Men on men

June 6, 2013

It was so much easier in the old days!

“The fact that the only way you can spout off this misogynistic gunk is online, anonymously, because you’re actually afraid to say what you really think in front of other people, both men and women, I think this is a sign of progress!” - Michael Kimmel, sociolgist

I'm just putting the finishing touches on the next show, the so-called Man Show, which will consist of three men and me. As I've been working on it this week a slew of relevant articles has landed in my (virtual) lap. There's this short piece by Lisa Belkin on The Huffingon Post referencing this excellent Business Week article on 'alpha dads'. Both articles draw attention to the topic of men who seek to spend more time with their families, taking the kind of active part in their children's lives that for many men is confined to weekends. They also focus on guilt, something I'm about to post about, and the fact that men are not troubled by guilt the way women are. The Business Week piece refers to 'puddles' of the stuff accumulating at women's feet. So true. Perhaps some of this guilt is linked to our biology (after all, we do incubate these little creatures) but so much of it comes from society's expectations for women and the pressure we put on ourselves. I also enjoyed this blog post, 'Apparently I am Destroying Civilization' by female breadwinner Mama Unabridged - there's a lot in there, with a cameo appearance by Lou Dobbs, Juan Williams and a couple of other Fox News guys (all angry).

Back to my male guests for a minute. I took a few things away from the discussion with the three of them. They're all steeped in gender studies (hate that word) in one way or another. 

• Most men are well meaning and don't want to be jerks. They don't want to offend women at work - or anywhere else - by 'saying the wrong thing', but they're not necessarily sure what the wrong (and right) things are. Men are afraid to ask questions for fear of sounding stupid or sexist. They see President Obama get hauled over the coals for complimenting the California attorney general on her looks and think, 'See. Women are so sensitive these days. I'm keeping my mouth shut.'

• Very few people or companies are having honest conversations about equality at work and what that means. Men think of equality at work as a woman's issue, not something they need to involve themselves in. Which is crazy. Plus, because men and women tend not to discuss women's experiences at work together, men can easily remain clueless about aggravating things women may regularly be experiencing (and vice versa). Which in turn can lead to the 'women are all a bunch of whiners' retort, which I've heard a lot.


• A lot of men would love to escape what some feel is a societal straightjacket - the idea that they have to be the breadwinners, that they can't take paternity leave because it paints them as un-career-minded. But Michael Kimmel (quoted above) says a lot of the pressure to be a certain way comes not from women, but from other men. 

The new show will be out on Monday.

The importance of asking for help

May 31, 2013

"Me and other very successful entrepreneurs came from the school of, 'Don’t you dare ask for help, that would be admitting a weakness.' But boy is it liberating to say, 'I don’t have all the answers.'"

- Maureen Borzacchielo, CEO, Creative Display Solutions

I have a friend who sees asking for help as a weakness. Increasingly, I see it as a strength. He believes seeking and finding his own answers to problems is the way to go through life. Admittedly this came up in a conversation we had a couple of years ago about therapy. I thought he could benefit from it and was quite surprised when he said he'd been thinking about it. But the next time we spoke, he'd decided against it. He preferred, he said, to wrangle with any family issues and inner demons internally. 

I thought of this again when I read this excellent post by Henna Inam on The Glass Hammer this week. The piece is aimed at women. So why did I begin this by talking about a man? Because I believe that while men usually rely on themselves when it comes to personal issues and where their egos are involved (like asking for directions) they're much better about seeking help and asking for favors in business. Women are more like my friend when it comes to work - we tend to rely on ourselves, thinking we have to do everything alone. We fear people will judge us as somehow lacking if we ask for help. 

Not asking for help is one of the reasons, I believe, that women lag men's success in the workplace. I interviewed entrepreneur Maureen Borzacchielo for a Marketplace radio story last year, and one of the things she told me was that the female entrepreneurs she mentored did not ask other businesspeople for enough help. Maureen herself hadn't done enough of this at the start of her life as a small business owner. Heather McGregor, who I interviewed for the penultimate show on women's appearance at work, also feels strongly that the only way to excel at work is to ask for help both at work and at home.

Tips for the help-shy: 

• I wasn't that conscious of this until I interviewed Maureen and she articulated it: many women aspire to perfection. We feel we have to do everything ourselves, and do it perfectly. But that's just not possible, and the sooner we come to terms with this the better. 

• This point seems so obvious when you look at it on the page, but it isn't always when you're in the thick of things, as Maureen was when she was starting out: "I met Russell Simmons at an event Tory Burch hosted…and he said he learned by seeking out people who were more successful than him. That’s OK. When did we [women] decide it wasn’t OK?" 
   
• Don't think of it as bothering people. This is such a woman thing. Henna Inam puts this really well when she asks you to think of a time someone asked you for help - you probably felt flattered they'd chosen you.

• Give help to get help. Heather McGregor has asked for a lot of help with her children over the years because she has always worked. She's had nannies, but she has also relied on family, friends and neighbors to step in. "If you’re not helping others you are not building a team," she says. "You need a sustainable community – you may never need to call the favor back in, but that doesn’t matter. You may watch someone else’s children, and you may have grown children, but you may go away unexpectedly and need someone to feed the cat." Having this community of willing helpers, who she and her family help in return, has helped her concentrate on her business.
   
• I've just signed up for a series of coaching sessions with a digital marketing strategist, and the feeling of relief that came over me when I hung up the phone was huge. It was like the clichéd weight being lifted from my shoulders. I just cannot do it all when it comes to the gazillion things, digital and otherwise, I need to do for The Broad Experience and to 'get myself out there'. I need help.

