[Music] so a few years ago I was on a plane ride to Des Moines and I found myself sitting next to a businessman we got into this lovely conversation and he's telling me about his kids and their sports teams and then he says to me so why are you going to Des Moines and I said well I'm going to speak at a Women's Leadership Conference and suddenly this otherwise lovely man just freezes and he gets that deer in the headlights love and finally he just like throws up his arms and he goes sorry oh man
and he proceeds to tell me that at his bank he has just been through diversity training and it was the worst thing ever it was like being punished or sent to the principal's office and he said at the end of the training he took away just one message and that message was it's all your fault and I thought okay that's a shame right these are the guys we need on our side and instead they're feeling alienated so the next day I'm in a ballroom full of women talking about the issues we face at work and
I'm not just talking about the me2 headlines about sexual abuse but about the everyday indignities being marginalized overlooked ignored interrupted simply not taken as seriously as the guy sitting right next to us and I'm watching as the see of female heads is just nodding in recognition I stopped in the middle of a sentence I said you know what we already know this we need men in the room to hear this instead that was a real aha moment for me because women when we get together we talk all the time about the issues we face at
work but what we don't do is talk to men and I really came to realize that women talking to each other it's half of a conversation it gets us at best to 50% of a solution we need men to join us now I've spent my career as a journalist surrounded by men I spent 20 years at The Wall Street Journal I was the editor-in-chief of a business magazine and of USA Today all of my mentors were men my colleagues were largely men they were great guys but because we have been cutting them out of our
conversations we end up unintentionally demonizing a lot of these perfectly good guys who could and should be our allies and what's more a lot of them are surprisingly clueless about what are the issues that women face at work in fact Pew did a survey in which the majority of men said they believe obstacles to women's career success are gone sexism is solved but the majority of women in that same survey said significant obstacles remain now that's why I spent three years seeking out and interviewing men who are trying to close that gap and I also
drove into the research now the data is crystal clear adding women to your organization makes you more successful companies that have a gender balance leadership are more financially successful their employees are happier but the research also showed that my seatmate on the way to des moines he had a point because diversity training has failed there's a professor at Harvard Frank Bob and he looked at 30 years worth of diversity training at more than 800 companies and he found that for two groups for women as well as for black men and women diversity training actually made
things worse there were a variety of reasons for this but one was resentment on the part of the white men who were the primary recipients of the training it made them feel bad about themselves which by the way turns out that was the point I spoke to her veteran diversity trainer he said hey what we used to do is basically bang white guys over the head with a two-by-four we wanted them to feel guilty and if they cry even better so perhaps it's no surprise we've been using the wrong strategies for decades which explains why
for example women still earn just 80 cents on the dollar and for black women that's 61 cents for Latinas that's 53 cents and meanwhile even though women earn more than half of all college degrees we make up only 5% of CEOs of major companies the Rockefeller Foundation did a survey they found that one in four Americans believes we will literally invent time travel before women run half of Fortune 500 companies so what's going on here well it turns out none of this workplace bias actually starts there it starts way earlier at home in infancy and
it's because of this unconscious bias that all of us have that's buried so deeply inside of us we don't even realize that it exists so I'm the mother of a daughter in the son the research tells us that mothers of infants routinely overestimate the crawling ability of their baby sons but underestimate the crawling ability of their baby daughters then when these kids turn to parents who type into Google it's my child at genius they're more than twice as likely to type that in about a boy two year old as a girl then these kids get
into school their teachers are biased in one experiment students were given two sets of math tests one graded anonymously one graded with names on top when graded anonymously the girls outscored the boys when graded with names on top the boys suddenly outscored the girls in math now this pattern repeats all the way up until college where a female college student needs an A average to be seen as the equal of a male college student with a B average that means by the time these now grown kids now young men and women enter the workforce they
have already internal that women are worth less and when we value women less we also value their contributions less so for example researchers have found that women are interrupted three times more frequently than men Northwestern University found that even female Supreme Court justices are interrupted three times more frequently than male justices and then when women when we make up less than a third of a room our voices are literally not heard when I speak with groups I very often ask for a show of hands among the women who have experienced the following scenario you say
something in a meeting and nobody seems to hear it it's like crickets right and then two minutes later some guy repeats exactly what you just said and everybody turns to him and they're like hey Bob great idea you had Bob right usually 100 percent of hands go up including mine because what we're experiencing is a respect gap that researchers have documented between men and women and I saw this most vividly when I interviewed transgender professionals these are the only people who have lived on both sides of that divide one of them was Ben Barris so
