Moment or Movement?

Wisdom from the Watermark Conference for Women 2018

On Friday February 23, 2018, I attended the Watermark Conference with Judy Kleinberg, CEO and President of Palo Alto Chamber of Commerce, and Shweta Bhatnagar, Associate Director of Government and Community Relations, Stanford University. This is my first year at this conference, and I was awestruck by the lineup of speakers — human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, actress, entrepreneur and activist Reese Withersoon, NPR’s Kelly McEvers, New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor, Teen Vouge’s former editor Elaine Weltroth and comedienne Maysoon Zayid, to name a few.

But the most striking thing was that, everyone who attended the previous years summed up this years’ experience with “It’s different this year!”.

6500 people, women and a few woke men, attended this year’s conference and their energy and commitment was palpable. Something did feel different.

Our first speaker Jodi Kantor, the investigative reporter who broke the Harvey Weinstein story, described it best.

“If we looked back at this time 10 years from now, we will either say,

It was a moment: There was a lot of talk of equal rights regardless of gender in early 2018, and then…. somehow… it all went back to the status quo, or

It was the beginning of a movement: Early 2018 was the turning point where everyone agreed that all people deserve to be treated equally with dignity and respect, and we did something about it. Which will it be?

It is up to us.”

Ms. Kantor spoke about how it felt to learn about the horrific acts of Harvey Weinstein and pressing the send button to publish the story, knowing that there was no turning back.

She talked candidly about her thoughts on zero tolerance: It sounds good in theory, but it is hard to enforce in practice. It is also not easy today to warn other employers about an employee who is let go due to sexual harassment allegations. They are simply released back into an unsuspecting employment pool.

Bureaucracy of Evil

Next, NPR’s Kelly McEvers interviewed Amal Clooney, a lawyer specializing in international law and human rights. Her accomplishments are amazing — she worked on the Enron case early in her career, she was an advisor to Kofi Annan, she was part of a UN commission investigating rules of war violations in the Gaza strip.

She spoke of her experience as a refugee when her family fled Lebanon. She spoke of unimaginable atrocities committed by the perpetrators of evil on women and children all over the world. She described what she calls “the bureaucracy of evil” where ISIS publishes “torture manuals” that prescribe in great detail, what torture to inflict under what circumstances. For example, if a small boy is captured, check his underarms, the manual might say — if he has hair (meaning he is to be treated as an adult), get rid of him, but if he does not, he can still be brainwashed.

They take the need-to-think away from their followers, almost fearing that if they stopped to think, they may not be obedient. I had imagined ISIS to be a chaotic, lawless group, but what Amal Clooney describes is something different. It is a carefully documented rationalization of basest human intentions to inflict more suffering on the weak and vulnerable, in order to gain more power. Kudos to her for shining more light on these egregious war crimes and urging the world to pay attention.

Amal and George Clooney donated $500,000 to support the Parkland student’s March for Our Lives rally for gun control. Amal spoke about how proud she was of the students, even after a devastating incident, they were able to channel their grief and energy towards positive action.

Reflecting on her talk, I walked away with a feeling that social minded lawyers are indeed a fantastic agent of change. They know how the system works and what it takes to change it. We need more people like her in the world.

Myth busting

Next, I attended a panel entitled “Fine tune your brain to make decisions more effectively”.

Dr. Theresa Huston, a cognitive psychologist, and author of the book How Women Decide, kicked off the discussion by busting some myths. She uses a wealth of economic and social science data to identify and test these stereotypes.

Stereotype 1: We have all heard of women’s intuition, but have you ever heard of man’s intuition? According to her research, on a spectrum of intuitive to analytical, with adaptive somewhere in the middle, men are 39% more likely to make decisions based on their “gut” or intuition. Women like to have their “ducks in a row” when they make decisions in case they are asked to back up their decision. In fact, in her research, women tend to explain their decision too much and they come across as indecisive, which leads us to the second common stereotype.

Stereotype 2: Women are indecisive. Dr. Huston’s research shows that when the complexity of decision is the same, the average time to make them does not vary by gender.

Stereotype 3: Women make decisions more collaboratively. And this stereotype is supported by her research. Women seek more feedback before decision making (which might make them seem indecisive).

Harvard University Prof. Bill George in his book True North, advises leaders (both women and men) to just communicate the decision and not all the nuances behind your decisions. You can reveal the details based on questions from the audience.

10/10/10 Rule

The panel had a good advice on decision making by asking the following questions:

• How will this decision affect me in 10 minutes?
• 10 months?
• 10 years?

Asking these questions will help make tradeoffs between the short-term cost and long term gain. It also cultivates a future mind-set by imagining the following scenario “It is 10 years from now and I will regret if I …”. Another version of this exercise is called the Rocking Chair test, where you imagine “I am old and on a rocking chair looking back on my life. I will regret if…”.

Diversity Refresh

Dr. Vivienne Ming, a theoretical neuroscientist, head of Socos, Founder and Chair of Engender, and was named 10 Women to Watch in Tech in 2013 by Inc. Magazine. She spoke about how current diversity programs are not working, and it is time for a refresh.

