Join host Martha Williams as she talks with Michelle P. King, who, after sixteen years working with major Fortune 500 companies as a gender equality expert, realized one simple truth—the tired advice of fixing women doesn’t fix anything because it's our workplace CULTURE that holds inequality in place.
Martha Williams:
Dear Culture Shifters, I'm Martha Williams, your host today. Thank you for joining us on episode seven of the Culture Shift Podcast, where we work to shift the conversation to inspire a more balanced, peaceful, compassionate, and collaborative world. We believe culture shifts come from a profound change and how we relate to self others and our planet. At the Culture Shifts Podcast. We've been talking to a lot of guests about diversity and specifically gender, including Jennifer Brown, author of How to be an Inclusive Leader. Sean Harvey, who is a soulful facilitator, Ava Pipitone on rethinking gender through embodiment and Cynthia Brix and Will Keepin about the power of gender reconciliation. All of our guests really bring a powerful perspective to the table. And so does our next guest, Michelle King, a leading global expert in gender and organizations and Director of Inclusion at Netflix. Previously, Michelle was also head of the UN Women's Global Innovation Coalition for Change. Michelle has spent her career advancing women in innovation and technology, leading global diversity and inclusion programs and advocating for women at work. Michelle is the author of the new book, The Fix. It's a deeply researched and thorough book that uncovers really the invisible barriers women face at work, as well as how those barriers affect everyone, including men and nonbinary people. Michelle, welcome to the Culture Shift Podcast.
Michelle P. King:
Thank you. Thank you so much.
Martha Williams:
I heard Michelle speak about a week before her book launch in March, 2020, which actually was about a week before the pandemic lockdown took effect, you know, for so many reasons, I was so struck by your research and what you had to say. And at one point when you were talking about something, you call the inequality map, which we'll touch on later. I knew I wanted you on the podcast, but before we really dive in, I'd like to create a little context for our listeners. And have you briefly tell us about yourself and how you came to write this book?
Michelle P. King:
Yeah, so I have been working in the area of human resources for a number of years and specifically focused on diversity and inclusion, so how we can advance difference and advance inclusion within workplaces. So that's really been sort of a core focus of mine and it was after the both of my second child about five years ago that I really wanted to understand what's happening when it comes to gender and equality. So specifically looking at sort of what women needed to do more or less off to advance in work. And it was because I'd been in organizations for long enough that I'd noticed that men and women don't really have the same career experience, right. They don't follow a similar path to leadership. And so in understanding you know, what it is that women need to do more or less of, you know, I came to realize that they don't really have to do anything.
Michelle P. King:
That women are really capable just as they are, both men and women, right? That women are hired in terms of their leadership capability in terms of their management style and approach in terms of like networking ability just across the board, even political skills or how women navigate office politics, women are highly skilled. It was not for a lack of capability or competence, which is often what, you know, a lot of books out there, claim to be. What I discovered through my research is actually it's because of the way workplaces are hardwired right the way workplaces are designed when it comes to things like policies, processes, practices, so sort of day to day behaviors And then, some of the beliefs that we hold about women, which is really at the heart of what gender inequality is all about,
which is this belief that…men are more competent and more valued than women and that masculinity associated with men is more valuable than femininity.
Michelle P. King:
And so in workplaces, you know, that's what I began to discover is how holding up masculinity and men, as the ideal and in workplaces, it's sort of an ideal standard for leaders, right?
When we think of Don Draper, when holding that up as the ideal, the 1950s Don Draper archetype, as you know, what good looks like, it creates enormous challenges for women.
So really what I wanted to do was provide a book that walks women through from start to finish and your career. What are the barriers and how does gender and equality work? Cause most people don't even know that. And then, you know, how does gender and equality and workplaces create barriers for men's advancement and men's fulfillment, right? And then what is it that leaders need to do to create environments that work for both men and women and why that's actually a business imperative. And I say, workplaces need this more than we do. And it's true. So when you look at sort of how this benefits work places, that's why one book kind of walks you through it's part educational part, how to and so, yeah, that was sort of the journey in sharing that.
Martha Williams:
You know, there are so many things you're saying that strike a chord. Most importantly, you know, that masculine traits are held at a higher value than feminine traits, but you also mentioned Don Draper. Now I understand the idea of Don because I heard you speak, but our audience might want to hear more. Can you speak about the idea of Don Draper a bit more?
Michelle P. King:
Yeah, so I unpacked Don in my book. So the best way to explain it is ready to answer the question, you know, how does gender and equality work in workplaces? And what I found is that in workplaces, there is a, what we call success prototypes, right? Which is the ideal standard for what good looks like. So when we think of leaders or we think advantages or ideal employees, we're going to think of a masculine ideal. Those going to be typically the image you might have in your mind – and believe it or not, this has been replicated over different geographies, different contexts of the last 30 years and has consistently shown that when you think of the ideal, you're going to think of a white middle class, heterosexual able-bodied male. But I think much more importantly than that, you're going to also associate behaviors with that ideal with things like being assertive, dominant, aggressive, competitive, you know, willing to make work the number one priority, wanting to engage in kind of even exclusionary or discriminatory behaviors to get ahead.
