Well, I am pleased to introduce our next speaker, Andy Kramer. She has vigorously, that's the word that I saw on her website, vigorously over the past 30 years worked to remove gender inequality from the workplace and to make women's career opportunities more comparable to men's. Andy and her husband, and I have to pause for a minute because I read L, but I actually read it the first time as A-I, so it was Andy and her A-I, and I'm like, is she A-I? Is there A-I involved? So tell your husband he's now A-I. Andy and her husband, Al Harris, are co-authors of three award-winning books, Beyond Bias, The Path to Ending Gender Inequality at Work, Breaking Through Bias, Communication Techniques for Women to Succeed at Work, and my favorite, It's Not You, It's the Workplace, Women's Conflict at Work and the Bias That Built It. Andy is a contributing writer on gender issues in the workplace for Forbes, and she has written numerous blogs, so if you ever Google her, you will find her all over the, is it called Intraweb is what I've heard? Andy is the proud rescuer of five dogs and two rescue cats, so please join me in welcoming Andy. That's why I could assure you that I don't bite. Why don't you come forward if you, come on, what the heck, come on. The presentation was put in the book as if it was, I was going to be speaking only to women, but I'm not, and so I modified the title to Breaking Through Bias, Techniques for All of Us to Communicate Better at Work, and so I see a few men, and I'd like to thank you because this is not an issue that really only applies to women, and don't take this as an opportunity to walk out when you're standing up, okay, good. I do a lot of speaking with my husband, and I will share with him that he's now AI, but we'll walk into a room, and we're waiting for something to start, and then very often women will come in, and they'll see him, and they'll say, oh, I must be in the wrong room, and he's like, well, what are you looking for? One about bias, and he's, no matter of fact, you're in the right room. It's not just a woman's issue only. What I'd like to do is tell you for a minute how I got involved in this. My day job is a lawyer, and I work with high net worth individuals and family offices and people who use the very services that you all provide, and one of the interesting things is that very often how does a couple decide who they're going to use as their advisor, and the minute that a mixed gender couple walks into a meeting, and the advisor only looks at the man, you can bet that they're not going to get that business, and it's not as if the advisor intended to open his mouth and put his foot in and choke on it, but the reality is that he doesn't understand sort of what the reaction is and how that affects the people that he's dealing with. When I was getting wired up here, the AV guy said that he and his wife were just, she was buying a car, and they went to the dealer, and the dealer kept talking to him, and he kept saying, it's not my car, it's her car. She's paying for it, and it's her car, and he would not pay any attention to the purchaser, and so the reality was they went someplace else. She said they bought a beautiful car, and so it's not just women that can benefit from what I'm going to talk about, it's really all of us, and what I'm going to do is take the three books that we've done and kind of mush them together into today's presentation. I'm happy to talk with you if you want to raise your hand or jump up or whatever, just feel free to do that. So it's because of gender bias that we have these different uncomfortable kinds of communication interactions. It can be very difficult and tricky, again, not because anybody's evil. That's not the point at all. It's just that we can be blindsided to issues that can be affecting the way we communicate with others. So one of the things that we found in our research is that the problems are exacerbated in what we refer to as gendered workplaces, and frankly most workplaces are gendered, meaning that men tend to be the senior leaders, they tend to be the ones who are in control, so their ideas, their culture, their style is very often what is viewed as the norm. And in those sorts of workplaces, that's an issue. But in dealing with your colleagues, that's one thing, but you also deal with other advisors, you deal with attorneys, you deal with your clients directly, and so you have all sorts of opportunities to think about what you could be doing in a way that might better advance your career. Because the whole point of this is not for me to stand up here and say, don't be biased. That's not what it's about. But it's ultimately what's going to benefit all of us and inert to our benefit, which includes making a lot more money. Now women, the studies all show, unfortunately, that women are more likely to face all sorts of barriers, microaggressions, overlooks for advancement, tokens for diversity, and so one of the key issues here is that how do you feel when you feel like you're excluded and you're pushed off to the side? You feel pretty crummy, and because of that, you don't give your full self to whatever task it is, and so that becomes a serious problem. And what happens is we lose very talented people due to the bias, and it's not just gender bias, but it's also racial and ethnic bias, and there's all sorts of – there could be a bias as to what school did you go to, or what parish do you belong to, or what this do you do, or purple polka dotted. I'm not purple polka dotted, so then I'm not as cool as you are, whatever. And