What is the big deal about sponsorship? A few years ago we didn’t even talk about sponsorship. Women were being urged to find mentors, and now this advice is being replaced with women being urged to find sponsors. This change in tack is nicely encapsulated in the title of Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s book (Forget a mentor) Find a Sponsor. Her subtitle The New Way to Fast-Track your Career also provides some insight into the positive hype surrounding sponsorship.
In this blog I want to talk about the research that brought sponsorship into the limelight, and why it is important, particularly but not exclusively from a gender perspective, to distinguish between mentoring and sponsorship.
Read MoreMerit is one of those words that gets bandied about a lot in regard to gender equity. Opponents of targets and quotas often use it as the final trump card in their argument – ‘we wouldn’t want to compromise merit’.
But what does merit mean? And is it really a trump card or a troublesome concept that is past its use by date?
Read MoreI am very proud to present my newly published article Champions of gender equality: female and male executives as leaders of gender change. It draws on my doctoral research and examines in detail what male and female executives say about gender championing. All agree that it is not an easy role!
As readers of my Blog will be aware, I am keen for men to engage with doing the work of gender equality and this research certainly influenced my thinking.
Read MoreThe phrase ‘playing the gender card’ has been used against women who raise issues of gender bias or discrimination, to discredit their claims. The implication is that by calling gender into play they are not only playing the victim but also directing attention away from their own lack of performance or fault in whatever may have occurred. Perhaps most famously in Australia this accusation was leveled at our former Prime Minister Julia Gillard.
Read More‘We must become better at asking and do less telling in a culture that overvalues telling’
Working with mentors is one of the hardest things I do. So, when I was drawn to the title of Edgar Schein’s book Humble Inquiry I approached it with this in mind. What, if anything, might be helpful for mentors in this book? Did it contain anything useful in developing their understanding and skills as mentors?
Read MoreI’ve worked for about 17 years to help improve Aboriginal/non-Aboriginal relations. Jen de Vries has worked even longer to improve gender equity. In both of these fields we are in a time of transition – about 40 years old and counting – from an era of unambiguous and socially sanctioned disparity in rights, dominance and power, to an era of genuine equity. That transition is hard work. And in both of those fields I’m in the dominant group. I’m white Australian, and I’m a bloke.
Read More‘We (men) are expected to lead’, one of the male participants exclaimed. As a woman so immersed in working with women’s leadership development programs I found myself somewhat taken aback. It was impossible for me to imagine a woman saying anything like it. For women the reverse could be said to be true: we (women) are not expected to lead. It was one of those moments when you are left in no doubt that gendering processes are alive and well. A moment when socialised gender roles, so often implicit become explicit. And, in this case, open for discussion.
Read MoreGetting men and women together to talk about gender. Sounds ordinary enough. Might happen around a dinner table but when was the last time it happened at work? Maybe it never has? Tim Muirhead and I recently ran a full day ‘Partners for Change’ workshop where attendees came in male/female collegial pairs. Women mostly did the inviting, asking a male colleague to come to the workshop with them, with the intended focus of strengthening their capacity to work individually and together to tackle gender issues in their shared workplace.
Read MoreMy title, ‘I don’t want to be mentored back into the straight line’, quoting a recent research participant, captures very succinctly a key difficulty with mentoring, and one that is almost entirely overlooked by mentoring practitioners and mentoring programs. I understood exactly what my interviewee meant, from both a research and practice perspective. Mentoring can inadvertently be used to help mentees to ‘fit in’, where mentors reinforce gendered norms and cultural stereotypes, teaching mentees to succeed the way they succeeded.
Read MoreSheryls Sandberg’s best selling book Lean In: Women. Work and the Will to Lead (2013) created a bit of a stir when it was first released, and the expression, ‘Lean In’ (at least for women) has moved into popular speech.
My response differed from some of my feminist scholar colleagues, with their stinging critique. There are a few things about this book that I really liked.
Read MoreBetter behaved with male colleagues? While debriefing an experiential exercise in an all female leadership program, one woman suggested she would have behaved differently if men had been involved.
She would have treated men more seriously and with more respect. While hard to admit, this observation opened up a discussion about how they, as women, treated their female colleagues differently to men in the workplace.
Read MoreIn this blog, which follows on from my previous bolt 'What about the men?' I explore the difference between inviting men to be allies in the gender change work and being partners. As allies men are being asked to help make organisations better places for women. But this assumes that men have no gender, or at least that their gender is not problematic in the workplace.
Read MoreWhat about the men? I have heard this question asked in so many different ways. Men sometimes ask it, complaining they are being unfairly treated, missing out on something that is being offered to women, for example the opportunity to be matched with a senior mentor or participate in a leadership development program. Women on leadership programs often ask ‘what about the men?’ ‘Men need this too’, they say. Or ‘men need this more than we do, they are our bosses and they are the ones who need to change, not us’.
Read MoreCreating more gender equitable and inclusive cultures is high on the agenda for many organisations. However there is often a disconnect between existing staff development activities and efforts to create the desired cultures. More explicitly linking individual development to organisational change can make a big difference to the return on investment when developing staff. The ‘bifocal approach’ translates this ideal into reality through clear principles and program design.
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