In this episode, Amy Diehl joins host Jason Mudd to discuss how bias against women persists in female-dominated workplaces. Amy shares her knowledge of why men are in leadership roles more often than women and what makes an industry equitable. They also discuss how to make your workplace healthy for men and women, the phenomenon of presentism, and how to eliminate bias and what can women do if they are confronted by bias.
Tune in to learn more!
Watch the episode here
5 things you’ll learn during the full episode:
- Why men are in leadership roles more often than women
- What makes an industry equitable
- How to make your workplace healthy for men and women
- The phenomenon of presentism
- How to eliminate bias and what can women do if they are confronted by bias
Resources
- Connect and learn more about Amy Diehl on LinkedIn.
- Visit the Amy Diehl Website for more information.
- Connect with Amy Diehl on Facebook.
- Order Amy Diehl’s Book “Glass Walls Shattering the Six Gender Bias Barriers Still Holding Women Back at Work."
Additional Resources from Axia Public Relations:
- Listen to more episodes of the On Top of PR podcast.
- Find out more about Axia Public Relations.
- The Importance Of Collaboration Between Your Public Relations Team and Your Investor Relations Team
- How to become an excellent TEDx speaker with Alan Cohen | On Top of PR podcast
Disclosure: One or more of the links we shared here might be affiliate links that offer us a referral reward when you buy from them.
Episode Highlights
[02:25] Why men are in leadership roles more often than women
Amy: “Workplaces were originally built by men and for men with men's needs in mind, but not women’s. So one aspect of male privilege is something called male gatekeeping. So when the men are in charge, they get to decide who gets to enter leadership. And when they do allow women into leadership, when they're using male gatekeeping, they put boundaries around women's authority..”
Amy: “They are sitting on the boards, they are sitting in the top C-suite positions that are keeping themselves. Like I just talked about that male gatekeeping, keeping themselves in charge and in control of the organization, and not saying that people do this consciously. It's basically the reason that it happens is because bias, gender bias is built into our workplaces, our organizations.”
[07:53] What makes an industry equitable
Equal amounts of men and women in any industry are idealistic right now. It is more important to see numbers approaching your goal
Amy: “I mean, there are some industries where it's like five or 10% and you don’t want to have this like critical mass of women at any level so that women are not alone and they're not tokenized. I would say getting above like 40% would certainly be something that would indicate that you that your industry is on a path towards true equity.”
Amy: “If you were to have complete equity and even you would be getting to have, you know, to make progress, you want to see something approaching, you know, approaching 50/50. Not everything is going to, you know, that's idealistic to say everything is going to be exactly 50/50.”
[10:00] How to make your workplace healthy for men and women
Replace workplace competition with cooperation
Measure success by goals instead of time spent at work
Amy: “There’s things you can do to make your workplace healthy, not just for women, but for men too. And so if you are the person at the top, you're a leader. There's lots of steps you can take.”
Amy: “One of the steps we talk about is replacing workplace competition with cooperation. And, you know, certainly, you're going to have competition between your, you know, your actual competitors outside the organization. But I always say, why do you want to have, you know, competition within your workplace? You want to set your workplace up so that people are cooperating and working together so that you can have the best outcome for your organization as a whole.”
Amy: “Another step that leaders can take is instead of measuring success by time in the chair or time at work, measure success by goals as opposed to time spent at work, or time spent online for people who are working remotely.”
[12:00] The phenomenon of presenting
Flexible work enables women to be more successful.
Since they are generally responsible for caretaking roles in our society, if women are measured based on the time in the office or in the chair, they will be less successful than if they were measured off on their goals and progress.
Amy: “And that's this idea that because you're there in your office, that's an indicator of the amount and the quality of work that you're producing and an indicator of your loyalty towards the organization.”
Amy: “ What's better is for managers, for leaders, to set goals for their employees, you know, certainly provide them with the resources to meet their goals and the support that they need, but measure the success by the goals and not just by the time spent in that chair.”
Amy: “Allowing people to work flexibly when it works for them, when, you know, again, measuring the success by their success, by the goals that they're meeting as opposed to the time in the chair, now can really help enable women to be more successful.”
