In this groundbreaking comprehensive analysis, based on more than twenty-five years of in-depth surveys involving 100,000 men and women across dozens of Fortune 500 companies, Barbara Annis and Keith Merron provide a deeper understanding of the multiplicity of forces that have combined to create and perpetuate gender inequality. Gender Intelligence exposes common false assumptions that prevent men and women from successfully performing together at work—myths exacerbated by worn-out theories of gender blindness and sameness thinking. It show how a small but growing number of courageous, leading-edge companies have broken through the barriers to successfully advance women, making the remarkable transformation from compliance to choice—from pressure to preference—and show how it can be done in any business.
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Women, Work, and the Art of Gender Judo
Why practice gender judo if women are supposed to lean in and just ask for what they want? My interviews with 127 highly successful women show that more straightforward strategies can backfire. While plenty of glass ceilings have been shattered, most good jobs — from senator to scientist, comic to chief executive — are still seen as requiring what have traditionally been perceived as masculine qualities. Lawyers are aggressive; chief executives are decisive; techies are nerds; comics are obsessed with sex. So women have to behave in “masculine” ways to be seen as competent.
One problem: Women are still expected to be feminine.Read More
Who Gets the Raise?
by Anna North, The Opinion Page: NYTimes, (Jan. 26, 2015)
Is it time to ask for a raise? Neil Irwin at The Upshot writes that this could (finally) be a good year for wages, with small businesses, and a big health insurer, planning to increase pay. And The Billfold titled a recent post “The Year America Gets a Raise” (though its author, Mike Dang, also cautioned that “we can only watch and wait” to see if wages really rise).
But even a large-scale increase in wages might not benefit everyone equally — asking for a raise, some say, works better for some employees than for others.
Orchestrating Impartiality: The Impact of “Blind” Auditions on Female Musicians →
The difficulties associated with proving and addressing gender discrimination in hiring processes have presented policymakers with a major challenge over the past few decades. In an attempt to overcome gender-biased hiring, a vast majority of symphony orchestras revised their hiring practices from the 1950s. Many orchestras opened up their hiring process to a range of candidates, rather than only hiring musicians who were handpicked by the conductor. As a result of these changes, most orchestras now hire new players after about three rounds of live or recorded auditions: preliminary, semi-final, and final. Additionally, as part of these revisions, a number of orchestras adopted “blind” auditions whereby screens are used to conceal the identity and gender of the musician from the jury. In the years after these changes were instituted, the percent of female musicians in the five highest-ranked orchestras in the nation increased from 6 percent in 1970 to 21 percent in 1993. Given the low turnover found in most symphony orchestras, the increase in female musicians is significant. In this seminal study, the authors examine whether these new hiring practices were responsible for the increase observed in women’s employment in symphony orchestras.
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