Is Lean In really gaslighting?

Posted on by Stuart Murray
Photo Courtesy of Drew Altizer.

Can you pull yourself up by your bootstraps to overcome an injustice you have faced? It really does depend. There’s a thriving debate about whether women should act as individuals or as part of a collective when fighting for equality. Quartz recently ran an insightful article about the impact of Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In and her related TED talk. While Lean In has received a great deal of critique from all corners, the article in Quartz argues that Sandberg negated systematic discrimination and told women they can personally overcome discrimination by taking individual action.

The Quartz article is titled All Career Advice for Women is a Form of Gaslighting. Gaslighting is when an abuser contradicts your understanding of reality, perhaps telling you the opposite of what you know is true, in a persistent manner that causes you to question your sanity. The key moment is when the abuser says you’re making things up in your head, or that you’re going crazy. If you’re in good shape, you identify that the problem is the abuser and take action. Otherwise, you could endure mistreatment for years. This definition doesn’t really match Sheryl Sandberg’s critique. Sandberg rightfully describes structural issues about how women’s careers are held back by the system, and then proceeds to offer tips to get ahead. It’s individuals engaging with society, and her advice is fair game.

What the Research Says

The Quartz article and a similar overview in Harvard Business Review summarize fresh research from December 2018. (For the full study, see Kim, J. Y., Fitzsimons, G. M., & Kay, A. C. (2018). Lean In messages increase attributions of women’s responsibility for gender inequality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 115(6), 974-1001.)

The paper covers six large-sample studies that look at how people judge women’s inequality based on messages they are fed. The main variable is a polarized portrayal of Sheryl Sandberg’s critique. In one sample, researchers only quoted Sandberg’s analysis of systemic discrimination, and people who saw this message came away with the impression that sexism was society’s responsibility and that we need to band together to change the system. In the other sample, they only quoted Sandberg’s advice on what individual women can do to improve their lot in life and get past everyday sexism. In that case people perceived that it was women’s individual responsibility to overcome sexism, and that women themselves are the cause of the sexism.

This notion that women cause sexism is victim-blaming. The researchers attribute this thinking to a kind of mental gymnastics that people indulge in to get past the discomfort that there is injustice in the world. But logically, victim-blaming is malfunctioning thinking. If you take reality seriously you must perceive injustice as it occurs and contribute voice and effort to remedy it.

The academic article is most concerned that people can’t disentangle causation and solution in their own minds:

“Responsibility for the problem, in this model, describes responsibility for the origin of the problem, or causal responsibility. Responsibility for the solution, in contrast, describes responsibility for finding a solution, or control over outcomes. …the two forms of responsibility are conceptually distinct, but will often be correlated.” [Emphasis added]

And indeed the research did find that the two were mixed up together in peoples’ head such that people became individualists or collectivists based on what messages they were fed.

How the Story Evolved Beyond the Research

Then it gets sticky. There are individual reasons why some people thrive and others fail, much as there are systemic factors that change a person’s odds of doing well. Therefore, there is a combination of collective and individual strategies to pursue women’s equality. If a woman is born petite, she can take up kickboxing and stare down physical intimidation. Conversely, if a woman had chosen a career which streamed her into a lower-wage workplace, she could still sign a union card and participate in a group effort that improves her life chances.

Even if people agreed that inequality was societal, that does not prove that all solutions must be collective. Social justice advocates are quick to acknowledge that you need a diversity of tactics to achieve your goals. It is not authoritatively true that individualism and collectivism fall on some great divide, with one being good and the other being bad.   

We all need to aspire to a nuanced view, but that’s not where critics took things. The authors of the Quartz article and the study itself seize on the one-half of the research sample that deliberately skews Sandberg’s message as individualist, asserting that do-it-yourself (DIY) feminism is bad news.

These people are like those tourists that went around Europe taking snapshots of themselves at the locations of the fictional events in The Da Vinci Code. Although there are real individualists out there, in this study Sandberg’s self-loathing misogynistic individualism was an abstraction fabricated for research purposes only. Now, social critics are weighing-in that if choosing between two polar opposites – a fabricated individualism or a fabricated collectivism – women must favour collectivism as “correct.” But the problem is not that causation and solution are actually twinned and people must choose between individualism and collectivism. It’s that if we revert to polarized thinking, individualists tend to win.