Why women need good presentation skills

May 28, 2013

Former Chilean president Michelle Bachelet

Recently I got this email from a friend and listener to the show who had attended a series of presentations by budding entrepreneurs:

"I noticed a GAPING chasm between the way the women presented to the group and the men. Their projects were equally valuable and interesting, but the men tended to speak very confidently and in a way that made it easy to listen and get excited about their project. The women were much less commanding up there...They tended to go up at the end of their sentences, trail off, and be non-declarative. It made me much less interested in their work."

I've had similar experiences myself lately. I've been to a couple of conferences where the lousiest talks were given by women. What really hit me was that some of the worst offenders were speaking at a women's conference. I came into the room late to hear a senior executive at a famous global retailer finishing off her speech in a monotone, clearly reading from a script. Yawn. An hour or so later one of the women running the conference got up to tell people what the agenda was after lunch. But no one could hear her because they were all talking amongst themselves. She didn't command our attention by coming on stage with something like, 'Before you go, I'd like to tell you a few things about the afternoon'. She didn't command the room. Like so many women, she approached her task tentatively, afraid to take a stand and shut us up forcefully (but politely), as she could have done. Instead, she kept speaking in a soft voice, and most of us kept ignoring her. Rude, yes, but this woman did nothing to engage her audience. She didn't deserve our attention.

Why does this matter? Because if women don't speak well and present our ideas clearly and compellingly, people won't take us and our ideas and products seriously. As my correspondent above also pointed out:

"It got me thinking, this has to be happening in workplaces and conferences all over the place. It's got to affect financing that women are not getting, projects their firms are not getting, etc."

I'm sure it is. What I don't understand is why these women - especially those who must speak publicly as part of their jobs - aren't being trained properly in presentation skills. This type of training is invaluable. Take it from me, a reluctant and relatively new public speaker.

Presentation tips:

• Your voice is so important. You need to speak relatively slowly (which can be tough when you're nervous), clearly, and take frequent pauses to enable people to take in what you've just said.
• As one of my presentation trainers, Stacy-Marie Ishmael, often points out, you must make eye contact with different members of the audience as you speak. It really helps connect you to them. She recently linked some of us on her newsletter list to this HBR piece by TED founder Chris Anderson on how to give a great presentation.
• Don't go in thinking people want you to fail. They don't. The audience is actually rooting for you. After all, no one wants to sit through a boring presentation. On the contrarary, we're all eager to be entertained.
• The reason many women suck at presenting is that we are far likelier than men to suffer from a lack of confidence. That comes through loud and clear in a presentation. If you don't believe in yourself, how do you expect the audience to buy whatever it is you're talking about or trying to sell? This is a wider issue, one that can't be neatly taken care of in presentation training, but being aware of it should at least help move the needle a little.
• Watch yourself present - get someone to tape you practicing your presentation - which you MUST do, time and again, to feel confident on the day - or just tape yourself. Then play the video back, and cringe. Yes, cringe, but then improve. Change the bits that aren't working.
• If, like me, you are someone who genuinely enjoys communicating with people, let youself go and actually enjoy your talk. I really like people (most of the time). What helped me was thinkng of this not as some big, scary presentation where I had to impress people, but as my opportunity to communicate with a whole bunch of people at once. Yippee!
  
  Changing the subject completely, be sure to tune into the latest show on professional women, work, and sex, which just came out. And let me know what you think.

Do successful women have sex?

May 20, 2013

(Yes, it's one of those corny 'unhappy couple' photographs)

According to my next guest, sexuality counselor, midwife, and author Evelyn Resh, many of them do not. Or at least not enough to sustain a healthy relationship. 

The next episode of The Broad Experience will cover ground that is hardly ever discusssed, at least openly. How many really successful women have healthy marriages or relationships? Lately I've been reading a lot of articles about female entrepreneurs as well as autobiographies of highly successful women. I admire these women's commitment to their jobs, and feel exhausted as I read about some of their schedules, tearing around the world doing good work, or helping run a corporation and sustaining a family life at the same time, which usually seems to involve having dinner with the kids, and, after putting them to bed, getting back online till you fall into bed yourself (then getting up at 5a.m. to start the whole thing over again). I've come away from more than one of these books or articles wondering: do these women ever manage to have sex? Frankly, with the schedules they describe, I don't know how they'd fit it in. Maybe at the weekend?

Resh, who practices in Massachusetts, says she's seeing an epidemic of extremely busy professional women with non-existent sex lives. These women tell her that between work and, usually, kids, they just don't feel like having sex. Here's a quote from our interview:

"The fact is, more liberal thinking, well educated, scholarly professional women who are in marriages are not having sex in large part. And they see sexuality within the context of that relationship as a chore, an obligation, one more thing to do on their to-do list, and actually an imposition that’s brought into the marriage by unthinking, uncaring, demanding men."

In case you're thinking this comes from someone who's extremely conservative in her views, you'd be wrong. Resh has been a working mother herself, and her life doesn't fit everyone's idea of conventional. But she is a big advocate for healthy sex lives as a vital part of relationships and overall good health. She says too many professional women are ignoring sex altogether. What women need to do to get their sex drives back, she says, is begin to cultivate a new attitude to pleasure - to actively pursue pleasure, whether that is a strong cup of coffee, savored rather than drunk on the run, or a pedicure, or simply reading a novel instead of only reading stuff for work. Pleasure, she says, begets pleasure. The other part of this problem is women's tendency to feel we *have* to do everything for everyone - prove ourselves as stars at work and prove ourselves to be stellar mothers as well. By the time we've taken care of all those obligations, the last thing we want to do is leap into bed - except to sleep.

Tune in next week to hear much more on women, work, success and sex. You can check out Evelyn Resh's book, Women, Sex, Power & Pleasure here.