so I'm going to – I tried to divide it into five pieces, and I have lots that I would love to cover, and I'm going to kind of zip through the beginning stuff so we could focus on sort of what can we do about it, as opposed to what the problems are, okay? So what's so great about diversity and inclusion? Well, it's morally right, and I could stand up here and I could talk about that all day long and it's not going to move the diversity and equity needle at all. It's just not going to. Yes, it's true, it's morally right, but here's the cooker, here's the one that matters. Profit enhancing. The studies show that organizations that have different perspectives, that have different ideas, that have an opportunity to think about strategies in an innovative way do better. They make more money. And because of that, diversity is profit enhancing. Now that's something that organizations are interested in. So if that's the case, why don't we have more diversity and inclusion, okay? Now, communication difficulties are often due to stereotypes and biases, and this is one of my favorite cartoons. For our third book, we included cartoons all over the place, not because this stuff is funny, but because we wanted to make a point, and so the good news is that in order to pay for the right to put all those cartoons in the book, I have the right to put them on my PowerPoint, so there we go. This is one of my favorites. It's an old one from Punch, and it's a table. If you can see it in the back, that's one of the other reasons to come up front. Table of Men, One Woman, and obviously the leader says, that's an excellent suggestion, Miss Trigg. Perhaps one of the men here would like to make it. Now, how many of you have ever made a brilliant comment, and in the meeting, it's acted as if nobody even heard you, and then four minutes later, Fred says exactly the same thing, and they take out a golden chariot, and they start carrying him around the room. I mean, that's a serious issue, and so this is funny, but it's not really funny, okay? So what are the biases that we need to break? Well, the first thing is that we have communication scripts that the stereotypes, he's this, she's that, this person's this, this person's that, and so we start to play into those, and we communicate based on that. So this is a classic optical illusion. Now, if I told you that the top line and the bottom line are exactly the same size, your brain doesn't see it that way. Even if you've seen this before and you know that they're exactly the same size, the top one looks bigger, and that's what happens with gender bias. Men are leaders and da-da-da-da-da-da, and women are nice and kind and sweet, and so even when they're equal, they don't get perceived or seen as equal, and that's really what bias is all about. We have to try to break through that, and just saying, don't be biased, is not going to help us. We have to come up with other techniques. And so, what are the biases that flow from the stereotypes? Well, affinity bias, out-group bias, and gender bias are three that I'm going to mention. Now here, we have the interviewer looking at the interviewee, saying to her, excellent application, would you like to come back when you're a man? Well, it's going to be a long time before that's going to happen for her, and so she's not going to get that job. So affinity bias, people prefer to hang around with, mentor, go to have a cocktail with, talk to people who are like them. This is just a natural human characteristic. We like to hang around with people who are like us. If men were in the organizations, when it comes time to put together a project, or to fill something in, or I've even seen it where it's for the United Way dinner, the men don't even think to ask the women if they want to go. And so, that's affinity bias. That's one of the biases that we have to keep in mind, and again, it's not somebody's a bad person. That's not the point. It's just that we tend to feel that way. Outgroup bias is kind of related to the affinity bias in another way, which is, my group is cool and your group is not. So my group's cool, your group's not. There's also an in-group bias, which is, my group is cool, your group is not, but it's really playing off of the same thing. And then the last one that I'm going to flag today, which is gender bias. Now, the stereotypes that are associated with women, and you'll see I don't have the word woman up there anywhere. I have communal and feminine stereotypes, and the reason for that is because men and women all have all of these characteristics. So that to say women would then be playing right into the very stereotypes and biases that I'm talking about trying to overcome today. So the communal stereotypes that are associated with women are that we are nice and kind and sweet, we are affectionate, compassionate, we worry about hurting other people's feelings, we're nurturing, we're pleasant, we're believed to be somehow better with children, and that we're more sensitive to the needs of other people. The biases that are associated with the masculine stereotypes, they're called agentic, oh let me go back for a second. Communal comes from the word community, and so you care about the group at large, you care about the community. Now agentic stereotypes, which are associated with men, comes from the word agency, which you all know that the agent has responsibilities to their principal. They've got a job to do, they've got to get something done. So agentic stereotypes are going to be achievement oriented, aggressive, assertive, dominant, you