Transcript of Solutions for a Workplace Welcoming to All, Part 2 of a Conversation with Karen Catlin

Cathy: So Karen, another issue that I see is that we, as women may feel sidelined and so we might simply throw up our hands and say, men just don't get it or something very generic because we're frustrated and maybe sometimes men just don't get it, but giving up isn't something that's ever going to result in change. So you know, we don't we don't want to women to give up and so we're reaching out with this question to our listeners who may be feeling that in this moment in time and I wonder whether we should refocus our efforts on improving our communications as women so that we can better explain the bias that we're experiencing to our male allies. What are your thoughts on that? Do you have some advice for women who are experiencing bias and are maybe having a hard time talking about it and talking about it in a way that male allies understand and hear. And also what's your advice to male allies if they find themselves in a conversation with a woman about gender bias and maybe they don't really get it. But what should they be doing and thinking at that moment in time?

Karen: So I know one of the tenants of Parity Podcast is we're not fixing the women, this is not about fixing the women right which I completely agree with.

Deborah: You have now become our friend for life!

[laughter]

Karen: Okay, I was hoping to get that invitation. Thank you. I don't want to put the burden on women to have to be talking about this or figuring out how to package up their message of oppression, discrimination, or bias. I want the men to act differently. I want the men to be curious about the experience that people who do not have all the privilege that they do, how they experience the workplace. We're talking about gender. But there are other aspects of privilege as well. I want men to be curious about this. I want them to be asking questions. I want them to believe when someone says something and they've never experienced it themselves. I want them to believe that it's a thing and to listen and learn from it and to figure out how they could be changing things, how they can not just be a bystander and either see it or not see and just let it keep going on, ultimately becoming complicit with the status quo. I want them to be an upstander. You really have to believe the experiences of someone who is different from you when they tell you about it and be curious, ask some questions about it, and again, pledge to do better, pledge to play a role in in changing the status quo.

Cathy: You know, I wonder if because in the United States were so litigious whether men who are in these conversations, respond in fear. “I'm scared that this woman is going to bring a claim against my organization. I'm scared that I'm going to be a witness. I'm just scared and I don't know what to do about it.” Whereas the woman just maybe once a better situation, a better culture, she doesn't want this bad behavior repeated. What's your advice for men who are feeling fear during these conversations?

Karen: I remember I was teaching a workshop on better allies a few years ago in San Francisco. It was for a division of a tech company and everybody who worked in this division was in this workshop. I think it was about 40 people including the general manager, the boss. And I was talking about how important it is to expand our networks, diversify our networks, why we should be doing that. And he raised his hand. The boss raised his hand and said, Hey Karen, I have to tell you, my wife gets jealous when I have a work dinner with a woman colleague. How should I handle that?

Inside my head, I was thinking couples counseling.  But he was paying the bills and I didn't want to, it just didn't seem appropriate for me to be that snarky. And so instead I said out loud, I said, you know, as and male leader, you have a responsibility to be opening up your calendar and being equitable with your time. And so I acknowledge like if your wife gets jealous, so maybe there are things you could be doing differently. Perhaps you only have breakfast meetings with anyone of any gender and no more work dinners at all. Maybe your wife would be comfortable with that. Or maybe whenever you have a work dinner, you invite two or more people, whether it's a man you're having a dinner with, you, invite someone else as well or a woman. I hope maybe your wife would be comfortable with that situation. Now, I'll never know if he took that to heart, but I hope it made a difference to like all the people who worked for him who were in that room listening to this play out and realized that I tried to hold him accountable, thathe can't start playing favorites just because his wife might get jealous of him having, having a meal with another colleague who happens to be a woman that's playing favorites in a way that will help the men get ahead at a faster pace and that's just not cool with me.

So we were, you know, we were talking about #metoo, he felt like he was concerned about #metoo, but also his wife. I think maybe he was pulling his wife in to give himself a little bit of an out for talking about this. But we can't do that. And frankly, on the litigious side, there's research showing - I'm not going to quote it because I don't know it off the top of my head - but research showing the tiny percentage of tiny, like miniscule percentage of claims that women make about from sexual harassment in the workplace, only a tiny tiny fraction are actually made up.