How To Actually Become an Executive

There are better sources to turn to if you are trying to get promoted. Elsewhere in the TED Talks, Susan Colantuono delivers a talk entitled The Career Advice You Probably Didn’t Get. Women are already well-represented in middle-management, the question is why do they not get beyond that. Colantuono found that a good executive must be good at three things:

  1. Use the greatness in you (individual effectiveness)
  2. Engage the greatness in others (leadership)
  3. Achieve and sustain extraordinary outcomes (business, strategic, and financial acumen)

The first two items are important for getting into middle management. When women are given career advice it is disproportionately in areas in the first two categories: self-promote, get a mentor, network, and speak up. Corporate talent and performance management systems are highly devoted to engaging the greatness in others, the second of the two competencies. That’s not going to make a difference for this problem.

That is because when assessing executive potential, the third item is valued twice as heavily as each of the other two. Women have truly been kept in the dark that they need to know more about finance and strategy in order to get an executive job. To clarify, society has withheld this information from women (i.e. the causation is collective). However, because each person’s best learning hinges on individual interest and personal goals, women need to determine that this advice is accurate and change their own course as individuals. That is, if becoming an executive is important to them.

The majority of executives (63%) perceive they do not have strategic alignment with everyone rowing in the same direction. Colantuono proposes that one of reasons why there is not strategic alignment is that those women who are half of middle management have not received clear messaging that they need to be “…focused on the business, where it’s headed, and their role in taking it there…” The culprit is not clever-and-efficient sexism, it’s incompetence but with a gendered filter. It’s squarely within the responsibility of men in power to remedy this issue, if they plan on being any good at their day jobs. Boards, CEOs, HR Executives, and individual managers must all change their mindsets in order to turn this around.

In this context it doesn’t seem at all like women have to choose between a collective or individual orientation. Women aspiring to executive roles need to have a clear sense of the collective vision of the organization and figure out how they’re going to lead their team towards that collective purpose. If anything is gaslighting, it is the deliberate misquoting of Sandberg’s work. In her TED talk, Sandberg spends a fair amount of time describing appropriate trade-offs between women’s household collective orientation and their workplace collective orientation. Indeed in May of 2016, a year after her husband died, Sandberg acknowledged that “Some people felt that I did not spend enough time writing about the difficulties women face when they have an unsupportive partner or no partner at all. They were right…” She acknowledged this two years before the research that polarized her comments.

Women with busy careers make frequent trade-offs about when they will take care of themselves and when they will take care of the group. It will ever be circumstantial which decisions are the right ones, and which tactics will actually work. Nobody knows this better than the very social justice leaders who foster individual agency when they encourage vulnerable populations to pick up a picket sign and protest.

Sweating like a pig, feeling like a fox

Posted on by Stuart Murray

I lift weights because I was quite small as a kid. In grade two, a tall athletic kid named Micah spoke down to me. When I talked-back he threatened: “Watch yourself or there’s going to be trouble.” Things escalated and word got around. We ended up in on the gravel soccer field surrounded by older kids who stood shoulder-to-shoulder so the noon-hour supervisors couldn’t see. One kid showed me how to hold my fist, moving my thumb to the outside, then told me to aim for the nose. In the next two minutes, my opponent hurled verbal threats at me while I got him onto his back and bloodied his nose. The older kids pulled us apart, and said “great fight.”

There used to be a great divide between jocks and nerds. But it’s now obvious there is no meaningful line between a strong brain and a healthy body. You have to have your wholeact together in order to walk into meetings with calm and confidence.

The Effects of Fitness on Workplace Productivity

There is ample evidence that the benefits of physical health translate into intellectual and emotional health. For employers, that means improved bottom lines, as outlined in a 2003 Journal of Exercise Physiology article entitled, “The Relationship Between Fitness Levels and Employee’s Perceived Productivity, Job Satisfaction, and Absenteeism”. The authors are Matthew G. Wattles and Chad Harris.

The study looked at three indicators of workplace effectiveness and four indicators of physical wellbeing. Notably, not all fitness measures were associated with all workplace effectiveness indicators.

  • Muscular strength influenced productivity
  • Cardiovascular endurance influenced job satisfaction
  • Flexibility influenced absenteeism

Amongst those who had increased their activity levels, there was more than an 80% favourable response to questions about exercise affecting their quality of performance, ability to relax, think clearly, and concentrate. Experiencing less fatigue was a big deal because:

“Employees who have more muscular strength would not be as physically taxed as employees with lower strength levels. This may make the employees physical work feel less demanding and may have contributed to their feelings of increased productivity.”

