Box of delight

In our world, we see so much around us through different media that we often become immune to messages and sometimes even cynical.

This video touched me so deeply that it brought tears to my eyes!!!!!

Often when I tell people that we have filled half of the top leadership positions at the University of Michigan’s College of Engineering with women, I can almost see the unspoken assumption in many of their eyes: They think we did it by passing over better-qualified male candidates.

At the 10 U.S. engineering schools with the largest research budgets, women make up about 17 percent of the faculty. It’s always noticed when women constitute a higher-than-usual proportion of an engineering college’s leadership, but somehow we don’t make the same assumptions about talent when all of a school’s top positions are filled by men.

Most women, as they rise to positions of power, face a bastion of stereotyping, focusing only on their gender and belittling their achievements. Read on how even stalwarts like Sheryl Sandberg also faced the same.

In this fast-paced business world, female leaders need to make sure they’re not perceived as pushy, aggressive, or competent. One way to do that is to alter their leadership style to account for the (sometimes) fragile male ego.

The lack of diversity at the top of pretty much every profession is well-documented, and scholarly communications is no exception. Compared with the number of women who work in our community overall, there are woefully few leaders, while people of color are very under-represented at all levels. Women of color who are leaders are even more of a rarity.

So it is a real privilege to be able to share this “conversation” between three such leaders — Dr Salina Gray, Science Educator; Raquel Tamez, CEO, Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers; and Dr Rochelle L. Williams, Project Director and Co-Principal Investigator, The ARC Network, Association for Women in Science.

More and more companies want to lessen gender bias in the workplace, but I contend they may be overlooking one of the most obvious, everyday breeding grounds for sexism: meetings.  In my just-released TEDx talk, I offer 3 ways that men and women can reduce gender bias through better meeting culture.