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If The Shoe Fits: China’s Nerd Perk

Friday, April 27th, 2018

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

Yesterday was my birthday and the last way I wanted to celebrate was to write a post.

But since it was for Friday, I thought I would share China’s version of bro culture.

China is a gender nightmare, in spite of having the world’s largest number of self-made female billionaires, as well as women holding down senior roles in many startups.

Employment ads specify the desired candidate gender and appearance along with soft skills.

Ms. Shen is a “programmer motivator,” as they are known in China. Part psychologist, part cheerleader, the women are hired to chat up and calm stressed-out coders. The jobs are proliferating in a society that largely adheres to gender stereotypes and believes that male programmers are “zhai,” or nerds who have no social lives.

Must be attractive, know how to charm socially awkward programmers and give relaxing massages.

Note that Shen holds a degree in civil engineering.

While the bias is far more overt, one has to wonder if the harassment and bullying is as common.

Image credit: HikingArtist

Role Model : Aileen Lee

Wednesday, April 25th, 2018

Backstage at the Crunchies 2013. Photo by Max Morse for TechCrunch.

Today was crazy (the aftermath of having a tree fall on your house) and I don’t have time to write a full post.

That said, I want to share an article on how individuals can band together to start changing a negative to a positive.

I hope you find The 36 Women Secretly Breaking Up Silicon Valley’s Old Boys’ Club as interesting as I did.

Now look around your little corner of the world and see where you can make a difference, too.

Image credit: TechCrunch via Wilimedia

If The Shoe Fits: Fairness Means Equal Pay

Friday, April 6th, 2018

 

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

I often field questions about compensation, stock allocation and bonuses that revolve around the idea of fairness.

There have been more calls since a rise in media attention to gender pay inequities, especially focused on tech. They look at what other countries are doing, such as a recent UK law, and wonder if similar things could happen here or if someday down the line they will have to do as Marc Benioff did.

Whether the subject starts with diversity or compensation, my callers fall in two distinct camps.

  • Those looking for ways to bake fairness into their company’s DNA; and
  • The ones who want to cloak current unfair actions in a veneer of acceptability.

(I have to admit that listening to the second group stumble around trying camouflage what they want to do is amusing, but definitely not funny.)

Of course, it’s easiest for founders just starting, since they have no historical staff or (hopefully) bad habits, but any size organization can do it if management is determined and has the grit to follow-through.

Here are some basics actions:

  • Develop core values around fairness, diversity, transparency, etc., make both values and culture public on their site, and follow-through when recruiting.
  • Salary and stock offers should be based on the value and effect of the position on the company’s success, as opposed to the person you are hiring.
  • Before approving compensation compare it with similar people inside and out for fairness, especially if the candidate is a woman or minority.
  • Talk to others, such as Gusto cofounder and CTO Edward Kim or the folks behind the Founders for Change coalition.

The most critical factor is a willingness to pass on hiring people when it’s obvious they are assuming it’s just talk or that you should make an exception for them because they are special.

As I’ve said in the past, “If you pay your people equally when you hire and promote there won’t be a pay gap for you to erase.”

Image credit: HikingArtist

Role Models: Edward Kim, Gusto’s Cofounder and CTO

Friday, March 16th, 2018

After reading about Gusto’s approach to diversity, I posed this question to a male founder I know and a friend of his, also a founder.

As a founder, what would you do if a top performer asked for a one-on-one meeting because she was uncomfortable and being treated poorly as the one woman on a team of 18 men.

The responses weren’t surprising; one was disappointing and the other disgusting.

One said he would do what he could, but also tell her that she’d be better off if she toughened up.

I don’t know the second guy very well, but it turned out that he is much more a bro. He said he’d tell her to stop whining and “grow a pair” and if it still bothered her maybe software engineering wasn’t where she belonged.

Compare them to Gusto cofounder and CTO Edward Kim’s, response.

Kim, Lee says, was extraordinarily receptive. In fact, he made it a personal project to study the gender breakdown on the engineering teams at other tech firms. The numbers he found were dismal.