In their literature review, the study cited one paper that found that “the average reported impact of fitness programs on absenteeism is between 0.5 and 2.0 days improvement in attendance/year and it is estimated that the improvement would translate to a dollar savings of 0.35 to 1.4% of payroll costs.”

It’s another case where doing the right thing and making more moneylead to similar conclusions.

Cardiovascular endurance, by contrast, creates a sense that everything is chill. Those with better cardio have less anxiety, more self-esteem, concentrate better, and are more satisfied. Interpretations beyond the evidence were that fitness increased work capacity, reduced minor illness, and provided “…relief from boredom, anxiety or pent-up aggression”.

I wonder if we could reduce aggression in the workplace – and in schools for that matter – if we just got more cardio into people’s lives. A lot of workplace issues relate to struggles between those with different levels of power. Yes, we can cultivate more meaningful conversations between those in the midst of a power imbalance. But people need to be physically calm in the first place.

Related to power imbalance is that results vary between men and women. Fitness improved sick-day absences for women by 32% whereas for men there was no change. This makes sense because fitness improvement is often about bringing women up to a level that already exists for men.

This Girl Can

The “This Girl Can” campaign out of the UK is a best-case scenario for inspiring people to get active. Sports England, a government agency, was concerned about the under-representation of women in sporting activities. In addition to an inspiring video-driven campaign homepage I also found an article in Campaign magazine which provides great drill-down.

The campaign started with a research base that identified that “by every measure, fewer women than men play sport regularly… despite the fact that 75% say they want to be more active.” Digging deeper, they found:

  • Women’s fear of judgment by others is the primary barrier to exercise. In particular, women fear being judged about their ability.
  • 44% of mothers feel guilty if they spend time on themselves instead of their family, in contrast to the fact that men having “hobbies” is encouraged.
  • 48% of women say that getting sweaty is not feminine so being seen sweating causes concerns about their appearance.

If you watch This Girl Can videos and read the write-ups you hear from women who are recovering from a major surgery, getting going after a breakup, or becoming active after having kids. These women had been put in certain place by their circumstances and the way they were born, and have decided to change their lives physically. The campaign created a manifesto:

“Women come in all shapes and sizes and all levels of ability. It doesn’t matter if you’re a bit rubbish or an expert. The point is you’re a woman and you’re doing something.”

Since the campaign, the number of women playing sport is up by 245,200 people over a 12-month period to the end of September 2015.

About the Self-Image of Muslim Women Kickboxers

Regarding all shapes and sizes, Asian Muslim women in Britain have a lot of extra work in overcoming the judgment of others. There’s a great article in Vice about a woman organizing a kickboxing studio geared entirely towards Muslim women. Khadijah Safari is a 5’4” Muay Thai boxing instructor who teaches classes in Milton Keynes, outside of London. In the past 10 years her community experienced a doubling in the size of the visible minority population, up to 26%, of whom 4.8% were Muslim.

The rising ethnic diversity and the occasional act of Islamist terrorism is now wrapped up in a toxic blowback about “British values” at the heart of the Brexit fiasco and open racism in the streets. Women wearing religious headdress feel particularly threatened, telling stories of being spat on and name-called. Instead of “going home” this vulnerable population can instead attend self-defence classes. In these women-only classes, the women remove their hijabs and cover the windows, while they build their muscles, skills, and emotional resilience.

One participant is a 33-year old woman named Afshah who has been in the UK for eight years:

“…I have three kids at home, and I want something for myself,” she says. “…before I came here, I lived in Worcestershire and people would shout ‘Muslim!’ at me in the street. I felt so insecure. I didn’t want to go out. This class has given me a little bit more confidence.”

These women have a great icon to look up to. Ruqsana Begum – known as the Warrior Princess – was the British female boxing champion in 2016 and at the time the only Muslim woman at the top of her sport in the UK. She’s petite, has used her sport to overcome depression, and has gone on to build a business designing and selling sports hijabs. She has a great interview in highsnobiety.com where she sums it up: “I guess for me, no matter what you’re doing it’s all about being the best version of yourself and what you tell yourself is what becomes reality. It starts in your mind and then you make it happen. It’s not how many times you get knocked down, it’s how many times you can pick yourself up.”

Can a generalist defuse a bomb?

Posted on by Stuart Murray
  • James Bond might not be an explosives expert.  Photo “EP-08-M007” by Johan Oomen.

