Overcoming our "bossypants" bias

This is the fifth post in a series of posts inspired by reading Sheryl Sandberg's book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. 

We've previously looked at some of Sandberg's evidence 

• That women are underrepresented in positions of power and leadership
• How lack of confidence contributes to the issue
• How decisions about having children play a role in the problem

If you've read the posts in this series you may be thinking Sandberg is blaming the victim. Indeed some critics make that claim, but I don't think a sincere reading of the book leads to that conclusion. The problem goes deeper. It's cultural.

When a male leader is assertive, decisive, and direct, people may see him as strong leader. When a female exhibits these same qualities, people think she's bossy. In Lean In Sandberg quotes Deborha Gruenfeld, a professor of leadership and organizational behavior at Stanford as saying,

"Our entrenched cultural ideas associate men with leadership qualities and women with nurturing qualities and put women in a double bind... We believe not only that women are nurturing, but that they should be nurturing above all else. When a woman does anything that signals she might not be nice first and foremost, it creates a negative impression and makes us uncomfortable." (Sandberg, 2013, p. 43)

Echoes of this are present throughout our culture. I found it in Maria Konnikova's book The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win, in which Konnikova documents dedicating a year to learning the popular poker game of Texas Hold 'em and competes in the World Series of Poker. Her coach is advising her to play more aggressively. She's struggles with this advice saying,

"It comes to me then, the thing that's been nagging at me, and I don't at all like the realization: a lot of my failure to up the aggression factor is due to my social conditioning. Over the years, I've learned that it doesn't pay to be aggressive while female. It's unattractive to those in power namely men, but also some of those women who have managed to make it to the top and now don't want to jeopardize their position." (Konnikova, 2020, p. 101)

More succinctly, "... success and likeability are negatively correlated for women." (Sandberg, 2013, p. 153)

We need to overcome this cultural resistance and celebrate good leadership qualities regardless of whether they come from men, women or non-binary individuals. Good leaders should be recognized as good leaders regardless of biological sex or gender.

If women in leadership roles were common this bias against female leaders may fade. As Sandberg says, "Real change will come when powerful women are less of an exception." (Sandberg, 2013, p. 50)

Recognizing that we may have implicit biases against female leadership and talking about how to overcome it may help improve things -- "The simple act of talking openly about behavioral patterns makes the subconscious conscious." (Sandberg, 2013, p. 148)

One story Sandberg recounts further underpins the cultural bias:

"Jocelyn Goldfein, one of the engineering directors at Facebook, held a meeting with our female engineers where she encouraged them to share the progress they had made on the products they were building. Silence. No one wanted to toot her own horn. Who would want to speak up when self-promoting women are disliked?" (Sandberg, 2013, p. 44)

In general, I think most self-promoters are disliked regardless of gender, but consider the situation, an engineering director encouraging female engineers to "share the progress on the products they were building." Speaking up in this context hardly seems like self-promotion, but I'm a male, and the fact that I see it this way may be more evidence of the problem.

What follows regarding this situation is interesting, "Jocelyn switched her approach. Instead of asking the women to talk about themselves, she asked them to tell one another's stories. The exercise became communal, which put everyone at ease." (Sandberg, 2013, p. 44)

As an engineering leader, I am interested in this communal approach because as Sandberg tells us and my own experience has shown, "... well-functioning groups are stronger than individuals." (Sandberg, 2013, p. 48)

Reading Lean In gives one the sense that a vicious cycle is at work. Cultural biases against strong females and a desire to be liked, dampen women's desire to speak up and may prevent them from seeking leadership positions. The resulting lack of representative female leadership perpetuates the cultural bias that leadership roles aren't for women and reinforces the stereotype that women should be nice and nurturing rather than strong and assertive. The cultural pressure to be nurturing may reinforce women's thinking about childrearing, causing them to leave the workforce and too often to leave before leaving again reducing the number of women in the workforce and in positions of leadership.

In the book Sandberg speaks about mentorship as a possible means of improving things. Here again the vicious cycle is reinforced. Because there are more men in positions of leadership and fewer women in the workforce, male leaders typically choose to mentor junior men in their organizations simply because there are more of them.

"Mentorship and sponsorship are crucial for career progression. Both men and women with sponsors are more likely to ask for stretch assignments and pay raises than their peers of the same gender without sponsors." (Sandberg, 2013, p. 66)

If there were more women in leadership positions, more junior women in organizations may find good mentors. 

In the first post in this series, I quoted Sandberg quoting Kunal Modi. Recall that Modi said, "for the sake of American corporate performance and shareholder returns, men must play an active role in ensuring that the most talented young workers (often women...) are being encouraged to advocate for their career advancement..." (Sandberg, 2013, pp. 165-166)

"Men of all ages must commit to changing the leadership ratios. They can start by actively seeking out qualified female candidates to hire and promote. And if qualified candidates cannot be found, then we need to invest in more recruiting, mentoring, and sponsoring so women can get the necessary experience." (Sandber, 2013, p. 166)

On the above point of being unable to find qualified candidates and the call to invest more in recruiting, mentoring, and sponsoring female candidates, I'd be curious to hear from the economists. Is this an effective use of a company's resources? Does it make more financial sense to just hire from the available supply of talent? I believe there's value in a diverse team, but how is that effectively measured? How much additional time and effort should a profit driven company spend recruiting? What is the return on that investment? There are anecdotes online and references to studies showing that women led companies outperform male led companies. (Novotney, 2023)

If we're unable to spend extra effort to recruit qualified females, it's a no brainer that we should encourage our best contributors to advocate for themselves, to strive for more responsibility, to speak up, and to lean in. Being a manager and a mentor aren't the same thing. Encourage members of your team to find mentors. Help them find one, if they want, and be a mentor to someone outside your team or organization.

As Modi said our motivations don't need to be altruistic because more female leadership doesn't just "lead to fairer treatment for all women." Sandberg tells us that "Research already suggests that companies with more women in leadership roles have better work-life policies, smaller gender gaps in executive compensation, and more women in midlevel management." (Sandberg, 2013, p. 171)

"More female leadership will lead to fairer treatment for all women." (Sandberg, 2013, p. 171) 

I hope that one day female leadership is so common we don't really notice it anymore. As Sandberg says,

"In the future, there will be no female leaders. There will just be leaders." (Sandberg, 2013, p. 172)

If you're a man in a traditional (i.e. heteronormative) relationship, you can help in simple ways. "... when asked at a conference what men could do to help advance women's leadership, Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter answered, 'The laundry.'" (Sandberg, 2013, p. 110)

I've been talking to my wife about Lean In and many of the topics discussed in this series of posts. We were talking about doing chores around the house the other day and she was telling me about some videos she'd seen online of women talking about their husbands doing things around the house like vacuuming, cleaning bathrooms, etc. and telling their wives that they were trying to "help out." These women were glad for the efforts, but annoyed at the reasoning. Don't do things around your own home to "help out," do them because you're an adult living in the environment and the tasks need doing. When you say you're doing it to "help out," you're implying that it's not actually your responsibility.

Lean In has more to say on these topics than I've covered in this series of posts. Writing these posts has helped me think more deeply about these issues. If you've read or skimmed these posts, I hope they have given you something to think about. In that vein, this time I'm going to leave you with Aretha Franklin's "Think."

Next post, I'm going to share some of the insights from Lean In that I thought were interesting or thought provoking and not necessarily relevant to the central theme of the book, but things that gave me a new perspective, helped me clarify my thinking, challenged me in some way, or that I identified with.