Calling it Quits Before Getting Started

Last week I spoke at Columbia Teachers College's Organization and Human Development Consulting Club. My talk was on "Executive Coaching", and much of it revolved around how I got to where I am today. During my speech I discussed "paths" for getting experience - namely training and education, and working for a coaching company and/or human capital consulting firm. I worked at Accenture for 5 years in their Change Management Practice (now Human Capital) which launched my career in this field.

One of the students called me this week, as I encouraged any of the attendees to do. We dove into her questions about next steps, and I realized what she was really struggling with: although she desired to work in the field of Human Capital Consulting, she had no desire to live the life of a consultant. She knew what that looked like, knew she could do it now, but didn't want to be doing it later in life when she might want to start a family.

She was opting out before she was even in.

I took a deep breath and asked her some questions about the work - she is interning at a human capital consulting firm currently (a boutique) and was disappointed in her role. Most of her job was crunching data and making it pretty. I asked her if she liked the field and could see a path to interesting, more client-facing work. She said absolutely. She cared very much about putting herself in other people's shoes, trying to understand how they think and how to help them. She knows she's good at it. Yet...

...she cannot imagine her life as a consultant, even if the work is engaging and thrilling and what she is meant to do.

This is not the first time a client of mine has stopped before they've started based on potential limitations their future career will place on their future personal life. A client of mine whose deepest desire is to be a filmmaker, had all but stopped pursuing her dream because she believed film making would lead to months on the road, which would cause her to never meet a man, and therefore never have a family. Basically she had painted a picture of her dream career as one that would cause her to never be happy. She believed it to be an either-or situation.

These examples go on and on. Girls in high school are focusing on schools and careers that will lead them to a career they believe will be more "flexible" and allow them to be home in time for dinner. They are calling it quits before even getting started. I'm pretty sure the guys aren't doing this. They are confident that they'll work it out when and if they need to.

Do companies know that they are losing amazing people years before they are a potential recruit?

I encouraged this student to take another look at consulting -- to be open to the idea that consulting may or may not be the right career for her in 5-10 years, but it could be great for now. Consulting as a next step could give her the invaluable experience she needs to do whatever she wants in the field for whomever, or even for herself, later on.

As I ended the call I was saddened that our conversation indicated that it's still easier for people to avoid a potential rough road than stand up for what they want -- what they are passionate about -- and be the change. However, I was happy that I may have rescued one more woman from opting out of her dream career before it even began.

Rebecca Rodskog is a Change Management Coach and Consultant, an actress, speaker and writer. She lives in Manhattan with her husband and two children. www.rodskog.com

By Rebecca Rodskog

Why Swords Are Good For Boys – And Girls Too

Yesterday, I got a message at work from my third child's nursery school: "Your son is making play weapons at school - light sabers, swords and shields. These are not appropriate for nursery school play. Please work with him to understand that these are not ok toys."

This is my third child, and second boy so I've been through this before. When my older son was in pre-school, one teacher told me his George Washington picture book was verboten -- he shouldn't bring this book to school because stories of war were not welcome in the classroom. (How this teacher explained why we're no longer a British colony, I just don't know.)

At our house, we've developed a pretty good arsenal. Sword fighting is a daily occurrence, as is wrestling, light saber fighting and even nerf guns. The kids love them, and all of the research I have done indicates that there is no harm in allowing these to be used in a "nice" way. Some of the research even shows that boys get demoralized when they are told that the toys they enjoy for their make believe play are "bad".

I am far more worried about girl cattiness in nursery school than I am boy make-believe weapon play. Those little boys who make guns out of bread: they seem to become CEOs of companies. Watching my older son play with water shooters in the pool with 10 other young boys shows me that they are learning to work together, form teams, develop strategy and importantly, have a really good time with each other. These are skills that should serve them well going forward. What types of activities do young girls do that work on these same skills?

I think schools should spend less energy criticizing boy play, and more energy helping girls to learn to participate. I would love my daughter to participate in sword fights with her friends, like my son does on play dates, rather than do art projects. I think it would be wonderful to watch a group of neighborhood girls stage a large water pistol engagement, rather than sit by the pool and chat. I believe these interactions help boys learn to relate to each other in a way that enables their success later on. I certainly wish I had learned to spar in sword fights - this could have been very useful in my first few years working in the corporate world.

By Joanna Strober

Brainy Barbie: How She Changes Her Climate and Drops the Doubt

“Barbie Hedge Fund Manager or Barbie Archeologist?” I teased my daughter when she named the leggy icon as her birthday party theme. Turns out Mattel has moms like me figured out. Now Barbies not only get married and put on makeup, they also have demanding careers -- like Barbie Computer Engineer.

The New York Times says that while the percentage of computer science dolls has gone up, the percentage of real-live women in computer science has plummeted from 37% to 18% in the last couple decades. Three people sent me this piece shocked by what they read – that in tech (as in all other parts of the economy with lots of money or power) women make up a small fraction of leadership -- and odd things can still happen when women try to change those statistics and strive for the top.

