Investing in women

July 17, 2013

This morning I attended a breakfast talk given by the Pipeline Fellowship and featuring guest speaker and serial entrepreneur (and she's not even 30) Lauren Maillian Bias. She started in modeling and then became a successful winery owner, as well as taking on many other roles, including that of investor in other people's companies. Which brings us to Pipeline. 

Natalia Oberti Noguera (l) and Lauren Maillian Bias (r)

Pipeline was founded by the equally young and dynamic Natalia Oberti Noguera (see #21), to train women who have some money - they're usually already philanthropists - to become angel investors. Only 16% of women-owned firms seek angel funding (25% of those get it). Currently, 21% of angel investors are women - a big leap from last year, one Pipeline has contributed to and wants to continue to fuel. The idea is that if more angel investors are women, more female-owned companies are likely to receive funding. Here are a few takeaways from today's event, mostly tips for entrepreneurs:

• Bias said one major turnoff for an investor is an entrepreneur who is not prepared. Potential investors will have many questions and she says when she asks a fairly simple question of an entrepreneur, such as, 'What would you do if you and your business partner parted ways?' and they can't answer, it's a major warning sign. That, and not having thought through a whole slew of potential money questions.

• If you email an investor and he/she hasn't got back to you in 24 hours, do not take to Twitter to chase them down. This has happened to Bias and she called it 'obnoxious' behavior. By all means follow up, but give it a while, and think about the way you're coming across (this seems obvious but apparently it escapes a lot of people).

• As nearly always happens at these kinds of events, Bias, a single parent of two young children, was asked how she managed work and family. She was refreshingly open about this: it wasn't a problem. Her kids are part of her life, her work is part of her life, and that's that. There is no conflict. She said her kids boast about speeches she has given and like to play 'conference calls' and meeting planning with friends when they came over to their house. They think she's cool. She didn't seem remotely stressed about this. Part of me wonders if this is an entrepreneur thing, the other part reflects that Bias was only in her early twenties when she had her first child, and perhaps it's easier to integrate everything when you haven't had that much time to think about it. Again, though, this comes back to entrepreneurship - Bias has never had a traditional job, so she hasn't had to worry about maternity leave or re-integrating into a job and how that company will treat her once she's back. A lot of women in corporate life report their career problems began after they had kids. It was good to hear from someone for whom the oft-cited 'juggle' isn't a big deal (yes, she has a nanny, and she is not struggling financially, which makes all this a lot easier).

• Natalia Oberti Noguera made a couple of points that came out of a recent conference she attended. First, she said another conference attendee had announced that as far as women and people of color go, you can't do a Mark Zuckerberg and drop out of college to become an entrepreneur - 'they need a brand', she said. What works for young white guys doesn't work for everyone. We are seen differently by investors (who are mostly white males) depending on our traditional place in the culture. Talking of women of color, I found out about the group Michelle O Brunch, which caters to 'ambitious African-American' women from 25-44, according to its founder, who was at today's event. 

• Second, Oberti Noguera mentioned that the 'money' part of the conference took place on Sunday and that it was not very well attended. Which, obviously, is a shame if you're an entrepreneur or an investor hoping to make connections. This reflected something I noticed at a women's summit I went to last month. Saturday was the final day, and there was a half hour talk on managing your finances that took place around lunchtime. The speaker, Manisha Thakoor, was excellent and funny; I learned a lot. But the room really emptied out when her talk was announced. It's worth repeating in the hope we can recognize this and change things: many women are terrified of and/or bored by money. We hope to somehow avoid discussing it. Even female entrepreneurs do this. A successful business owner I interviewed last year told me many women she mentors say they don't want to grow their companies because they're afraid of their finances. They want to keep things small and 'manageable'. Oberti Noguera told me that some of Pipeline's female angel investors, after their training, have told her that training has helped them better manage their own finances. 

• Finally, a question I didn't get to ask at the event: did any of you read this piece by Gotham Gal Joanne Wilson? In it Wilson, an investor, says she wishes women entrepreneurs would lighten up a bit when they meet with her. The men have a breezy ease of interaction, she says, whereas often women come across as intense and serious. But as many women know, the way we come across to others, especially in a business context, is a truly fine line. One of my correspondents says bitter experience has taught her to err on the side of breezy/slightly ditzy, as she was previously accused at work of being overly serious. Commenters on the Wilson post say the opposite. I'd love to hear what people think. Post a comment below if you get a chance.