Michelle P. King:
And so that is really seen as the ideal and was so hard wired for it because when you look at the history and I go into this in my book of how workplaces were first created back, you know, it was Ford motor company. And you know, his manufacturing on that was when this ideal was sort of firmly established as what good looks like the problem is we've never really been aware of it, and so we haven't really shifted it. And women really haven't had a chance to sort of define what leadership looks like to them because we've sort of been handed this ideal to live up to the challenge was having a success prototype based organization. So one way, this is the standard of what good looks like is that most of your leadership chain, you know, will have to live up to it, which is why
..most leaders today look and behave in pretty much the same way.
Michelle P. King:
It's also then by leaders, living up to it by engaging in those behaviors that were associated with the prototype they encourage employees to do the same thing. And so what happens is you've got this whole workplace where the experience, or the day to day behaviors or moments or the exchanges – all of the lived experience of the workplace – really represents Don Draper. And the reason that matters, is because the closer you are to Don in terms of being white middle class heterosexual, able bodied all the behaviors that were associated with it, the more you engage in that, the easier it is for you to advance at work. But the more you differ from Don, the harder it is to advance. So nobody's saying, you know, that Don didn't work hard or that men don't work hard, particularly white men. What we're saying is you can work hard, but not have to navigate all these invisible barriers because you don't naturally automatically fit the idea of what good looks like and workplaces. And so my book outlines a lot of the barriers that this creates for a woman and for men.
Martha Williams:
What I love about Don Draper is that it so clearly captures and externalizes the corporate ideal of this working person or man we're all supposed to be striving to emulate. I'd love you to talk more about how the Don Draper ideal affects men too.
Michelle P. King:
Yeah. I mean, I feel like Don is just the archetype in terms of, he's not interested in his home life in terms of the fact that he had to mold to this idea of what success looks like. So to your point, changing who he is to fit in, you know, wearing the wrong clothes, speaking in the wrong way, really trying to have this picture perfect, like ideal. And interestingly, even in the show, you know, he experienced a lot of challenges with living up to that ideal. And so the whole sort of take on men and how living up to Don creates a lot of challenges for me was something that I sort of discovered by default. So I have a confession when I wrote the book, I really wasn't writing it for men at all. So I was writing it just for women. I was only interested in the barriers because I made the assumption that a lot of people make that gender inequality works for me.
Michelle P. King:
So I assume that, you know, because we have this unequal playing field, surely, you know, this must be something that works for most men. And it wasn't until I presented my research findings to a group of about 400 male partners in a professional services firm and got like this crickets and just the squirrel looks for men, you know, looking at me like, what are you talking about? This did not resonate. Whereas explaining the barriers, explaining how inequality works. And it really sort of, I struggled with the feedback like men were pushing back on this. They didn't understand it, it wasn't landing. And so I went back into the data, my qualitative data took all the women out and spent hours just reviewing the comments and feedback from and reviewed my survey data with over thousands dispense again, took all women out, just reviewed the data.
Michelle P. King:
And what I found consistently was that, you know, men face numerous barriers and are trying to live up to this. So things like, you know, if men want to reduce their work hours for family reasons, research finds, they're going to be penalized they'll face a 26% reduction in pay compared to women who face a 23% reduction. If men want to take on sort of more feminine attributes that we typically associate with sort of feminine leadership styles, the things I think, empathetic, collaborative, you know, more democratic, more inclusive, they're going to be penalized something known as the femininity stigma, where we associate those behaviors with more sort of feminine styles of leadership.
If men display any sort of emotions or talk about their feelings or things that they're struggling with, all this stress, again, they’re penalized because for men, that's deviating from the masculine ideal of being tough and being decisive and willing to go it alone.
Michelle P. King:
And men are also bullied into silence at workplaces. So they are bullied to not speak up if they witnessed discrimination or marginalization to just go with it, because that's the way you fit into the ideal, right? So there's almost this groupthink and the group pressure. And the problem is it has a real cost on men's mental and emotional health. So when you look at things like suicide rates, depression, and there's a huge load that men carry where, you know, they cannot deviate from Don because the differences for men deviating from the Don Draper, ideal cost them in terms of leadership in the same way that it does for woman, but where at differs is it also costs them in terms of their core identity, which is gender. So being a man. So for men, you know, when they move away from what we consider the ideal leadership, they're not just moving away from, you know, good leaders look like they're moving away from what good men look like, and that can be hugely taxing.