[19:02] How to eliminate bias and what can women do if they are confronted by bias
- Don’t take it personally
- Call it out if you feel uncomfortable
- Create a buddy system
Amy: “Whenever women encounter bias or are confronted by bias, the first thing is they should not take it personally. It happens to all of us. And it's not because of our personal failings, it's because of the bias that's embedded into our systems and into our workplaces.”
Amy: “Depending on the power dynamics of the people in the meeting, you may not feel comfortable speaking up and saying something like that in the moment. If you do, I would say do it. If not, that's okay. But I would suggest engaging with consistent interrupters in private to explain how their interruptions affect your ability to do your job.”
Amy: “Another thing I recommend is developing a buddy system in which you ask colleagues to stop interrupters on your behalf. This also works well when people take or are given credit for something that you did. There's a phenomenon that we discuss in the book called he-peating. It's when a woman says something and then a man repeats it. He says the same thing, exact same thing, and everyone loves it. And he gets credit for it. So if you're working with the buddy system, the buddy or your colleague can say, hey, that was Joan's idea. Let's hear more about what Joan thinks about it. That gives you the credit as well as the floor.”
Amy: “We don't want to change anybody from their authentic self. We want everybody to be able to be their authentic self. But what we do is we do give strategies for how women can navigate barriers.”
About Amy Diehl
Our episode guest is Amy Diehl, Ph.D., the chief information officer at Wilson College and a workplace gender bias expert and consultant. She has a 27-year career in information technology and is a prominent gender equity researcher. Her work has been published in academic journals, book chapters, and in Fast Company, Ms. Magazine, and Harvard Business Review.
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Transcript
[Narrator]
Welcome to On Top of PR with Jason Mudd presented by ReviewMaxer.
[Jason]
Hello and welcome to On Top of PR. I'm your host Jason Mudd. Today I'm joined by Amy Diehl. We are so glad Amy is here because we're talking about how bias against women persists in public relations. I want to welcome to the show today Amy Diehl. Amy Diehl Ph.D. is the chief information officer at Wilson College and a workplace gender bias expert and consultant. She has a 27-year career in information technology and is a prominent gender equality researcher. Her work has been published in academic journals, book chapters, and in Fast Company, Ms. Magazine, and Harvard Business Review. For full disclosure, I discovered her on Twitter when there was a repost of her article. Amy, welcome to the show. We're glad you are here to help us stay on top of PR.
[Amy]
Well, I'm glad to be here.
[Jason]
Excellent. So, Amy, you have a new book coming out titled Glass Wall: Shattering the Six Gender Bias Barriers Holding Women Back at Work. Tell me more about that.
[Amy]
Yeah, so I'm very excited. The book is coming out in June. It's available for preorder, so preorder now. In this book, I have a co-author, her name is Dr. Leanne Dzubinski. She and I tell stories of prominent and everyday women in order to detail the six core gender bias barriers that we have discovered in our original research. So these barriers are more than a glass ceiling, and this is where the title of our book comes in. They’re more like glass walls surrounding women. No matter which way a woman turns these ever-present but invisible barriers impede her. So in the book, we explain how you can shatter the barriers, shatter the walls to eliminate bias in your workplace, whether you're the leader in the workplace, whether you're a workplace ally, or whether you're an individual woman. And just to give you a quick example, the first barrier that we discuss is something called male privilege. So workplaces are built on male privilege. Workplaces were originally built by men and for men with men's needs in mind, but not women’s. So one aspect of male privilege is something called male gatekeeping. So when the men are in charge, they get to decide who gets to enter leadership. And when they do allow women into leadership, when they're using male gatekeeping, they put boundaries around women's authority. And so that's just one quick example from you know, from chapter one of our book. At the end of each chapter, we give specific steps as well as scripts that leaders and allies, and women can use to stop to stop these barriers. And then we also at the end of the book, we talk about an overall framework that leaders can use to rid their organizations of gender bias.
[Jason]
Excellent. Excellent. So before we press record earlier, we were kind of talking a little bit about how in the public relations profession, it's heavily dominated by females, but yet, you know, most leadership positions I've read are occupied by males. So tell me, why do you think that is?