Only 12% of the engineering staffers at 84 tech firms were female…  He also read a 2015 McKinsey study showing that companies with diverse workforces outperform financially. “The fact that no one else in tech was able to really crack the gender diversity nut and solve it represented an opportunity for us,” Kim says. “If we want to reimagine what HR is like for the very diverse workforces of our small-business customers, we ourselves have to build a diverse workforce.”

Boston Consulting published findings similar to McKensey’s in January. (Well worth reading.)

Kim’s and Gusto’s efforts have paid off handsomely.

  • Gusto’s women-only recruiting effort lasted six months. It stopped, Kim says, because “we exceeded our goals.”
  • Though hiring women engineers took more time, Kim says, Gusto never dropped its standards. “It bothers me when people say that prioritizing diversity lowers the bar in terms of the caliber of talent you’re able to hire,” he says. “That is simply not true.” Nor, he says, was there any pushback from inside Gusto.
  • Gusto also addressed its compensation policy. Since 2016 its salaries have been audited by Mercer, a human resources consulting firm, which has found no gender pay disparity. Benefits include 16 weeks of paid leave for a primary parent, plus an additional $100 a week for groceries and food deliveries, $100 a month for six months of housecleaning and up to $500 for a baby-sleep coach.
  • Now that 17 of Gusto’s 70 engineers are female, it’s getting a little easier, says Gusto’s HR head, Maryanne Brown Caughey. “It’s kind of a domino effect,” she says. “Women know they’re joining a welcoming community.”

While Kim is pleased with the results, he isn’t resting on his laurels.

While Gusto has made progress, its engineering team has no Latinos and no African-Americans. Kim says Gusto has two hiring goals in 2018: senior women and racial diversity in engineering. “The way we make progress is by focusing on one problem,” Kim says, “and then we move on to the next.”

Role model, indeed; techdom needs a lot more founders like Kim.

Image credit: Gusto

Ducks in a Row: Greed Hiring is Good

Tuesday, March 13th, 2018

Way back in 2007 I described what I call the number one best motivator.

Over the years, I’ve found vested self-interest (VSI) to be not only the most powerful people motivator around (…) And the idea must have merit when you consider that a Sudanese cell phone billionaire is using it to incentivize African heads of State to act responsibly.

So, instead of hiring for diversity and the social good, why not hire for greed, pure and simple.

You won’t even need to rationalize your decision, since the data makes it a no-brainer.

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and George Washington University calculated that going from an all-male or all-female team to one with equal representation of men and women correlated with a revenue gain of 41%.

41%! That ain’t chicken feed.

Moreover, the phenomenon is global.

A study of 1,000 companies across 12 countries by McKinsey & Co. showed that those in the top quartile for gender diversity were 21% more likely to have above-average profitability than companies at the bottom of the pile. If companies had a greater balance in ethnicities at work, they would on average perform 33% better than those that don’t. Other studies that McKinsey did in previous years (paywall) yielded similar conclusions.

It seems obvious that women would understand women customers better than men do, but if you doubt it Home Depot is an excellent case study.

Trish Mueller joined HD and became CMO a few years later. She recognized that the data collection showing most purchasers were male was incorrect and the company set out to disversify their market.

In 2013, the Home Depot’s core executive team had a strategy meeting about how the brand could appeal to more customers and markets—like women—and expand their product range. There were two women executives in the room: Mueller and Cara Kinzey (Senior Vice President, Technology). Trish and Cara suggested that the brand’s product range should be as wide as its name. Home Depot included the word “home,” after all, and could expand into product categories like cookware, small appliances, and kitchen accessories.

“Cara and I came at it from a women’s perspective,” Trish says, “without it being that overt.”

They decided to test their ideas on the next Black Friday sale.

They gave their merchants a broad mandate: “If it’s something you can conceive of using in your home, let’s have a conversation about it.”

