“I often feel like I’m walking a tightrope as I navigate these issues. It’s sometimes exhausting to analyze your actions and decisions from all the regular business angles. Then go back and layer on top the fact that I’m a woman leader, but I believe it’s necessary and beneficial for myself, my team, my company, my industry, and the movement I want to help move forward to be able to give women a better place to work and more opportunities to lead. And if I’m going to be true to that mandate, I have to be honest when I don’t do things in the best way. By sharing this, hopefully we can start a conversation that will help both men and women leaders communicate more efficiently and productively with teams that are not gender balanced. By sharing this, I hope I’m also breaking down the notion that we have to be right all the time, that we’re infallible.”—Elizabeth Tobey in Medium: How do I woman properly?
“It’s not that men are intentionally discriminating against women — far from it. I’ve spent the past year interviewing male executives for a book about men and women in the workplace. A vast majority of them are fair-minded guys who want women to succeed. They’re absolutely certain that they don’t have a gender problem themselves; it must be some other guys who do. Yet they’re leaders of companies that pay men more than women for the same jobs.”—Let’s expose the gender pay gap by Joanne Lipman in the New York Times
“Boards should be looking at skills, and not necessarily titles particularly given that women hold less than 5% of the Fortune 500 CEO positions. Traditional thinking on board composition felt that a director needed to have been a sitting CEO or another highly ranked C-suite executive. That view is changing, particularly as organizations have begun to limit the number of boards that their own CEOs can serve on. As a result, there are fewer corporate CEOs now available to sit on boards, which will hopefully encourage organizations to consider a wider pool of candidates. And as boards become more comfortable with considering a business unit CEO as a candidate, or a private company CEO or a CFO, that has widened opportunities for more women candidates.”—Deloitte: Increasing the number of women in the boardroom
“…when 248 performance reviews of tech all-stars (both male and female) were examined, negative traits like being abrasive, strident or irrational appeared in 85 percent of reviews for women. Those same words appeared in just 2 percent of men’s reviews. As Thomas says, “It is ridiculous to assume that 85% of women have personality problems and that only 2% of men do.””—Digital Trends: Why aren’t women staying in computer science?