Have you ever thought you could defuse a bomb in 7.3 seconds? Have you ever wondered if you could undo handcuffs with a bobby pin and break out of an isolated cell, beating down a dozen well-armed men? Those are specialized skills developed by super spies who have dedicated their lives to the pursuit of espionage. And they are also fabricated in the movies.

But back in reality, we are left to wonder what variety of super skills can one person develop over a lifetime.

To explore what it takes to develop diverse skills, we start with the Wikipedia article about Jack of All Trades. There is an implied dispute about whether it’s good to be a jack of all trades, as people forget the latter part to the expression which delivers the insult, “jack of all trades, master of none.” Interestingly, in Japanese, the expression is “many talents is no talent.” In Russian, one expression is “specialist in wide range” which can be a compliment or an insult depending on the level of irony. In Dutch, the phrase is “12 trades, 13 accidents.” It’s a fun read if you like insults.

But that’s just folklore.  Maybe we should seek some actual evidence on this topic?

Elite Athletes Provide the Data About Specialization

There is a custom that the title of “World’s Greatest Athlete” goes to the reigning gold-medal champion of the decathlon. Decathlon involves 10 track-and-field activities with varied measurements such as sprint-time and throwing distance. They can’t add raw scores, so decathlon has a points system that measures excellence and gives equal weight to each activity. 

Decathlon points provide an opportunity to compare the performance of decathlete generalists to the gold-medal specialists in each activity.

Usain Bolt posted the world record in the 100-metre dash – at 9.58 seconds – for which he would be assigned 1,202 decathlon points. The “decathlon best” or best performance by a decathlete is for Damian Warner who did that run in 10.15 seconds, for which he was assigned 1,059 points. Bolt’s performance is six per cent better than Damian Warner’s. But Warner also holds the decathlon best for 110m hurdles and won Olympic bronze for hurdles in 2016. Given the acceleration and deceleration required for hurdles, there is a prevailing view that Bolt could not win a medal at hurdles. 

Would you rather be the best in the world at sprinting, or the best of the generalists in multiple sports?

Under the current decathlon scoring system, a 10-person team of world-record holders of each sport could get 12,568 points combined, which is 16% stronger than the 10-person team made of decathlon bests. In elite sports, generalists function at 84% of the effectiveness of specialists. Specialists are better if exactly one skill is needed.  If you have the option of creating a team, a rag-tag band of specialist weirdos might give you that 16% bump you desperately need. The drama is in the exceptional teamwork.

Single-person efforts requiring many skills are best suited for a generalist.  Otherwise, a diverse team of specialists will tend to outperform.

But teams are not allowed in the decathlon. For single-person efforts demanding many skills you are better-off assigning a generalist like Damian Warner. Movie series like Indiana Jones, James Bond, and Jason Bourne are built around the idea that one person has all of those special skills that are needed to save the day, if not the world. But there’s something off about those movies. The hero’s sidekick is stereotyped as a less-capable younger woman who might become sexually available in the next two hours. That might not be a viable model for a respectful workplace, career navigation, and statutory compliance.

Mathematics in the Post-Soviet Era

But back to the math.  In an article in the Harvard Business Review researchers looked at changes in the research performance of mathematicians between 1980 and 2000. The Soviet Union, which had exceptional mathematicians, had a political collapse in the middle of this time period. Soviet mathematicians were set free and unleashed onto the world, disrupting mathematics globally. This change generated a natural experiment for research outcomes before and after the Soviet collapse. It was also possible to categorize mathematicians into those publishing in a single specialization (i.e. specialists) and those publishing in multiple fields (i.e. generalists).

Generalists are stronger in stable environments and specialists are stronger in environments of change

The research question was, what is the relative performance of specialists vs. generalists, in those fields that were stable relative to those that experienced disruption? In brief, they found that generalists are stronger in stable environments and specialists are stronger in environments of change. In those fields that were stable and evolving slowly, specialists under-perform generalists by 22%. The generalists were able to draw from diverse knowledge in the broader mathematics domain and accomplish more. In environments experiencing dramatic change, specialists outperform generalists by 83%. Those specialists were able to use the new knowledge that was at the frontier of their specialized field, pushing the boundaries far more.

These findings are specific to scientific creativity, not to be confused with other types of performance. We have no idea how mathematicians would lead a team of staff in a wet lab, in so far as mathematicians understand wet labs, or staff. Also, publications are elite performance. There are areas of good-enough performance where very basic knowledge is the most important thing that day, such as choosing to be rude to a potential assailant or getting someone who is suicidal to a therapist. There will always be a place in the world for some general knowledge.