Writing Getting to 50/50 has freed me of the upset I too used to feel – I now know I too need reminders that things don’t magically get any better just by the passage of time. These articles bear out what the social science says clearly: That left unchecked, with complete absence of malice, both men and women (both young and old) discriminate in ways that keep women out of power and keep leadership 85% male.

The research also points to very simple things we can each do to fix things – if enough of us say what we really think (with a sense of humor). Some simple examples:

“Out” the inner doubt.

The NYT cites studies that say women drop out of technical majors if they don’t get top marks – while men are more likely to persist even with average grades.

A woman two degrees from Carnegie Mellon told me about research she worked on – trying to figure out why women drop out of computer science. In the group of students she tracked 3 of the stars were female. But in their self-assessments, these women were all sure they didn’t measure up -- despite their top grades, they didn’t feel like they fit in and that fed their self-doubt.

What would happen if we talked about these facts more openly – that we raise boys, on average, to be over-confident and the reverse for women? (See research on Harvard Business School students where this made a big difference on what women got paid).

Change your own climate.

When I was in the 9th grade, I loved dissecting frogs and imagined my future as a biologist. But what I pictured was a life alone in a lab – or in the company of terribly serious, terribly silent men in white coats. That did not seem so appealing. While science lost nothing by my failure to join, I do wonder where this pre-conception came from. And I wonder if I can help my daughter see her options more broadly - and understand that the social dynamics of mostly-male work environments are not the reason to cross whole professions off the list.

Because workplace environments change when enough women jump into the fray.

The NYT talks about a woman who disliked the isolated work-style of the engineers she worked with. Rather than concluding the field was not for her, she fixed her microclimate so it felt more comfortable: Hired an intern she could talk to and organized a weekly group lunch to create some community.

By Sharon Meers

HOUSEWORK MATTERS even on "No Housework Day"

Whether you realize it or not, all that nagging housework can be eating into your job productivity and getting in the way of you getting ahead in your career - especially if you're a woman, says Londa Schiebinger, director of Stanford's Clayman Institute for Gender Research. Published on January 19, 2010 in Academe, Schiebinger's study, entitled "Housework is an Academic Issue", shows academic scientists spend about 19 hours a week on basic household chores. The solution? Schiebinger urges universities and businesses to offer an employee benefit to pay for housework. Read full article.

This past week on "No Housework Day" (April 7), Clayman Institute hosted an event entitled, Housework Matters: A Panel Discussion on Housework Benefits.
The event sparked many great action-items from a wide ranging audience including Stanford faculty, administrators, professional women, graduate students, professional cleaners and one husband.

Interesting points included: Professionalizing housecleaning, creating a housecleaning community and creating a new tax-protected benefit.

To bring housework out of the private sphere and into the public sphere, The Clayman Institute has created a housework FaceBook App. It's quick, helpful and a survey worth sharing because this housework conversion is one that will benefit many.



By Sharon Meers

Are quotas really the answer? Check out our thoughts in NYT Opinion Blog- "Using Quotas to Raise the Glass Ceiling"

In 2002, Norway enacted a law requiring that 40 percent of all board members at state-owned and publicly listed companies be women by 2008.

Since then, Spain and the Netherlands have passed similar laws. Now Belgium, Britain, Germany, France and Sweden are considering legislative measures involving female quotas. And although Germany is also debating such a law, Deutsche Telekom, which is based in Bonn, announced last week that it would voluntarily introduce a quota aiming to fill 30 percent of upper and middle management jobs with women by the end of 2015.

Do quotas work? Would they work in the U.S.? Does the U.S. need them?

Marit Hoel, Center for Corporate Diversity, Oslo
Amy Dittmar, University of Michigan
Peter Baldwin, author, "The Narcissism of Minor Differences"
Linda Hirshman, author, "Get to Work"
Sharon Meers, former managing director at Goldman Sachs. Read full opinion below.

Throw Out Old Assumptions- Sharon Meers

Quotas are one way to allocate positions of power — but they come with a lot of risk and resentment. Instead, we should put good process in the place of bad assumptions.
Employers can do a much better job holding social myths in check in the workplace.

Weeding out sex-role attitudes and assumptions is difficult. And it’s especially hard to get started when many leaders don’t think that there’s a problem, that nothing needs to change, that the low presence of women at the top is natural — the result of female preferences, family roles and the demands of the 24/7 workplace.

But research paints a different picture: 80 percent of mothers who leave the work force would prefer to stay on the job; children do at least as well when mothers work outside the home and men are fully engaged parents; divorce risks drops 50 percent when women and men more evenly share earnings and housework.

Unfortunately, popular chatter, from the boardroom to the PTA, does not reflect these facts. We persist in our Mad Men belief that children and marriage benefit if mothers lower their sights and stop shooting for the top.