Dr. Ming’s data shows that women and minorities pay a “tax for being different.” She told the story of a man named Jose who changed his name to Joe to get a job. Upon investigation she found that it wasn’t a simple “yes or no” decision based on the name. It was actually more nuanced. She found that a Jose will need to be more qualified, with a higher educational degree, more years of work experience to be considered for the same position as a Joe. This additional qualification translates to more time in school or at work, which in turn translates to more financial investment. Dr. Ming calls this phenomenon a “tax for being different.”

It is ironic that the more an organization emphasizes meritocracy, the more likely they are to hire people just like themselves. In other words, if your organization is made up of predominantly white men to begin with, and you emphasize meritocracy, you are less likely to change your mental model of a qualified candidate.

Counter Stereotypical Exemplars

Sadly, current diversity programs such as implicit bias training and empathy training, are not making a realistic difference in outcomes. The reason is that if you want to change someone’s bias, you need to rewire their brain. And to do this, you need rich natural experiences, which means spending a significant amount of time with people who violate your stereotypes. In scientific terms this is called Counter Stereotypical Exemplars.

Furthermore, our brain is a “very lazy statistician, but an exquisite counter”. This means that only having a few of such exemplars is not enough. It will be disregarded by a biased brain as “noise” and not enough of a “signal” to change its current, “perfectly functioning” mental model.

To overcome this problem, Dr. Ming recommends long term interaction with a diverse team of counter stereotypical exemplars. She advised a large research organization trying to address their gender distribution, to create a diverse, high performing, central lab that interacted with the rest of the organization. As more and more teams interacted with this team of counter stereotypical exemplars, their mental models changed and influenced their future hiring.

Belief Based Utility

Dr. Ming also addressed the problem of highly qualified women leaving the workforce. The common reason cited for this is child birth. Dr. Ming thinks that the reason is more complicated, since some companies do manage to retain their female employees after child birth.

She analyzed the data between these types of companies — where women stay after child birth verses companies where women leave — and spotted a key difference: The picture of the leadership team! If it is all men, the women consciously or unconsciously, make the decision that their hard work will not pay off in this organization and decide to leave. She refers to this phenomenon as Belief Based Utility.

Talent is the new monopoly

Dr. Ming believes that the future belongs to companies that can recruit and retain highly qualified candidates regardless of gender and ethnicity. Therefore, it is in an organization’s best interest to pay attention to their internal beliefs and practices.

All you can do is laugh

At lunch time we were treated to the very funny Maysoon Zayid. Her TED talk I got 99 problems … palsy is just one has over 9 million views. She is an Arab American who has Cerebral Palsy since birth and she had us all in stitches. (Note: I made the mistake of initially writing “suffers from palsy” and Maysoon was kind enough to DM me on twitter to correct me. Thank you Maysoon. I am humbled to learn from you. The way we use language is incredibly important, so thank you for gently showing me my blind spot.)

99% of Self Doubt is not True

Teen Vouge’s former editor Elaine Weltroth interview of Reese Witherspoon, Oscar winning actress, entrepreneur and activist, was so open, honest and vulnerable that it felt like an intimate conversation that 6500 watermark attendees were privileged to listen in on.

Reese spoke about her many insecurities and how she works hard to overcome them. When she turned 29, the phones stopped ringing and she realized that there were never enough roles in Hollywood for women past a certain age. It was then that she became a producer and started making movies with roles that she could identify with.

Her first movie as a producer, Wild, was based on a book that she read and fell in love with. She called the author Cheryl Strayed and told her that she had no experience being a producer, but could she produce her movie anyway. To her surprise, Cheryl said yes, and the rest is history. It was not easy teaching herself to be a producer, and during the difficult times she kept pushing since she did not want to let Cheryl down. The thing she loved the most about the story is that it has a happy ending, where the protagonist saves herself, and yet, has no man, no job, no money.

Next she talked about Big Little Lies that featured multiple strong female characters and the whole auditorium applauded. For this project she collaborated with the amazing Nicole Kidman and she discovered the power of doing things together. This project was obviously a joy for Reese — she did her little Australian accent imitation of Nicole and talked about how she adored working with her.

She has exciting new collaborations in progress: a work place drama centered on a morning TV show with Jennifer Aniston, and a TV Series with Kerry Washington.

In January, Reese spearheaded the Time’s Up movement and mobilized contributions to the Time’s Up Legal Defense fund in the National Women’s Law Center. More than 1000 women have called in from all over and have received experienced legal counsel. In her words, once we have learnt how badly our sisters have been treated, there is no going back.

In Conclusion

Listening to all the wonderful, thoughtful, intelligent and empathetic speakers like Reese Witherspoon, Amal Clooney, Dr. Vivienne Ming, to name a few, gives me hope that this is not just at a moment, but the start of a movement. And perhaps, this is why the energy at the Watermark conference felt different this year.