[Amy]
Well, you know, it's interesting because before I got on here, I did look up some statistics. And in the United States, anyway, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, they have all kinds of good information. And, you know, when I looked at the stats, what I saw is that, you know, from the different job classifications. Just to give you an example, PR specialists are 59% women. PR and fundraising managers are 68% women. So when you get to the executive level, PR executives are about 30%. And what you find is that as you move up, as the hierarchy levels move up, and this is not just in the PR industry, this occurs in most other industries in which men are the ones in control at the top. They are sitting on the boards, they are sitting in the top C-suite positions that are keeping themselves. Like I just talked about that male gatekeeping, keeping themselves in charge and in control of the organization, and not saying that people do this consciously. It's basically the reason that it happens is because bias, gender bias is built into our workplaces, our organizations. And so even organizations where you've got more women than men at the bottom and even at the mid levels like you do in the PR industry, what you see is that the gender bias that which is comprised of various barriers, which again we detail in our book Glass Walls, they impede women's progress and keep most of them at the bottom and mid-level, as opposed to the having equity at the top.
[Jason]
Amy, you know, what's interesting is I think the PR profession has this unique challenge that at one point the Public Relations Society of America, PRSA, was creating a campaign to help attract more men to the industry, more males to the industry. And that campaign ended about as quickly as it was created for whatever reason. And so is it unique that a profession has the challenge of not having enough males entering at the entry level but then being top-heavy with males? Or is that still typical?
[Amy]
Yeah, it's not it's unfortunately not unique at all. And you know, the Harvard Business Review article that we wrote, that I wrote along with Dr. Leanne Dzubinski and Dr. Amber Stephenson, in that article we looked at four different industries. PR was not one of them, but we looked at four industries, four other industries that actually make up a large portion of the United States economy. When you add up the numbers, we've looked at medicine, law, higher education and faith-based nonprofits. All of these four industries they're all equitable or they are female-dominated, at the bottom, or the middle. And if you think about it, you know, these are four just kind of generalized industries, health care being the largest one. To answer your question, no, it's not uncommon. It was really interesting to us. What was interesting to me is we didn't pick these industries because they weren’t female-dominated when we originally conceived of our research. But when we got through the research, then we started looking at what the stats were when we thought, hey, there's something, you know, it's not just that there's not enough women in the pipeline. That's not the problem here, right? The problem is the pipeline for the sake of women, it leaks. And again, it's because of the barriers that they're facing day in and day out.
[Jason]
What makes an industry equitable? Is it 50/50? Is it 40/60, 60/40? Like what? What is an indicator of healthy equity?
[Amy]
Well, I think you would see, if you think about men and women, we're just using gender as our category here. There were certainly many other categories of diversity that we could be talking about. But here we're talking about, for the purposes of this discussion, we're talking about men and women. And so and, you know, the and throughout the world, it's, you know, generally 50/50 as far as population. So, yeah, you would expect to see 50% give or take in any industry, in any role. If you were to have complete equity and even you would be getting to have, you know, to make progress, you want to see something approaching, you know, approaching 50/50. Not everything is going to, you know, that's idealistic to say everything is going to be exactly 50/50. But yeah, that would be the goal.
[Jason]
But it's what's considered to be healthy or acceptable.
[Amy]
Healthy or acceptable. I think it's well, so I think the thing is you have to look at where you are in an industry and like where I was just talking about the 30% for PR executives, actually, if that's actually not bad. It's not equitable, but it's not bad. I mean, there are some industries where it's like five or 10% and you want to have this like critical mass of women at any level so that women are not alone and they're not tokenized. I would say getting above like 40% would certainly be something that would indicate that you that your industry is on a path towards true equity.
[Jason]
So 40% would be a good number?
[Amy]
It would be a very good baseline.
[Jason]
Okay, good. Thank you. And then, Amy, what if you could wave a magic wand over the industry, what steps would the public relations industry start to take today to get us to a better outcome?