How to Allocate Your 10,000 Hours

Malcolm Gladwell’s 2008 book Outliers asserted that it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to master a particular skill. Gladwell simplified and popularized research by a man named K. Anders Eriksson, who had devoted much of his career to identifying how people become excellent. I read some of Eriksson’s work, and he didn’t actually proclaim a 10,000-hours magic number. It was an approximation. Eriksson was also describing what is required to become world-class at something done at the performance or tournament level, such as piano or chess. 

You’re still pretty good at 5,000 hours and you can become even better by putting in 20,000 hours.  For example, “Sully” Sullenberger had logged 20,000 hours of experience as a pilot before landing US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River and saving 155 lives in the process.  (Thanks again Sully). 

In Outliers, Gladwell noted that you only have enough time and learning-juice in one life to completely master two fields, for a total of 20,000 hours of deliberate practice. Those trying for a third kind of mastery run out of time. If you need be really good at more than two things, you can’t really aim to be the world’s best. 

In my review of Emily Wapnick’s TED Talk, I summarized what you can do if you become restless in your career: Get into a new field every couple of years. Wapnick encourages those who have found their true calling to pursue that one thing. But for those who just can’t stay in one lane, there are ways to make a good life with what you have learned in multiple fields. There are unique, one-of-a-kind ways of advancing a combination of strengths.

Is it better to be a generalist or a specialist? The correct answer is to listen to yourself. You are the best at learning those things that are important to you. If the drive comes from inside, that is where you’ll find real motivation. And that motivation is the magic. If you look around, nobody is filming an action movie in which you have to establish yourself as the hero. You’re the only one who is always watching, so play to that audience.  Do your best, and do it for yourself.

Swearing makes people stronger

Posted on by Stuart Murray

Hear no evil, speak no ev... Well you know the rest. By Barbara Burton
Hear no evil, speak no ev… Well you know the rest.  Photo courtesy of Barbara Burton.

Do you swear in the workplace?  I bet you try not to, at least not too often.  But sometimes it slips out, and sometimes it just feels right.  What do we know about the effect profanity has on our candor and our emotional closeness to others?

Years ago, I was driving my two-and-a-half year old daughter to childcare.  It was cold out, and she was safely bucked into the car seat in the back.  We lived on a major street, and I drove Westbound a half-mile to the nearest red light.  There was a car in front of us with the right turn signal on, but they weren’t turning.  My daughter said “Get out of the fawa way.”  My head tilted, and I ran the phrase through my head.  “Sweetie,” I asked, “what did you just say?”

“Get out of the fucking way,” she announced.  I contained my laughter.  This was her first F-bomb, and I had just enough self-control to realize I couldn’t teach her this was funny.  I had to keep this social.

“Darling,” I asked, “where did you learn to talk like that?”

“Mummy talks that way every time she drives.”  I gripped the wheel and tensed my facial muscles, using all of my life force to resist laughing.  The light changed, and we continued driving.  I turned into the ever-familiar cul-de-sac, and we stepped into the childcare to take off her shoes and jacket.  I asked our childcare provider, Liliana, if I could borrow her phone.  I said there was something I needed my wife to hear.  Liliana said she knew what this was about.  She was experienced.

I phoned my wife who was at home on maternity leave bonding with our second child.  “Hello?” she answered.  “Hi, your daughter just said something and I want you to hear it” I said.  “Oh, this can’t be good” she cringed.  I handed my daughter the phone and prompted her to “Say to mummy what you hear her say every time she drives.”  She was wearing a cute little dress with pink flowers.  She held the phone to her ear and yelled: “Fuckin’ mooove!”

What the Science Says About Profanity

What does swearing accomplish, really?  Citing excerpts from Emma Byrne’s Swearing is Good For You a Wired article from January 2018 described several behavioral experiments involving swearing.  In one, test subjects were asked to submerge their hands in ice water until they could not tolerate it any more.  Some were asked to state neutral terms describing furniture, and others were asked to say a profanity.

“…when they were swearing, the intrepid volunteers could keep their hands in the water nearly 50 percent longer as when they used their non-cursing, table-based adjectives. Not only that, while they were swearing the volunteers’ heart rates went up and their perception of pain went down. In other words, the volunteers experienced less pain while swearing.”

Enduring physical pain was also associated with aggressive game-playing, and a willingness to harm others in a simulation in which they could choose to shock others.  There’s a cross-over between insensitivity, enduring discomfort, mean-ness, and profanity.  Hence our vocabulary is so much richer when driving.

