Lean back, Eric Schmidt! How interrupting men & unconscious bias are killing women’s careersLaug

Lean back, Eric Schmidt! How interrupting men & unconscious bias are killing women’s careersLaugh or cry: A Google exec repeatedly interrupted one of tech’s most powerful women while talking about diversity“It is equal parts hilarious and depressing that Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt was called out for repeatedly interrupting Megan Smith, chief technology officer for the United States, while trying to talk about diversity and women in tech.The SXSW panel, which hosted Smith, Schmidt and Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson, was about innovation in tech, and so the conversation turned to attracting new talent and bringing more women and people of color into the field to spur new ideas.It seems that the crowd noticed that Schmidt was regularly interrupting Smith to share his own views about diversity, so someone in the audience brought it up during the question and answer period. According to a report from Karissa Bell at Mashable, the questioner asked, “Given that unconscious bias research tells us that women are interrupted a lot more than men, I’m wondering if you are aware that you have interrupted Megan many more times.”The person behind the question, in another delightful twist, happened to be Judith Williams, head of Google’s global diversity and talent management program. For her part, as Bell pointed out, Smith replied that, “It’s an interesting thing, unconscious bias. It’s something we all have and it’s something we have to really debug.”According to one study on this dynamic from Kieran Snyder, the men in her sample group interrupt twice as often as women. They were also three times as likely to interrupt women than they are to interrupt other men:All told and no other factors considered, men accounted for 212 of the 314 total interruptions, about two thirds of the total. Among the individuals I observed, 60% were men. That means that if men and women had shown the same rate of interruption, we would expect to find that 188.4 of the interruptions came from men. We actually see 212. The men I observed interrupted twice as often as the women did.So there you have it: At least in this male-heavy tech setting, men do interrupt more often than women.So what would it mean to “debug” in these situations? Put bluntly, if men in male-dominated fields like tech (and politics and venture capital and journalism and and and…) are serious about diversity and women’s leadership, then they need to STFU more often. Literally. The problem will not be solved by women leaning in. Instead, men need to lean back. Hard.This means not interrupting and listening to women when they’re speaking, but also requires men to be mindful of when they’re dominating the conversation. This is a pretty common occurrence, both in Silicon Valley boardrooms and, like, anarchist collective meetings. And just because men may be louder and more aggressive about speaking doesn’t mean they are more knowledgable — there are studies that show that men tend to talk more than women even when they don’t know what the hell they are talking about. (Rebecca Solnit’s “Men Explain Things to Me” is kind of the mic drop on this issue.)Here’s Sandberg on the problem of men interrupting their female colleagues and what to do about it in a recent column for the New York Times:The long-term solution to the double bind of speaking while female is to increase the number of women in leadership roles. (As we noted in our previous article, research shows that when it comes to leadership skills, although men are more confident, women are more competent.) As more women enter the upper echelons of organizations, people become more accustomed to women’s contributing and leading.”Read the full piece here -- source link

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