And it is so much work to file a lawsuit for sexual harassment that most. And I've spoken to women and my attorney said, don't even bother unless you want to be spending this much time and this much money and this much emotional energy on this. Women get advised not to file lawsuits because of how onerous it is. And I want men listening to realize that women are not litigious just because it's going to be fun to be litigious. They're being litigious with real concerns. So unless you have something to really be concerned about with your own behavior, chances are you're fine. Have these conversations listen to what's going on, acknowledge that things could be done better and do them great advice really like that.

Deborah: So I'd like to shift gears and talk about some of your thoughts on creating a workplace that is diverse and inclusive. Your chapter on hiring practice was excellent. And I wonder can you share some of your tips that organizations can implement to ensure that they're creating environments that welcome underrepresented groups into the applicant pool.

Karen: I collected so many best practices – I’m a curator. I love getting ideas and inspiration from lots of different sources and weaving and stitching them together. And so some of the things I learned is that women and others who are underrepresented tend to not apply for jobs unless they have all of the qualifications listed. So one of the things I recommend people do is when you do have a job description, go back through it and think ask yourself, hey, if the perfect candidate came here with everything except this one thing bullet this one thing we've listed here, would we still hire them? And if your answer is yes to any of those bullets in your job description, you really should pull them out because clearly they aren't requirements.

If you would hire somebody without that specific thing. You know, if someone came with everything else you were looking for, um I must admit when I was still in tech and hiring people, I would just copy the last job description, I had written, make a copy of it and start adding to it. So these, these job descriptions do get bloated. I also used to have, you know, four year college degree required and many of our jobs, some of them require degrees, but so many do not anymore. But I used to just put it in there because it's like, oh yeah project manager. It's like of course I need a college degree for a project manager because that just means that they are smart and they went to school and they're motivated and it means none of those things. Um it means some privilege potentially. So really ask ourselves do we need all those requirements?

So clean up our job descriptions. That is one thing we can do.

Another thing we can do is remove language that is typically and I'll say masculine if we tend to have a masculine workforce, masculine words are things like rock star, driven, aggressive.

Like we'll aggressively go after our client needs or things like that, which might be a turn off to people who don't identify with all of those characteristics. So you can think very consciously about it. The words you use. Um and there are tools to help you with this, you can use software technology to help find some of those things and flag them.

Deborah: It sounds like you're looking for a man when you have that description, Rockstar, driven, aggressive. I don't think of applying for that job.

Karen: Well exactly. And there's a funny tumbler site which is like tech companies that hire only men or some other companies that hire only men. I think I referenced in the book, but it's like full of screenshots of company job descriptions like we are looking for a right-hand man for the CTO, like literally, it's even worse.

Cathy: It's pretty amazing that in this day and age we're still seeing that. But of course we are,

Karen: Of course we are. The other thing I'd say to about, oh gosh, that I mean there's so much to this. I have a companion book where I took that chapter and expanded on it because I got so many requests for more information about hiring. So in the Better Allies approach to hiring, I explore even more. I think about how you talk about the benefits that you offer, like those, the benefits and perks make sure your your listing out things that are appealing to caregivers, which tend to be women for example. Make sure that you've when that person comes to interview that candidate, when you've brought them in to interview, that they are seeing people like themselves represented in the interview team so they can imagine being successful here.

Also making sure you vary where you post job listings don't always go to the same website if you tend to only get one demographic from that website. It's kind of a kind of like a no brainer here, but start putting them in different places, listing your jobs. Um I think I could go on for about an hour here, but I'll leave it at that. There are not many, many ideas, practical things we can do.

Deborah: Yeah, I think at this point our listeners need to go buy your book or books. I mean, I think your advice is just so critical in this area. One question I tend to get a lot or one thing I hear a lot about in my field of intellectual property and I imagine, it has absolutely been the same for you, is this so called pipeline problem. Specifically you will hear that it is challenging or impossible to find applicants from underrepresented groups. So, what are your thoughts on that subject, Karen? Is there really a pipeline problem when it comes to some of these more male dominated industries?

