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.

The 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

Because of where I live I have the dubious pleasure of being inundated by both Washington (my state) and Oregon (across the river) political ads. So I went looking for comments that might add some intelligence to the standard political garbage in which we’re all drowning.

Let’s start with some commentary from across the pond.

For the cynics among us, George Bernard Shaw offers an excellent definition of democracy, “Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.”

And a bit of levity from Jessica Mitford, “Things on the whole are much faster in America; people don’t ‘stand for election’, they ‘run for office.'”

Of course they run, since, as H. L. Mencken said, “Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.”

Politicians have been known to lie—frequently, so that’s nothing new. It probably dates back as far as politics and is part of the human condition; as Otto von Bismark said, “People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election.”

While that is true, Cal Thomas’ words offer a viable explanation of why they lie, “One of the reasons people hate politics is that truth is rarely a politician’s objective. Election and power are.”

Have you ever wondered why modern politicians rarely, if ever, earn the sobriquet “statesman?” We probably need a new song, along the lines of ‘Where have all the statement gone, longtime passing…’ They aren’t endangered, they’re extinct. James Freeman Clarke explained why when he said, “A politician thinks of the next election. A statesman, of the next generation.”

It’s a sad state of affairs, but the general population is just as responsible, because, as Bill Vaughan said, “A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but won’t cross the street to vote in a national election.”

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/davidortez/2883940379/

I love George Bernard Shaw; he was brilliant and had a rapier wit with which he skewered deserving people, ideas and situations, while supplying pithy commentary on the events of his time as well as inspirational ideas.

Some of the things he said have passed into such common usage that few people even realize they are quotes. How many times have you seen this on cards, plaques and samplers?

“You see things; and you say, ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say, ‘Why not?’”

Sound familiar? It’s a favorite of mine; in fact, I have it on my office wall.

So I went looking for a few of the more esoteric Shawisms.

The first is an important heads-up for all of us, but especially anyone in a leadership role; you might even find that it accurately describes the problems you’re having.

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”

Progress is something that both people and business expend great effort to do; what we often forget is that progress means things will be different.

“Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.”

Because we progress we are all constantly changing, but too often people don’t take the time to find out who you are now; Shaw sums the problem and solution up in just a few words.

“The only man who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew every time he sees me, while all the rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them”

Collaboration boosts progress; Shaw understood this and explained why it’s so important.

“If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”

Progress requires innovation, but real progress requires thinking as opposed to rephrasing previous ideas to sound new, but if Shaw was correct it accounts for the lack of progress in so many areas.

“Two percent of the people think; three percent of the people think they think; and ninety-five percent of the people would rather die than think.”

Those who don’t think often lean on ideology to support their agenda. The problem with ideology is that it doesn’t lend itself to seeing another’s world-view. Shaw understood how ridiculous this was.

“The frontier between hell and heaven is only the difference between two ways of looking at things.”

My last choice is one I would like to apply to all politicians and educators. Perhaps, if we did, it would significantly improve the quality of those who claim to serve. (Hmm, it probably wouldn’t hurt to apply it to everybody else, too, including yours truly.)

“We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years and justify our existence…on pain of liquidation.”

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons