Co-Creating Gender Equality in Leadership
Episode 476 | Host: Emilie Aries | Guest: Wendy Wallbridge
How do we help men foster emotional intelligence and become allies in the pursuit of equality?
What can we do in our own lives and workplaces to further the equalization of power between the sexes? Sometimes, men come away from the discourse around gender equality feeling threatened, as if their power and the positions they worked for are being rescinded so they might be redistributed to women alone. But what if men were encouraged to be equal contributing partners in this vital movement, allies instead of opponents?
Wendy Wallbridge is an expert in creating cultures of belonging and teaching strategies for practically enlisting men as allies. Her program shows them the widespread, mutual benefits of gender equity. After working as a corporate coach for more than three decades, Wendy now runs Spiral Up, a Silicon Valley-based organization that helps the next generation of tech business leaders tap into their workforce’s full potential and lead collaboratively. She has worked with companies like Dolby, Intel, Apple, and Wells Fargo and is the author of Spiraling Upward: The 5 Co-Creative Powers for Women on the Rise.
Wendy shares the impetus behind her work and practical approaches that encourage men to leverage their patriarchal privilege to further the equalization of power in the workplace.
Raising women up doesn’t mean knocking men down
No one wants to lose what they’ve worked for, even if a patriarchal system enabled much of that past success. Men hold more than 90% of C-suite roles in the U.S.—we definitely need their cooperation to reach equality, so their concerns need to be addressed, not dismissed. Using frameworks that highlight how everyone benefits from a just, equal, and equitable society, Wendy answers the anxieties men feel when confronted with the possibility of “losing their power” to women.
Wendy points out that the things men care about get better with more equal representation—workplace progress, productivity, health, and relationships. What’s more, many of the qualities that used to drive business success are changing, so helping men build less practiced “soft” skills benefits their career trajectories right alongside overall corporate improvement.
The era of elbowing your way to the top has passed
Many men in this country grew up heavily influenced by competitive sports. As Wendy puts it, they were taught to steal the ball, run down the field, and score a touchdown. So much of the corporate culture of the past century has been based around this approach, but the matrix style of workplace organization, with its focus on collaboration and open communication, is becoming more and more common. The ability to shout the loudest and push the hardest is being eclipsed as the paramount skill for leadership and success by the ability to center relationships and connectivity.
These latter skills, often referred to as soft or “feminine,” ask leaders to learn and practice emotional intelligence (EQ) above all else. By guiding largely male workforces in somatic practices—such as pausing before reacting, taking note of where tension exists in the body, and breathing into it—Wendy and her team prepare men in positions of power not only to be allies to the women and non-binary people around them but to secure their own success in the workplaces of the future.
Opportunities to advance gender equity at work
Through years of research, Wendy has identified three broad buckets that women point to as the main sources of unfairness in the workplace: they are dismissed, they feel excluded, and they must establish a proven track record to excel, while their male coworkers’ successes seem based on potential alone.
Micro-interventions for macro problems
So, what can men do to help? Wency cites micro-interventions as some of the most impactful changes men (and anyone whose leadership style is traditionally masculine) can make to foster positive change and a rebalancing of power in the workplace.
Rushing into a problem and attempting a rescue is a common but problematic response, no matter how well-intentioned it might be. Rather than offering solutions or being confrontational when noticing a troubling situation involving a woman or non-binary coworker, Wendy encourages leaders to approach with curiosity and the awareness that they don’t know the answers, and that’s ok.
Acknowledging that something in the interaction they witnessed seemed off and they want to offer support but are unsure how to do so does more than many people think: it opens the door to conversation. In a society that is slowly shifting more and more to cultures of communication, connectivity, and collaboration, supplying opportunities to converse and learn is highly impactful.
Stretch assignments and sponsorship
Providing stretch assignments goes hand in hand with not blindly assuming there is a problem to fix and a person to rescue. “Benevolent sexism” can develop when leaders give less demanding projects to people they deem unable to handle the challenge, such as women they know have kids at home, even if the behavior stems from an instinct to protect.
However, not giving women space to grow in their organizations is a huge source of inequality. Rather than deciding a capable employee “needs a break,” Wendy encourages bringing these people into the conversation and rewarding their skill and hard work with challenges if they want them.
Men in positions of power can also practice sponsorship and mentorship to lift up women and non-binary people on their teams. While movements like #MeToo have left some men nervous about establishing one-on-one relationships with women on their teams, there is a right way to approach these opportunities. Advocating for people on the team who deserve recognition (sponsorship) and directly supporting someone in a specific skill set they require for advancement (mentorship) can make a huge difference in that individual’s career success.