Karen: I think it's a pipeline excuse. It's an excuse people use because it's like, I like what we have or it's just easy to find people or we post a job and only men apply, so that's who we hire a convenient excuse. Imagine that I know. It's a convenient excuse. And so I think that okay, here's another thing that's a convenient excuse. It's like if you imagine you're actually interviewing someone who is a woman and a male dominated firm or field and you get to the end of the interview debrief and all the interviewers are like, yeah, thumbs up our good, whatever. And then someone's like, I just can't put my finger on it. I just don't think they'd be a culture fit here or I can't imagine going out for dinner if we're like on a business trip together or stuck on a layover somewhere or whatever. Oh my gosh, So that is just so much bias in there to talk. To blame the pipeline, and not blame yourself for having so much bias during your interview process. In my book, I point out something that I heard from someone else. If you hear someone say: “I just can't put my finger on it. I don't think they'd be a culture fit.” Speak up and say: “I think they would be a culture ad they would bring something to our culture we don't have today. And I think that is going to help us with client needs help us do whatever our business objectives are. And so I think that's why we should bring them in.”

So if you do hear people saying that or if you hear people blaming the pipeline simply say,

I think that we are, it's a convenient excuse and let's think about how we can attract the talent is out there. It may not be as many, you know, quite the ratio of the dominant genders. It may not be as many women as men, but they are out there and they are qualified and we can find them.

Cathy: I had the privilege of listening to a speaker. Her name is Dr. Talitha Washington. She's a math professor at Spelman College. She also does a lot of programming, so Karen, you might want to look her up. She would be a great add to your network and she's active on LinkedIn. Um, but this particular conversation was about the pipeline and how if you're looking for Black engineers or Black mathematicians or Black scientists, recruiting at an HBCU is an absolute must because there's a very high percentage of Black graduates in STEM from those schools. And so if you don't include them in your recruiting, then you might have a pipeline problem because you're not looking in the right places. But she basically said the same thing as you, Karen, which is, there is not a pipeline problem. You're just not working hard enough or looking in the right places. So I I really did appreciate what she had to say.

Karen: I love that and I love the culture at HBCUs. Yes, that was really good. Really good point.

Deborah: So, Karen, you also discussed in your book the need to give feedback to women that is candid and helpful because of the fact that studies show women get more vague feedback than do men, which is not helpful at all because we need actionable steps that we can take to grow in our jobs. And then you also discussed the concept of gatekeeping feedback. Can you tell our listeners a little bit more about this?

Karen: Yeah. So first of all, you have this research out there is showing that women getting vague feedback over their careers, compared to the very specific feedback that men get about new skills they should learn and how what they're doing is tied to business outcomes and how, you know, to keep doing these things because it's good. And women get vague or feedback or more vague feedback, I guess is the grammatically correct way to say that. And then though there is this gatekeeping feedback, gatekeeping feedback is putting a gate in place in some place that there is no need for a gate. It's also called Benevolent sexism at times, it's like, are you sure you're ready to handle that additional responsibility? Okay. Or raise your hand if you've experienced this.

Cathy: Yeah, I love that. Benevolent sexism. I'm going to have to use that term.

Karen: I didn't make it up and somebody coined it. Yeah, It is a good one. It's like, I'm looking out for you. Are you sure you're up for the rigors of that PhD program. Are you sure that's gonna be really tough. That type of gatekeeping or here's one more and this is one actually I experienced firsthand. Um I was still working in tech, I had a man who worked for me, I was his supervisor and he just got a basically approval for a budget to add someone new to his team. He could go out and hire somebody new and it was, we leveled it at a certain level higher than the rest of his team. We wanted to bring in someone senior. And I said to him, are you thinking about promoting, I'll call her Ann. Are you thinking about promoting Ann who's the most currently the most senior person on your team and is your best performer? Are you thinking about promoting her? And he said you can't make this up.