Michelle P. King:
So they are sort of seen as the other, they can be ostracized by their peers particularly men fighting for gender equality, for example, they can be ridiculed. There's just huge challenges that men face talking about this. And so I actually went back to that same group and presented the challenges that inequality creates for men. And that was sort of my way of showing them that, Hey, your fight is my fight. We're in this together. The system doesn't work for either of us, living up to Don is like handcuffs. You know, we need the freedom to display different types of behaviors, and that really enrolled them in, like I found men that really landed. And now I've men writing to me saying, thank you, Michelle, for writing this book for us. So, you know, I think it's a really important message. And one, we don't talk about enough.
Martha Williams:
I want to talk about culture change that you're advocating for, because you do say it's not women that are the problem. It's the workplace.
At Culture Shift Agency, that's the thing we're most interested in is this big monster beast called culture. And especially now with our society being put on pause due to the pandemic, we're at this point where we can really look at what hidden assumptions and perspectives are running the show.
So I want to talk about what it's like for you to address workplace culture and how you suggest we tackle it in your book.
Michelle P. King:
I think just pulling back a step as to why culture, I think a lot of diversity and inclusion programs to date have not worked. And as a diversity inclusion practitioner, I mean, I work finance folks during this work. I'm the first to admit that it's because the programs don't address the lived experience, the day to day moments, behaviors, exchanges, your experiences that you have at work, which is where inequality happens. So when we talk about these concepts, it feels very ambiguous, right? Like, Hey, you know, what is inequality? What is it this woman's talking about? But what I'm really referencing is when you go to work and you have those exchanges with people in your office, that's what culture happens. It happens in moments, right? And it's the same with inequality that's where it happens. It happens in moments. I talk about inequality moments.
Michelle P. King:
And so it can be something like, you know, my first day as a manager and I walked into the kitchen of work, my boss was standing with some of my colleagues who were reported to me. He picked up a kitchen towel and he threw it at me and said, Hey, you're a woman, why don't you wash the dishes? That's a culture defining moment because he is marginalizing against me because of my gender. I then have to decide how to handle it. I can either laugh and, you know, in doing so I'm laughing at a core part of who I am or I can, you know, push back on the marginalization and the discrimination he's engaging in and say something back or any of my male colleagues can say something and be allies in that moment. And that would again, redefine the culture. I'd so all of that, like how it plays out is culture defining moments.
Michelle P. King:
And so for me, you know, there's almost no diversity programs to date. They've really tackled that. And what we're asking is, you know, culture's really day-to-day behaviors, you know, leaders are the culture of an organization, because they set the standard for behaviors.
Every day, a leader gets to decide what they're going to ignore, reward, endorse, support, advance, you know, they decide that. And so they are really the ones who govern the culture of organizations.
They get to decide that, and that is a huge privilege, right? It's a privilege to determine whether a woman who's on her first day as a manager is not only going to get to a manager role, but if she is going to be valued and treated like a manager and like the peers, right. In my case, that wasn't the case.
And so I think we forget that it's, you know, really each of us, we build cultures will culture builders, right? And we do that through our behaviors and our choices.
Michelle P. King:
And so for me, if we want to solve inequality, we have to solve the lived experience.
And that's where it shows up. And you can do that by unpacking, you know, how inequality looks in your workplace, thinking about the stories and the examples people have either witnessed or experienced and how this unfolds and workplaces, you know, that's how the barriers women face come to life. They're all experienced. And so that's why to me, culture is the number one way to solve this. And we've seen that through research like extensions that shows and cultures of equality, you know, men are twice as likely to advance to senior leadership positions and women as six times more likely because, you know, you're no longer advancing a small number of people that fit the Don Draper ideal, right. You create an environment that values difference and values people for being themselves.
Michelle P. King:
And that's what this is about.
A culture of equality is fundamentally an organization that values difference.
And so that's really the aim of, of what we're trying to achieve here, but it stops and starts with leaders. Like we have to hold leaders accountable for the cultures of inequality they create. And I just want to say the most important point with this for leaders is, you know, the inequality people experience in your workplace is a direct result of your leadership. And I think it's really important that people think about that as a statement, you know, like leaders are the ones who are accountable, but the experience of inequality that their people have to endure
Martha Williams:
So when I first heard you speak live, you discussed something, you call the inequality map, which I'd love you to actually talk about next. But I just want to say that it's when you talked about this, that I was brought to tears and that's when I knew I wanted to interview you because for me, it was the first time in my life.
I saw so clearly how my life choices were funneled through the veil of systematic inequality.
That was so invisible to me, to us that instead of thinking it's the system, that's the problem. It was me. I'm the problem. I thought, you know, I'm too creative, I'm too wild and outspoken. I'm definitely too big. This conclusion is what led me to being a media artist who makes her own rules. But initially I wanted to be in politics to work on creating change in the government and as a woman in her forties who studies and presents this stuff, to see so clearly how my life path was fundamentally affected and directed by a systematic sexism that I couldn't beat, that was huge. And this is why I knew your work was so powerful. So tell us about the inequality map.