Some of the home appliances and cookware options they tested proved so successful that they’re now kept long-term inside every store. The Home Depot also had some rather unexpected hits during their Black Friday sales, like a giant fluffy teddy bear that sold for $29.99. “Who would’ve ever thought to see that at Home Depot?,” Mueller says. “But we were sold out in ten minutes, the first year we carried them.”

But is the effort paying off consistently beyond Black Friday?

Unlike smaller rival Lowe’s, Home Depot isn’t aggressively adding to its store base. In fact, it has opened just one new location in the U.S. market since 2013. Yet the retailer is beating Lowe’s in overall revenue growth thanks to its stronger customer traffic.

Would HD have had the savvy to go after the women’s market without Mueller’s and Kinzey’s viewpoint? Unlikely for guys who thought pink power tools were the answer.

Has it translated to more diverse hiring? It has in Canada (I couldn’t find US stats).

So, for all you guys who have no time for moral imperatives, turn your VSI up to high and do it for greed.

Image credit: Pexels and MotleyFool

If The Shoe Fits: VCs Moving Where??

Friday, March 9th, 2018

https://www.flickr.com/photos/hikingartist/5726760809/

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

News of a Bay Area exodus has been appearing off and on for a few years.

I saw the latest stats,

But in the last three months of 2017, San Francisco lost more residents to outward migration than any other city in the country, according to data from Redfin, the real estate website. A recent survey by Edelman, the public relations firm, found that 49 percent of Bay Area residents, and 58 percent of Bay Area millennials, were considering moving away.

in and article about a much different group that is becoming disenchanted with it: VCs.

“I’m a little over San Francisco,” said Patrick McKenna, the founder of High Ridge Venture Partners who was also on the bus tour. “It’s so expensive, it’s so congested, and frankly, you also see opportunities in other places.”

In this case, ‘other places’ refers to the Midwest and cities like Detroit.

Which I find amusing, considering that

VCs are known to invest primarily in young, white males, mostly from elite colleges, who are introduced by a trusted source in their network.

They aren’t known for investing in women entrepreneurs

Venture capitalists invested $58.2 billion in companies with all-male founders in 2016. Meanwhile, women received just $1.46 billion in VC money…).

And practically none went to Black women.

Only 11 startups led by Black women have raised more than $1 million in outside funding—and are typically funded by the same three investors.

So here’s the question.

Knowing the personal attributes that VCs look for (and are comfortable with) who will they fund?

Image credit: HikingArtist

 

Ryan’s Journal: Does Transparency Lead To Accountability And Your Best Self?

Thursday, December 7th, 2017

https://www.flickr.com/photos/renemensen/6727431229/I watched a movie tonight called, “The Circle”, staring Tom Hanks and Emma Watson. (A quick thank you to Amazon and Apple for finally allowing me to stream Amazon Prime to my Apple TV!).

If you have not seen the film it is about a tech company in the Bay Area. The company is basically a combination of Google, Amazon, Oracle, and any other major tech company wrapped up into one.

I won’t explain the whole plot, but one overriding theme is that the company knows everything about you.

Your health, likes, friend and family groups, credit history and so on. The company believes that with this knowledge they can help humans live their best selves.

That total transparency will lead an individual to the right path. Secrets are what breaks down society so they must be abolished.

Obviously this is a movie that has some truth in our reality, but is an extreme version of it.

However, it made me think about the current climate of sexual victims coming forward.

In almost all the cases that have been proven the events happened behind closed doors and in secret. The assaulter hid their actions behind a veil and it was only when the victim came forward that some justice was served.

I continue to be bemused that after the victim comes forward the assaulter will release a statement saying this was a mistake and they have learned from it, it shouldn’t define them and so on.

How could transparency have prevented all of this?

I am sure in some cases the acts would have never occurred. The offender would have thought it too risky or perhaps would not have considered it at all since there were no hidden places.

This is more a thought lesson, but I could see how some increased transparency would prevent this type of action.

We have all been victimized at some point. It could be as simple as a playground bully or something much worse. Humanity is not always kind.