know a leader, independent, forceful, unemotional, willing to take a stand, willing to take risks. This all sounds very positive. And when we think about leaders, guess what? We think about leaders as being decisive, assertive, independent, competitive, and tough. Not warm, pleasant, caregiving, modest, and emotional. And that brings us right back to that optical illusion that I had up here a few minutes ago. Yes. You can, and if you want a copy of these PowerPoints, you could give me your email and I'd be happy to send them to you, so you don't have to kill yourself snapping. And so this is the issue that we have to overcome. Now guess what happens? If a woman, and we call this the Goldilocks Dilemma, which is that if a woman is really nice and kind and sweet, well then they're going to put her on the library committee, they're not going to throw her out, but they're not going to give her an important client, they're not going to give her an important book of business, they're not going to put her on an important team. If she's too hard, no one wants to work with her, because she's one of those, you know, we're being recorded and I don't know if they would have to beep it out, so I'm not going to say it, but we all can imagine. I don't want to work with her. She only cares about herself. She this, she that. She's too this, she's too that. And so what women have to do, and the guys in the room, you don't have to worry about this, so you're going to be thinking she's really making this stuff up, but I'm really not, is that she has to try to find a way to be just right, which is really a hard thing to do. So that when I started at a, I now have my own law firm, but when I started at a huge law firm a number of years ago, I get in as a fancy full partner and got my own clients and one of the guys says to me, one of my partners says to me something, and I mentioned in the context of some conversation that I had a two-year-old at home. Well now all of a sudden he was sure that I was a fraud, that I didn't care about my job and somehow they'd given me this corner office by mistake and that I didn't really have these clients. And so he would, I had one project with this guy and he would call me and say I'd like to talk about this with you at five o'clock if you'll still be around. So I could have had nothing to do at five o'clock and there's no way I was going to be available for him, so I told him that I'd be happy to meet with him at 6.30 or any time after 6.30 or how about any time after five tomorrow morning. Well he never wanted to talk to me, he just wanted to prove that he had something on me because I was a mother. So too hard, we might be really competent but there's something wrong with us so no one wants to work with us. Too soft, we could be as competent as the next guy but they're going to assume that we're not competent. And so this is what women face that men fortunately don't have to deal with and if that isn't enough to be depressing, intersectionality makes it worse which is try to be a woman of color, try to be a person who's not from the same parish, not from the same school, not from whatever, LGBTQ, a mother, all of the age be in a different age bracket. All of this makes it even worse. And so we have to think about this in the context of what we're going to build on next which is, I've made that point, which is, what can we do about it? And so in the time we have left, what women can do, what men can do, and then what organizations can do. And this is a pretty fast whip through all this stuff. But we cannot debias ourselves. If we could say, don't be biased all day long, it's not going to matter. It's not going to matter. And so much of the training programs that we get don't help us. Because they say, here's the stereotypes. Here's the biases. Don't be biased. And here, the cartoon is the elephant is at the psychiatrist's office and says, he does fit on the couch, which I think is kind of amazing. I'm right there in the room, and no one even acknowledges me. And that's really what the problem is. The elephant is right there in the room. We can't deal with it for ourselves. But guess what? We can see it in other people. So we need to be thinking about and trained, if you will, to be able to interrupt bias when we see it. So the next time that you say something brilliant, and four minutes later, Fred says the same thing, and they go get the golden chariot, somebody else, you could say, well, wait a minute, Fred. That's a nice addition to what I said five minutes ago. But sometimes that can be a little uncomfortable. Somebody else in the room should say, Fred, she said that five minutes ago. And maybe, do you want to elaborate on what you said previously? And now that Fred is built on your, you know, whatever. So what can women do? We can try to avoid the Goldilocks dilemma. And this is interesting, because how do we do that just right? And it turns out that the studies show that women who can be very agentic, but also can show communal, actually do much better than everybody else. They clearly do better than all the other women, but they also do better than the men. And some of these studies are not just in schools where, you know, at some psych class where they're doing an experiment, but they actually do go out into the field in careers and in businesses and track this stuff. And so a woman can get ahead if she kind of does some of the girly things. Boy, that's a nice necklace you have on today. You know, how's the family? Whatever. OK, now I need it by 5 o'clock. Now if she just says