Michelle P. King:
I've done a lot of work with a range of different companies in the energy and resource sector and really looking at, you know, what it is that they can do. And for me, I think the starting point is the power of storytelling. So I talk about this in my book, something every leader can do. It's really easy activity. And it's incredibly powerful is to map their inequality journey, right, is to map out different experiences that you might've witnessed or yourself engaged in that created barriers to people's advancement that created an equality that created discrimination, anything you've witnessed or experienced. And you map it out over the timeline of your career, right, from start to finish. So just think about any time you've witnessed or experienced inequality. And then as a leader, you share that with your team and really trying to unpack what it is that created those situations and invite your team to do the same.
Michelle P. King:
And it can be about an hour long exercise, but why it's really powerful is that it does one really important thing. It starts the process off by helping people recognize that we're all in the state of the, we all have a role to play in creating cultures of equality and it just re-ups denial.
So one thing we haven't talked about is the denial that a lot of leaders are in, right?
Which is why, despite all these diversity and inclusion efforts, you know, inequality is persisting because leaders are in denial about people's different experiences of the workplace. And I'll give you a quick example of this. You know, if you ask a lot of leaders, particularly male leaders, white male leaders today, if there were places of meritocracy, they'll tell you overwhelmingly. Yes. So I've experienced that in my research, right? Yes. It's a meritocracy and you'll say, well, how can that be?
Michelle P. King:
Like, you've got so few women or, you know, so if members and your leadership team from underrepresented groups, and they'll say things like, well, you know the workplace, we treat everybody the same because everybody is the same. Everybody has the same sort of career ladder is no differences. You know, not in this workplace, if you are an employee, we don't treat people differently. And so there's this real belief that, you know, workplaces are the same and experienced in the same way. And so sharing an inequality journey and mapping that out is one way to disrupt that denial around the fact that, you know, workplaces don't work for everybody in the same way, and it's not a level playing field. And success does discriminate because we have the Don Draper ideal. And so, you know, the closer you fit that, the easier it is for you to live up to that.
Michelle P. King:
And so I think some of this is an education, but with leaders and I was quite strong to not only find that leaders believe that there were no barriers and women and underrepresented groups, you know, from underrepresented groups face at work, but leaders also more importantly, didn't really make the connection that they had a role in this, right? So there was this denial around what it is that they needed to do differently to create an environment that supported women aside from just recruiting more, you know, they didn't really connect with what their role was and until they make that connection, that actually they're accountable for the lived experience of the workplace, it's not enough to get women in. You have to make sure you've got a supportive environment for them to thrive. Like we're never going to crack this gender inequality problem.
Martha Williams:
You speak about the future of work. You talk about the top five capabilities needed for the future and all are related to empathy and emotional intelligence. So could you talk about the necessity for these skills and how critical these capabilities are for the future?
Michelle P. King:
When I started researching us, I would be confronted in workshops with senior male, and even in some cases, female leaders who would say to me, Michelle, the truth is the thing that we don't want to say to anybody is that the reason we have the Don Draper prototype is because it works. It's really effective. We need Don don't, we need Don. And I would have to sort of swallow the misogyny in order to answer the question and just take a breath and say, listen, here's the thing that we don't actually talk about is that Don doesn't work. So you could make an argument that in the 1950s and Ford motor company was a command and control style of organization where you just needed stuff manufactured. You just needed everybody to do their job and, you know, a sequence and an order and repeat that same task every day, they're having a Don Draper, you know, prototype might've worked.
Michelle P. King:
And it was an environment where most of the employees were men, they all were the same. So it didn't really matter that it was only one standard of success because that was the path of most of the people. That was an organization where it wasn't difference in terms of, you know, the workers in it. And that's where a lot of the myths have been created. And the reality is Don Draper prototype today does not work in environments that require collaboration, innovation, problem-solving. You cannot have command and control style. You cannot have a leader that's simply telling you what to do and expecting you to follow. You need to be able to think for yourself, you need to be able to manage your own workload. You need to be able to come up with innovative solutions and it doesn't matter what job you're in. Like you have to have that level of autonomy and that ability to, you know, engage in different ways of working and increasingly so, right.
Michelle P. King:
So that's today, but increasingly so in the future. So if we fast forward three to five years and just look at the data coming out of The World Economic Forum, you know, in terms of the skillsets, people will need to work with AI, to work with robotics, nanotechnology, the internet of things, to really work with all these technological advancements that are estimated to change up to 60% of jobs out there in the next three years, right? Because it's not far away, this is happening today. And we're seeing it in law firms and accounting with sort of what your middle white collar jobs are really disappearing and are going to disappear increasingly.
So, and so people, most people will be working with some form of AI, some form of robotics, you know, and the way we work together will change. So the soft skills will be needed.
