough to act in ways that benefit all.

Social Technologies create the opportunity for change at all three levels of productive participation.

• At the Individual level, social technologies give us tools for self-expression, self-affirmation, voice and agency. They give us places to participate and actual things to do that can make a difference.

• At the Organizational level, social technologies connect us and coordinate us through communication networks and locations. They let us find the information and the colleagues we need, when we need them. They let us share resources so that we work more efficiently, and share ideas so that we work more effectively. They let us collaborate to pursue shared purpose.

• At the Economic level, social technologies help organizations rethink their relationships with their stakeholders. They let organizations align and negotiate with stakeholders across both similarities and differences.

Social technologies make it possible for organizations to connect with other organizations and actors to create communities that surpass the functionality of markets.  These communities of commerce can create new types of economic opportunity for organizations large and small, because they offer different terms for conducting commerce. These communities have the social and technical structures to let us distribute the total value generated by our interdependent work in a way that is more fair.

Social Technologies work because they subvert and circumvent the kinds of power dynamics that organizations depended on when communication was more constrained.

Social Technologies Make Democratic Participation Possible

These technologies can make real the dream of democratic participation by individuals in organizations, of democracy as a guiding process in organizations, and of democratic negation within the economy for a more just distribution of net value.

A bonus opportunity is that social technologies make it possible for changes at any level to stimulate, support and power change at other levels. By design, social technologies integrate individual communication with group communication with stakeholder communication. Shift one level of communication and you nudge them all.

For example, digital collaborative work systems organize colleagues around shared goals and shared purpose while simultaneously making it possible for individuals to contribute to work projects that are personally meaningful. While both collaborative work and individual opportunity for meaningful work have always been potentially linked, social technology tools that routinize collaboration make personal connection the default option, not the occasional benefit.

We need leaders who can see the Trifecta of Possibility

As promising as they are, social technologies create only the possibility of these interacting opportunities for change. Social technologies still require ‘leadership’ from managers and engaged participation by most members before these opportunities can lead to real change.

Before we can really take advantage of social technologies for liberating us as individuals, organizations and economies, we need to recognize that change at one level requires change at all levels.

Social business advocates who talk about how technology can transform organizations also must address:

• How will these same social technologies create opportunity for individuals?

• When social technologies put pressure on an organization’s relationships with other organizations, how can we use this pressure to transform inter-organizational (economic) relationships?

Leaders must think bigger. They can’t just focus on transforming their particular work organization. Leaders must also have a vision of how the individuals who compose the organization will transform, and how the economic communities these organizations participate in should be transformed.

We’ve talked about how making organizations “social” requires leadership as well as technology. But in fact, what social organizations really require is for people — not just managers but all members — to think bigger about the kinds of changes social technologies can support for us.

Social organizations will thrive has members are freed to become more human, and as stakeholder communities are pressed to become more just.

If we choose to be truly visionary, social technology can drive all three forms of change, so that we all thrive.

Must see also:

If Social Business is the Answer, What is the Question? 3 Driving Forces, by Deb Lavoy at CMSWire.com

Factories: The Original Social Businesses by Anne McEwan, Phd The Smart Work Company

When will “Social Business” Become “Social Change Business”?

Image: WinPlaceShow Some rights reserved by Professor of Death

There are many fledgling businesses that have laudable intent and shaky commercial foundations.  

This is a problem because, in an ideal world, the businesses that stand for values we share should also be able to sustain themselves as businesses. That’s the key premise underneath social entrepreneurship and conscious capitalism.

Purpose-driven organizations need compelling values, but they also need coherent business models. 

People want to buy products that support values they believe in. To meet this consumer need, some businesses now make their values visible in their products and services, and sell them to customers who share those very values. 

But what happens when the values are more popular than the products, as with Holstee and their Holstee Manifesto? What kind of business can you create then?

This problem of organizations with compelling values that can’t seem to make a business out of them came to mind when a friend shared a Washington Post article about a company called Holstee.  Holstee is experiencing a somewhat dramatic version of this problem.

Holstee has a company values statement that people are crazy about and a business model that is underwhelming.

Who is Holstee?

Holstee is a Brooklyn-based, mostly e-commerce business that sells clothing and accessories described as “products with a conscience.” These products include upcycled wallets, t-shirts, messenger bags, and similar lifestyle items.

By designing and curating with a conscience, Holstee offers a place for mindful shoppers to find meaningful products.

However, Holstee doesn’t seem to support itself by selling these lifestyle products. Instead, Holstee supports itself by selling its actual values — The Holstee Manifesto — in the form of a poster.

The Holstee Manifesto

The Holstee Manifesto is the Holstee founders’ life vision put into words.  It’s been typeset and printed on high-quality paper stock, and is sold on the Holstee website.

The Holstee Manifesto is Holstee’s most popular product.