For even more examples of the future of our workplaces and how men and women can work together for equality, listen to my and Wendy’s full conversation.
What did Wendy bring up that resonated for you? What have your experiences enlisting men as allies been like, and how have you seen these essential partnerships play out in your workplaces? Share your thoughts on the Courage Community on Facebook or our group on LinkedIn.
Related links from today’s episode:
Learn more about the Spiral Up program
Order Spiraling Upward: The 5 Co-Creative Powers for Women on the Rise
Read Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez
Bossed Up Ep 452: Redefining Success: Women and the Fight for a Fair Economy
LEVEL UP: a Leadership Accelerator for Women on the Rise
Level up your leadership in the pursuit of equality:
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[INTRO MUSIC IN]
EMILIE: Hey, and welcome to the Bossed Up podcast, episode 476. I'm your host, Emilie Aries, the Founder and CEO of Bossed Up, and today I am so excited to dive into equalizing power between men and women in the workplace.
[INTRO MUSIC ENDS]
We'll talk a little bit about why this can be so challenging in a patriarchal world, how this can feel like a threat to men and their power and their prestige and their privilege in so many ways, but also how to practically enlist men as allies in this quest for equality, why it benefits men to be allies in the quest for gender equity in the home, in the workplace, and what we can do to make that happen, both in our households and in our workplaces.
Joining me for today's powerful conversation is a strong and vocal advocate for gender equity, Wendy Wallbridge. She's a pioneer in the coaching field and a rare talent for creating cultures of belonging. Wendy's uniquely positioned to help next generation business leaders tap the full potential of their diverse workforce and to collaborate and lead through the constantly evolving landscape. Her singular brand of coaching, defined by her Spiral Up model, empowers women to become architects of their own lives by following a radically different roadmap to success. Her gender partnership programs delivered global tech companies for the last decade coach women to unleash their feminine strengths and support men in being strong advocates and allies.
Wendy's the founder of Spiral Up, the WEL Forum of Silicon Valley, and the award winning author of Spiraling Up: The Five Co-Creative Powers For Women On The Rise. Spiral Up's clients have included Dolby, Intel, HP, Apple, Genentech, Symantec, Oracle, ABC, Disney, Texas Instruments, and Wells Fargo, among others. And Wendy herself has spoken all over the place, including at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business, the Professional Business Women's Conference, the Texas and Pennsylvania Conferences for Women, Women in Technology International, and TEDx. She's been profiled by Fast Company, Fortune, Huffington Post, and the New York Times.
And she's joining me here today to talk through how men can use the levers at their disposal and really leverage the power that they have to share power to equalize power with women in the workplace.
Wendy, welcome to the Bossed Up podcast.
WENDY: Thank you. I'm so happy to be here.
EMILIE: I'm so excited to talk with you because I feel kindred spirits around women like us who've been working in the women's leadership development space for quite some time and have shifted our attention in some ways to men. And so you've re-released your book, Spiraling Upward: The Five Co-Creative Powers For Women On The Rise with some very interesting new elements to it. Tell me about kind of what inspired this new version.
WENDY: Well, just like you're hinting at, and know from understanding what's going on everywhere around the workplace and with men and women, the equation to women rising is not complete without the engagement of men. And, you know, for a long time, and even in our programs, we were working solely on empowering women, having them have more voice, stepping up, you know, pushing back all of the things. And it's just clear that the 90% of CEO's are men and they have a monopoly on corporate power. So in corporations, any kind of structure, you've got to have them engaging with women in partnership.
EMILIE: Right. Exactly. I think that's such a good word for it, partnership, because there's something here about power sharing in a world that has been just dominated by men and patriarchy in so many ways for so long.
So, not that it's always been the case, not that it's always been the case everywhere, I. But how do we take a society, public sector, private sector, just like family structure, that has been so steeped in patriarchy and help men see the benefit of equalizing power between the sexes and, you know, expanding sex, of course, beyond the binary here. But just thinking about what does that require from men? And how can we as women, who are, by the way, speaking predominantly to women right now, like, what can we do about that?
WENDY: Right. Well, there's a lot packed into that question. I will say that the word sharing power, the phrase sharing power probably isn't the best way to go, because would you want to share what you have with, I don't know that that would be something that they would welcome, but I liked what you said, equalizing power. I mean, that feels a little more righteous and justice-based and fair.
And here's the thing. Men, everything that men care about gets better when there's shared, let's say, when there's equal representation in leadership or at home. So their relationships, their health, the productivity, the way things are going at work, and in fact, that in organizations that are, you know, more matrix, which is where we're all going. In flat organizations or matrix organizations, men are forced to learn how to collaborate, which actually is going to get them promotions, because that's what we're looking for in leaders today is EQ.