Michelle P. King:
We're going to have to be a lot more innovative. We're going to have to engage in the softer side of work. And I go into my book about examples of this with doctors, where, you know, you have IBM's Watson diagnosing a patient, and then your job is to really look at how you work with the patient, right? So you need the softer skills to share the messaging to really think through it. And so for me, on the softer side, if you look at the capabilities men and women have today, and you go an ask men and woman, this, I did it in the survey, you know, men and women say that woman have four out of the five capabilities that are required in the future world of work. So exactly to your point, things like empathy, collaboration, democratic leadership style. So they really have that ability to be inclusive.
Michelle P. King:
Men and women say that men have one out of the five. And so for me, you could look at that and say, okay, so are we saying that men need to be more feminine? Is that what we're saying? That's not what we're saying. So I'm not saying for a moment that suddenly we need men to take on a whole bunch of feminine attributes, because that would be really ignoring how he got into this mess. In the first place we got into this mess because we prescribed that everybody live up to one sort of standard, one set of behaviors. And for me, this is much more about giving employees the freedoms. In the future world of work. What we need is cognitive behavioral and emotional flexibility, the kind of show up differently, right? Like, can you take on new skills? Can you behave in different ways? Can you manage your emotions in different ways? You have freedom to engage in a wide range of behaviors. There might be times where it's perfectly acceptable to be competitive, to be assertive. And then there might be times where you really need to be empathetic.
And so men and women need the freedom to engage in a wide range of behaviors and not to be penalized for it. And that starts with creating the right environments that enable that.
Martha Williams:
So we live in this production economy, which is the economy hyper focused on producing things, concepts, and values that we can measure. And it's founded on the assembly line, uniformity plug and play economy of scale. Right now we seem to be moving into a new kind of economy.
At Culture Shift Agency. We talk about it as the process economy, a sort of antidote to the production economy. It's a far more relational and human centric economy, a new kind of world that requires more sophisticated relationships.
We need to find new containers, new ways of holding that space. From your vantage, what are some of the ways that we can cultivate these attributes in our workplace?
Michelle P. King:
I know I keep coming back to cultures of equality, but when we look at organizations that are doing this well in terms of how they approach it, I think the starting point for me, and at least with one firm that I've worked with over the last three years, you have to get to the leaders, right? And not all leaders though. I've worked with an organization. With LinkedIn, I've actually written this up as a case study where they had Mike Damson was heading out – this is quite a few years ago. He's no longer there now, but he was the SVP of like their sales division. And he had his Ah-ha moment where he witnessed an inequality moment, and he realized in that moment that, you know, things were not working that for women in the same way that they were for men. And he had made the assumption that it was a meritocracy and that as a white male leader, that it functioned like it did for him, like for everybody else.
Michelle P. King:
But when he witnessed this moment, he realized, Hey, you know what? This is not the case. Like this works differently. And if we're going to succeed in sales and the way that sales environment has changed and will change with the technological advances that are happening we need to adapt and we need to create an environment where people can engage in different behaviors. And this starts with understanding how it's not working for everybody, right? So he then didn't wait on the CEO for some big announcement around, you know, commitment to gender equality or, you know, and it's sort of permission to go ahead and do this work, he just went and did it and with his own unit, right? So he got his leaders together. They actually did their inequality journey. They share their experiences. They invited you know, minority people from underrepresented groups within the team to come and share their experiences of inequality.
Michelle P. King:
And you have to do this in a very delicate way, because, you know, for me, it's not about asking underrepresented groups to educate those people in positions of privilege and power about inequality. So for me, that's not the aim. This was much more, they're done some of the work upfront. And so it was an invitation for people to share their stories who are comfortable doing so, and that was very powerful because that got replicated throughout his division. And what happened is that really disrupted everybody's denial. And I had this really powerful sort of amplifying effect where everybody realized, wow, this is a real problem. Like, you know, this is getting inhibit our effectiveness in sales because we're not selling to just Don Drapers, we're selling to a global community. And so we need like the diverse approach and we need the ability to flex in order to sell to that group.
Michelle P. King:
And so then what they did was they use those stories to try and identify what the underlying problems were and where this was showing up. So it was showing up in things like, you know, promotion decisions and how that was made was showing up in terms of the culture. So, you know, how women were experiencing the workplace and things that weren't great. And then they combined engaged in this program that Mike basically supported to put some solutions in place of organic and relevant to his division. You know, it probably wouldn't necessarily make sense and a lot of other corporates, but they looked at solutions and ways of supporting women's advancement. And within three years, their representation went from something like 10% of women in senior leadership positions around 43% across the board. And it was sustainable because it focused on the right set of issues.
