Support your Sisters

Have you as a woman ever caught yourself acting in a gender-biased way? You may answer this question with "no", but think again. We are often unconscious of our gender-biased behavior, especially in a business setting when we are doing our best to advance as quickly as possible. 

An exemplary situation for gender bias

Here is a typical situation you may have at work: you are working in a team project with your close colleagues Tom, Mike, and Sarah. One of you is supposed to be selected to be team project leader. Tom is a laid-back guy who gets the job done, but nothing more or less. Mike is an efficient and reliable employee who goes the extra mile for important projects. He can be persuasive and has proven before that he has leadership potential. Sarah is very ambitious, accurate and reliable. In fact, she is so ambitious that sometimes coworkers remarked she was being kind of pushy and annoying. When she was leading teams in the past, team members said she was behaving in a bossy way.

Who would you prefer to lead your project team?

If you answered with "Mike", then you were probably subject to gender bias. It may have seemed to you that, although Sarah and Mike have similar qualifications, she may be less suitable for the job and corresponding responsibilities. You may not like her as much, because you heard she might be a bit bossy or brusque. Mike is more suitable for the job… Right?

No. As we wrote in our last post, don’t let yourself be fooled by double standards. Instead, support your female colleagues and celebrate them for their qualities and capabilities.

Work as a coalition, not as competition 

Stanford Professor Deborah Gruenfeld puts it simply: “We need to look out for one another, work together, and act more like a coalition. As individuals, we have relatively low levels of power. Working together, we are fifty percent of the population and therefore have real power.”

Sadly, it is mostly women who criticize other women at the top. For example, when Marissa Mayer announced that her maternity leave would only be a few weeks long, women spoke out, denouncing her decision. Instead, why didn’t they cheer her on as a talented young business leader and mother who made the situation work out for herself? Wasn’t this a personal decision of Marissa Mayer?

As women, we need to look out for our female peers. We need to support our female colleagues and cheer them on, and grant them the success that they have earned instead of criticizing them where we wouldn’t criticize our male colleagues. Or would you criticize your boss for taking that promotion when his wife was days away from delivering their first child?

I love Taylor Swift’s quote, which I probe women to never forget: “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.”

Annamarie