[Amy]
Right. So I want to talk a little bit about you know, I have read this study, it was a recent study on women in PR in North America. And one of the things that it talked about was how masculine work patterns actually underpin a lot of workplaces. But they also are prevalent in public relations. And the examples that they gave were long work hours, unattainable work-life balance, and unequal career progression. There’s things you can do to make your workplace healthy, not just for women, but for men too. And so if you are the person at the top, you're a leader. There's lots of steps you can take. One of the steps that we talk about, we enumerate several steps in the Harvard Business Review article, as well as the book, The book goes in to much more detail, but one of the steps we talk about is replacing workplace competition with cooperation. And, you know, certainly, you're going to have competition between your, you know, your actual competitors outside the organization. But I always say, why do you want to have, you know, competition within your workplace? You want to set your workplace up so that people are cooperating and working together so that you can have the best outcome for your organization as a whole.
Another step that leaders can take is instead of measuring success by time in the chair or time at work, measure success by goals as opposed to time spent at work, or time spent online for people who are working remotely.
[Jason]
So you're saying time hours in the workday, not tenure in the role?
[Amy]
I'm talking about hours in this case. I'm talking about hours in the workday. Yeah. So like, there's something called presentism. And that's this idea that because you're there in your office, that's an indicator of the amount and the quality of work that you're producing and an indicator of your loyalty towards the organization. And what's better is for managers, for leaders, to set goals for their employees, you know, certainly provide them with the resources to meet their goals and the support that they need, but measure the success by the goals and not just by the time spent in that chair. And the reason that this is important for gender equity is because, you know, and this will go on to my next step or my next strategy, and that's providing the opportunity for flexible work. As we know, and unfortunately, women tend to shoulder caretaking responsibilities in our society. And the first thing I'll say is that that needs to change, that caretaking responsibilities need to be divided equitably amongst men and women. But that being said, allowing people to work flexibly when it works for them, when, you know, again, measuring the success by their success, by the goals that they're meeting as opposed to the time in the chair, now can really help enable women to be more successful.
And I want to put my plug in here too. For industries like PR and many other industries, I think have learned a lot from our experience in the pandemic, and that's about the success of remote work. Really, the pandemic showed how remote work can be very successful in so many industries and for so many roles, and it has allowed employees to reduce the time that they spend commuting to the workplace and increase the time that they're spending with their family or with personal pursuits. So this is particularly important for women who are far too often shouldering the majority of housework and childcare. We'll go back to that. I'm going to go back to my first strategy, and that was about competition, right? When you're setting up your workplace to be competitive and you're measuring all your success by billable hours or by, you know, or by some other metric where one employee wins and another employee loses, you're really losing out in terms of the organization and what the organization can achieve as a whole.
But in particular, also your women tend to lose out who maybe can't work those long hours, who need to, you know, run and pick up their child from the childcare center at a particular time. And you know everything I'm saying when I talk about gender equity, it's what I'm passionate about and everything I'm saying when I talk about flexible work, remote work, cooperation, making more supportive workplaces, is it's good for everybody.
You know, no matter your gender, it's good for everybody in the workplace. And then that becomes then good for the organization overall.
[Jason]
Excellent. Amy, we need to take a short break, but we'll be back on the other side with more with Amy Diehl talking about how bias against women persists in public relations. Thank you for being here, Amy. Thank you for tuning in. We'll be right back with you.
[Narrator]
You're listening to On Top of PR with your host, Jason Mudd. Jason is a trusted advisor to some of America's most admired and fastest-growing brands. He is the managing partner at Axia Public Relations, a PR agency that guides news, social and web strategies for national companies. And now back to the show.
[Jason]
Hello and welcome back to On Top of PR, I'm your host Jason Mudd with Axia Public Relations and thank you for joining us today. We’ve got Amy Diehl here still and we are diving deeper into this conversation. Amy, welcome back.
[Amy]
Yeah glad to be back.
[Jason]
Thank you. So you mentioned while we were taking a quick break here that you've got a Victoria's Secret story. And I feel like at least on the surface, that would probably appeal to the men and women who are tuning in to this episode.
