Men On Board

Will solidarity replace sexism?

It’s been thrilling to watch the demonstrations of solidarity between men and women that have been taking place since Kamala Harris entered the presidential race this summer. I’ll be writing about it later this week. But since this newsletter goes into the posting queue on Tuesday night (which means we won’t have election results when it gets sent out), this seems like a good moment to reshare a an updated version of a post from March 2022, about men and women demonstrating solidarity in the workplace.

In recent years, one of the most heartening developments I have witnessed is women’s increasing solidarity amongst themselves and in parallel, growing support among men for women.?

In an earlier post in this space, Solidarity Wins the Day, I described a turning point for me that came in late 2019. I was delivering a women’s leadership workshop at the Construction SuperConference in Las Vegas. Expecting the usual female audience, I found to my surprise a standing-room-only crowd of? 70% men.

They’d been inspired to attend because their industry was struggling to retain talented women. One of the executives was blunt. “Please don’t waste your time telling us why our companies need to become better places for women to work. We get it. Just help us learn how to do it!”

Since then, I’ve heard similar pleas hundreds of times. “Tell us how we can be better mentors, better champions, better supporters of women.”

I explored this evolution in male attitudes at length in my most recent book, Rising Together, published in February 2023.?

The fact is, one of the most encouraging aspects of the many workplace changes we have all been living through is increasing male support of women. Previous sprints forward for women, in contrast, were inevitably accompanied by periods of backlash, as Susan Faludi astutely chronicled in her 1991 classic of the same name.?

Adversity has been the springboard- as is so often the case- for the current forward movement that has ushered in important new ways of thinking and doing.?

At the start of 2020, women’s advancement had gained significant momentum:

• a strong economy?
• global competition for talent?
• highly visible women leaders in the public and private sectors
• well-developed women’s leadership initiatives,?
• increasing solidarity among women coming out of the #MeToo movement

But as winter turned to spring and the pandemic took hold, all expectations– not to mention work norms–?were upended. And as we now know, women bore the brunt of the negative impact across multiple fronts.??

The changes were so wrenching, so immediate, and so far reaching that it is both hard and yet of utmost importance to note that the crisis also gave us a silver lining, which then led to the next turning point in our collective story. We grew more clear about what of value to us and what is not. What we will accept as normal and what we will try to change.?

For example:

• People throughout the developed world started bailing on jerk bosses, terrible pay, and toxic work environments.?

• Healthcare and service workers, the majority of them women and many of them previously toiling unseen, became highly visible, everyday heroes, celebrated by all.?

• Working from home finally lost its stigma and gave many men a close-up view (if not necessarily the actual experience) of what it’s like to juggle child and elder care while also trying to earn a living and maintain professional equilibrium.

As the chief human resources officer at a major global energy company told me, “Our leadership has always been very conservative and was never on board with people working from home. To be frank, this attitude has limited our ability to attract women. But during the pandemic, our leadership began to see that it works. They don’t see a decline in productivity. I can’t imagine that we’ll ever go back to exactly how it was.”

The greater similarity in men and women’s experience during the pandemic showed us our commonality. This boosted the trend toward mutual allyship that continues gathering steam to this day.

Like what you’re reading? Click here to order my most recent book?Rising Together, or How Women Rise, both are available from Amazon or from your favorite bookseller.