EMILIE: Right. Emotional quotient, emotional intelligence, soft skills, as they've been termed over the years. But it's, you know, you kind of talk about them as feminized or, feminine quality is, what, what do you mean by that?
WENDY: Yeah, I mean, what I say is that we're at this flash point where we've over indexed on the masculine striving for scale and profitability over human values for too long, and we're centering on relationships and connectivity, really. So those are the things that are moving towards the forefront. But that would be called feminine power. But it doesn't belong to any one gender. And in fact, not all women have it.
So we want to be sure to not gender that word. It's hard not to. So I don't even use it that much anymore. But it's really about these qualities of collaboration, connectivity, communication, just reaching over the aisle, you know, all the things that we need now, and it exists everywhere. I mean, if you look, it's starting to really show up in a lot of places, you know, systemically.
EMILIE: And where it's not like, I don't know, the United States Congress, it's maligned for the fact that we can't. Nobody there can seem to get along. Right.
WENDY: It's the decline of an American lion empire. But there are still, you know, these white men rolling off the stage. It's not happening as fast as we would like, in terms of having leadership represent the audience, the people that are ruling.
EMILIE: Totally. I had a really interesting conversation with June Carbone, legal scholar, on women in the fight for a fair economy. And she really was talking about, back on episode 452, the winner take all economy being traditionally masculine, elbowing your way to the top. That's not really what we're looking for in business leaders today.
WENDY: No, no. All the work that we're doing in corporations for the last, like, it's been eight solid years of this kind of gender equity work is literally teaching men how to have emotional intelligence. So the things that we're noticing that people don't, you know, it's not always as really obvious to women that some of the things that are happening that are going on because we've put up with a lot of it for so long, especially in corporations, you know, we get interrupted more often, we get talked over rds get stolen, and were judged more harshly for trying to push back on those things.
So it's really a, it’s a transformation of both women and how we engage powerfully and not in a masculine way, but with our own authenticity. And then men becoming aware, first of all, becoming aware of these things that were taken for granted for so long, and then seeing the ways that they could not come in like a hero in a rescue mission and fix it, but come in, first of all, realizing that they are also a product of the patriarchy, and they're going to probably be speaking from that unless they're super aware.
So one of the problems is that men are, instead of sponsoring women, mentoring women, which is one of the levers that they can pull, you know, because of Me Too, and some of the backlash to that, there's some reticence and frozenness and stepping back. So how do we engage them and give them specifics about what to do and not do? And that's kind of what my book is. My new chapter is about.
EMILIE: Yeah, and I love this chapter. It could be truly a book unto itself on, Spiral Up for dudes, which I love, as someone who lives in Colorado and whose husband uses that term of endearment for everyone in his life, that works.
But I am wondering, you know, the first sort of trigger that comes to mind is defensiveness among men. And I wonder, how does a woman begin to engage men in the workplace? And how does the concept of equalizing power between the sexes not feel inherently threatening? Like, how do you frame that entire conversation not as an individual woman, just as someone who's studied this. How do we begin to even look at that concept as not men losing power? Because that's how a lot of men seem to be reacting to recent movements like Me Too, and all of that.
WENDY: Yeah, there's a lot of different parts to that question again. But what I see is that when men can see what's in it for them, then they're way more up for, and also if they can see how they can practically intervene in situations without, really men aren't really prone to calling another man out. It's really uncomfortable for them to do. We want them to do more of that, but to learn how to do it in a way that is comfortable for them. Take the guy aside afterwards and ask, or even just approach the person who's been micro-aggressed against and say, how was that for you? I noticed something off just to open up the conversation. Even that is seen as a solution for women, a partnering, so to speak.
So there's gentle ways to get inside of it. You know, there's so many things that are going on, like I said, that weren't noticeable before, that are becoming more noticeable now. Like, for instance, 66% of women received negative feedback on their assertiveness, whereas men 1% did in a performance review.
So, you know, that's that catch 22 thing. I'm sure you know about it. The likability thing where women are, you know, pinged for being too strong, and we're considered incompetent if we're too warm. So there's just, like, there's so much underneath the surface that just bringing out some of the biases and stereotypes. People start to, once you see it, you can't unsee it, you know, people start to change.
EMILIE: So I almost hear, like, there's an awareness raising that has to happen first. And then you're saying, when it becomes practical, tactical, and, like, not that threatening. We're not saying, men, give up your livelihoods, give up your access to power structures, give up your promotion, give up your career. We're saying, like, micro interventions to a macro problem.
