It’s a bit concerning that nearly 100 years after the suffrage of women in the US, there’s still such a disconnect in leadership for women. It doesn’t make sense that with all the education and learning and time, that women should have such a low representation in global leadership and top managerial positions. For the most part when it comes to gender bias, what we’ve mostly done is created affirmative action programs or quotas, awareness programs about gender bias, and trained women to be more assertive. I wonder though if we’ve approached it the wrong way…
The classical music field faced the same challenge. As Malcolm Gladwell talks about in Blink, in the 1980s women only composed 5% of symphony members. They could have approached it by saying that the Orchestra Maestros have a powerful bias against women and worked to change perception through education and awareness raising. Instead what they did was make the auditions blind. All the auditions occurred behind a screen and suddenly women the norms started to change. Instruments that were thought only to fit men started to find the best performing players in some women. The role of women jumped from 5% to over 50% in just 25 years.
What do we learn from this? The focus on the intervention was on the instinctive judgments, those things we can’t control. The perceptions we don’t realize we’re making. Perhaps its time to make our decisions about leadership blind too. Imagine an interview for a leadership position that was blind. The applicant submitted answers through an intermediary and all applications would be expunged of data related to age, gender, ethnicity. What would really have then is something focused solely on performance, on ability, and not all the other things that inform our views of people. Imagine then what would happen to the balance of gender in leadership. Perhaps the answer is much simpler than we thought.
Not a bad idea. Quite counter-intuitive, in fact. Part of my "egoic dysfunction", as Tolle calls it, is to give a great deal of import to my senses. Emotions are, by nature, irrational - a scent, a gesture, a tone - all can lead me to make choices which, in the end, may or may not serve me well.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the contemplation.
A brilliant thought my friend. There are great value in the senses, but also great danger. If a white man and a black man were to face charges for drug offenses, a black man is 57 times more likely to go to jail. What we pick up through the senses here explains the difference. There is a balance to be struck and it is a delicate one.
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