Swearing also makes people physically stronger.  Athletes can attest to this.  In one study cited by the Guardian people swearing while operating an exercise bike saw their peak power increase by 28 watts.  In another test, profanity increased grip strength by 2.1kg.

We can envision a profanity-rich working environment where people exert physical effort and occasionally get hurt.  I imagine construction sites, the armed forces, and resource sectors as places where swearing might just be a normal coping mechanism for the physical environment.  But what about an office environment?

Directly quoting Byrne’s book once again, an article from the Cut noted

“From the factory floor to the operating theatre, scientists have shown that teams who share a vulgar lexicon tend to work more effectively together, feel closer, and be more productive than those who don’t,” she writes. …A study published earlier this year backs up this and other research, suggesting swearing with colleagues can help create “a sense of belonging, mutual trust, group affiliation … and cohesion.”

Referencing other research, the article noted that profanity “…does still carry some social risk — it’s still a little bit taboo — so it imparts a feeling of trust in whomever you’re swearing with.”

Profanity Must Be Distributed Fairly

It’s interesting that we would trust people who swear more.  On one hand, people are going against the current to express a more candid emotional state.  On the other hand, people who break all the rules tend to swear more… and those people aren’t more trustworthy.  There’s a good review of the literature by Scott McGreal in Psychology Today, in which he looks at three different studies about honesty and swearing.  McGreal concludes the findings are mixed and sometimes contradictory.

A frustrating feature of this trust and solidarity is the double-standard on the use of profanity.  In the article in the Cut, Byrne noted men and women used to both swear with abandon until the early 18th century. Then women were encouraged to adopt cleaner language.  Men, by contrast retained the right to swear, using their power to express a full range of emotion.  To this day, there is more judgement when women swear, compared to the men’s presumed freedom.

My question is, if there’s a workplace that has a mixture of men and women, how are people to experience equality and camaraderie without a level playing-field for profanity?  If it’s male-stereotyped work involving physical strength and the endurance of pain and discomfort, do we disadvantage women in those workplaces by discouraging them from swearing?  And what about female-dominated work in health care, child care, and food services that often require strength and the enduring of pain and discomfort?  Those are customer-facing work environments, so some decorum is in order.  Are we discouraging full workplace performance by requiring lady-like vocabularies?

Besides, who ever said that women should swear less in the first place?

One thing’s for certain, this opinion did not come from my wife.

Creepiness Defined

Posted on by Stuart Murray

Dead-eyed girl portrait
Dead-eyed girl portrait. Photo courtesy of simpleinsomnia.

You can inadvertently become the creepy leader.  To avoid doing so, you need to know more about what creepiness actually is.  Here’s an example.  If you are a parent, you may have noticed in your duties as tooth fairy that you need to safely hide the teeth.  In our family it was my duty to make the money-for-tooth exchange silently in the dark.  Also in the darkness – but not as stealthily – I would diligently place the tooth in the hiding space my wife had designated, in the middle drawer of her jewellery case.  One time in the light of day my wife fully-opened the drawer, saw the collection of teeth in all its glory, and screamed.  She was creeped out by herself.  We joked about making a necklace, and we laughed and laughed.  They’re gone now.

Creepiness was the subject of fresh research published two years ago in the paper On the Nature of Creepiness.  It’s by Francis T. McAndrew and Sara S. Koehnke in New Ideas in Psychology as of March 30, 2016.  It’s only six pages long, it’s well-written, and you can download it here.

The Definition of Creepiness

They define creepiness as follows:

A mugger who points a gun in your face and demands money is certainly threatening and terrifying. Yet, most people would probably not use the word “creepy” to describe this situation. It is our belief that creepiness is anxiety aroused by the ambiguity of whether there is something to fear or not and/or by the ambiguity of the precise nature of the threat (e.g., sexual, physical violence, contamination, etc) that might be present. Such uncertainty results in a paralysis as to how one should respond. In the mugging situation, there is no ambiguity about the presence or nature of threat. [Emphasis added]

The findings from the paper come from a survey of 1341 people who ranked items on a creepiness scale.  They ranked careers, behaviours, hobbies, and features of physical appearance.  With some consistency, the items at the top of the creepiness scale represent an ambiguity of whether there is something we should fear.

