It’s Women’s History Month and yesterday, March 15, was Equal Pay Day. That’s how far white women in America must work to earn what men earned in the previous year for doing the same job. And if you’re a Black woman, it’s in AUGUST. FFS. Men, if you want to do something other than stay quiet about this stuff, take an implicit bias test today and talk to someone you work with about your results.
My son Fred was also born on March 15—he turned one, yesterday. To celebrate we went out for lunch with his mum, paid for with some of my un-earned extra income. Also, we searched the term “pay gap” on LinkedIn and I had to scroll through 22 posts by women until I came to one by a male connection.
Come on, chaps. We can do better. We are staying quiet on this issue and that must drive all the women we work with nuts. We men need to do more talking to each other about why this is messed up. The day itself was started by the National Committee on Pay Equity under Bill Clinton in 1996. It was a public awareness event. I think the sad thing about that is we’re all aware, now.
A big part of the reason men stay silent about this stuff is: We don’t like to have to acknowledge our incompetence. There’s confirmation bias about earning money that means we like to believe we deserve it. So, here goes:
- I am no more competent than most of the women I work with.
- In my experience I am often far less competent, hard-working, and yet, I get the credit more often.
- Hardly anything I do is rocket science, either. In communications what I’m usually doing is getting people to say stuff more clearly. That’s about it.
- I think a big reason people trust me and want to work with me is that I’m funny and kind. That’s nice. But there are a lot of very funny and kind women out there too.
Frequently, I go so far as to tell clients, “You could do this yourself fairly straightforwardly if you could carve out the time, and honestly, I can’t guarantee results on a lot of our work together, it’s just not that kind of business.”
Yet, when I do that, they often want to work with me more.
I sometimes wonder if there’s some sort of gender pay cliff. Like, how far do I have to go to tell people to hire a woman before they’ll push me off the cliff and go ahead and do it? Sadly, I don’t think the cliff exists. The further I get towards it, in fact, the more it seems to recede. That’s some weirdness.
There’s a great video produced by Ogilvy this week encouraging young men to challenge each other on harassment. The hashtag, #HaveAWord, is clever. And the tone of the video is just right.
I think the equivalent in the gender pay gap space is just for men to say, “I’m far less competent than you think I am”, a lot more often. It’s also a very good idea for us to take, and recommend others to take, the Harvard implicit bias test on gender.
So again, fellows, if you want to do something other than stay quiet about this stuff, take an implicit bias test today and talk to someone you work with about your results.
You might think you’re “not sexist,” but we all have internal biases related to gender, and I was appalled to find how biased I am. Women have these biases too. We swim around in them. But until you take your test and realize, “omg, I am so f____ed,” on the bias score, how can you do anything to challenge yourself and society at large?
Men. We’re a lot less competent than you think we are. Please stop relying on us so often and so much. Also please forward this to a bunch of men you know and ask them how they feel about it. I expect they’ll tell you I’m “virtue-signaling” and they’re probably right. But get them to take the test, anyway. And who knows? They might even thank me for it. It’s no coincidence men’s depression rates are through the roof when we internalize society’s pressure to “be the provider” and knuckle down, whatever the cost.
These conversations are hard but we should commit to them. As father to a boy I’m also hoping to model the right behavior for him to speak out and challenge these things as he grows up. I don’t want him to see his dad keeping quiet about them.
