Podcast: Encouraging Advocates for Gender Equity in Your Workplace

HR.com Live! podcast with guest Jeffery Tobias Halter on the four solutions to creating male gender advocates

Are women really being heard in your workplace? Do you feel that they have limited opportunities for growth? What should your leaders do about it?

In this 15-minute podcast, Jeffery Tobias Halter and our host Dr. Patti Fletcher uncover the Four Solutions to Creating Male Gender Advocates and the importance of having a more inclusive workplace.

Jeffery is a Gender Strategist and President of YWomen, a strategic consulting company focused on engaging men and women’s leadership advancement. He is the former Director of Diversity Strategy for the Coca-Cola Company and also the author of two books -- WHY WOMEN, The Leadership Imperative to Advancing Women & Engaging Men, and Selling to Men, Selling to Women. He is a two-time TEDx speaker and his clients include Walmart, Barclays, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Bacardi, and dozens of other Fortune 500 companies. 

Jeffery, one of the things that I learned through the conversations you and I have had, through being in the audience watching you speak, you just kind of cut through the noise and you get to the “What’s the problem? Now that we understand the problem, what’s the solution?” critical moments when we’re trying to understand really the context of where we are, where the challenges are, can you talk a little bit about the critical moment?

As I worked with companies, what I want to do is talk to them about their pain points. This is often a missed step. So many companies have women’s initiatives but they have no strategy, they have a bunch of disjointed programs. But if you approach it like a business model, how is it tied to sales, how is it tied to operating profit, how is it tied to company reputation, then all of a sudden it takes on a different context. 

The three reasons to have an integrated women’s leadership strategy are to grow revenue, improve operating profit through talent and engagement, and to enhance your company reputation. The reason that the tipping point is coming, there was a great quote from the recent McKinsey Women and the Workforce report and it said “Seventy-eight percent of organizations say they articulate the business case for change for women. But only 16% back it up with numbers and hold people accountable.” So what’s missing in this equation is senior leadership, and by the way still 80% men in those companies, I believe that men are 80% of the problem in advancing women and I think we’re 80% of the solution. 

So we’ve got to engage men, but you’ve got to engage them in business-speak. So what are the qualitative and quantitative metrics that you have? That’s a big missing step. And there’s one other key data, and that is that men and middle managers are only engaged at about a 38% level in any diversity and inclusion initiative. Again, as a business person, you don’t have to convince women and people of color this is a good idea. You’ve got to look at where the ROI is and if I can train and convince men and middle managers that it presents the greatest ROI on my investment. This is the approach. It’s fact-based and it’s data-driven and it’s built on their pain points. 

It’s an interesting concept. Me having been in this space for as long as I have been and being a woman in technology, it’s incredibly frustrating. We need to figure out how to get the men engaged, and it always changes. It’s about meeting people where they are to get to where they need to be. Your job is not to make it okay. Your job is to meet people where they are. Jeffery, I think you’ll agree, we’re talking cultural transformation here. This is a disruption topic. 

Yeah, absolutely! I talk about the fact that women are the next great business disruptor, and you also have to look nationally and globally at what's going on with women. Women’s voices are gathering. I believe that women are beyond the tipping point and it’s driven by a couple of things.

In California, they just passed legislation on mandating women on boards. Now, three is a start but if you look at it, the penalty if you’re not there by 2022 is $600,000. It sounds like a lot of money but it’s really not to big companies. But when you’re the one company who shows up in social media, this impacts your company reputation. Think about this; company reputation is what’s keeping CEOs up at night. Look at Uber, Uber lost almost $20 million the day that the Susan Fowler blog dropped and this is another wake-up call for senior leaders. If you don’t have your house in order, everywhere, millennial women are not calling HR. They’ll post in a blog. You’re going to be front-page news on a Wallstreet Journal, and now you’re playing defense and so there’s a Yin and Yang here. 

I'm an optimist. I work with business leaders on the positive, more revenue, better engagement, better talent, but you need to do this as a moat for when those circumstances happen and you’re ready for it.

Jeffery, you just said something that completely just erupted some kind of disruption in my own unconscious bias, and that is you already believe that women are already past the tipping point and it’s men that we need to help so that they can meet us where we are. That’s huge! I never heard someone say it like that. The women are there; we need the men to come to and then join us. 

So let’s talk about that because there are barriers. Can you talk to me about the most prominent barrier you’re seeing when it comes to getting men actively engaged?

Certainly. There are actually four that I found doing this D&I work for 20 years and more focused on women for about eight. The four barriers are: 

• empathy - “I don’t believe that men and women are having a different experience in the workplace,” 
• apathy - “I don’t understand what the big deal is,”
• lack of accountability - “If it’s not important to my boss or my paycheck, why should I care?” and
• fear. 

Men are walking on eggshells. We are scared to death we might say or do the wrong thing and so we choose to do nothing. So I’ve come up with a very simple set of solutions that mirror these exactly. They are: listen, learn, lead, and have the will. Let me unpack these for you.

So, empathy, men have to genuinely listen and go out and talk to a woman and take a woman that you trust to coffee. Or if you’re a woman listening to this podcast, invite a man out and ask one simple question, “Patti, are you having a different experience at work than I am? What don’t I know?” By the way, you’re not gonna say anything in the first 10 minutes. You don’t want to be the flag bearer for all things women, well you do, but most women don’t. Then ask again, and in the next 10 minutes, she’s going to come up with something and just shut up and listen. Don’t say, you know, “We’ve got a program for that. We’ve got a policy for that.” And then ask the third time. In that last 10 minutes, you’re going to hear root cause issues you had no idea existed.