The creepiest occupations are clown, taxidermist, sex shop owner, and funeral director.  Creepy behaviours are things like standing too close, making it impossible to leave, and odd clothing or laughter.  The creepy features of appearance are greasy hair, bulging eyes, long fingers, and pale skin (i.e. features that make people look like a zombie or a skeleton).  Creepy hobbies include things that involve a lot of watching (such as bird watching), or collecting dolls, insects, or body parts.  I mean really, who collects body parts?

It’s fascinating that creepiness, although real, is three steps removed from a matter of substance.  The substantial item is harm.  You take it back one step and perceive a threat, which is the intention of harm or the likelihood one will experience harm.  Then you perceive the ambiguity of that threat.  The final step is that this ambiguity is subjectively-felt as anxiety.  So, whereas there may be material evidence of harm after it has been experienced, creepiness anticipates harm, three steps removed, has less evidence, and is hard to prove.  It’s no wonder why creeps lurk in this environment.

Eliminating Creepiness in the Workplace

It’s one thing to understand creepiness in public spaces.  But what does this new understanding about creepiness say about how we should behave at work?  We know that leadership and organizational culture shape our environment.   As a manager or human resources professional you have significant influence over several perceived risks such as health & safety, workplace cleanliness, and sexual harassment.  You can also influence things that could adversely affect the employee’s economic wellbeing such as layoffs, promotions, and performance conversations.  It is critical to convey a sense that you mean the best and you’re not going to sacrifice the employee’s wellbeing for your own self-interest.

There are also risks associated with the questionable use of data.  If you handle data about peoples’ address, benefits claims, and participation in wellbeing programs, you should feel a great sense of responsibility.  Add to that the secrets given to you by other managers about secret agendas and the organization’s direction, and you soon discover that you are truly a guardian of privileged information that can be used for good or evil.

Handling information properly can impact your reputation and how people feel about your leadership and your judgment.  You need to feel that healthy sense of fear that if you mishandled something, bad things could happen.  When I snuck into my children’s bedrooms at night to swap money for teeth, I was quite worried that I would be exposed as the tooth fairy and scar their innocence.  I felt the weight of generations past, that I must do this one thing well.

If confidential work is done poorly, you could harm a third party, the organization, or your own career.  The harm could be a matter of substance.  Or it could simply be a threat to those affected.  If you cannot provide credible assurances that you mean the best, then you are creating ambiguity about a threat of harm.

You can inadvertently become the creepy leader.

To avoid being creepy you need to be truthful, consistent, and transparent.  Or to be precise, you need to show a competent handling of truth and transparency, as if lying and secrecy were things you only do as a duty to society.  After the truth is known, will people say you did the right thing?

More than anything, trust is about advancing a sense of integrity and authenticity, that things are as they seem.  A trustworthy environment allows people to forget about bad things.  Trust allows people to stop spending precious work hours protecting themselves and each other.  If you want people to contribute their best work and share their best ideas, they need to feel safe.

So could you please keep your story straight about the tooth fairy?  Other leaders are trying to keep it together, too.  We need to tell the same story.  And keep that tooth collection hidden.

Pay Equity need not be a beast of burden

Posted on by Stuart Murray

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I sometimes get self-conscious about being more supportive of feminism than some of my women colleagues.  Sure, I have lots of tools at my disposal to help make a difference.  And yes, it is part of my job in Human Resources to make things fair and reasonable.  But is this really my fight?  Should I really be getting excited about it?  I’ll give an example.

In April 2018, Tracey Smith from Numerical Insights blogged that the Gender Pay Gap is NOT the Same as Pay Equity.  It’s an interesting read because there is some truth to it, but the devil is in the details.  I have worked on a several efforts to equalize pay between men and women, and I can confirm the pay equity exercise is narrow in scope and changes salaries far less than some would hope.

The problem is branding.  It’s too popular.  It has become the yoke that carries all the hopes and dreams of the broader equality conversation. We need to expect less of this one solution, and allow for some levity. We need to give pay equity permission to wear sweatpants to the convenience store and grab a slushie, without paparazzi snapping photos for Stars Without Makeup.

Some Problems Are Not Solved by Pay Equity Alone

Smith references the predominance of males in some professions:

Certain STEM-based professions (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) are naturally male-dominated because the graduating classes are male-dominated. That’s the hiring pool, so through no fault of any company, these STEM companies will be “more male” in the specialized jobs.