Ben Barris was as neuroscientist at Stanford University he was born as Barbara Barris and he transitioned in middle age after already establishing a successful scientific career and he told us how after his transition he went to a conference he delivered a paper and in the audience one scientist turned to another scientist and said wow that Ben Barris he is so much smarter than his sister Barbara so it turns out there are a whole bunch of communications disconnects that exacerbate everything we're talking about so for example women do use more hedging language the I hate to
bother you but or this might be a stupid question but and we use that up speak we say it as a question when we really mean a statement and also women we apologize like all the time and we are not sorry we are also highly aware of all of these verbal tics we try like crazy to curb them I've met women who have sorry jars on their desks every time they apologize they have to throw a buck in I've met women who have taken acting classes to appear to be more confident to the men with
whom they work or who have fired vocal coaches to lower the pitch of their voice to sound more like the men who they work with we women we are leaning in so hard to fit into this world that was created by men for men that we're just about falling over it is about time that men lean back in toward us now the challenge there is that even men who want to be part of the solution often aren't sure quite how and one obstacle it turns out is fear 74% of men in one survey cited fear
they were afraid of other men's disapproval afraid of loss of status and afraid that they would say the wrong thing to us women and we would chop their heads off now in my travels interviewing man I found another type of fear and it was fear of Tears these were men in positions of authority they said they were afraid they would inadvertently say something to a female subordinate that would hurt her feelings and make her cry but the research tells us that when women do cry at work it is not because our feelings were hurt it
is because we're pissed off we're frustrated were furious a woman crying at work is an awful lot like a man yelling at work but the men don't know that and this actually has really serious consequences for women's careers 79 percent of men in one survey said they were afraid to give women the candid feedback they need to how to be successful and we see this in studies of performance reviews in one study the men got very much metrics based cut-and-dried feedback the women however ended up getting personality critiques with words like irrational strident and abrasive
now the good news in all of this is that there are actually simple steps that any one of us can take that actually will counter those biases they come down to awareness and I'm just going to mention three really easy ones one interrupts the interrupters anybody should feel empowered to say hey Darlene was speaking I would actually like to hear her finish some companies now actually have no interruptions rules for their meetings amplification now this is when one woman says something and then somebody else it could be a man could be a woman repeats her
point giving her credit for her idea by name thus amplifying her voice and then brag buddies this is my favorite this came from women at a consulting firm and they came up with a strategy where one woman recounts her awesome achievements to another and vice versa and then each goes to the boss and brags about the other one the bottom line here is be an ally right with your man or a woman call out bad behavior when you see it and notice your own behavior are you the person who snaps to attention when a man
is speaking but suddenly you want to try to check out your email or your Facebook on your phone while a woman is talking put down the damn phone right now I realize none of these steps are cure-alls and clearly we need systemic change we need family leave we need gender wage gap analyses to ensure men and women are being paid equally but these steps they're a start and if we take them what might the world look like well it turns out that the World Economic Forum ranks countries by gender equality and number one for the
past decade has been Iceland so I went to Iceland here's what you need to know about Iceland it's the most macho country in the entire planet you go to recomment the capital and in the middle of it the Church of Iceland has the most phallic spire you have ever seen true story you're looking at a picture of me on my first day in Iceland the hotel clerk choose me outside saying it's a lovely day for a walk so I walk outside and it's raining ice and the ice is coming at me sideways so I duck
in to the nearest museum to get out of the ice you're looking at a picture of it it is I kid you not this is the world's only penis Museum hundreds of specimens and one hell of a gift shop this is a country that values its masculinity and yet when I sat down with the men of Iceland these big burly fishermen and farmers they would say things like of course I am a feminist there were no political connotations to that word whatsoever it was sort of like saying of course I'm human and I realized the
reason Iceland is number one has very little to do with the women and everything to do with the men because the men realize that gender equality it's not a female issue it's not a girl thing it's about all of us it's a humanitarian issue we all need to work together to close that gender gap that's the idea that we need to get into the rest of the world and certainly here in the United States and I have to say I know this is hard but I am cautiously optimistic I have heard from hundreds of men
over the past year who want to be part of this transformation one of them was a management consultant and he had written an article about gender equality and he said to me it was one of the hardest things he had ever done in his life he said men worry do I know enough do I have the right to talk about this issue and my answer to him and my answer to all of you is hell yes hell yes that is how we will close the gender gap because when men and women work together we can
and we will change the world thank you you you
