This year’s theme comes with a statistic:
At the current rate of progress, it will take until 2158, which is roughly five generations from now, to reach full gender parity, according to data from the World Economic Forum.
Focusing on the need to Accelerate Action emphasizes the importance of taking swift and decisive steps to achieve gender equality. It calls for increased momentum and urgency in addressing the systemic barriers and biases that women face, both in personal and professional spheres.
So, together, let’s Accelerate Action to speed up the rate of progress worldwide.
One of the best ways to forge gender equality is to understand what works and to do more of this, faster.
In the spirit of accelerating action, today on the blog I’m contemplating “what works” on an introspective (and perhaps idealistic) level. My emphasis is on continuing the conversation and removing resistance with the aim to inspire a collaborative effort across all genders toward equality.
Before we begin: It’s important to me that this is an inclusive space. At the heart of this discussion is respect and appreciation for the humanity in each and every one of us, regardless of how we identify.
When someone is different from us, when we don’t have an immediate understanding or shared experience, the tendency is to retract: to be wary, and to close off our hearts.
That is until we catch a glimpse of our own humanity, reflecting back at us from within them.
Here we go!
Growing Up Strong and Self-Sufficient
I’ve always believed strongly in the power of women. As a kid, I couldn’t quite wrap my head around gender biases, yet they existed. The more I encountered them, the more determined I was to prove them wrong.
Of course I was indeed a little girl growing up, and although (mostly) nobody said it, there was this underlying notion that being a little girl would hold me back. So, I was raised to be…
Tough.
Disciplined.
Smart.
Independent.
Strong.
Brave.
I hope to raise my daughters to embody these qualities too, by embracing their innate strength and confidence!
I also hope that the context into which these traits play out continues to advance.
Thanks to the many advancements toward equality that had been made up to this point, when I was growing up a major concern for parents (at least in my experience) was that they did not want their daughters feeling like they had to rely on anyone else to make it in the world. There was a huge emphasis on self-sufficiency.
To be self-sufficient, you had to have a good career.
To get in with an employer where you could excel at said career, you would need to be competitive.
To be competitive, you would need to prove that you could rub elbows with the big dogs in the industry.
Of course, the big dogs in the industry were still primarily men.
So the ever-important move to empower girls happened at a pivotal point where women were actively seeking domestic freedom, but workplace culture had not caught up yet. In a way, we came out of the frying pan and into the fryer that was a capitalist environment historically built by men, for men.
To make it there, you had to fit in. Your presence couldn’t be too jarring, or “rock the boat” according to the existing leadership team. So when women initially started entering the workplace, it was common to take on roles that were sort-of expected and nonthreatening. Service and support roles, mostly.
By the time I got there, we were overdue for, and actively seeking out, greater equality in the workplace.
We Needed (More) Women in Leadership, But There Was a Catch
Of course, being a woman in leadership meant you’d have to work well with the men who predominantly held those positions already. One strategy was that we learned to be “one of the guys.” Non-threatening, predictable, reliable, and as much as we could – relatable.
See? We’re no different from you, really. We can be here at the top, too.
Personally, I felt the pressure to hide my stereotypically feminine traits. I worked hard not to show vulnerability. I did not want to be labelled as…
Too emotional.
Irrational.
Too timid.
Soft.
In a male-dominated ecosystem, these are weaknesses. Liabilities, even.
They were also expectations – stereotypes that we kept feeling the need to prove wrong, so that we could be seen as capable and competent, just like our male predecessors.
Perspectives on (and Breaking Out of) Traditionally Feminine Roles
So what happens when a woman’s actions are demeanor deviate from those expectations?
I have to imagine (at least at a subconscious level) it’s sort-of surprising and uncomfortable. A common example? When a man speaks directly, he’s “assertive”. When a woman speaks directly, she’s “bitchy”.
This totally wrong, but at our current degree of progress, this reaction makes some sense. We had a role and demeanor in mind for this person based on her gender, and she stepped outside of those expectations. That feels threatening. The negativity and name-calling is an aggressive reaction to the unexpected and uncomfortable.
Women have to work with this disparity: We feel we have to be “one of the guys” enough to get along and share points of view, but not so much that we are shattering the preconceived notion of what a woman should be.
Out of tradition (and intentionally or not), we were raised that it’s fine to be a bit softer and perhaps more emotional, but in order to be treated as equals, to “succeed” in life and remain independent, we have to turn it off.
Trying to juggle these concepts leaves us metaphorically and literally falling behind trying to walk to a lunch meeting in our heels.
Why do the men have to walk so fast in the first place?
A Compassionate Look at Traditionally Masculine Roles
So let’s think about that. What are some common stereotypes for men?
Unemotional (or, able to leave emotion out of the equation).
Logical.