I need it by 5 o'clock, everybody's hair catches fire. Who does she think she is? When the guy says I need it by 5 o'clock, yes sir. And so mixing communal and agentic. So how do you do that? Well, you do that with verbal and nonverbal communications. And those are, in my first book, Breaking Through Bias, where I talk about how to overcome bias by playing into or acknowledging or ignoring. Or sometimes you say, I'm just going to go full speed ahead anyway, and torpedoes away or whatever they used to say in those movies. So you can verbal and nonverbal. This may be a dumb idea, but I'm not sure if this is a good idea. If Albert Einstein had said, I think that maybe E equals MC squared, I think maybe, I don't think we'd be flying airplanes today. Just my guess. And so that's sort of the verbal kind of stuff. A man would rather cut off his foot than say he's sorry in many situations. Now it turns out there's a very interesting study which shows that it's not because men don't want to say I'm sorry. It's just that they actually believe that they have done something that they need to say I'm sorry for less frequently than women think that they need to say I'm sorry for. And if you factor out that difference, women and men say I'm sorry at about the same percentages. So something to keep in mind. The nonverbal. I'm up here talking. Well, what if I crossed my legs and I hunched myself over and I, you know, first of all, I would topple over. But women will tend to make ourselves small. Men will throw their arms up, throw their shoulders back. They're going to be gesturing away from their bodies. Women tend to gesture towards our bodies. So we're busy working all day long to make ourselves look really small. And the men are projecting really big. And it turns out that, interesting as well, more about the studies, that we work so hard to make sure that every single word we say is perfect. And it turns out that nobody remembers what we say. What they do is they remember the nonverbal. So that if I'm going to go in and try to convince somebody that I should be entitled to something that I want, a new client, a new this, a new that, I can do all the communication, the verbal stuff, that I want to do one way or the other. But if I don't have my shoulders thrown back and I'm not appearing confident and competent, then it doesn't matter what I say. And so that's the takeaway from that. The other thing is that in writing this book, what we found was that that's what I've just talked about is conversations with others. But it turns out that conversations that we have with ourselves are equally important. And having a positive mindset, resilience, confidence, coping sense of humor, it turns out that all of these sorts of attitudes have absolutely nothing to do with our IQs. These are all like muscles that can be trained or strengthened or whatever. Positive mindset, well, it's not a failure. It's something to learn from. Resilience, you hit the wall, you dust yourself off, and you try it again. This time, you'll be careful to make sure you go to the door and not through the wall. Confidence, there's all sorts of things. Stand up. I'm serious. You're going to feel good. Stand up. You don't have to if you don't want to, but stand up. If you put your feet apart, put your hands so that you could be on your hips. They could be in the air. They're just not hugging each other. No touching. No hands touching, OK? And you throw your chest back. If you do this for two minutes, your testosterone goes up and your cortisol goes down. So it's not just the men that have the testosterone. We all do. And cortisol is the fear of flight hormone, which can make us feel frightened. And you have an important conversation, an important Zoom call, an important meeting, and you do this for two minutes. And you're going to feel more powerful. And by feeling more powerful, you're going to translate that into appearing more powerful to the other person. There's lots of studies to this effect. There's another one for building confidence, which is that you can write. And I don't mean type at your computer. I mean actually take a pen, pencil, and write down an experience when you really felt powerful, or when you were really happy, or when something really went your way. And that gives you a mindset that's going to reflect how you're going to be interacting with other people. And even though these tricks feel like they're kind of circus tricks, the reality is that they're very effective. And so you could stay standing up for the whole rest of the session if you want. But you've had your two minutes. You can sit down and feel more powerful. And a coping sense of humor is not being a stand-up comic, but being able to look at the most outrageous, the most bizarre, the most I can't believe that somebody can think this way today. If you have a coping sense of humor, meaning you can even just sort of internally smile about it, like you've got to be kidding, this is really crazy, whatever, the studies all show that you're going to be more resilient. You're going to have a more positive mindset. You're going to have more confidence. So that's something that you can do. You say, well, I'm not funny. Well, you don't have to be funny. But listen to some stand-up comics on your streaming list or whatever you listen to. When I'm at the airport, I'll listen to short snippets from comics. They're not so funny. Some of them are not so funny anymore. But you get the flavor. If you're waiting and your flight's five hours delayed and whatnot, you can try to be a little