Haven’t We Heard This Before? — DianaLarsen.com

“We’ve been making these issues [of women in the workforce] explicit at least since ’70s. Forty-five years is a long time to talking about the same stuff.”

How are you pushing to expand the discussion? How are you seeing others come up with genuinely new insights and observations about the struggles of women in the workforce?

00:02:45: We’re hoping that we can take these patterns as givens, and can then move the conversation forward.
00:03:00: “Fostering Women Leaders: A Fitness test for your top team”. The author seems to not know much about the history of women and gender equity in organizations – the article states the obvious.
00:04:50: The article offers “resilience, grit, and competence” as skills for women to build – as if men don’t need these same skills. Sharon believes women often have a surplus of “resilience”, as opposed to needing special training.
00:07:00: Looking at the talent pipeline to make sure women are entering isn’t enough.
00:09:30: Researchers looked at opinions of Gen Xers vs Gen Y about expectations around gender equity in life and work and found a sad picture of unmet expectations.
00:14:00: Venture capitalists are not funding women-led start-ups at the same level as men.
00:17:00: What if the reason more and more women are doing more childcare, rather than following their careers, is because their male partners have less obstacles and make more money due to bias, and they are just giving in to an unjust reality?
00:24:00: Conversations about women in organizations need to happen – but we need to talk about new things, instead of having the same conversations over and over again and expecting different outcomes.
00:26:40: Leaving this problem for the millennials to solve is a fantasy. We all need to work together to figure out newer solutions, including the organizations we work for.