He said, oh she wouldn't want the role because of all the travel and she, you know, she has two young kids at home. That is gatekeeping, fortunately I thought of what I should say in the moment and I said to him, you know, that's not your decision to make. If you think that she has the skill set, you're looking for, you need to talk to her about it. Well he did, he listened to me and he did and he ended up making her, you know giving her the role and she was amazing at that. It didn't, you know, she had it worked out at home, she did not need to be home, she could travel, she had support at home for her young kids. She was great in this role. So we have to look out for this gatekeeping feedback.

Cathy: Yeah, that's interesting to call it gatekeeping. Deborah and I talked about it, we sort of mentioned Cinderella and how the prince was saving Cinderella. He was being the hero saving her from herself. It's kind of the same idea I think.

Deborah: Yeah. And it's such a great example of how you did something concrete and it had a very tangible direct impact, which is what we can all be doing as allies. So I really love the message in there that you added.

Cathy: Yes, you transformed Ann’s life and improved the organization.

Deborah: So going back to this concept a moment. Um which again I love of talking about the question to us should be, is this person a culture ad and not whether they're a culture fit? How do we work to open up our corporate culture when people really do treasure what they have and they don't want to change. Is that a broad enough vague enough question for you?

Karen: Yeah, I get it. And they're always going to be some of those people who I like the way it is. Um you know, and I've been hired to do this job. Why do you want me to also be looking out for other people and helping other people. Everything is just fine as it is. I've heard a lot of that.

So two things here, one is as someone who wants to be a better ally. Don't worry about those naysayers, just start doing stuff yourself. My whole message is that one person can take one action and almost like start a ripple effect when you start being more inclusive and speaking up when interruptions happen or whatever that might be, other people will start doing it too. And that's that ripple effect where you can start changing culture because you are acting more inclusively yourself. So don't worry about everyone else, you're in control of what you're in control of and see if there aren't things that you can be doing to start being a better ally to be on this journey. The important thing, you don't have to do it all. You don't have to know it all, but just start taking some small steps and you build from there.

The other thing I will say this is more of an institution organizational decision to make, but you can also incent people to be better allies and to be more inclusive, incentivize them in terms of how they are compensated, the bonus structure that's in place. Um promotion requirements, like what it takes to be promoted. Um something else that's valued in your organization. You can tie that to goals around being inclusive, having great engagement, survey results having um you know, improving the diversity of your workforce.

If you're in a position like in a leadership position, you can advocate for that kind of change too. And frankly, you know, we do our jobs because we earn money from them, this is what we support ourselves. And so if you want to incentivize people to be more inclusive, sometimes you can do that through compensation.

Cathy: Great ideas. So Karen, Deborah and I developed the parity prescription which is a framework that we can all use as we work towards greater gender equality. The parity prescription which spells SCRIPT which is

 S - stop trying to change women

C – Create diverse teams

R – Recognize unconscious bias

I – Intentionally include

P – Partner with men as allies

T – Talk about the issues

Your work has allowed us to touch on all of these items in one way or another, which is one reason why it resonated so deeply with us. But I'd like to focus on the first element for a moment. When Deborah and I first started out, we were so focused on the stop trying to change women aspect that we thought about calling our podcast Unbroken to highlight the fact that there's too much focus out there on how we can fix women so that we better fit in a male dominated workplace.

We talked about the fact that our bookshelves are filled with books telling us how to behave, how to dress, how to speak differently to fit in etcetera. What are your thoughts on shifting the focus away from changing women to how we adapt the workplace to fit everyone including women and not the other way around:

Karen: 100%, 100% to everything you've just said.

Cathy: High five Deborah we got it, we got the endorsement. And we're all doing high fives listeners!

[laughter]

Karen: So I'm a leadership coach in addition to my work on better allies and I'm a leadership coach for women who work in tech. That sounds like I'm fixing the women right? I am, I'm coaching them to be different to be better to do whatever well. And sometimes that is the approach of coaches, right? Just that is sometimes the approach don't you think?