WENDY: And also part of that awareness is, guys, you are suffering from this patriarchy. You know, we go in our programs, we go into, what is it to be in the man box and really pulling apart what men have had to download and how their full expression of humanity is limited because of the stories that they've been told and, you know, what to be acceptable then. So, in the liberation of people, this is the bigger movement here. It's this transformation that's happening in, you know, our evolution. And you see it everywhere, from how much gender diversity there is, how much creativity, how much people want to be authentic. Well, it's happening to unburden men of their restrictions in terms of being able to express the full humanity of their emotions and things.
EMILIE: I've been saying this for years. I want to see more men's ERG’s, like employee resource groups, where men get together and talk about masculinity…
WENDY: They need it.
EMILIE: …right? They need it. It's just not. They don't have a lot of air time given.
WENDY: And they don't really know that. See, you know, women, like, I love Jane Fonda has been a meme, has been going around where she is asked about how important are women friendships to her. And she's like, we look across to each other. Men sit side by side and, you know, point at the sports, the women, whatever is going by, and they're not connected. And the studies show that when men retire, or if they lose their spouse, they've lost their social connections, and they're very lonely. You know, loneliness is an epidemic across America in general, but with men, especially older guys, real bad.
EMILIE: Real bad. So this is constraining to them. The patriarch is not helping them either. I think that's such a good point.
WENDY: I mean, they're winning financially in a lot of ways, but they're at the cost of their souls. If you pull the guys that we work with, one of the things they say is when we really ask them to be honest, and we do different bonding kinds of exercises. I really feel bad that I haven't talked to my brother in three months, or I'm alienated from my family. I've missed my kids, you know, XYZ game or important event. Those things that women say they want, or the DEI are more vocal about. It's also what really helps human beings.
EMILIE: Yeah, I love that.
WENDY: It's about being human-centric.
EMILIE: Yeah. I mentioned before we hit record here that I'm in my baby making era, and what gives me a lot of hope right now are millennial dads, because this new generation of fathers is just evolving the role and the gender roles around parenting faster than any I've seen, you know? And not everyone approaches fatherhood the same way, obviously. But I think just like the approach my husband takes to caregiving is so radically different than his father, who was so radically more warm than his father. You know what I mean?
WENDY: And how do you think, why do you think it's changing? What do you think is the impetus for that?
EMILIE: I think, and this relates back to your framework in the book, I think women's expectations have a lot to do with it. You know, I think if millennial women weren't demanding this of our partners, for those of us with male partners, you know, they wouldn't be happening.
WENDY: Yeah. And, you know, another point to that, this is a great book, this Invisible Women. Do you know about this?
EMILIE: No.
WENDY: Oh, my God. Given that you're so focused on data, this is all about the gender data gap in things like everything from medicine to how suits are made and every single thing, seatbelts, the temperature of offices, on and on. But what it just made me think of, as I read a section this morning about how the paternity leave, it didn't change until it was mandatory.
EMILIE: Mandatory, right?
WENDY: Well, it goes away if you don't use it in different countries. So South Korea and different ones, where it caught on, Norway, where the way they did it was through structural change. So the top down, you know, leadership, as we make those structural changes, those are going to help, too, because, yeah, it can be the pressure from the women, but it can also be a structural change.
EMILIE: Yeah. And a structural change makes it easier on every individual if we can say we're normalizing men being present for their families. Yeah, I love that.
WENDY: Yes.
EMILIE: So I want to think a little bit about some of the levers and just universal challenges that you see. Women need men to change. And as you call it the blame-free way that we go about addressing them. What are some of those universal challenges that you want to see change?
WENDY: So this is our research for the last ten years in global tech companies. But also this corresponds to just the general research out there, which is that there are three things, three buckets that women consistently say they experience work that isn't fair. They're dismissed, they're excluded, and they have to prove it again. You've heard of that before. They have to prove themselves again and again instead of, men are often looked at for their potentiality. Women need to have a track record.
And so those three things are consistent with, you know, women feeling like they're not being listened to, being interrupted, their ideas taken. It comes out in more like nuanced ways. But those three buckets are the three things that we see over and over again. I'm sure women that are listening right now are all going, yeah, tell me about it.
EMILIE: So how do we begin? Like, what do we ask of men to begin changing those? Because a lot of the time they're unconscious, aren't they?
WENDY: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure it's unconscious. And that's why it's been so acceptable for so long. If you take a meeting and you look at how meetings are run, especially in these, in the high tech companies that I've been in, very fast paced, the loudest voices win. You know, that's kind of how it works. Well, if you look at people that were brought up with sports backgrounds, majority of boys, they're taught to steal the ball, run down the field, steal it back, and take it down for a touchdown.