Sponsorship vs. mentorship, and the way women see work relationships

July 11, 2013

"I had assumed that people would know what I wanted to do [in my career]. But I needed to actually say it." - Gaenor Bagley, PwC, quoted in the FT

The first part of that quote is something a lot of women will probably nod their heads at. Many feel a) 'Surely it's obvious what I want, after all, here I am, beavering away for everyone to see' and b) 'It's inappropriate to articulate my desire for advancement - won't people look on me as too forward? Surely my work speaks for itself.' (It doesn't.)

The piece quoting Gaenor Bagley of consultancy PwC ran in the Financial Times this week, but as their pieces are behind a paywall, I'm writing about it here. The story is essentially about how having a sponsor, rather than a mentor, truly is the key to getting more women into leadership roles. A sponsor is someone who will advocate for you and put their own reputation on the line for you. In other words, a sponsor is someone who believes in you utterly, because otherwise they wouldn't risk their own reputation. A mentor is someone who is there to give advice and show you the ropes, but won't necessarily go to bat for you. Here's a revealing quote from the Financial Times piece - the bold highlighting is my own:

"PwC, frustrated at the lack of pro­gress made by women in reaching senior positions, decided to launch the Female Partner Sponsorship programme in 2010. The board identified 26 female partners – including Ms Bagley – who had “senior leadership potential”, in the words of Sarah Churchman, who oversees the firm’s diversity programme. They were matched with senior male executives who introduced them to their contacts and involved them in high-profile assignments. Three years later, the firm was surprised at the results: 60 per cent of the women had moved into a leadership role, such as joining the executive board, or were running a business unit; 90 per cent had been promoted." 

Clearly there aren't nearly enough senior women to act as sponsors to those lower down in an organization, so in most cases, if you want to sponsor, you'll be seeking out a man. The piece also quotes Sylvia Ann Hewlett of the Center for Talent Innovation. She has a book coming out in a couple of months with an unequivocal title - Forget a Mentor, Find a Sponsor. Hewlett brings up the way women view relationships and how that can hamper us at work. Women tend to see work relationships as friendships, not something to be 'used' for advancement. This applies with networking too - a lot of women express discomfort with or disdain for the idea of networking because it seems icky to them - too transactional, a bit dirty. Women are, in general, very 'relational' people, thanks to millennia of looking after others. Men don't see a problem with having a work friendship and also using it to help them succeed.

Obviously, more women need to a) articulate what they want from their career to someone higher up the food chain at work and b) start to see relationships at the office as something that can help us succeed, and not judge other women who are already playing that game.

Finally, this talk of sponsorship is all very well for people who work in organizations, but what if, like me, your work on your own? I'd be very interested to hear from anyone who's an entrepreneurial type or freelancer about how they have sought and found mentors or sponsors. Reply in the comments below or shoot me an email at ashley [at] thebroadexperience dot com.

Mean girls at work

July 2, 2013

“The idea of the Women’s Movement makes sense in theory...'let’s all bind together'...the sisterhood...it’s beautiful. The problem is we bound together to enter a male workplace - a place that was created by men for men.”

- Michelle Villalobos

Several months ago this piece by Peggy Drexler on 'queen bee syndrome' came out in the Wall Street Journal. I then wrote a post acknowledging that all was not perfect in the office, but ultimately defending female bosses and naming a couple of great ones of my own. After it went up I got a long email from a listener to the podcast who had read it. Sure, she said, there may be some good female bosses out there, but every experience she'd had with a woman boss was awful - she was undermined, sneered at, and bullied, to the extent that she actually left that profession (academia) and started anew elsewhere. I decided then that at some point I'd have to address what seems like a politically incorrect topic in these days of supportive 'Lean In circles', but that, secretly, most women know to be true: women can be absolutely horrible to other women at work.