Assertive.
Decisive.
Competitive.
If women were stereotypically raised in the image of a mother and nurturer, then men were stereotypically raised in the image of a father and provider. And for many generations, soldiers.
Scared? Tired? Upset about it? Too bad, toughen up, and go do the thing.
Historically, the ability to hide (or swallow, or to not feel) one’s emotions was a quality (skill?) of an “effective leader”. Being “emotional” therefore makes you unfit for leadership. One of the most prominent female stereotypes is that women are what? “Too emotional”.
In contrast, men in leadership have “mastered their emotions” by not engaging with them.
Sorry – how do you master something that you hardly ever engage with?
Swallowing Your Emotions
I think men have been historically raised to believe a display of emotion is unpalatable for them. They’ve also been hardened by socioeconomic circumstance and the expectation to provide. The working environment perpetuates this, being comprised of other men who were raised the same way. If the leadership team shares these values, they reward others who demonstrate the same values. We want stoic leadership.
There is a cost to this too, of course.
If a woman is emotional, well, she’s a woman. I guess it’s socially expected. If a man is emotional, then what?
Seriously, I’m asking.
Ok – this, too, deviates from our traditionally male stereotype and – you guessed it – makes people uncomfortable. Maybe they’re “not cut out for it”? This isn’t right, either.
What I’m saying is men also experience the pressure to be “one of the guys”, but from childhood, not just upon entering the workforce. Yet to feel your emotions, to experience vulnerability, to have and to show compassion for yourself and others is so very… human.
Maybe women do have an advantage: we were raised to embrace our humanity, not to deny it.
When We Honour the Humanity In Ourselves
I’m not a psychologist, but I’m going to suggest that we all have emotions, regardless of gender.
I don’t think the stereotype that men are less emotional than women is true. Men have the capacity for just as much emotion as women. They were just raised to work hard not to engage them. They become skilled in suppressing them.
This is societal expectation, not genetics, and it leaves a huge disparity between the experiences of working men and working women. (Let alone household/familial expectations.) It’s unfair to everyone, and it creates an “us versus them” mentality.
As I noted in the opening, we tend to close off to people who are different from us, even subconsciously, because we don’t have common understanding linking us together. We don’t understand them, and we feel misunderstood ourselves.
That is, until we see the humanity in them.
Or more specifically, until we catch a glimpse of our own humanity, reflected back to us from within them.
This is what helps us connect, converse, and remove resistance to working together. A little thread of connection that is the shared experience of our humanity.
If we can’t see the humanity in ourselves, how will we recognize it in others?
Appreciating Our Differences to Accelerate Action
Here’s the punchline:
We need to stop evaluating the strength of women’s leadership abilities by how well they can emulate their male colleagues’ traits and work habits.
Instead, we need to start appreciating our differences. We need to bring women into leadership because they can offer a different perspective, experience, methodology, and value system. Not in spite of it. Diversity in leadership is an asset.
To do this, we have to connect and converse. We need to have that openness so that we can find new ways of working together, rather than focusing on how we can bring new players into an old system.
To have openness, we have to find a little commonality that connects us and helps us appreciate our differences rather than inherently distrusting them.
To find that commonality in each other, we have to have familiarity with ourselves.
The type of familiarity that doesn’t care about stereotypes and whether they’re true for us or not.
Maybe we can all look inward and identify the experiences and biases that shaped us into the gender roles that we play. We’ve already talked in this post about how women can find these more “masculine” traits and work with them, turning them up or down.
What would it take to have men find their more “feminine” traits, and maybe give turning those up and down a try?
Can we look again at that list of things I didn’t want to be labelled as? Maybe they’ve been misclassified. What if…
To be emotional is to care deeply about the work we do and the people we do it with.
To be irrational is to bring the creativity, the unexpected, and the intuitive to shake up the status quo.
To be timid is to have self-restraint when communication requires precision, tact, and careful thought.
To be soft is perhaps to be empathetic, kind, and genuinely invested in our human capital.
Bring these to the existing leadership table, and if we can work collaboratively, I think a balanced approach results.
I think that the pressure to swallow your emotions (regardless of gender) is what keeps us separate and wary of change. It denies us the chance to get in touch with ourselves, which in turn denies us the chance to truly connect with others. We need to connect to collaborate and to innovate the way we work and live.
We’re diverging socially. We live in a world that is becoming more and more separate (despite the internet which globalized us – who saw that coming?). Our lifestyles grow increasingly lonely and superficial. We don’t need to be continually separating and reinforcing this gap between us.
We need to continue the conversation and remove resistance to accelerate action.
Let’s value the things that make us different, and appreciate the things that make us the same.
Thanks for reading! For more, here’s my post from 2024 IWD: Inspire Inclusion. Happy IWD!
