“For women, there’s a fine line between speaking your mind vs sounding like a bitch.”
As I sat on a panel at a tech conference, I looked out into the audience and heard a woman in the back row utter the comment above.
Tag: Gender Equality
Who Turned the Lights Off at GE?
Money Quote Monday Nov. 13 2017
How could the darling of the Valley become the bane of Wall St. in just one quarter?
Cramer: My investment in GE is ‘one of the biggest mistakes of my career’
Shrinking GE rattles investors, shares hit 5-year low
Just a year ago, GE was the poster child for corporate transformation, turning jet engines into digital data, running whimsical ads that attracted top tech talent to the century-plus old industrial giant. Today, the company’s stock has plummeted, its top executives have all been canned, and the new CEO is promising the kind of austerity only a corporate raider could love. So what happened? To be honest, it’s not clear. At some point, the full GE story will be written, but that day is not today. Today GE announced its plan to respond to Wall Street criticism, including cutting its dividend for the second time since WWII. Money quote: “GE is the worst-performing Dow component this year, down 35 percent through Friday’s close. GE stock has effectively been dead money since September 2001, when recently retired Chief Executive Jeff Immelt took over, posting a negative total return even after reinvesting its juicy dividends.”
Read MoreWhen You Realize How Much You Don’t Know.
I thought I understood sexism in the Valley. I don’t.
Pao lost her suit, which concluded just two years ago. But her loss could in fact become a larger victory for women overall. In the following two years, scores of women have found the courage to come forward, and the “bro” culture of Silicon Valley, a culture very much on display in Pao’s book, is now ostracized and, I hope, well in decline.
Further, Pao has turned what for anyone would be a scarring experience into a positive platform for change called Project Include. Check it out. I certainly will be.
The FT is on a roll
Read MoreWhy Be Arm Candy When You Can Be Arm Pizza?
There’s a reoccurring theme that continues to happen to me when I go out with my partner and we happen to strike up conversation with strangers. Be it at dinner, attending a wedding as a plus one, making small talk in an elevator, and even attending a conference as a speaker:
I am rarely asked what I do for a living. 😐
I’ll paint the picture for you- here’s a picture of me and my partner at an event…
Equal Pay Isn’t Just Lip Service — It’s What You Do When No One’s Looking
Twice in my career, I’ve left jobs because of gender discrimination resulting in unequal pay. One time I quit. The other time I got fired.
The time I quit, I was part of a gender balanced leadership team. It was amazing. We had a high level of trust and truly enjoyed building a team together. After being part of this team for four years, I learned that a male peer of mine in another department had been making more than me for the past four years, despite the fact that he was running a team of 2 and I was running a team of 65. I also discovered that another male peer of mine was promoted above me in both pay and title, despite having consistently poorer performance reviews than I had had over the years. I was confused. I felt betrayed and lied to. I did go to HR, who did try to help, but no real change came from it. So, I packed my bags and said my goodbyes.
Read MoreWomen Hold Up Half the Sky.
Davos, conferences, and how to change the dialog for the better.
Like many business-minded folks this time of year, I’ve been monitoring the news out of Davos, where the World Economic Forum holds its annual soiree. The coverage of this year’s event is of course framed in the dramatic news of the day: Brexit, Trump’s ascension to power in the United States, and the rise of anti-globalism worldwide. Had Trump and Brexit not won in 2016, I imagine Davos would be full of stories about climate change, corporate responsibility, automation, AI, and the realities of a post-industrial economy (that’s been a major focus on the WEF’s content on Medium, for the most part).
Instead, it seems “Davos Man” is having something of an identity crisis. Long the bastion of global free trade and neoliberalism, the World Economic Forum appears uncertain how to tackle what seems to be a genuine shift in the very structure of capitalism itself.
Read MoreDon’t ask what she makes
Massachusetts draws a line in the job-interview sand. The most novel feature of Massachusetts’ new employment law bars employers from asking job applicants how much they made in previous gigs (The Atlantic). Legislators and activists hope to reduce the gender wage gap by breaking the loop in which small initial pay disparities turn into ever-larger inequities over the course of a career. Considering how stubborn the gender pay gap is, and how complex its causes (Vox), this experiment is surely worth a shot. But the law won’t go into effect for two years; it’ll be longer before we know whether it works. Applicants can still voluntarily tell Massachusetts hiring managers what they make, and the law guarantees workers the right to tell each other, too. Can limiting information in the hiring process really help? In the long run, more info is better than less: you can’t fix the system without knowing the data.
Lab keys are under the mat. Airbnb has taken the wraps off Samara, its new urban-planning innovation lab (Fast Company) aimed at “exploring new attitudes toward sharing and trust.” The first project: a communal housing project in Japan, done up in relaxing unfinished cedar, aimed at revitalizing small rural towns. How will these design projects contribute to the company’s bread-and-butter short-term rental business? Samara’s motto offers a clue: “The journey is long.”
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