Michelle P. King:
And so for me, that's such a great example of where you don't have to be the CEO, you don't have to have information, you know, you just do that. And as a result, his division was more productive, more profitable. And then LinkedIn adopted that throughout the organization. That's exact models for solving this problem and the diversity and inclusion folk, you know, they were, they're more looking for opportunities to scale, looking for opportunities to leverage what he had done, but they weren't driving this. This was driven by Mike. And so I think this is such a great example of a white male, you know, spending his privilege, understanding the business imperative and making it work. And so it is possible.
Martha Williams:
You talked about spending your privilege. A lot of people might not know what that means, spending privilege. Tell us a little bit about what that means.
Michelle P. King:
So a lot of people are uncomfortable with privilege until I kind of map it out in the sense that we're all privileged to some extent, right?
So if we think again about Don and the more ways that you fit that idea. For me in a workplace setting, at least that's how much more privileged you are, right? So as a white woman on whiteness and common with Don, that makes it that much easier for me to advance compared to women of color. And I sort of explained this throughout the book with each of the barriers, right, and how that's compounded with things like race and things like physical, mental ability, religion, age, sexual orientation. So it just makes it that much hotter. And a great example of this is, you know, if you just look at the pay gap and how that is for women of color, how that's so much worse for folk from the LGBTQ community, and then how that's much worse fo you know, members of the disabled community and the pay gap is, you know, a great example of how difference compounds barrier, right?
Michelle P. King:
And so the pay gap exists because we fundamentally don't value men and women's contribution in the same way. And so privilege is really that it's an unknown benefit that you get from automatically fitting what the ideal looks like and workplaces, right.
And it just means it's that much easier for you. So for me, I always say to people, you know, you need to spend time exploring how your different identities give you privilege and be able to talk about it in a way that kind of acknowledges that. For me, given that it's an honor and benefit though, on something that Brittany Packnett says and her article in The Cut about spending or privilege, I think that is really the benefit of talking about it because once you acknowledge it, it's what you do with that, that counts. So you've got to spend it. So in the case of being a white woman in workplaces, you know, I've made it my mission to understand the challenges women of color face and understand how ignoring those barriers and not seeking to acknowledge them.
Michelle P. King:
I actually perpetuate them and how it's my job to spend my privilege by calling out the barriers or by knowing what they are, and then calling them out when they pay out of my workplace and which happens all the time. I mean, you know, in one of the organizations I've worked in, I had a wonderful and highly capable and experienced black woman work for me. And she was going to present a workshop. Now, one of the barriers that black women face is hyper visibility, right? And continual questioning of their capability, much more so than white women, where they have to prove and prove and prove that they do have what it takes just to do their job. It will only advance. And so knowing this, when this male leader said to me, you know, do you think, you know, this black woman that works for me, do you think she's capable enough to lead this?
Michelle P. King:
Now he'd never met her. So he'd sort of seen her about the office, but he had never actually spoken with her. It didn't know her background. He didn't know her experience. There was no basis for him to make this questioning right? For all he knew she could have been more experienced or qualified than me. So knowing this barrier, I could then call them out, which I did. So I said, you know, on what basis are you questioning her ability to do this? And help me understand what your concern is? The leader was sort of saying, well, you know, I'm just not sure she's experienced enough, or is she too junior to be leading us to say it again, on what basis? So in a previous organization, she was a director, which is my level. And she's got like nearly the same years of experiences as me.
Michelle P. King:
In fact, she's got more qualifications than me to help me understand on what basis you're making the statement. And then the leader immediately was like, Oh, well, you know, it's fine. If she can do it, you can, you can let her do it. It's fine. I just thought I would ask. Right. And so by asking the questions and I say, well, asking why it's a very powerful way to get somebody to explain their racism or sexism. And in that moment, that leader had to confront his bias in that moment. Right. And then he pushed back like, absolutely. You know what, let her go ahead and do the workshop, no issue from my standpoint. Right. And she did the workshop just highly effective. It was a great workshop, but that was an example of me removing a barrier. She didn't even know that happened. Right. So I think that is a great example of allyship and how, like, for me, calling that out, I was spending my privilege because I was having an altercation with this leader on it.
Michelle P. King:
And we're already pushing him to be uncomfortable, to confront his bias. And so like, that is really what we need to do. We need to spend our privilege.
Martha Williams:
And what does it mean to live up to your privilege?
Michelle P. King:
Living up to your privilege is really what I think a lot of white women do and a lot of white men do in particular, which is where we ignore the barriers. We say, it's a meritocracy because that makes us more comfortable with the idea that actually it's our hard work alone that got us where we are, right. That there was no on level playing field that's helped me. And so I talk about this in the book where I, for many years, was saying things like, you know, it's hard enough for me to advance as a woman. Why do I have to understand the barriers women of color face?