And so unless you've been in competitive sports as a girl, you might not be comfortable with that. Because we're socialized to be polite, take turns, include everybody, and not have the loudest voice in the room, and we're punished if we act like a guy and try to do those things that the guys do. So we're caught in this hard place. That's not making it easy. So you're saying, what is the answer to that? I don't know that I have a one…
EMILIE: 30 second clip on that one. [LAUGHTER]
WENDY: …Yeah, but I think becoming aware and then having the men become aware, that is our pivot point, is getting the men to be aware. Because when men see it, they want justice and fairness, too. It's just that they have to become inspired by the fact that it's not fair. It looks fair to them. They're surprised when you tell them that it's not equal there's more men named Michael or James than there are women leaders in America.
EMILIE: Yeah. Is it like CEO's, right?
WENDY: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
EMILIE: That's so wild. I do think you're right. Like, we've been ingrained with this American meritocracy belief, right. That all those James and Michaels must have done something extraordinary to warrant a deserving that. It's really hard to say. Look at the systemic bias that this is evidence of, especially when you're on the receiving end of privilege, and it doesn't always feel that way, you know?
And so I like how when you talk about gender allyship, or allyship in general starts with you, working on you, and, like, really taking that approach to, like, noticing, creating mindfulness, developing emotional intelligence, and committing you, right? Reflect and commit to the small things.
WENDY: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Instead of thinking that it's one big thing that you could do, like, you know, if you see a microaggression, like jumping in on it and trying to fix it. Or coming back to the thing you said at the beginning, like defensiveness, you know, if you do a microaggression, and I've gotten called out on microaggressions, it's happening. You know, it's. We're so learning. We're in a learning mode here. We're all going to do it.
So, if you do make a mistake and say something that is harmful to someone else, just be quiet for a minute. Let the other person say it. Don't center yourself. Let the other person be centered. Let them say how it is for them, and then make amends. If you can, just shut up and make amends, you know, whatever you do, do not start backstepping and defending and all of that.
EMILIE: And explaining your position. Yeah. I had a white dude come up to me. He was probably 50 or 50 plus in an audience. He's in the parking industry. I gave a keynote earlier this year on active allyship, and he came up to me and he said, look, I work with a lot of young black women who don't share my identity on any of those fronts. And I just don't know, like, I'm so afraid to say the wrong thing that I err on the side of saying nothing at all, when I think I really should have said something.
WENDY: Yeah, great. So here's how it works. That guy could say to that, one of those beautiful black females that he's working with, hey, I really feel awkward right now, and I don't know how to approach this, but I notice something off. Just whatever is the honest observation, as, you know, less specific as possible. It just opens up the possibility of a conversation.
So just, that's the getting, you know, I once heard David White talking about hard conversations. You know, the poet, David White, welsh poet, and he was saying how, you know, the. The real work of it is just getting the boat in the water. Like, if you can just get the boat in the water, then the water takes the boat. So it's the same thing with this. Like, if you can just say, hey, I'm really trying to be a male ally, and I don't know how to do it, but I'm going to just say, I thought something was off there. What did you think? Do you need any support? You know, just these little things that are kind of honest.
EMILIE: I love that. It sort of relinquishes the expectation of getting it right.
WENDY: Exactly.
EMILIE: Right. Cause he's presuming that he's gonna have to get it right all the time. When you accept that, you radically accept this wrongness, that you will make missteps.
WENDY: I think if we all come into it with a little bit of forgivingness at the beginning and know that we're all gonna mess up. That's really the best attitude. It's not get it right, and it's also, it's not a rescue mission, guys, we don't want you to come in and rescue. We want you to slow down. Men have been trained to jump in, to take a risk, to be the one, but this is not the case for that. This is not the case for them jumping in.
EMILIE: What do you think the benefit is of slowing down in these instances?
WENDY: It's you actually can see what's happening. You actually can see what's happening in a room. And also you're wanting to notice what your emotional reaction is, what is going on in your body. A lot of the work that we do is somatic. You know, we train people first to pay attention to, like, you're wanting to jump in, what's going on in your body? You know, what discomfort are you having about that? That could tell you something, rather than you jumping in and intervening and being urgent, you know, and maybe messing it up worse.
EMILIE: How do men react to that kind of somatic approach? And maybe just give us a primer on somatic approach.
WENDY: Simple. Simple would be like, okay, before you speak, could you just take a breath and feel what's going on in your body? You know, we do a thing where we have them do just a scan of their bodies and noticing where the tightness is, bringing breath into that tight area. You know, just being, being more conscious of your body tells you so much about your reactivity. I mean, let's boil it down.