I’ll give you a real quick story. I was doing this quick presentation for a group of senior scientists, and I made a statement that “Women’s voices are talked over more than men, 8-10 times a day.” This guy called me a month after my talk. He said, “Jeff, I’m a scientist. I need data. I did not believe you.” So I sat in my own staff meeting and I took notes, and every time a woman’s voice was talked over or ignored I put a checkmark down and when I reached 40 I said, “Oh my God, We’ll have a new staff meeting protocol. Every voice is going to be heard.” This seems so simple and it’s such a big deal. 

To self-apathy, you’ve got to learn it. What do I mean by that? I mean we have to operationalize the business case, goes back to my very first statement that we carry a conceptual idea of the business case but we’ve got to learn how to operationalize it. By learning, that means you’re going to have to go out and learn, and talk, and put in qualitative and quantitative metrics. 

Accountability, this is when you have to lead. Leaders need to lead. It’s very easy for me as a middle-manager to say, “You know what, my boss isn’t doing this, why should I?” I’ll give you the perfect example, how many times have we heard the story that there’s a job opening and you go to Jim, and you say, “Jim, do you have a woman ready for this?” and he says, “You know Jeff, I just don’t,” and I go “Yeah, I understand. Let’s go with Bob.” What happens is that leaders need to lead. When I go to Jim, “Do you have a woman ready?,” he says, “No, I don’t.”  I need to say “Well, what are you doing to get one ready? That’s leadership. And now, by the way, Jim, if you can’t develop people, why do I need you?” That’s what leaders do; leaders ask tough questions and they get results and I think it’s a complete lack of leadership in this space.

I’m going to give a 2-minute blurb on me too right now, you know this notion we hear this from the Lean In statistics. Men are afraid to mentor women or sponsor women or travel with women or be alone with women. This is a complete lack of leadership. Senior leaders need to come out and say, “We can’t stop working with half of our salesforce, we can’t stop working with half of our staff, of our people. You need to travel together.” This is where leaders need to do something really bizarre and that is, pull out your annual report where you have 6 values listed that you wrote 120 years ago and say, “If we’re living these values, these behaviors will not be tolerated.”  And by the way, we need to embrace the development of others. So weak leadership is a huge one. 

But then the last, with everything that I talked about so far in my mind is head reason, facts, and data and things like this. The last one I think is a heart connection, that is, have the will and the will means you want to choose to be an advocate. I use that choice mindfully because there is a lot of talk out there now about allies and I think that is too weak. Advocacy comes from a personal connection. It’s very tough to advocate for race if you don’t know a black person; it’s very tough to advocate for gay rights when you don’t know anyone who is gay. 

What I will tell you, believe it or not, men never make the connection that if we’re not advocating for women in the workforce, we’re hurting our sisters and our wives and our daughters. I don’t want men to go out and treat women in the workforce like their daughters and pat their head in a patronizing way, but I tell this story first-hand because it came to me very late in life. Men put their heads down and go to work and we never make the connection that if I’m not correcting bias, if I’m not talking about gender equity, what kind of workplace am I leaving for my daughter? I think the way we’re gonna drive change in this country for women is to get a bunch of pissed off men to realize the responsibility they have to the people in their lives. 

There is an actual Harvard study and in my own research of women on boards and women on the C-suite, it’s the men with daughters. “Will my daughter have the same opportunity as my son?” It’s backed up with research. You talked about the scientist who collected the data around how many times women were spoken over. I’ve had a few female clients I’ve worked with that did the same thing only to have the men to push back. I would probably listen to a woman more than I would listen to a man on something that impacts my life so much because there’s an acknowledgment, an understanding, and you speak the language. So the importance of what you’re saying is men, reaching out to other men, advocating for a different culture is essential!

Probably most of us will say we have the mindset of “We value everybody. Let’s harness all talents! We’d have more women if I could find them.” but it’s really on the action. So do you have a call to action you can leave with us?

Yes. It sounds so simple but it’s going to start you on a path to advocacy and I go back to the listen piece. My goal in life is for us to have one gender conversation a day, whether it’s a staff meeting, whether that’s a one-on-one. Once I start to understand the issue, I would choose to get curious.

Focus on the pain point and have this be part of the solution. Jeffery, you talk a lot about men being advocates, like you are, you’re an advocate, you’d think that it’d be easy but it’s really hard. Do you have any tools that can help out listeners to be able to understand where they are and how they can be better advocates?

If you go to my website www.ywomen.biz, there’s a tool called the male advocate profile. It’s 20 questions. The first 10 questions ask about how you think about gender equity and the next 10 questions are actions you take. By the way, Patti, there’s also a gender advocate profile for women to take because many women think about being gender advocates but they don’t take any action. So you will see a continuum there of steps you can take to move you from wherever you are to advocacy. It’s free, and we don’t keep the data. It’s just really a tool, but it will help you build a roadmap to increase your role to be an advocate.

To learn more about how you can create male gender advocates in your organization you can listen to the full 15-minute podcast here: 
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	Dr. Patti Fletcher, Chief Disrupter and Equity Advocate.
	Jeffery Tobias Halter, Gender Strategist and President, YWomen