Michelle P. King:
You know, I own that. I, I admit that that was a way of thinking that I had. And for a while, I was like, this sounds very familiar. Where have I heard this before? And I was like, I've heard this with white men who say, you know, why do I need to know about this gender and equality stuff? Why do I have to bother with it without realizing that it's their behavior? And in many times their beliefs that perpetuate inequality, the woman experiences. So it is our job. And I mean, I often say to people what a privileged position to be in, I mean, to remove inequality that you yourself never have to experience is a very powerful position. It's to spend my privilege. You know what I mean? It's a great position to be in, but I also think for men and women in particular, the one thing I definitely want listeners to take away is that when you're spending a privilege, you're not actually helping underrepresented groups.
Michelle P. King:
So this is a big and important point because there's this belief that when I'm being an ally, it's like the male savior effect. Can I see it all the time in gender equality, it's horrible men kind of take on this role of, you know, the white Knight. I'm going to save women and help them. It's horrible. And like women don't need your help under represented groups. Don't need your help, studies show. They are super, super capable just as they are. They need you to remove the barriers you're creating and research shows that that actually serves to benefit you. So when you witness an inequality moment, so when you witness discriminational or marginalization of work, it has the same negative impact in terms of your mental and emotional wellbeing as if it has happened to you. And so that's why when you take steps to remove that you are actually benefiting yourself.
Michelle P. King:
So in the case of me having a dish towel thrown at me, I had several of my male colleagues come up to me afterwards and said, Michelle, I'm so sorry. I wish I'd said something. I feel terrible, but that's the mental and emotional load, right? To not saying anything and had one of them said it, they would have felt much better. And the reason for that is nobody likes to see their colleagues discriminated against. Nobody likes to see, you know, people being marginalized, nobody likes that. It makes people feel uncomfortable. You've got to be a very, you know, odd individual to like seeing somebody suffer. And so the aim here is, you know, how can we create communities of care? How can we practice allyship? How can we speak up in the moment and take action to remove barriers. And in doing that, knowing we're actually creating a bit of workplace for ourselves
Martha Williams:
And it takes courage to speak up.
Michelle P. King:
It takes a lot of courage. I mean, courage is not something we talk enough about.
On my podcast, The Fix I interviewed Renee Myers, who's actually my boss at Netflix. And she talks about courage is one of the most important attributes around inclusive leadership, right? The reason you need courage is because it is uncomfortable. You know, even like talking about these topics for me, I approach it from a place that it's a privilege for me to talk about this and have the means to do that. But I think for a lot of people at that moment, you have to decide who you are and what your values are and what you want to be known for. Do you want to be the person who was silent and didn't say anything, and if you speak up, you potentially could be ostracized. You could be marginalized yourself. You could be seen as being difficult, right? You could, or not a team player, or you could lose your sort of male favoritism right in that moment. And so it's really important when you're spending your privilege to recognize that, you know, you're spending something that matters and it does take courage, but it also takes humility. I think humility is a huge part of it because you have to humble yourself to be open, to hearing different experiences and things you might not agree with.
Martha Williams:
You know, this sounds like such an emotional journey you're talking about. And it seems to me that in order to really tackle inequality, there needs to be emotional intelligence and courage from both leaders and workers alike.
Michelle P. King:
I'll just add, my first master's degree was in intelligence and I actually surveyed 150 CEOs on stress. And so emotional intelligence is a huge part of it, right? Because you have to have the skills to manage these conversations to navigate them. But the other thing I'll say is most people probably don't have these skills. And so it's important to seek out partners or subject matter experts, but that's your diversity inclusion team or human resources to help you sort of facilitate that. And then for all of us to give each other grace, because you're not going to get this right. And that's the whole point. And it's the thing that really frustrates me in this work is that people feel they need to be perfect. They're too scared to talk about racism and sexism. And so consequently, when somebody says something's racist that some of it becomes more detrimental than the racist behavior itself, right?
Michelle P. King:
And so we've lost our ability to learn because when not willing to do the work emotionally and be vulnerable and have these conversations and recognize that, getting it wrong is learning. That is the journey. You know, when I get feedback on being accountable and I say, Hey, I'm accounting for my behavior. I'm accounting for my lack of knowledge, I'm accounting for the fact that I'm learning. And that is the work like I'm doing the work to humble myself to understand what it is that needs to be fixed. And so I think the problem too, is the way we view this. Like, Hey, all of a sudden we're becoming really emotional and talking about emotional things. And the reality is we're actually always emotional, we're humans, right? It's just that there was this myth that somehow when you walk in your office, you'd leave your human at home. And it's like, that's just not the case at all. You know, people are biased, they're sexist, they racist, they have prejudices. They are also wonderful and collaborative and allies and we're complex creatures. You know, you can be a good person and still have biases. And so we need work places that see the whole person and invite you to bring your whole self to work and talk about some of these issues
Martha Williams:
In light of COVID-19 what's the state of gender bias. Has it been exacerbated?
