Startups and corporates both constantly preach about the importance of culture.
It's something that's supposed to attract and keep the hardest working and most talented folks, and people who lead teams or found companies like to brag about how good their culture is, and how much everyone likes working there.
But good, deeply creative culture has nothing to do with sodas in a fridge, ping pong tables, bonuses, awards, or praising people.
Read MoreNegotiation is everywhere.
Though not always obvious, negotiation rarely happens in isolation. How you negotiate in one area (like salary) immediately affects other areas (like long work hours, unpaid overtime, and possibilities for promotion).
One place where this is critical is the powerful, often unspoken, element of gender bias. For women and non-gender binary confirming individuals, “good” negotiation is a double bind. You sometimes have to play the game the way that men do, but you also face punishment for reasons that are difficult to call out (think Hilary Clinton being attacked for being “too aggressive” vs. criticism for being “a weak leader who cries in public”).
It’s a very subtle line to walk, and there’s already great deal of research into how gender bias works…
The Ellen Pao suit against VC firm Kleiner Perkins from earlier this year illustrated how troubling that double bind truly is. If you pay close attention to workplace dynamics, many of the scenarios from that case, like preference in seating charts, will sound familiar (some of Pao’s testimony is here, and the full stack of court documents is here).
And while hidden negotiations and bias have implications for people on the unequal side of a power balance, it also, as the HBR piece from above suggests, has an effect on everyone. Creativity, productivity, autonomous decision making, and quality of work all suffer when gender bias is at play.
But how do we realistically and practically combat gender bias when it is hidden in so many cases? Here are a few insights from a recent email exchange I had a few months ago with two of the smarter folks I know who work in technology / startups…
Read MoreYesterday one of my roommates and I talked about the lack of diversity in tech / startups.
In particular, we were thinking out loud about pipeline problems. In plain English that just translates as: how to get a set of good, qualified applicants who aren’t all white, male, and from upper economic tiers.
This is a fairly regular conversation for me. It’s also something I’ve worked on in startups and corporate, at times directly via hiring and at times by supporting other people involved in or responsible for the process.
Even the best founders / tech companies struggle with this. It’s common to hear people say that they are open to having a diverse hiring culture….and then find out that they don’t know how or aren’t willing to make the effort beyond posting jobs in a few obvious places. This is usually followed by wondering why they seem to get the same type of applicants.
Other people have written extensively about why you might want to have a diverse hiring culture with respect to race, gender, sexual orientation, and other categories, so I won’t do that here…if you are looking for stats and research for the whys, here’s a good / fairly comprehensive resource created by Brittany Laughlin, GM of the Union Square Ventures Network and multiple times an entrepreneur.
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