However, I also love my privacy and want to live my life outside the view of others from time to time. How do we balance it all?

I’m not sure I have that answer yet, but will continue searching.

Flickr image credit: Alias 0591

How To Talk To Women

Wednesday, December 6th, 2017

https://www.flickr.com/photos/byzantiumbooks/16173360807/

Valeria Chuba is an intimacy coach (clinical sexologist) and has found three main responses by her male clients to the recent bevy of harassment complaints.

  • Defensiveness
  • Disbelief at the enormity and pervasiveness of sexual violence and misconduct
  • Difficulty with empathizing

No surprises, but her commentary is interesting and useful.

In trying to figuring out how to interact with women many men are choosing the easy route.

… men who want to enact the “Pence rule” (avoiding socializing alone with any woman who is not one’s wife) do so at a potentially enormous cost to their female colleagues, their organizations, and themselves. In fact, the notion that some men are confused as to how to “mentor young women without harassing them” is a troubling comment on masculinity.

Easy, because it takes little effort from them, while further screwing (pun intended) women and “keeping them in their place” — which is below and away from men.

There’s a better way to monitor your words and actions.

Best, it’s a simple yardstick with which to measure them.

Ask yourself if you would say the words, use the tone, or perform the action on your mother, sister or any female relative.
Measure other men’s comments/tones/actions the same way.

Think about how you would feel if they were speaking to your mother/sister/grandma/etc. If it was your mom/etc. would you let it go or would you call them on it?

That simple mental test is an excellent guide for men who are worried about whether they or someone else is crossing the line.

That said, men also need to understand that women may still make the wrong assumption and take it the wrong way based on her previous experience with other men.

Not because it’s a bad yardstick, but because trust takes time — especially when dealing with systemic social problems.

So keep using the yardstick; share it with your team; embed it in your culture, be an active part of the (eventual) change.

Flickr image credit: Bill Smith

Ducks in a Row: Power And Arbitration

Tuesday, December 5th, 2017

https://www.flickr.com/photos/caninhas/2417574568/

In response to a post by Ellen Pao in September I said I wasn’t holding my breath waiting for things to change.

Good thing I wasn’t.

What changed started with a post by Susan Fowler calling out Uber’s misogamist culture, which led to CEO Travis Kalanick’s firing, Gretchen Carlson sued roger Ailes and won, other women started coming forward with their own stories and then the entire #metoo thread on Twitter.

Next came the harassing men crying crocodile tears and saying how terribly sorry they are if their past actions caused any pain.

Talk about arrogant, unfeeling, ignorant, and purely self-focused.

Monday Sheryl Sandberg wrote an excellent post pointing out that harassment has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with power.

The 1992 presidential race was once summed up in a pointed phrase: “It’s the economy, stupid.”

Today, as headlines are dominated by stories about sexual harassment and sexual assault at work, a similar phrase comes to mind: “It’s the power, stupid.”

And that nothing would change until the white male power structure became more balanced.

She goes on to say,

It is my hope that as more employers put thoughtful, effective policies into place – and as more is done to punish the perpetrators – more people will come forward without fear. For too long, too many people have believed that there’s no point in reporting harassment – that nothing will happen, or worse, that it will negatively impact their career. And on the other side, some people are scared that their reputations will be ruined unfairly. Having a consistent and fair process that applies to everyone helps protect against both scenarios and restores a degree of faith in the system.

However, I don’t believe anyone has much faith as long as they are forced to take harassment complaints to arbitration.

A growing number of American companies are requiring workers as a condition of their employment to sign agreements that stipulate they must resolve a dispute with their employer through arbitration. This agreement is known as a mandatory arbitration clause.

It was Carlson whose lawyers found a way around it.

In signing her employment agreement 11 years prior, Carlson had agreed to resolve disputes with Fox News Channel through private arbitration. But she and her legal team found a way around this by suing Ailes personally.

But, as Sandberg says, you need to have a certain level of power to even consider moving on someone with more power — and enough money that you can survive for a while sans paycheck.

