It's Not You, It's Your Workplace | Michelle Penelope King | TEDxChelseaPark

so growing up I was severely nearsighted but nobody knew it I didn't even know it because when your vision deteriorates it happened slowly and for me this continued until I was about 12 at which point my vision was so bad that I couldn't see my own reflection in the mirror like I literally couldn't see myself and you know this is probably a blessing because I have braces and freckles pale skin and one of those seventies bold haircuts good luck and you know not surprisingly I struggled in school I couldn't spell or do math because I couldn't see the numbers on the board I was disruptive in class and I talked too much I still do and over time I began to feel as though I always may be one of those students you know that teachers don't want to make off and I also began to believe that I wasn't good enough and then one day my favorite teacher Miss Andersen realized the problem was I couldn't see I've managed to get by for so long by relying on memory alone and talking and the day I got glasses I didn't care that my classmates teased me because now I could see the downside of course was you know now I could see that 17 fold haircut and it came as a bit of a shock you know think like a young Harry Potter but um I'll never forget those first few days I just stared at all the details around me the leaves on the trees the handwriting on the board I could see everything I could even see myself not seeing things for what they are has made us blind to the inequality that men and women experience in workplaces today I know this because I was blind to it myself as a researcher I spent the last five years trying to understand why it is that there is so few women in leadership positions and I've had to review thousands of journal articles because there's no shortage of theories many of what suggests that women need to be fixed or improved in some way to advance but this assumes that women are the problem and it turns out we're not research finds baking research finds that women a communal democratic innovative collaborative transformational you know we raise young women to think that if they work hard they can achieve anything and clearly based on this research they can so the question then becomes what's holding women back well workplaces don't work for everybody in the same way because they were never designed for difference they were designed to support an ideal type of worker to succeed and this tends to be white middle-class heterosexual able-bodied male but who importantly are willing to make work the number one priority and engage in dominant assertive aggressive competitive and even exclusionary behaviors to get ahead the problem is not everybody fits this ideal just take a look at the people sitting next to you today go on have a look you know we're all different or unique in some way and even if you look like the ideal worker and I promise you I'm not having a go at you if you do you know you might not be willing to engage in some of the behaviors needed to get ahead the important thing to remember is the more ways you differ from the ideal the more barriers you're going to face trying to advance at work and for women these barriers show up the moment they enter workplaces and this continues throughout their careers for example women's struggle to gain access to the right leadership opportunities because they don't fit the ideal this makes it harder for them to prove their capability and then lead women don't have access to the same networks or sponsors and even if they do research finds they don't benefit from them in the same way that men do importantly though this creates a lot of challenges for men none of which ever seem to get talked about men have a really narrow way to show up at work they're under tremendous pressure to engage an ideal worker behaviors let me an example if men want to reduce they workouts for family reasons research finds they're going to be penalized it's estimated man will face a 26% reduction in earnings 26% compared to women who face a 23% reduction men who want to take up flexible workplace practices to care for their families a suddenly seen as lacking career ambition you're not serious about work right because you're not wanting to live up to the ideal standard based on this one finding alone it seems to me a gender equality might be one of the best things to ever have happened to men they just don't know it yet but gender is just one area of difference I mean take a moment to think about all the ways somebody might differ from the ideal what about race ethnicity sexual orientation physical or mental ability religion or age not seeing our differences makes it impossible to see our experiences of inequality and why is it so hard to see our differences well I discovered the answer to this when I completed 72 interviews as part of my PhD research and in all interviews I asked participants the same question one of which was in your organization there not a lot of women leaders so you know what are some of the barriers you think that women you know experience and in all of these interviews senior leaders responded to this question in the same way they told me women and minorities they don't face any additional barriers because everybody's treated the same our workplaces are meritocracies these responses make absolutely no sense if women don't face any additional barriers and how come it is that they make up half the workforce in these organizations but less than 10% of all leadership teams so I was super frustrated with these findings and I shared them with a colleague to try and make sense of them and after looking it over she turned to me and she said Michelle what's the greatest barrier that women face at work I like without even thinking I just said this the denial of gender differences and experiences of inequality at work and like as soon as I said it she looked at me waiting for me to get it like this is amazed but it took me a while to kind of catch on and then eventually I realized that wow this is an incredible finding we can't tackle inequality if we're in denial that it even exists and this denial costs all of us in workplaces that have cultures of equality research finds that women are four times more likely to rise to senior leadership positions and men are twice as likely because we no longer advancing a small number of people who fit the ideal everybody's got an opportunity to make it everybody's free to be themselves and this might sound like a great place to work but the truth is workplaces need this more than we do in the future world of work the ability to do things differently will determine which companies survive workplaces need great minds to innovate problem-solve and create but the thing that makes great minds so great if they don't all think alike there is no one conventional employee or experience of work even though we're encouraged to believe that there is so what can we do well we can start by seeing all the ways and it's not you it's your workplace because nearly all of us know what it's like to feel excluded we've all witnessed or experienced it you know the barriers men and women face they show up in day to day moments what I like to call inequality moments and you know these moments can be big right like the time I was told to clean the office kitchen at work because I was the only woman on the team and all the men who reported to me last one of them even like picked up a dish child and threw it at me an encouragement and you know that was my first day on the job like come on all you know these moments can be a passing comment or office banter you know like the time my boss sort of jokingly said to me that he hates working with women and I was the only woman on that team it also happened to be my first day in that same job so rough stuff but you know moments like this a powerful when you experience them and some of you might even be thinking of yours now you get that instant feeling right like oh I'm not good enough I don't fit in but these moments are powerful precisely because this is how we come to knowing equality we have to use these moments to disrupt our denial this is where our freedom lies sharing out in quality moments is how we come to see each other and ourselves all the detail when I started this journey I was blind to inequality I was looking at women I was searching for what women need to do differently to advance and then early on it became clear that it's not women that need to be fixed it's workplaces and if we look closely at our organizations it's clear this is something that both men and women stand to benefit from but throughout this journey the thing that I saw most clearly was myself the challenges I've had to manage my differences and how they something to be valued rather than something to be overcome and you know this made it easier for me to see the men and women I work with their identities and challenges your differences are what make you remarkable and deserving of the freedom to be your self at work and to be valued for this getting there starts with speaking up sharing our identities experiences and inequality moments and all the ways that workplaces are broken because this is the only way we'll know what we need to do to fix them and most importantly how men and women can do this together thank you [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 41,862

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Global Issues, Book, Career, Discrimination, Feminism, Gender, Social Change

Id: eMBrR5YgfC0

Length: 10min 25sec (625 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 29 2019