cheerful about it. And you've got to always call out the bias. But sometimes now is not the right time. Sometimes later is the right time. So that if you're having a conversation with the most senior guy in your organization and he says something that is just totally off the wall outrageous and offensive, you might feel comfortable to say to him, that was the most outrageous, offensive thing I've heard in a long time. Or more appropriately, if there's other people in the room, I would not recommend doing that. Context is important. You could always go later and say, hey, I really want to talk to you about you said such and such. And I don't think you meant what you really, but here's how it was perceived. And you could go from there. So these are just a few of the tips that women can do for ourselves. Attuned gender communication is showing the positive, the agentic and communal traits, projecting communal but being seen as a leader. And that's really what Breaking Through Bias, our book Breaking Through Bias is all about. I've already gone through these, so I don't need to spend anything more on what women can do. But let's talk about what men can do. Well, first of all, what I was just talking about applies to men, too. It's not just a girl's secret. But the reality is that if a man is interacting with a woman and she's doing all these communal, well, this may be a dumb idea, but, or I'm sorry, blah, instead of just immediately assuming that she's an idiot and doesn't know anything, he might benefit by thinking, well, maybe she's uncomfortable and she's acting this way because she is trying not to piss me off, or maybe there's something going on. And so it benefits everybody to know that there's different ways of communicating in different situations. And some people have different styles. But in addition to that, men could be mentors. They could support women. They can sponsor them. They can coach them. They can intervene when they see something like Fred getting carried around in the Golden Chariot. Well, Barbara said that 10 minutes ago. Let's go back to what Barbara said. Interrupt. Very often, if you see it happening, you don't have to sit there like a mope. You can say, excuse me, let's do that again, or whatever is appropriate in the circumstances. Beam role models. And again, call bias out now or later. Now here, it's the same issue, which is context is everything. There are times when you are not, it could hurt your career if you're honest about bias in the moment. It's a big, important meeting, and the senior guy is going off on something bizarre. You might want to catch him on it, but there's another thing about the way girls and boys grow up. And one of the things, again, this is all because of stereotypes and the way that girls and boys are trained as little children. But by the time a boy is four or five years old and he wants to get on the t-ball team, he might think that the leader of the t-ball team is an absolute idiot, but he's not going to tell him that he's an idiot. He's going to act like he wants to be on his team. Girls, by the time we're three, four years old, if you hurt my feelings, I'm just not going to invite you to my birthday party, because we've been already inculcated to feel that exclusion is a bad thing. So I'm going to exclude you. And so that plays into all of this stuff as adults. Call out bias now, call out bias later. The situation will do it. And what I just said for what men can do, it turns out is not just for men. Everybody can be an ally. Everybody can help each other. And one of the things that I say, which is actually very effective, is in your workplace or in a meeting or whatever, look around and find somebody who just doesn't look like you. And go up to them and figure out how to put them, take them under your wing. And it turns out that if you decide, I'm going to get to know this person, it is not just to benefit that other person. It is enriching and rewarding for both of you. And you start to learn to see the world from different eyes. It's really enormously valuable. And it doesn't cost you anything. And so I had this conversation with a group of people. And a woman said that she would go to their cafeteria and all of the Hispanic women and men would sit together. And everybody would sort of split into their groups. And I said to her, well, what if you walked over to one of those tables where you don't normally sit and you said, would you mind if I sat with you? And it turns out, she said it totally changed her life. Because they were all sitting together because everybody felt that they weren't welcome at the other table. So if somebody makes the effort to go out and extend your hand to somebody, it's shocking how dramatic an impact that can have. And it doesn't cost anything. And I can assure you, you'll feel great afterwards. Everyone can be an ally. So how do we address these gendered situations? Well, the women have to deal with Goldilocks, not to this, not to that. But we all can be aware of that issue. Active listening skills. Actually try to hear what the other person's saying. Empathy. Call out bias and support others. I mean, this kind of goes without saying, but the reality is we're in our little blinded, I think, appropriate being here in Louisville. We'll think we're all those horses that they put the blinders on so they can't see what's going on. I mean, they're all, their eyes are to the side. So they put those there. It's not like they can see very much. But that's a way of getting them to go in a particular fashion. We all have a