Shattering the glass box of gender bias

On Super Bowl Sunday, my 11year-old daughter and I watched the half time show from separate couches, texting our critiques of the dancing, the song choice, the costumes. What’s up with that jacket? The bandanna? “Oh, and THAT fringe,” I joked. It’s the kind of silly bonding moment that makes a mom grateful for her kid’s smart phone.

But then.

Justin Timberlake made his way onto the field through the stadium halls and stairways, flanked by dozens of women, who just stood there as he danced against them, with seemingly no other purpose than to serve as props for his show. My heart sank. My daughter was watching this.

“Not a fan of that last part,” she texted me in real time.

In that moment, the anxiety I felt around the battles my daughter will face simply for living and working while female, balanced with a comforting realization. As a 11-year-old in the mid 1980s, that scene may have made me feel uncomfortable, but I would have shrugged it off… just another bump and grind video moment. My daughter? Never. She — and her generation — will be just fine.

The glass ceiling may not yet be shattered, but the glass box of tempered expectations that bound many in my generation and those before us is in shards. The next generation of women to enter the workforce will simply not tolerate anything other than respect and equality.

Evolving legacy corporate culture to build a millennial-friendly workplace remains a significant challenge for Corporate America, and the #MeToo movement has proved that it can’t all be solved with office game rooms and kombucha on tap.

Countless studies and pontifications have been written about how to manage millennials, with their general affinity for flat organizations, their tenacity for quick advancement and their tendency to blur the lines between work and personal life. It is this same millennial belief system — coupled with the brave women from all generations who have shared their stories of sexual harassment in the workplace — that has brought us, collectively, to a day of new expectations.

The burden today is not on the woman to smile and shrug it off. It is on the organizations for which they work to ensure that every person in their ranks feels comfortable and respected while at work.

The 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer California Supplement took a deep dive on gender issues in the workplace in the wake of the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements. More than 70 percent of California women believe the media, entertainment, and technology industries have not done enough to improve gender equality and fair treatment in the workplace. One-third of California women (32 percent) reported that they had been sexually harassed at work, with 38 percent having experienced unfair treatment at work because of their gender.

That number goes up significantly for Bay Area women (46 percent), where Silicon Valley exploits make one question whether pushing girls into STEM fields is indeed a smart parenting choice. More shocking, the percentage of women who reported they have experienced gender bias at work skyrocketed to 49 percent for California’s college-educated women.

In the war for talent — especially in the Bay Area’s thriving tech sector — companies need to pay attention to the seismic shift in cultural expectations that is impacting employees’ perceptions of what it means to be a great place to work. Even among men, gender parity is a key driver in assessing whether they would choose to work for a company. Fifty-eight percent of men said gender equality and responsiveness to sexual harassment claims were important when applying for a job — that is just slightly under other key indicators, such as good benefits (66 percent) and work/life balance (62 percent).

If these issues are important to men, they are defining for women. Seventy-three percent of women cited gender fairness and 72 percent of women cited responsiveness to sexual harassment claims as key drivers in choosing a place to work, a 15- and 14-point gender gap spread on the two issues, respectively.

Women, and men, want to know where companies stand on gender parity, and in the face of behavior that challenges either the law or societal expectations, they want action. And it may not come as a surprise that the people they want to hear from at this moment of shattered trust are women.

Sixty-five percent of respondents said that women in positions of power are more trustworthy voices than men, a seven-percentage point increase in the advantage for women since 2017. The perception that women in power are more truthful than men holds across both genders, with 52 percent of men and 77 percent of women citing female leaders as more trustworthy.

The relentless revelations of sexual harassment and abuse in recent months have been hard to stomach and have left many leaders grasping for guidance on how to build a culture where respect is the norm, abuse is not tolerated and unconscious bias is a thing of the past. We all thought we had come so far, only to realize that, in many ways, our work has only just begun.

The good news is that we have come far enough that this generation has found its voice, and it will only get louder. The onus is on business leaders to listen, and act.