Why So Few Women at the Top? Facebook COO's Take

I found this TED video provided a dose of common sense thinking about the limiting attitudes (sometimes self-limiting) which can make it difficult for women to reach the top of all kinds of organisations.

You will see Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg looking at why a smaller percentage of women than men reach the top of their professions -- and offering 3 powerful pieces of advice to women aiming for those roles.

Click on the blog's title to go to the video.

Testing Hidden Bias at Harvard (Alan Alda video)

In preparation for workshops it's great to have different ways of encouraging people to challenge their thinking...about themselves. For some time I have been steering people toward the Harvard University research on hidden bias. Their Implicit Association Tests give people an opportunity to reflect on the unconscious biases they may have - along with all the rest of us!

I found a video clip from a Scientific American TV series in which Alan Alda does a test for himself and discusses the results with the researchers involved. Despite their familiarity with the tests, the research leaders also still demonstrate significant unconscious bias based on gender and race. Amazing how persistent these biases are over time. On the positive side there is a discussion of actions which can reduce the impact of bias.

Here is the Alan Alda video

Women Matter

“At the time I got to meet one or two good women marketers. Most marketers I’d met [until then] were men. What I started understanding very quickly, as I worked with them [the women], is because we were in the diet market, it was only women who really understood women engaged with dieting. It didn’t matter how intellectually smart and how brilliant a marketer you were, as a man you didn’t fully connect with dieting. At the time they’d taken a really bright guy and put him in charge of marketing for the US. When you looked at the way that the insights were pulled together, the way they were driving the marketing thinking, it was completely chalk and cheese. That was because you’d asked a guy to work out how women’s minds work on dieting, versus a woman”.

This is an extract of a recent conversation I’ve had with a senior leader in a food company. I use it to illustrate just one of the ways in which business leaders are beginning to link gender diversity to the performance of their organisations. In my view there are many other situations where the presence of women in organisations can directly tie to performance. We know that more women than men have an empathetic mindset for the challenges faced by others. This feminine characteristic, which of course some men demonstrate, is a potentially powerful aid to profitable new product development. While the masculine mindset is attracted by the challenge of building a great widget, the feminine mind is more likely to scan the environment for widgets that people need and will pay for. Both mindsets are needed and a more profitable future depends on having both.

McKinsey have recently published a report on the value of women in organisations called Women Matter. Mirroring other reports by Catalyst it presents evidence for the positive impact women at senior levels are having on the performance of organisations.