Private arbitration is good for companies, since the rules favor businesses and most arbitrators think of the companies as clients — and who bites the hand that feeds it?

Moreover, the results aren’t published, so, there is little blowback even in the rare cases when the company loses.

“This veil of secrecy protects serial harassers by keeping other potential victims in the dark, and minimizing pressure on companies to fire predators,” Carlson wrote for The Times.

The Arbitration Fairness Act of 2017, which is before the House Judiciary Committee and for which Carlson is an advocate, would prohibit employers from requiring arbitration.

But considering the men who make up our current Congress, let alone the current president who would have to sign it into law, I certainly won’t be holding my breath for this one, either.

Flickr image credit: caninhas

Golden Oldies: The More Things Change…

Monday, December 4th, 2017

It’s amazing to me, but looking back over more than a decade of writing I find posts with information that is as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of what I consider some of the best posts during that time.

Three and a half years and nothing’s change. Not that I expected it to, but one always hopes. That said, my opinion hasn’t change. The only thing any of the men recently outed as harassers and worse are sorry for is being caught — not for their actions — which will make it harder to do it in the future, although I’m sure they will — people have very short memories

Join me tomorrow for a look at one of the major reasons nothing has changed and is unlikely to in the future.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/wfryer/11347987415The more they stay the some.

Einstein said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.”

George Bernard Shaw said, “The single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”

Both of these go a long way to explaining the unchanging culture that fosters gender harassment in the workplace, most prominently in STEM fields.

…666 responses, three quarters of them from women, from 32 disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, biology and geology. Almost two-thirds of the respondents said they had been sexually harassed in the field. More than 20 percent reported being sexually assaulted. Students or postdoctoral scholars, and women were most likely to report being victimized by superiors.

Does a woman or minority in a leadership role actually have more ability to help level the playing field? Not hardly…

…when minorities and women behave in a way that calls attention to their race or gender characteristics — i.e. by advancing others like them — it separates them from other white male leaders, causing them to be devalued by their peers.

Schmoozing and small talk are considered lubricant in business negotiations, but they don’t work for women.

Men who engaged in small talk were likely to get positive ratings on questions about trust, overall impressions and solid foundations for a future relationship, (…)  When it came down to final offers, they were willing to give the men who chit-chatted nearly 8% more than they offered women who engaged in small talk.

Ben Horowitz, of Andreessen Horowitz, has a new book about startups and the Valley called The Hard Thing About Hard Things. There are exactly four women mentioned in the book and one is his wife.

In the first 90 percent of the book, I counted three females: a human resource staffer, a woman whose husband ran NetLabs, and Horowitz’s wife Felicia, a woman with “award-winning green eyes” whose focus seems to be family and her husband’s success. He doesn’t present a real-life female peer until four pages from the end, when he hires Margit Wennmachers, a marketing guru-turned-venture capitalist whom he dubs “the Babe Ruth of PR” and “Sultan of Swat.”

There are many anecdotal stories from women founders on the varied ways they are hit upon by potential investors, but this one in Forbes is first person sourced.

I met the author several months ago and was floored by the stories she had to tell about her dealings with mostly male investors. Like many men (as she writes), I knew women in tech faced a certain degree of chauvinism and harassment, but I’d had no idea it was so barefaced and routine, in an industry that thinks of itself as egalitarian and forward-looking.

In the real world, however, it seems that traction is the best way to stop investors from hitting on you.

Payal Kadakia, the founder of ClassPass, thinks it’s the fact that her startup has started to gain significant traction and now investors who once had an upper hand actually want a piece of her business. And they don’t want to say or do something that could mess up their chances.

In a 2009 post about repentance I wrote, “Repeating the behavior makes it obvious that there is no real remorse and that you see getting caught as the true offense.”

Or, in the words of Friedich Nietzsche,

“The consequences of our actions take hold of us, quite indifferent to our claim that meanwhile we may have ‘improved’.”

Flickr image credit: Wesley Fryer

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