[Amy]
Yeah. So I don't know if you saw this documentary, Jason, but there was a recently a documentary, I'm sure it's still available on Hulu, and it was about Victoria's Secret. And so I was watching this documentary and I thought this really has a good example of how male privilege and male gatekeeping, how it works inside of an organization. So I'll give you the short synopsis of my take away from the documentary related to this topic. There are two men at the top, basically two men running Victoria's Secret. One of the men, in fact, commented on the fact that he was really proud that he had so many women present in so many senior roles. But what became very clear in the documentary is that even though there were women and they were present in these high-level roles, it was the two men who are making all of the decisions. So to give you one example, years ago, one of the women at the senior level suggested adding shapewear as well as other items that would be more comfortable for women to wear. But the men dismissed the idea. What they were trying to do was sell products that fit the male gaze, so very sexualized products, right? So what ended up happening is that Victoria's Secret ended up losing market share when other brands like ThirdLove started offering bras and underwear that were comfortable and they were also marketed to a diverse range of body types.
So Victoria's Secret came very late to the game, to inclusivity in their products and marketing, and they lost revenue just because of not listening to the women that they had hired. And this is a really clear example of male gatekeeping. Again, with male gatekeeping, yes, you do keep a lot of men in those top roles. But when you do let women in, what happens with male gatekeeping is that they're the bounds of their authority, are very limited and that they're they are just, you know, for the sake of appearance and not necessarily for the sake of having a voice in decision making.
[Jason]
So we already established that there's at least a perception and real numbers show that, you know, there's a high amount of females in the PR industry, especially at the entry levels. Right. So if someone is listening to this and they're new to the profession, maybe they're a recent college graduate, maybe they're about to graduate from college, or maybe they've got a few years of experience behind them, like what would you say to them? What should they be doing in their role today?
[Amy]
Yeah. So one of the first things I want to say is that the book that Dr. Dzubinki and I wrote, Glass Walls, this is the book that I wish I had, that I wish I could have read when I was coming into the workforce just out of college. Because when I entered the workforce, when I was in college, I didn't necessarily feel any kind of gender bias. I was in a very male-dominated major, computer science, but I kept up with everybody, like I had straight A's. You know, I didn't feel any disadvantage because of my gender, but when I started out in the workplace, that's when I started... strange things started to happen and I didn't understand what was going on. You know, one thing, for example, was that I would watch how the men were leading and I would try to emulate them. And one of the ways I did that was by trying to be very authoritative in my decision-making. And I found very quickly that when I was authoritative, I wasn't respected like my male counterparts were.
Another thing that happened to me was that I would encounter women who were not supportive. And in the book, we have a whole section dedicated to what's called female hostility, queen bee behavior and mean girls behavior are the two labels that we've given to the behavior. But I didn't understand, why weren't these women helping me? I just wanted to do my job. Why were they blocking what I was trying to do? Why were they getting in my way? So to go back to the book, when we wrote this book, we got to the finish and I realized I wish I had this book and would have read this before I started in the workplace so that I would have known what to expect. And so I would have known strategies. Sure, it would help me. But also there's one key thing that I think that I learned and that we discuss in the book, and that is whenever women encounter bias or are confronted by bias, the first thing is they should not take it personally. And that's what I did, especially in the beginning. I thought I was doing something wrong. I thought I was at fault. And so, I learned through my research, the articles that I've written, that it's pretty much, unfortunately, it's pretty much ubiquitous. It happens to all of us. And it's not because of our personal failings, it's because of the bias that's embedded into our systems and into our workplaces.
I have a few other than not taking it personally, which I think is just key. And it'll help everybody to feel better about themselves and their experience. But there are a couple other specific steps that I could recommend for women if they're confronted by bias. The first thing would be to call it out if you feel comfortable. I'll just give a quick example, often women get interrupted in meetings, you know, they’ll start talking and somebody will interrupt them. In fact, if you happen to watch any of the vice presidential debates of 2020, then-vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris was debating then-Vice President Mike Pence. And there were a number of times during the debate where she asserted, “I'm speaking, I'm speaking” whenever he interrupted her until he ceded the floor back to her. So you have to understand that, depending on the power dynamics of the people in the meeting, you may not feel comfortable speaking up and saying something like that in the moment. If you do, I would say do it. If not, that's okay. But I would suggest engaging with consistent interrupters in private to explain how their interruptions affect your ability to do your job. Another thing I recommend is developing a buddy system in which you ask colleagues to stop interrupters on your behalf.