Employers can do a much better job holding social myths in check in the workplace. At one big company, senior managers met to identify the firm’s future leaders. Everyone agreed that a foreign posting was key. But as they went down the list of prospects, female names were quickly crossed out. “Oh, Anne won’t move. Her husband has a good job.” Then, “I don’t think Sarah would go to China, her kids are in grade school.” When it was about to happen a third time, a senior woman asked: “How about we call Anne and Sarah and let them tell us if they’d really never move?”

At the University of Michigan, with National Science Foundation backing, tenured male professors teach their peers about the data on implicit bias, the tendency we all have to choose John’s resume over Jane’s even when their credentials are identical. Michigan’s hiring committees, bathed in facts about how social attitudes blur vision, now have a more informed process. For the medical and science faculties, it has doubled the percentage of female hires form 15 percent to 30 percent.

Assumptions about work hours also limit women but new studies are starting to unravel them. Harvard Business Review recently published this finding from work at Boston Consulting Group: consultant teams that were forced to work fewer hours had measurably better client results. Better communication, clearer minds and a more disciplined process produced superior results. This supports what other research says: that working parents can excel at work and still eat dinner with their children.

A favorite male boss once joked with me “I’ve no idea how this dual-career thing works – someday, you’ll have to tell me.” His life was different from mine but he had a sense of humor and an open mind. When leaders are willing to educate themselves, to ask and not assume, women advance at the same rate as their male peers.

So how do we embolden more leaders to do the hard work and put good process in place? Let’s turn up the volume on what the studies say is true: That co-ed leadership is good for everyone and results in better profits and no talk of quotas.

For full article check out New York Times opinion blog re European quotas for women at the top - and a better choice for the US.


By Sharon Meers

Why Guys Love 50/50

In 2006, a survey of 360 married men found that men who did more chores at home fared much better in the bedroom. “The more satisfied a wife is with the division of household duties, the more satisfied a man is with his marital sex life,” according to the survey. These married men reported that when wives were happier with their husband's household work, the frequency of sex was also higher. And, confounding many skeptics, the survey found that “the more hours a woman works at the job, the more sex she has at home.”

Why would this be? Aren't dual- career couples more harried and tired? Maybe, but fatigue may be a smaller factor in who gets sex than how couples interact. If you look at the wealth of research, couples who share work and family life more evenly have three factors on their side. First, wives are less likely to see their husbands as slackers at home (less “you jerk” effect); instead, wives may find husbands more appealing because they snuggle their kids (more “Baby Bjorn” effect); third, employed wives are statistically more likely to be happy with themselves (more “self-confidence” effect). —read more here

DadLabs explore this phenomenon a great video- Choreplay: Does it work? Check it out below.



BY Sharon Meers

Are we better than David Paterson?

David Paterson is keeping me up at night. Whether he remains New York’s governor is not my worry - I live across the country and even liked how he confessed his own foibles while taking office. Since then, the governor’s decline and alleged misuse of power have been sad. But what really troubles me is a more far-reaching sin: Paterson’s failure to stand up against violence. Asked about his girl-friend-choking aid, Paterson minimized, telling The New York Times that what happened was “like breakups you hear about all the time.”

Paterson’s right about one thing: relationship abuse is ubiquitous -- and so are bystanders who, like the governor, don’t do enough to stop it. My grandmother, a teen-age single mom, fell into the arms of a pathologically violent man. The results were so dire that my dad ran away as a 9^th grader. I’m lucky my father found a useful outlet for most of his trauma - he put himself in therapy, became a mental health worker and devoted his career to the many patients whose ills start with abuse. But pain still lives in my dad’s eyes. And I ask myself how many bystanders had the power to step in, to protect my grandmother and her children -- but did not.

I know the urge to look away, the feeling of “I can’t deal with this now, how could I help anyway?” I saw it in myself, in how long it took me to read, Crazy Love, a riveting book by my college classmate Leslie Morgan-Steiner, about her marriage to a charming, intelligent man whose rage almost killed her. It was also hard to face the fact that we Gen X’ers aren’t that much better than our parents. As a group, we still don’t acknowledge this violence for the horror that it is. Knowing what Morgan-Steiner’s ex-husband had done, people still invited him to parties and into their homes, as if saying “well, these things happen.”

In the book, a psychologist explains that abusers often come by their disease honestly -- as victims of cruelty themselves. Because of this, predators often live in extreme denial, believing that their brutality is justified or just plain normal. And how much are we each doing to disabuse them of that notion?

"Domestic violence is a brutal crime that shatters millions of lives every year, transcending race, ethnicity, social class and even gender," said Rudy Giuliani ten years ago. While Rudy’s politics differ from mine, I admire his words and wonder what it takes for more of us to speak -- and act on -- them. How many bosses want law-breakers on the payroll? What if more abusers knew that violence could cost them their job? Imagine if Paterson had handed his aid a note: “I care about you. Call this number - get professional help. If it happens again, you’re fired.”

By Sharon Meers