part to play. Take someone different. Build inclusive workplaces. Prevent gender harassment. Model inclusiveness and call out biased behavior. So that's what women and men can do. So now, in the time we have left, I'm moving on to what organizations can do. And this is really from our newest book, which is called Beyond Bias, The Path to End Gender Inequality at Work. And so what we did is the first two books, Breaking Through Bias and It's Not You, It's the Workplace, were really what women can do in biased workplaces. And we finally, looking at each other, it was like, I'm tired of talking about what women can do and what men can do. And the organizations have to be the ones that change. And so what we've talked about so far are valuable. And don't forget them, because they are valuable. But we also have to think about how can we have structural change to make sure that if the guy who's driving the train is an absolute biased animal, he can't impose that on anybody else's career advancement. So what we ended up doing is we came up with a PATH, P-A-T-H. And the P stands for Prioritize Elimination of Exclusionary Behavior. We have to work hard to get these into the PATH. You'll see. It was hard. But the point is, get rid of exclusionary behavior. Invite somebody who's different from you to join you. Invite them to go to a client meeting, to go to one thing or another. And the reason for that is this cartoon here. The leader is sitting looking at his table full of people who look exactly like him. And his thought bubble says, I finally have a team that thinks like me. And he thinks that's a positive. But it's not. It's not a positive. And so we have to find ways to eliminate exclusionary behavior. Well part of it is if we see it and we call it out, if we interrupt it when we see it, if we are sympathetic or, you know, go to bat for somebody else, all of these things can make sure that we're going to eliminate exclusionary behavior. But organizations need to make it part of their code of conduct. And so one of the things that they can do is they can, and big companies are doing this, say to their employees, what is it about your job that really upsets you? What would you like to see different? And somebody says, well, I never get invited to the client pitch or I always get the last people at the bottom of the cold call list. I mean, I don't know what, make it up. And I really think that that's not fair. Well, you could come up with a code of conduct that basically says that the organization expects you to do the following things to be inclusive. And miraculously, that's the first step in the path to ending gender inequality at work. Now each of these do not have to be done in the order of P-A-T-H, and they don't all have to be done, and you can pick and choose. But the reality is that the next one is we have to have unbiased personnel decisions. So A, for the A in PATH, is to adopt discrimination-resistant methods of personnel decision making. I told you it was hard to get these into the PATH. But here's a woman sitting for an interview, and the man looks at her resume, and he says, I see by your resume that you're a woman. Okay, well, it turns out that there's a couple of interesting things here, because it turns out that in order to get the interview nowadays, organizations are taking off the gender and the racial-ethnic sorts of things that would flag who somebody is. And it turns out that when you get rid of those sorts of things, and you just have the person's credentials or abilities for the particular job, whatever, miraculously, women and people of color get invited in for that first interview like way, way, way more than they would otherwise. And if you've got your foot in the door to at least have an interview, at least you have a chance. But if they don't even, and there's an interesting study where all of the people, it's the exact same resume, half were named John, half were named Jane, and they were sent to science professors around the country for a lab manager. And the scientists, they were high school, college professors in research labs, everything, and they got, half got the name Jane and half got the name John on it. And they were asked, would you hire this person? What would you give them as compensation? And how much time would you mentor them? And the ones who saw Jane gave her interview, wouldn't hire her dramatically more, you know, they just wouldn't, she wouldn't get hired, John would. She would not be offered the same salary if she was lucky enough to even be considered, and her mentorship would be like, oh, two hours instead of, you know, John, James, whatever would get, you know, I'll mentor them for six weeks, you know, something. And so what we have to do is we have to keep in mind that if we could just get rid of that, things will change. What I found at my law firm when I was, I headed up our gender diversity committee and had formed our LGBTQ committee, and what I found was that if, and I was on our compensation committee, and what I found was that if you took away the ability of the person who's doing the review from saying he's a go-getter and she's not a self-starter, and you had core competencies, how do you fit in meeting these particular requirements of the job, miraculously the women and the men did much, were much more equal in the evaluation. Get rid of, put them behind the screen. Many of you are probably familiar with, in the late 60s, early 70s, symphony orchestras started to do what they were calling blind auditions, where what they would do is they would put