Selena Rezvani is author of the new book, The Next Generation of Women Leaders: What You Need to Lead but Won't Learn in Business School. Follow her on Twitter at @NextGenWomen.
A glass ceiling, by any other name...
Over the last 25 years we've heard different names for women's work predicaments : a maternal wall, a sticky floor, the mommy track, a labyrinth and, of course, the glass ceiling. Such monikers attempt to boil down in a neat, bite-size nugget some extraordinarily nuanced social dynamics. Has such language served to help women by uncovering veiled unfairness, or do these labels actually hinder progress?
That very question was raised recently at a women's leadership conference I attended. "Focus on the bright spots," one group argued, while another urged that we need to be candidly vocal about gender inequality in today's workplaces. I find myself seeing a need for more of both.
To be sure, today's workplace bias is not exactly the same as it used to be. You can still find an organization or industry that looks and operates like characters on "Mad Men," but for the most part, what hamstrings women at work today is far less overt. Micro-inequities, those seemingly insignificant events that exclude women or lessen confidence in them, are far more rampant. MIT's Mary P. Rowe has studied micro-inequities, calling them "fiendishly efficient in perpetuating unequal opportunity, because they are in the air we breathe.... Micro-inequities are woven into all the threads of our work life and of US education. They are 'micro', not at all in the sense of trivial, but in the sense of miniature." Rowe also points out that the "scaffolding" that supports today's workplace is built of these seemingly small events, many of which are hard-to prove and covert--and even, often, unintentional.
What does a typical micro-inequity look like? Imagine pitching your services to a man and woman working at the same company, and giving your eye contact--and attention--to the man. This happens, in part, because people assume that the man is more senior or more of a decision maker. Envision a department that's throwing a celebratory lunch to mark winning a new account. No one casts a suspicious eye when the young woman on the team is asked to order and fetch the food. And for anyone that's worked on the dreaded team project in graduate school, they will likely remember that it was a woman in the group that somehow became the note-taker or team secretary.
Without a doubt, some people still do and say outright sexist things. On my first day at one job, I remember asking a high-ranking male which way conference room 10 was, and was promptly told: "It's over there. I'm not surprised you don't know though-- women are spatially challenged." And more recently, I had lunch with the head of a well-respected publication who cracked the joke, "You want to know how women can make it to the C-suite? Marry the chairman."
It seems whatever our worldview of gender inequity is―including the perception that it doesn't exist―we find confirmatory data to substantiate our view. Think the world is teaming with sexism at work? Then most likely you'll look for it and find it wherever you go. Believe that all of this glass ceiling nonsense is a bunch of post-feminist jabber? You too will look for reasons to support your view. You will see singular examples of women who've attained power like Hillary Clinton or Nancy Pelosi and assume progress for women is complete.
How do we proceed then? Interestingly, of the 30 successful women executives I interviewed for my book, all of them expressed that hurdles indeed exist for women, and yet they don't get mired in them. In an interview with Rosslyn
Kleeman, chair of the Coalition for Effective Change, for example, she noted, "There is a mistaken idea that barriers no longer exist, but there are still a lot. . . .Women need to find a happy medium between acknowledging the barriers that exist and forging ahead anyway."
Most any set of statistics will show that women still have strides to make in terms of gaining leadership status and fair pay, or finding workplaces that truly accommodate their caretaking realities rather than just tolerating them. Micro-inequities can be so hard to demonstrate that if we don't point out these irksome, distracting splinters under our skin, we sit ignorantly by, mistakenly waiting for relief. The reality for working women may not always be encouraging, but when we hush the dialogue, we go backward.
By Selena Rezvani
| January 11, 2011; 8:03 PM ET
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