It's all about slowing down the reactivity so that you're not everybody, if they want to be more conscious, that's work. Is that the pause between the stimulus and response. To expand that little moment enough so that you can bring some intelligence into the situation. So you can bring some real ingenuity maybe into the situation. Rather than just your knee jerk wanting to respond to it.
EMILIE: Which is like the lizard brain that defaults to cognitive heuristics, including racism, sexism, ageism, bias, right?
WENDY: That's what we're going to bring. It's all downloaded into us. And it's silly to think that any of us are past that. I mean, I can only speak for the people that I work with and myself. But that's what I notice is that we have to be, you know, we have to realize that it's there. It's kind of there. Unless we can be conscious and then we can be. Have more choice.
EMILIE: Yeah. And, like, there are some days when you're going to be more conscious than others. You know? Like.
WENDY: That's right. And it has a lot to do with how slow you can go. Because, I mean, our whole culture pushes us to go fast. And that is it's equated with profit is, uh. You know, I don't know about you, Emilie, but I know for me, even in my day to day life, I still go, like, how productive was I today?
You know, it's downloaded into me. The masculine system of productivity and taskmaster, at all costs. Get it done. Do it fast. So we're working against a very hardwired imprint to our systems. That doesn't allow for the feminine, really, which is slower and more nonlinear.
EMILIE: Yeah. All of that makes me cringe a little bit, if I'm being honest. Because, you know, I am wrapped right up with the productivity hamster wheel and the efficiency. Like, I definitely am a fast moving achiever. And so that feels uncomfortable. Although I can see the value in what you're describing. And the connotation of masculine versus feminine energy always kind of rubs me a little bit weird because it's not really that simple. But I hear what you're saying. Yeah.
WENDY: It's binary. And when I say that, you know, as I said, those are archetypes. I'm not talking about anybody adhering to any kind of either or. It's we're at such a fluid time, in terms of our identification. But there is something to be said for trying it a different way than you're patterned to do it and seeing what might be possible for creativity, for presence, for connection, all those good things.
EMILIE: And for, like, quality decision making, creativity. You know? Like, I can just imagine how in a society that raises men and boys to either feel, like, happy or angry, those are like, the two emotions that we historically have given men permission to feel, right? It's like, to be asking yourself, where's the tightness in my body right now? Is, that's an exercise I want my husband to go through because he's so busy serving others and making things happen and helping his clients and helping his team. You know what I mean?
WENDY: They define themselves, the guys, by how results-oriented they could be, how much they served you and family, and that is at the cost of all of their other parts. But, yeah, I mean, what you just said, I just had, like, ten thoughts that went through my head and I forgot them.
EMILIE: That's okay. I mean, I could clearly talk with you all day. We should have, like, a coffee or a cocktail in hand right now, because this is, like, so delightful. But I do want to get to some of the levers that you describe. Cause you give men a really wonderful playbook. In your book here. You basically write, like, if these are the challenges, what are some accessible tactics that men, at any level of the hierarchy in an organization, can really lean on and pull, frankly, as levers to help make these changes? What are some of the most important ones you wanna get the word out about?
WENDY: So what we've seen in our research for women rising is that there's, there's some specific things. Talent reviews, or those non-informal discussions about talent that guys have on the golf course, or they have in the bar, or they have in the meeting, after the meeting, or in a thing called, a talent review. Those are places where they need to speak up for the women that they see have potential. And be sure that the slates are diverse in terms of what's being brought forward as possible job people.
The second one is stretch assignments. What that means is giving women and non-binary people opportunities to do things that will stretch them, that will show their gifts, that will allow them to really swing out enough in a new area. But not a glass cliff. So you've heard the term glass cliff. That's when a woman is given a company or a project that's doomed to fail, or that's got everything working against it, and it will crash, and they will burn. Um, basically.
EMILIE: Yeah. When was it Elon Musk named his and female CEO to Twitter. I was like, this, this is an example.
WENDY: Good point. Yeah, yeah. And the woman that took on JCPenney and the woman that. And, you know, back in the day, Marissa, Yahoo. Yeah.
EMILIE: GM?
WENDY: Is it Marissa Mayer?
EMILIE: Oh, Mayer.
WENDY: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then a third one is absolutely sponsoring and mentoring before we move on.
EMILIE: To sponsoring and mentoring, because I want to come back to that. I feel like the challenge assignment, stretch assignment, like ask that you're making of men here, requires kind of pushing back on this paternalistic form of sexism, this, like, benevolent sexism, which I often hear about. Oh, my god, Lexi is so busy. She's such a valuable member of our team. She's so overburdened. She's got kids at home. We can't give her this amazing assignment, because she wouldn't wanna travel right now. Right. And so there's this, like, benevolence behind it, but is totally perpetuating a sexist outcome, which is Lexi doesn't have any say in that matter. Right?