Miami businesswoman Michelle Villalobos knows this all too well. I first spoke to Michelle for a public radio story two years ago and have kept up with her online. Recently, she published a short e-book called The Stiletto in Your Back - The Good Girl's Guide to Backstabbers, Bullies, Gossips and Queen Bees at Work. She went into WLRN's Miami studios last week to talk to me about all this. The WLRN version of the story will air tonight (July 2) at 5.50p.m. and the longer, podcast version of our interview will be released next week.

Michelle has had some hellish experiences herself, but I must say they make excellent listening. There was the fashion magazine she ended up fleeing to protect herself from further backstabbing, and more recently the group business venture where one woman gradually and skillfully managed to turn all the other women against eachother and eject them one by one...Michelle was the last to go, but only woke up to these machinations just before the axe fell.

She's done a lot of research into the origins of female aggression, which I found fascinating. In short, it all goes back to the savannah - millions of years ago women couldn't be openly aggressive like men, because losing their lives in a fight put their children at too much risk. So women evolved to compete and mete out their aggression in underhanded ways, at which we still excel. 

She has advice about how to cope if you're the victim of an office bully or of unpleasant office gossip - and she strongly advises women not to share too much information about their private lives with other women at work. She says over-sharing is a huge source of workplace misery for women once a relationship sours. She also advocates calling a bully out on her behavior, but only once you are well armed with information. She concedes that in some cases the only answer may be to leave that workplace and find another, friendlier one instead - which, admittedly, may not be as easy to do as it was before 2009.

Tune into WLRN's live stream tonight at 5.50p.m. or to the podcast, which will be packed with more information - it'll be released after the holiday weekend (or you could do both - in fact, why not?)

Gagging on diversity

June 27, 2013

"My boss said, 'I've never had a skirt work for me before. I don't know what to do.'"

- Shirley Engelmeier

When Shirley Engelmeier began her career in the consumer products business in the '80s, women were still viewed with suspicion, at least in some quarters of corporate America. "People thought you were a token placement," Engelmeier told me this week, "That you got your job because you were a woman." It took Engelmeier, the CEO of consultancy InclusionINC and author of Inclusion: the New Competitive Business Advantage, several years to realize just how tricky life could be for a hardworking, ambitious young woman in sales.

"My numbers were the sixth best out of 26, and my buddy down the hall was 26^th out of 26^th, and he got the job," she says of one occasion. Politics played a part, as it always does. She says men hung out with other men and asked other men (and their wives) to dinner at eachother's houses. As the quote at the top shows, her boss was pretty clueless about what to do with Engelmeier. She didn't get asked to those dinners, anyway.

"I love Sheryl Sandberg, she nails the problem [of the lack of women's advancement], but her solution’s off," says Engelmeier. "Probably two decades before she was in the workforce I was raising my hand, asking for a seat at the table, and nobody cared." 

You could argue that things have changed tremendously since, giving professional women today a much better chance of being recognized when they make an effort to put themselves forward. But Engelmeier isn't so sure. We met the day after she attended a conference at The Conference Board on diversity and inclusion "and some companies still don't care", she says. I think the word 'diversity' is an automatic turnoff to a lot of white people, especially men. They associate it - and Engelmeier backed me on this - with ticking off some box HR told them they have to fill, but they don't attach any real value to it. Engelmeier says she's always "slightly depressed" after attending such conferences when she reflects on how relatively little has changed since she started thinking about all this properly in the '90s.

"After two decades of managing diversity it hasn’t worked because we didn’t link it to business…it was seen as an HR talent acquisition frenzy...and we excluded white men – men think this is for some other group, so they feel excluded and terrified," she says. (This is something that came up in show 7, 'Non-white and female'.) Engelmeier's work is all about improving business results for clients through employing teams made up of different types of people - women and people of different ethnicities (and of course a cross between the two).

"MIT researcher Tom Malone has shown diverse viewpoints will come up with a better set of outcomes, and in his case he was saying with women on the team, than [if the team were made up of] the same like-minded geniuses."

Engelmeier founded her consultancy 12 years ago and how has clients across the US and the world. Yet, she says, too many CEOs still don't get it, even while they're aware of changing demographics in the US and around the globe, and the fact that women make 80 percent of purchasing decisions. "It’s not that complicated!" she says. "Who are the key employee demographics to help you sell baby food and design cars?" Back in her own consumer goods days, diaper brands were entirely staffed by men.