KARLA PORTER

My Repost from Lip­stick Dis­cus­sions Dis­par­ity of Influ­ence with Mau­reen Sharib on ere community

The Glass Ceil­ing Act was was enacted with only minor changes as Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1991. Four years later in 1995 a 257 page report was pro­duced, the result of a 21 per­son panel (76% female).

The sta­tis­tics reported at that time showed that equal­ity in Cor­po­rate Amer­ica was a mess and the prog­no­sis in the report pre­dicted lit­tle if any improve­ment in the near future. The research found rel­a­tively few women and minori­ties in the pipeline posi­tions most likely to lead to the top. There was lit­tle hope for women and minori­ties in crit­i­cal career paths for senior man­age­ment posi­tions which require tak­ing on respon­si­bil­i­ties most directly related to the cor­po­rate bot­tom line.

To this day, the few women and minori­ties found at the high­est lev­els tend to be in staff posi­tions, such as human resources, or research, or admin­is­tra­tion, rather than line posi­tions, such as mar­ket­ing, sales, or production.

If you sense deja vú it could be because this topic mir­rors recent pop­u­lar dis­cus­sion ask­ing the questions

• Is HR dead?

• How can we increase our value proposition?

• How can we get a seat at the table?

• How can we be taken more seri­ously and be seen more importantly?

Look at those ques­tions and change the word­ing around a lit­tle bit. Per­son­ally, I see a lot of paralells.

So, it irri­tates me when I hear moan­ing like

If I hear the cliché seat at the table one more time I’m gonna puke.

What if I just want to be average?

I want to puke. Because we gave up. It’s our own fault. We shouldn’t have to over com­pen­sate, over­come stereo­types, work for less or work harder to get the same.

But the fact is… oh yes we do. It isn’t going to fall unto us like manna from the sky. The gov­ern­ment passed ammend­ments and acts and we still don’t have it. It’s not even easy to fix like other dif­fi­cult to achieve mile­stones that just required a vote. Face it, Women’s Suf­frage was a 70 year struggle.

I also know that boys are taught through tough love and con­tact sports to be aggres­sive  and com­pet­i­tive from a young age and girls are taught to “play nice” with dolls and stuffed ani­mals — it’s all train­ing for pri­mary rolls in life. And when it doesn’t turn out like our soci­etal con­di­tion­ing has man­dated for­ever, that girls should be sub­mis­sive and boys dom­i­nant –girls are bitches and boys are sissies.

I’m not a mother but if I had a child I would be read­ing her bed­time sto­ries in another lan­guage, word prob­lems, mak­ing games out of mem­o­riz­ing all the bones in the body. She would study mar­tial arts and I wouldn’t be read­ing her fairy tales about being saved by knights in shin­ing armor.

Why mask real­ity and then be sur­prised at the outcome?

We’re always talk­ing about best prac­tices but we have a really small lens we look through when we look at the map. We won’t take into con­sid­er­a­tion mod­els of flex­i­bil­ity, extended mater­nal leaves for births, day­cares in work­places, real vaca­tion time and time to take it from coun­tries where it works any less than we’ll accept the truth that it is noth­ing short of a crime for the rich­est coun­try on earth to have home­less peo­ple liv­ing on the streets and an infant mor­tal­ity rate that’s inexcuseable.

There’s a lot of Stock­holm Syn­drome going on, we need to wake up and I’m just get­ting warmed up…