WENDY: Don't disqualify people before they've even had a chance to say what they want. Yeah, absolutely. There's a lot of mom prejudice, whereas what we found in our research is that moms want to be leaders more than other people. Why would that be? Probably so that they can provide for their families. They're even more motivated to go out there and really do it.
EMILIE: Have you seen the cost of childcare lately? It's definitely part of it. Breadwinner moms have a lot to bring home right now, for sure, but I don't want to get too off topic. So what was that third lever you want men to pull?
WENDY: The third lever is sponsorship and mentorship. Those are two different things. Sponsorship is when you speak about a person when they're not in the room, like those talent reviews. Mentorship is offering guidance about, like, how the org works, what the lines of communication are, some specific skill set that would help them be more of an executive, like, executive presence.
But, you know, sponsorship is really the thing we need, is where they invite you into the opportunities by speaking your name and bragging about you to somebody else that has power and influence.
EMILIE: I love that. And that's something we all can do, like, on behalf of others and that it benefits you to be someone who's sponsoring others, too. I just feel like it makes you look like a leader who really knows what's going on in the organization too.
WENDY: Super good point. Don't think that you can't be somebody that could mentor and sponsor whoever's listening. There's somebody you can. I mean, I'm constantly, like, open to my people. I just got off the phone with a young lady who's just finished a paid internship, and she's very beginning of her career. But I love, you know, having the opportunity to get up underneath somebody else, and, you know, that's really what women, I would say if I had to say one broad way that we all can lift ourselves up.
This is so much what you stand for. It's about connecting. It's about finding your pod of women, finding your board of directors, that are your people that you can trust, that will not just affirm you, but that will call out the best part of you. It's not a common thing. You know, women often have a thing where we're just, you know, affirming each other. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about, speaking to the other person's highest part and going like, wait a minute. That's small, what you just said about yourself. How about this continuing to bring us up, and it's really important, and, you know just, I feel like that's a solution to the loneliness epidemic. That's a solution to a lot of things.
EMILIE: Yeah, totally. Back to Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin. You know that they call each other out on their bullshit. They're not just blowing smoke, right? They call each other out when they're being less than they can be. So I do think your point, it kind of brings you back to female friendships in a way of, like, what can we do as women to mentor and sponsor and just lift each other up? And then also expect the same thing from the men in our lives and encourage the same thing from the men in our lives?
WENDY: Yeah. I mean, I feel like, you know, the whole reason why this book is called Spiraling Upward is that spiral represents that our purpose in life is to grow. And I feel like women are the ones that want to come to those kinds of groups that are all for changing and growing and reinventing themselves. And sometimes men have to be kind of encouraged to do it. It's not, you know, if you just look at who's. What's the readership of your books? And what's the, so, how do we get them, how do we enroll them, get them to be partners with us, to really, really want to grow? Because that's what this time is.
You know, we could have been born in a lull, but we've been born into this tipping point that is a time when everything is up for reimagination, and it's going to be up to us to decide who makes the rules for the next way. Is it going to be just the status quo? Or are we going to find a voice? And how are we going to bring forward our true, authentic desires and imagination for what could be?
EMILIE: Totally. I love how clear it is, based on just how you talk about these issues, that this feels very much like your life's purpose. And I want to bring you back to the beginning of this new version of your book. Can you tell us the story that you opened the book with there part of my mind is, like, was just was kind of. I got goosebumps when I was reading about that trip that you took with your son. And then the other part of my mind as a boy mom, who's just starting this parenting journey, is thinking about power for this next generation of boys, who turn into men.
WENDY: Wow. Okay, you just gave me chills. I know, because I remembered now what I wanted to say earlier because of what you just said. So I will happy to tell that story, but let me tell you one other thing first. So, right when I was developing the content for the men's program, this crazy thing happened, which was my sister died and her son, who was about eight or ten in there, ended up becoming my son.
So he was my nephew, and he bounced around first to a few places, and then he landed with me, and I decided to become his mom. So while I was developing the content, I was watching this boy and the amount of access he had to all his feelings still, even though with a lot of trauma he had been through. And knowing that my job was to keep his pilot light lit, you know, keep him, like, fully like a human, because I could see in the culture what it wanted to do to him. Like, even the boys he was hanging around with, what they do to each other is they just pick on each other. That's their, their way of showing love. It's so upside down, you know?
So my passion for wanting us all to be, have access to the wholeness of who we are in all the different colors, really got amplified by raising this kid. And he's 22 now. He's out in the world, and, yeah, he still has his capacity. He's not shut down. So that's pretty amazing.