She also notes it is common for fewer women to apply for management jobs, implying women are self-selecting away from these roles in child-bearing years.  As a result of men self-selecting into higher-paid professions and higher-ranking roles, this creates average salaries for men that are higher.  Smith asserts that this is not a measure of pay equity, and that’s true.  The smaller number of women in these roles might be paid equal to their male counterparts, so pay equity might have been achieved already.

But let’s step back, consider the larger picture, and match problems with reasonable solutions.  If there’s a shortage of women graduates from STEM disciplines, we should consider reserving an equitable number of college and university spaces for women in these fields.  If women are less likely to put themselves forward for management openings, workplaces can cultivate leadership styles that are less critical, are more encouraging, and are time-structured to get people home at a reasonable hour.  If the problem is career growth during childbearing years, a suitable remedy is maternity leave provisions and government-funded child care.

Which tools should we consider if we want to achieve broader equality between the sexes?  My favourite tool is, “all of them, now.”  Does that sound better?  It makes far more sense that ridiculing pay equity for its shortcomings.

Battles Over Pay Equity Legislation Are More Than Meets the Eye

Smith also noted that the United States recently cancelled legislation to require the reporting of average salaries by sex.  The government expressed concerns that the reporting obligation would “lack practical utility, …[be] unnecessarily burdensome, and …not adequately address privacy and confidentiality issues.”  There was something fishy about this quote, so I cut-and-pasted it into a Google search and got something totally different.

In a Washington Post article, reporter Danielle Paquette described this cancelling-of-legislation as the Trump administration reversing an Obama-era rule to shrink the gender wage gap.  That article notes Ivanka Trump originally supported the Obama-era measure, but after she consulted experts, “worried that it wouldn’t work as intended.”  We have since learned that the only expert consulted at the White House is the President himself.  The Obama-era official who brought in the rule and leaders of women’s equality organizations panned the decision.

The Post article quoted Nancy Hammer, who spoke on behalf of the Society for Human Resource Management:

She recommends that employees go to their human resources department if they’re concerned about their paycheck, giving their employer a chance to explain or fix the issue.  Otherwise, Hammer said, “to really do it, you’d need to practically report on every single employee.  That’s not a practical way at looking at this issue nationwide.”

It’s ironic that she thinks it’s impractical to report on every single employee. Moreover, she asserts that for women, as individuals, to approach their human resources department to fix unequal pay without government or union backup, is totally practical. I would note that Nancy Hammer is a lawyer speaking on behalf of HR generalists.  The correct professionals to consult about this work in Compensation, and in North America their profession is represented by WorldatWork.  Also, employees are legally allowed to talk to each other about their pay, despite of the fact that HR often discourages such talk.

Pay Equity Analysis is Not Onerous

Under conventional pay equity plans, employers do in fact report on every single employee, bundled by job classification.  This data-bundling includes average pay and headcount indicators of whether a classification is predominantly made up of men or women.  This data, combined with other sources, allow employers to do a simple statistical analysis to measure pay inequality and take appropriate action.

The analysis is done either by consultants or in-house by HR departments.  The analysis is made available to regulators, union representatives, and litigants alike, under appropriate confidentiality protections.  The process involves slightly more work than creating a new pay structure in the first place.  It’s not practical to do it this way nationwide, because it is done at the organizational level as is normal for pay structure design.  The cancelled legislation obliged employers to report simplified data that was consistent with this approach.

Activist Campaigns Even the Score with the Trump Family

Let’s go back to Ivanka Trump speaking against this legislation.  In July of 2018, Ivanka Trump closed shop on her fashion brand.  Sales were flagging.  In particular, sales were way down at Nordstrom and Hudson’s Bay Company, two of the companies targeted by #grabyourwallet.  For those unfamiliar, #grabyourwallet is a consumer activist campaign that calls on people to refuse to give money to the Trump family.  The campaign was a response to the Access Hollywood tape revealing that Donald Trump thought he could accost women sexually, in public, without recourse, because he was rich and famous.  Some women felt otherwise, hence the campaign.

Let’s return to how women advance their own careers.  If women are reluctant to advance themselves into situations that make them vulnerable because the environment makes them unsafe, maybe the best remedy is to foster and support an activist base that keeps men on their toes about abuses of power.

And if a company is openly unsupportive of women’s equality, one possible remedy is for an activist base to reduce it to rubble.

But don’t try to do this alone.  Team up with others to bring more than one solution.  Pull your car into the convenience store and pick up your old friend in the sweatpants.  As she hands you your own slushie she smiles and says “I found your wallet.”  And drive onward to the next adventure.