Deborah: Yeah, yeah, definitely.

Karen: And that's our goal is to help our clients improve, so I have to be careful not to have and I don't want to be doing this. I don't want to have them improve too, that they are just like men, they are awesome people and what they're bringing to the table and they are awesome and I want them to just have that awesomeness validated. I want to sometimes have them be aware that they need to make sure other people know about their awesomeness and so forth. But I want to make sure that I am not fixing them. I am helping them just amplify everything that they are already doing. Um and I, my clients all know, its like in addition to the coaching I'm doing for you, I am out there trying to do this advocacy work to get more people to be better allies, to create these inclusive workplaces because it's got to be done in conjunction. That's how I see it.

I'm a little naive but that naivete, I think just um I set it aside, It's like I got to try to make a difference here and that's what I'm doing one step at a time.

Cathy: More power to you, Karen, we're believers.

Karen: Thank you.

Deborah: Yeah. And somebody has got we just have to step in and do the work, right? The workplace isn't going to, it's not going to change on its own. So we can all sit aside or we can all be satisfied with the status quo or we can do something about it and you are doing something.

Karen: Yeah, and you know what else? One other thing I'll mention here is often the changes that get made to create a more inclusive workforce, workplace don't just benefit underrepresented people don't just benefit women. It's like everyone benefits.

Um, one example and I'll give a shout out to my husband for this. My husband is a VP of engineering at a company and he runs this thing called Friday Demos. Friday demos are an hour on Friday afternoon where anyone in the company can give an update basically of something they have built in software or a marketing campaign they put together or something they learned about anything. Sometimes they're even like baking demos. People are like, I learned how to make sour dough bread or whatever it might be. So people just talk about something they learned or whatever. Now what he's doing, this is incredibly inclusive. He's doing this in a way that makes it very easy. People, he basically lowers the bar. Like, you don't have to be an amazing public speaker, you do not have to spend a gazillion hours preparing a talk. This is like a little five minute update if that's all you want or a 10 minute update.

He like democratizes the ability to be visible in his organization, in his company and people love it and you can just imagine everyone knows each other a little bit more better as a result and especially they have all been working from home for the last two plus years, this has been an incredible way for him to build team camaraderie and spirit, but also make sure that everyone has a chance of being more visible and he may encourage some of the quieter people, some of the women so that the underrepresented people to like you got a good idea, you should do a demo on that.

He probably encourages them along the way too. But it's the kind of thing everyone benefits and he's being a huge ripple within his organization no doubt.

Deborah: Yeah and everybody, everybody wants to have a more inclusive workplace, right? I mean we all want to enjoy our work more than we currently do except for my job, it's perfect but everyone else for sure.

[laughter]

So Karen, shifting gears here for just a moment, we've developed this parity in play segment where we discuss a current topic and we analyze it against the backdrop of the parity prescription. I wonder if you could talk about the confirmation hearing for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson and how you saw things play out from a better allies perspective.

Karen: So the one thing that was just loud and clear for me was this concept called credential questioning or extra credential questioning. Um now I want to admit there's a lot of politics involved with all of this, with what was going on in those confirmation hearings, but let's just focus on this one thing. I think it was Tucker Carlson on Fox News who started demanding to see her LSAT scores and when I heard that I was like why do you need to see her LSAT scores? Those L SAT scores are used to help law schools evaluate the talent and identify who they want to bring into their schools. She got into Harvard Law which I hear is kind of challenging and a highly selective school. So she must have had good LSAT scores, right? Like why does Tucker Carlson first of all think he is, you know, he's eligible to see her.

It's like why does he think he has the right to see it? But really what he's doing here is trying to cast doubt on her qualifications and by the way, in addition going to Harvard law, she then went on to have an incredible career as an attorney, as a public defender, as a judge. She had like she's got she was over qualified for this role but he's like trying to focus on something to just cast doubt on her qualifications that she was bringing to the table.