up a screen and the people who were going to listen to the musician performing would decide who, without knowing whether it was a woman or a man. And so the women started to take off those high-heeled shoes so they weren't going on the stage, and all sorts of ways to try to make it. And now from 2% or 3% women in major symphonies, it's now 50-50. We now have people of color in the symphonies, things that had been unheard of back in the bad old days. And so, A, unbiased personnel decisions. T, P-A-T, treat inequality in the home as a workplace problem. Now this cartoon has the sign for really good careers, and to walk in it says an equal opportunity employer, and it has a cutout which is clearly a man's body. So here's this woman with her kid, and there's no way she's going to fit through that. Now home, no organization can solve the fact that women do most of the household chores at home, that women are the ones who take care of the kids, that if somebody gets sick most of the time the women are the ones who get called. When our daughter was little, my husband's older than I am, and so we'd put his name on all these forms in kindergarten, in case of an emergency call, and put his name. It didn't matter that my name wasn't even on there. They would call me, because it's the mom that's somehow supposed to deal with this stuff. I mean, I was happy to do it, but my husband was pissed off. He's like, well, I'm standing here ready, and they would never call him. So if a couple decides he's going to go for the brass rig, and she's going to lay back and worry about the family or whatever, that's not what an organization can worry about. But part-time, flexible schedules, maternity and paternity leave, child care facilities. The United States is the only country in the industrialized world that doesn't have any government subsidies for child care, for maternity and paternity leave. The only country. And so organizations need to think about what can they do so that women who are talented, who want to make a go of it, who want to succeed, who have the skill sets, are not pushed to the side because of their home life situations. And those are things that organizations can do, and the ones that do do it successfully have very diverse organizations, and they make a lot of money. And then the H for PATH, P-A-T-H, Halt Unequal Performance Reviews, Career Advice, and Leadership Opportunities. Now here is the one where when I mentioned once we got rid of the open-ended questions that miraculously the women did better, that really belongs in this section. And our cartoon is a cat, and the person who's getting their review is a dog, and he looks like he could be a Dalmatian. And the cat says to the dog, frankly, your performance has been spotty. Well, it's not like he can change his spots, it's just he's a spotty dog. And so what we need to do here is we need to think about this. The studies show that in evaluations, men are told, you know, you really could have done this better, or here's how to do it better next time, or you're doing great, you're on target, and women are told, it was like 60-something percent of all of the evaluations that were being reviewed, women were told, you're too aggressive, you're too this. Things that have nothing to do with the job, everything to do with her personality. So back to Goldilocks, you know, you're not walking that just right, just right. And it turns out that the men, the career advice that men get very often is, if you do X, Y, and Z, you should be in line for a promotion. Here's what you need to do. Women are not given that same advice. Women are not given the same career advice opportunities, and when leadership opportunities are presented, women are not given the same chances, and very often that can be tied to a training program, or a leadership training, coaching, whatever, and the women are not included in many of those. And so organizations, what organizations need to do is they need to say, I'm not going to be able to change the world, and I will turn my phone off, they're not going to be able to change the world, we're not going to be able to say, don't be biased, and miraculously everybody's going to be bias-free. But what they can do is they can get rid of the discretion in the whole path process, and the discretion is what prevents women from succeeding, because they might have a boss like the man who I interacted with my first week at my last firm, where he knew I had a two-year-old, and wanted me to meet him at five o'clock if I'd still be around. And so those are the kind of things that we need to do, wrap up, women and people of color are supposed to be here too, it's not just an old white man's club, and join the discussion. If you want to go to our website, we have lots of blogs and things on there that might be of interest, and now for the last few minutes, any questions, comments? Are you still conscious? Yes. Yes, thank you for your presentation. I was reminded of a news article from about five, ten years ago where a male, I think it was a graphic designer, accidentally logged into his assistant's email and was emailing clients for like two weeks unknowingly, and she had a female name, and suddenly clients who had never pushed back on him were pushing back on him, and he was like, why are they giving me all this second guessing? And then he had her do his email for two weeks, and it was like, suddenly she was such an effective employee. So it makes me wonder if you know if anyone has used this to their advantage, to set up an email, maybe it's like a CSA email