EMILIE: Wow. I didn't know. I knew I had to ask you about that, but I didn't know what the story was there.
WENDY: It doesn't show up in my book, except for at the very end, because that's when it was happening at the very end when I was publishing. But yeah. So I decided when he was going to turn 18 that I wanted to give him an experience of something other than his phone, which was, like, where his head was buried most of the time. And that's a whole scary thing in of itself, which Jonathan Haidt is trying to change. Just check him out. H A I D T. I know.
EMILIE: I'm already on top of the screen time thing. I'm like, my son is two. And I'm like, honey, he's not getting a smartphone until he goes to college. That's it. I'm making the decision now.
WENDY: Oh, my god. It's pressure. I had mine in a Waldorf school and the phones came late, but I was. Yeah, when it happens, it's scary. Anyway, we went to Ecuador with a group of people that are close friends with the Achuar tribe and the Sápara tribe. And they've been building this relationship over a long time to not save the people in the rainforest from the oil people, but rather, I mean, it's partly that, but it's also changing the dream of the west. Changing the dream of commercialism, which is driving the invasion of the beautiful places like rainforests for oil and for extraction.
So anyway, we went, and I just tell the story in the book about this, where we landed this little tiny plane, and like seven of us got off the plane. And as we walked towards this Palapa, the shaman was in full headdress and they had their paint on their faces. And this little naked boy walked up to us and he had like, a sloth, a baby sloth, on him. And it was a reality. You know, I'm not in Kansas anymore. This is way, a shift in reality in a quick second. And we walk in and we did these different rituals to cleanse ourselves of the western world, I guess.
And so they brush us first. We sat in chairs and they brushed us off. And after that, then I think we did something with the water. There was a river next to it, and then there was a Shaman and his interpreter, and we also snorted tobacco, which was kind of weird. And then we did this thing where he would discuss in their language what they were seeing about each person and they would give them a name. And one after another, they gave them names. And I was kind of listening and I wanted to know what Chase's name, my son's name was. And they named him the most handsome man in the jungle or something like, he did not need to hear that.
But when they came to me, they said, your name is Tirawhicha. And I said, what is that? And they said, it is the woman who brings equal power to the female as the male. Something like that. And I was like, yeah, I was like, oh, okay. And did you read my LinkedIn profile? [LAUGHTER] Because they don't know. They couldn't have done that. It was definitely sort of one of those moments that are just like, okay, God's talking to you on some level, and, you know, how do I live up to that? How do I live up to that? And how do I stay true to that? And, yeah, that was…
EMILIE: And here you are, doing the work.
WENDY: …and here I am still doing it. Yeah.
EMILIE: And I'm sure it's not an easy road, you know what I mean?
WENDY: No. And I'm never going to get it done in my lifetime. It's not me. It's me. As representative of this movement that's happening that's way bigger, that wants fairness and equality for everyone. And it's part. It's that one little sliver that I'm part of trying to change.
EMILIE: Well, Wendy, I thank you for all that you're doing to try to tip the scales of justice to that equilibrium. And I'm optimistic. Like you, I share this belief that we are on this precipice of some kind of some massive transformation. And it's not going to be easy or pretty probably, but it's happening, and we're living in it. So where can our listeners go to learn more about the amazing work you're doing and get their hands on a copy of this new version of your book?
WENDY: Thank you. Thank you. SpiralUp.com is my website. The book can be found everywhere that books are sold. Spiraling Upward: The Five Co Creative Powers For Women On The Rise.
And, yeah, I just thank you for the work that you're doing. You know, you're doing breakthrough things and brave things, and, you know, just raising a family, even in this time, is. Is a brave thing to do. And especially in a unique way that you want to do it, in a revolutionary way that you want to do it, where you're carving out new rules, new expectations, new status quo. So thank you.
EMILIE: Thank you, Wendy. It's been a pleasure.
For links to everything Wendy and I just talked about, head to bossedup.org/episode476 That's bossedup.org/episode476. There you'll find a shareable blog post summarizing Wendy's key points from today, as well as a full transcript for sharing as well.
And now I'd love to hear from you. Let's keep the conversation going. As always, in the Bossed Up Courage Community on Facebook, and in the Bossed Up LinkedIn Group. What resonated with you during today's discussion? What, if anything, were you left wondering? What did you want to hear more about? And how have you enlisted the men in your life as allies?
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What great allyship have you seen on display in the workplace? I want to hear more about it. So let's keep the conversation going there after today's episode, as always. And until next time, let's keep bossin’ in pursuit of our purpose and let's lift as we climb.
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