And I think I've seen this too in terms of the whole interview process in organizations, it's like you may talk, you know interviewed someone and someone that like brings up some random things like you know before we actually give them this responsibility of managing a team of five people at our company, I'd like to make sure they could manage a team of four people where they are now and maybe that was never in place before. So there is this um other bias that I've heard about called prove it again bias and I write about in my book too but we expect people who are underrepresented to prove themselves over and over again.

Whereas people who are in the majority in most cases white men in our society um they get promoted based on potential. I just think he'd be great at this job. He's you know he's done similar things. Maybe not exactly this but I just I just know he's gonna be great. That's the potential privilege that they get. And then women and as we saw with Judge Brown Jackson I should say Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, that's what she was going through with these questions and then oh my gosh then like the questions about well on the school that you're on the board of they have this book called Anti-Racist Baby. Like why is that in the school library? Well, I don't know about you. If you serve on any board of directors for nonprofits, you don't, you're not an operating, you know, part of that, that organization, you're not making those kinds of decisions. So it's just so many things that people were trying to bring into the conversation that had nothing to do with her qualifications to be a Supreme Court justice.

Deborah: Yeah, I totally agree. And one of the, I don't know if it's a sad thing or just a troubling thing for me is when people seem to be able to cast out on people, like Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and they don't seem to, you know, pay the piper, so to speak. They weren't penalized for making these sorts of statements. Um, and we as a society, we just, we're going to have to say enough is enough at some point and stand up. And I think that's going to take us all recognizing that there is unconscious bias and that we all have it.

Cathy: And we've got to snuff it out wherever we see it. We're getting to that point, Karen where we're sort of winding up the episode and, and I want to say that for me, the big takeaways here are that you are an incredibly kind and humble person. And I really think you're on to something by being so laser focused on how to be a better ally, because allies, they are sort of pivotal within an organization. You can help yourself, you can help others, it nudges your culture in the right direction. It solves the great resignation if everybody would just stand up and read your book and begin to execute tomorrow.

Deborah: Okay, world peace next!

Karen: I'm on it!

Cathy: I do see a relationship between better allies and world peace by the way. So yeah, I think that book is within your reach, Karen! What did you think Deborah, how did you feel like the episode went?

Deborah: Well, I have a very similar, I have a similar sentiment, I'm not going to talk about world peace, but I did want to really go back to this notion of solutions, what you have in your book over and over and again, you have concrete solutions and you did it here. There's I don't think we've put a problem in front of you that you don't have a solution for and I think that's a lesson for all of us that there is always a work around and so the one that struck me today was there was the boss or a coworker who said, well my wife gets jealous when I have a dinner with a woman. Well there are 50 solutions to that problem out there and I don't think that's unique at all. There are solutions out there to these problems and I so appreciate, as Cathy said, you're very practical approach which is to give people things that they can do to tangibly improve the workplace lives of others.

Karen: Well, Deborah and Cathy, I am humbled by your support and your positive feedback. I have so enjoyed this recording and getting to know you both through it. It's been just, it's been a fun time for me today. I was looking forward to this all morning and I'm glad that we have, you know, been connected and that we got this to go together today.

Cathy: I'm glad you had fun because I did too. Thank you so much for today's episode, Karen. Listeners, if you would like to learn more about Karen and her book, her books with an S on the end, you can find her details in the show notes and we'll have links also to her books which you should definitely pick up and take a look at.

So listeners please know that we are here to help you tune in while you are rollerblading or grocery shopping or both. Imagine that listeners, you could grocery shop - rollerblade, grocery shop, and listen to the Parity Podcast. Now, I don't know if you can find a grocery store that will tolerate that, but that's our challenge for you today listeners.

So we have timestamps, show notes. You can find links to the resources that we mentioned in today's episodes, as well as links to find us on social media and our web page. Thank you everyone for supporting the Parity Podcast.

Deborah: If you enjoyed this episode, then please rate and review us on apple podcast and give us a shout out on social media and with your friends. With your help, we are building the perfect community for our ongoing discussions. We hope to connect with you again soon so that we can make progress with the parity prescription.

Thanks everybody!