or some generic email, email from that, so we don't have to change the world. Sure, sure, sure. I don't know anybody who's done the, I am familiar with that email story, but I'll give you a couple of other ones. My name is Andrea. Well, the only person who ever called me Andrea was my mother when I was in so much trouble that it was frightening, and in those days they used to beat you, they can't do that anymore, and so if somebody calls me Andrea, my first reaction is, what did I do wrong? So I go by Andy. So my first summer job, I was working at a law firm, and I get called into the senior guy's office, and I go there, and his office was about the size of this room, and he had a desk and two chairs, and he was sitting with his hands behind his head and his feet up on his desk, and I was told to go to his office. So I kind of knock on the door jam, and I walk in, and I extend my hand to say, hello, I'm Andy Kramer, and the guy, I knew that you're supposed to shake hands with somebody when you meet them, but I didn't know that it's disrespectful for a guy to be sitting down when he's shaking your hand. So the guy had to put his feet on the floor, stand up, and shake my hand. Well, that was the end of it, but how did I get into his office in the first place? I'll bet his assistant said, we've got Sarah and Maggie and John and Jake and Andy, and he said, I'll take Andy, and he thinks I'm a guy. Now for women litigators, it turns out it can be very effective, because what they'll do is they'll do this, aw shucks, girly stuff, and then they get this witness feeling really comfortable, and then they say the most outrageous things that are not in their best interest. And so you can play it both ways. It can be a positive or a negative. It really just depends. But walking in somebody else's shoes is really interesting, and the fellow who's going to be up next, I was talking to him beforehand. He does artificial intelligence sorts of stuff, and a lot of that is very biased. And so in addition to thinking about what organizations need to do, we also have to think about how we can prevent those kinds of biases from seeping into all of the other communication techniques that are being utilized in business. Anything else? Yes. He's the guy who's coming next. Thanks, Andy. As business leaders or owners in a firm or a business, there's sometimes a power structure in place. If we look and we see a woman who we feel like we could mentor, we could coach up, sometimes it doesn't feel appropriate for us to maybe make the first move. What is the best way? Do we wait for somebody in an organization to ask for that mentorship, or are there comfortable ways for us to broach the subject so we can become that mentor or coach? That's a great question, because it turns out that a lot of men will say that they're not comfortable mentoring a woman. For them, if the organization puts in place a policy, that's fabulous, because then they got an, I'm doing it because I was told to. But there's no reason why you would have to wait for an organization. If you could identify people, or a woman in particular, who really has the skills or could develop them, there's nothing wrong with saying to her, what are your goals? What are your objectives? What are you looking to accomplish? You just don't know. I had a situation where I had been on the same floor in this big office building with these same people for eight years. They would walk around, the men would walk around, and they would invite each other to lunch. They would walk past my office and all the other women's offices, and they would never invite us. One day I thought, I've had enough of this. I stand up, and I go to the door, and I said, hey, I'm actually free today, I'd like to join you. We have lunch, and the response was, I can't believe you're so funny. I said, I've been here eight years, and nobody's ever invited me to lunch, except when I've made the invitation first. Don't be one of those guys who has to wait eight years to find out that, oh, that person isn't as bad as I thought. I just want to add to this conversation, because I do think that approach is really important, because it could feel like I'm a big guy coming to rescue the little princess, and let me take you under my wing. That doesn't feel good at all from the woman's perspective. When she's saying, ask about their goals, I would pay attention to making sure that any sort of approach lets her keep the autonomy, and by asking, how can I support you in your goals? I believe that you're very talented and smart, and how can I support you in that? She has autonomy the whole time. Absolutely, and part of it is, if she's sitting at her desk, you don't go stand over her and kind of freak her out, but there are lots of ways, and in fact, we have a lot of those techniques in our third book, Beyond Bias, about what organizations need to do, and why men are afraid to be allies. We have a whole chapter on men aren't allies, and why. A lot of it is that they feel that they wouldn't be welcome, or that they don't know what to say, or they don't know what to do. We have all sorts of takeaways and tips for those kind of issues as well. I believe I'm out of time, and it's now time for you guys to learn about social media. Get number one on that search engine optimization. Thank you very much. I'll be happy to send you the PowerPoints if you want them.

gender bias

workplace

exclusionary behavior

discrimination-resistant methods

biases

inequality in the home

equal opportunities

open dialogue

allies

inclusive environments