Calling All Allies! #BreakTheBias

In the late 90’s, I was a new college graduate when my alma mater marked the 25th year anniversary of going co-ed. The quarterly alumni magazine celebrated the milestone by dedicating one issue to women at the college. The cover was a beautiful photograph of an early alumna and her daughter, a current student. There were photos from the early days in the 70’s when 14 women transferred into a class of 600. It resonated with me as a sweet tribute, but also as sort of amazing that it was only 25 years.

Then a professor called me. She had just fielded a tearful phone call from the editor of the magazine who was getting buried in angry mail, the gist of which was this: “How dare you dedicate space solely to women?”

I did the math. In the 156 years (at the time) of the school’s history, only 1 magazine had been dedicated to women. A quarterly magazine published 4 times a year for 156 years is 624 editions. If you round down to 500 to account for time it wasn’t published.?Still - only 1.

I wrote my own letter. I pointed out that the institution’s motto is “men and women for others.” I said, “if we can’t be men and women for each other, how can we be men and women for others?”

23 years later, the question still stands. For all of us. The incoming resistance is as hot as ever. It’s lonely and demoralizing to sit atop a mountain of data, all of which says, “bias is a real thing.” Even more corrosive are the individual lived experiences of so many women. These are real examples:

• When someone tells you, “the only reason you have your job is because you’re a woman.”
• When someone else takes credit for your work. And gets paid more as a result.
• When you’ve been working as the next in line for the job only to be leapfrogged by someone with limited experience when the job comes open.
• When a 10K shows a goal for gender diversity on the board, but the number hasn’t changed in several years, revealing zero progress made.
• When a company fills a half dozen senior leadership jobs in a matter of months, but never invited any women or people of color to interview.

The suggestion that this isn’t happening is maddening and exhausting, as is the invitation to somehow release yourself from systemic bias through hard work (NB: we already are working hard).

The theme for International Women’s Day 2022 is to #BreakTheBias. Calling all allies! When you hear examples like this, you have an opportunity to consider how such situations impact your organization and to take action to improve the outcomes:

• Erode your corporate culture and morale
• Constrain your growth potential
• Bring questions from investors
• Limit your hiring pool of talent
• Disadvantage you in a client RFP

We can be courageous enough to know that there is opportunity for everyone and that meritocracy can be a real thing for everyone. An equitable world would have the motto, “all people for each other.”