Role congruity theory of prejudice towards female leaders
How do I get a promotion? This is a topic that crops up in our coaching practice and workshops. Last month I took part in a panel on levelling up — a career special facilitated by Emma Jones. Topics discussed were around how to respond to vague feedback from your manager and handling performance reviews. And both in the lens of women looking for a promotion.
The panel reminded me of the barriers to career advancement for women in senior leadership roles. Women face challenges in their quest for promotions and senior leadership roles. Women leaders who display assertiveness and dominance may be perceived as unfeminine, leading to biases against them and negative evaluations, which contributes to the "glass ceiling" phenomenon and the myth of a pipeline problem.
Organisations can counteract these biases by increasing awareness of gender stereotypes, modelling desired leadership behaviours, offering feedback training, standardising career growth frameworks, and implementing practices that support work-life balance for all genders. By taking action to address gender-based devaluation and stereotypes, organisations can foster a more inclusive culture and promote greater gender equity in leadership roles.
The current status quo sucks and we all have to work at it and keep talking about this, for anything to start changing. To read more about this topic, check out the full article. If you’d like support in fostering a more inclusive culture in your business, we can help.
~ Elle
What’s been happening?
Ruby Conf AU this week
Lachlan and Elle are going to be at Ruby Conf AU this week. Elle is speaking on Thursday, April 11th (this afternoon). She will be exploring Rails anti-patterns. If you are at the conference, come and say hi!
Empowering Individuals for Team Success workshop
Do you have a good relationship with your manager? Do people at your company know what you've been working on? Or are you struggling to communicate your needs at work? To align expectations with peers? Are you able to say no when you have too much on your plate?
This workshop is designed to help individuals become better communicators, prioritise tasks effectively, set boundaries, and foster a culture of accountability and resiliency.
Tickets and details available here
Leading Engineering Teams workshop
Tickets are already on sale for Leading Engineering Teams workshop. If you're a manager who wishes you'd had some leadership training before taking on a team, or are considering a leadership role, this is the workshop for you.
Tickets and details available here
New newsletter format
This is the first of two newsletters you'll get from us this month. We've split the regular format in half. This week is the editorial and recently read list. In a few weeks you'll get an interview with someone we admire and a recipe too.
What are we reading?
Completed Staff Work – Jade Rubick explains the concept of Completed Staff Work, how you and your team can use, and then points to an even better approach to follow it with.
Seconds to Strategy: How Your Relationship with Time Shapes Your Career – Auren Hoffman with some ideas around how your perception and use of time impacts what kind of work you're good at. And then ties that to how we evaluate candidates in job interviews.
Facebook secretly looked at Snapchat, Amazon, and YouTube user data, documents reveal – Just in case you were not entirely clear how much Facebook cares about your privacy.
Conventional Comments – A proposed convention for comments (in pull requests and such).
Nutrition Science’s Most Preposterous Result – This came up in one of our team meetings as an aside but it stopped all conversation until it was fully explained and everybody went to read the article later. Ice cream is probably healthy for people but nobody will do the research to truly find out why and how.
And we’re out
Thank you for showing an interest in our newsletter and we hope that you enjoyed the read. Feel free to contact us if you have any feedback, a burning question, or just a recipe that you would like to share.
Until next time, keep learning!
Everyone at Blackmill