So far, the Manifesto has been viewed over 500 million times and translated into 12 languages. There are Flickr groups, Facebook conversations, and blog post after blog post focused on how inspiring the Holstee manifesto is. Holstee sold over 11,00 posters in 2011, at $25 a pop, and posters accounted for half of Holstee’s revenue in Nov. of 2011.

Holstee “isn’t a Manifesto Company”

In an interview in Inc. magazine, the founders explain that

“We’re not a manifesto company, whatever that would be. The success of the posters helped us bootstrap, but at the end of the day, we’re about products with a unique story that are designed with a conscience.”

I’d take those words at face value, if it wasn’t for Holstee’s second most popular product.²

Holstee’s “Lifecycle” video sets the Manifesto to evocative images and music. Released only three months ago (Nov 2011), the Lifecycle video has been viewed almost 900,000 times to date, and has inspired its own Tumblr.

Clearly, Holstee is putting time, money, creative energy, and not a little bit of love into sharing their Manifesto. Why, then, aren’t they a manifesto company?

Is Holstee a Manifesto Company?

If half of your revenue, the majority of your units sold, and 99% of your public’s awareness can be attributed to the manifesto you sell, aren’t you a manifesto company?

And, given the hundreds of companies that sell ethically-sourced, free trade, biodegradable t-shirts, isn’t there something neat about being the only one also selling a Manifesto?

In the words of Holstee’s founders,

We wrote a manifesto but we never wrote a business plan.

If that’s true, what does that tell the founders about what really matters to them, as a business?

Is there a business behind the values statement?

The 50 million and 900,000 views that the Manifesto is generating are telling Holstee that there is demand for the values in their Manifesto to be articulated, shared, and made visible.

But while the millions of views are good public relations, they aren’t helping Holstee they way(s) they could be, since   these page views aren’t making Holstee any money.

I don’t know how much non-manifesto merchandise Holstee is selling, but using sales from the Manifesto to bootstrap their non-manifesto product business suggests that the products are not selling enough to sustain the business on their own.¹

• Why does Holstee see their Manifesto as a short-term way to provide start-up capital (i. e., as bootstrapping) but not as a source of ongoing, growing revenue?
• Why hasn’t Holstee “productized” and monetized the Manifesto further?
• Why can’t people buy the Manifesto on mugs and mousepads?

Holstee is leaving a lot of money on the table.

When the posters of your values statement outsell your intended product line, you’ve got a business problem and a business opportunity. 

The market is telling Holstee something.

The market is telling Holstee that their values are more desired than their current products. And, the market is telling Holstee that it’s missing an opportunity to meet consumers’ needs and to build themselves a sustainable business by promoting the values in their manifesto.

Right now, Holstee doesn’t seem to have a business model that fully supports their values. They need to rethink their busiess plan, and they need to ask themselves what kind of business they are, and what kind of business they want to be.

A Lifestyle Products Business?

If Holstee wants to be a Brooklyn-based purveyor of clothing and accessories “with a conscience”, they might focus on developing a product mix that conveys their values more prominently.

A Life Inspiration Business?

If Holstee wants to be a Brooklyn-based organization devoted to inspiring individuals’ hopes and dreams for a meaningful life, they might look for different ways to convey the actual words of their Manifesto.

Can’t Holstee capitalize on people’s desire for inspiration? Look at all the “Keep Calm and ….” merchandise — all purchased by people who want a reminder of what’s important to them.

Maybe what consumers want is the most streamlined exchange possible, where they literally buy the meaning itself, so that the item on which the words are placed is largely irrelevant.

There’s nothing wrong with mousepads and mugs with inspiring words on them. Words printed on various everyday items aren’t any less noble or less impressive than t-shirts. They can all be made “with a conscience”.

What should Holstee do to match its business model and its values?

Should Holstee develop the organization’s capacity to translate their values into products so that the products are more meaningful?

Or, is it time for Holstee to pivot, and change their business model so that they are selling the values directly through words and images?

Either way, don’t you think that Holstee should do more with their Manifesto?

¹ I’m interpreting and opining based on publicly available information. There may be important details I don’t know about that would reshape the conversation. If so, I’d love to learn about them. Email me at cvharquail at authentic organizations dot com.
² Measured by page views.
Also, I hear from mutual friends that the Holstee founders are lovely people, which you’d expect given the ideas in the manifesto. 

See also:
Why Your Company Should Have A Social Mission, by Olivia Khalili at CauseCapitalism.com
Communities of Commerce: Where the Marketplace is also the Meaning Place
Their Need or Your Ability: Why does your organization exist?
Make Distinctiveness Matter by Linking It To Organizational Purpose

Images: © Holstee and AllPosters

Hat tip: I was introduced to Holstee by @BrainPicker. I’ve been to their site to see what I could buy to support them, and I bought a poster that’s now on our refrigerator.

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]