This also works well when people take or are given credit for something that you did. There's a phenomenon that we discuss in the book called he-peating. It's when a woman says something and then a man repeats it. He says the same thing, exact same thing, and everyone loves it. And he gets credit for it. So if you're working with the buddy system, the buddy or your colleague can say, hey, that was Joan's idea. Let's hear more about what Joan thinks about it. That gives you the credit as well as the floor.
[Jason]
Are we going to find more tips like this in your book?
[Amy]
Yes. Yes, many more tips. In fact, the very last chapter in the book is a chapter where we really just are speaking to the women about what you can do. And it's like, how do you navigate bias? And the thing about our book is that it's not a fix-the-women book. We don't tell women how to dress. We don't help tell them how to behave. We don't try to change them. We don't want to change anybody from their authentic self. We want everybody to be able to be their authentic self. But what we do is we do give strategies for how women can navigate barriers. The strategies actually were pulled, I pulled them from my dissertation research, which was on how women leaders in higher education made meaning of adversity. So these are strategies for how to navigate adversity, of which certainly gender bias is a type of adversity.
[Jason]
Okay. So speaking of the book, you said you can preorder now. How does somebody go about pre-ordering and will it be available in a soft copy, like a digital copy as well as audible or audio version? Talk to me about that.
[Amy]
Yeah. So it's going to be available in hardcover. It's going to be available as an e-book. We're talking to the publisher currently about whether there's going to be an audio version. I'm certainly hoping so. The book can be pre-ordered now. If you go to my website, which my website is Amy-Diehl.com. That's a m y dash d i e h l dot com. I've got preorder links to all of the major booksellers. So basically you can go to your favorite online bookseller and find the preorder link. And we're looking forward to the release in June.
[Jason]
Good. I'm looking forward to reading it. It Sounds like something I can read at the lake cabin this summer. Maybe the timing will work out perfectly for me to do that because I've learned a lot during this conversation today, and I'm pretty confident that our audience will, too. Amy, If there's a way that our audience can connect with you beyond the website, how might they do that?
[Amy]
Yeah, so certainly I'm available on my website. As I said. Amy-Diehl.com. I'm also on Twitter @Amy Diehl. I'm on LinkedIn. You can look me up on LinkedIn using my name. I'm on Instagram, Amy Diehl, Ph.D., and I'm also on Mastodon. I'm available on Mastodon as well as I've been diversifying my social media.
[Jason]
Okay, Excellent. Well, Amy, we're really glad you were here today. We enjoyed the conversation. I enjoyed the conversation. I know our audience will appreciate it as well. So with that, I'm going to sign off. This is Jason Mudd with Axia Public Relations, thanking you for tuning in to On Top of PR and giving me the opportunity to help you stay on top of PR as well. If you found this episode valuable, please do us a favor and share it with a colleague or friend who would benefit from it. And if you feel so inclined, please also post about this episode on social media tagging Amy and or myself and we would appreciate it and we'll look forward to engaging with you through social media with that.
That's another episode of On Top of PR. I hope you'll take some action steps as to what we discussed here today and that you will find it helpful in your workplace experience. Thanks again.
[Amy]
Thanks for having me.
[Narrator]
This has been On Top of PR with Jason Mudd presented by ReviewMaxer. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode and check out past shows at OnTopofPR.com.
Sponsored by:
- On Top of PR is produced by Axia Public Relations, named by Forbes as one of America’s Best PR Agencies. Axia is an expert PR firm for national brands.
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About your host Jason Mudd
On Top of PR host, Jason Mudd, is a trusted adviser and dynamic strategist for some of America’s most admired brands and fastest-growing companies. Since 1994, he’s worked with American Airlines, Budweiser, Dave & Buster’s, H&R Block, Hilton, HP, Miller Lite, New York Life, Pizza Hut, Southern Comfort, and Verizon. He founded Axia Public Relations in July 2002. Forbes named Axia as one of America’s Best PR Agencies.
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