Michelle P. King:
So I tend to be the bearer of bad news, right? Somebody told me about gender inequality. I mean, you pointed out before in your previous question, gender inequality is everywhere, right? So it's in the arts and this is on my podcast is on, cause I interviewed people from surfing, from girl Scouts, from the art world, from any athletes from corporations, it does not matter gender inequality is everywhere because fundamentally the universal belief is that we value men and masculinity more than women and femininity. That's it, that's what we're trying to solve for. And so what happens in a crisis is it somehow exacerbates this issue because in a crisis, we sort of default to what we know because we're panicked, right. And we're scared. And so it's like, let's default to what we know, right? And what's safe. So safe is let's get rid of sort of anybody who doesn't fit the prototype in our mind.
Michelle P. King:
Right. And let's make those people redundant. And we're seeing right now that a lot of women, you know, are being made redundant and particularly women, you know, from service sectors and caring professionals, we're seeing a lot of challenges in terms of redundancies. We sustain challenges with women who have to work from home. And I know this as a mom of two, you know, I get emails from teachers asking me to undertake curriculums with my four and six year old, assuming that that'll be me, that it won't be my husband. And so there's this burden of women to be up to date, to manage now household schooling and a job. And so that's a tremendous emotional, mental load. And then we also see the impact in terms of care workers who predominantly, you know, most hardest hit a woman of color in those professions, who are now potentially facing, you know, contracting coronavirus.
Michelle P. King:
And so across the board, like they're just many different examples of all the different ways from a gender inequality lens that this virus is having a terrible, detrimental impact. What I will say though, is on the positive side, the thing that I've come to be grateful for the virus, is that it's called into question a lot of assumptions that perpetuated myths about gender inequality, for example, you can't do your job remotely. Well, we now know that's not true. The burden of having to educate your children and, and care for them as one as work. You know, men are now seeing that smack bang you being confronted with that workplace is the bank in front of with that. Right? And the reality of that. And so it's brought some home truths of women who've been struggling with for a long time, like to the forefront of workplaces.
Michelle P. King:
And I do think of ours will fundamentally change the way workplaces work because it's called into question, a lot of the assumptions and workplaces now to confront some of the practices they've been engaging in that have marginalized and, you know, effectively unsupported women. And so for me, it's an exciting time because I think what we're learning is that inclusive leadership wins like in a crisis. That's the only form of leadership command and control will not work because you've got employees at home. They have to decide how many hours they're going to spend on their computer, working, how much time they can put in. They need work, places that see all the challenges they dealing with. They need the ability to actually decide, you know, what they're going to produce and when and how they're going to do that. And they need leaders to coach them and guide them and mentor them.
Michelle P. King:
So it's exactly what we've been calling forward, sort of split up this project to deal with it. And the reason that's important is that really prepares us for the changes that are about to come through technology – so the disruption, right, we're going to experience. So in a way it's actually a blessing because crisis leadership is the new normal, like this is going to be disruption is the new workplace. And so we need environments that cater for that and allow and give people the freedom to show up differently. And so we're starting to get that freedom now simply because we have to, right. And so in some ways it is a blessing.
Martha Williams:
So want to ask you two last things, one, if there's any one idea of your toolbox of ideas, what idea would you want to scale? And what would that look like
Michelle P. King:
It's this idea that it's not you at your workplace.
So I think we just assume the way workplaces work is how they need to work and how they will work. And there's not the sense that we can actually change that.
There's not the agency to change it. And so for me, it's really empowering people to realize, Hey, you know, you, you decide how your workplace is experienced. So you do have a role in that. So for me, you know, getting people to realize that changing the workplace is not necessarily about, you know, something that's out of your control, it's actually within your ability. And the challenge is your experience in your workplace. And not because you lack something it's because your work isn't designed well. And so we need to think about the culture and environment, practices, policies, beliefs that people have and think about how we can shift that, to create an environment that works for everybody.
Martha Williams:
I love that because you can't have that unless you have an engaged relationship to the culture around you. This is what we stand for. The continual cultural inquiry. I mean, it is a monster, but you know, you can ask those questions in your workplace and in your community and in your families. So I'm really excited about that idea. It's not women, it's the workplace. Lastly, what are some of the actions? Some of our listeners can take to help be active agents in The Fix besides of course reading your book.
Michelle P. King:
So there's three things that I really recommend everybody do. Obviously it's a bit different for leaders and there's a whole chapter in my book for leaders, but leaders need to do this as well. So the first is to become aware. You need to become aware of your privilege and do the work, understand how your identities sort of make it that much easier for you to advance and that much harder for anybody else. So do the work to really reflect on that. Now think about your privilege, think about your experience of inequality that you've witnessed, maybe do your inequality journeys, or really use all of that to become aware of how inequality works and then deepen your understanding. So trying to understand how does this show up for people in your workplace? How does it show up for you? What has been your career today? What are some of the barriers you might have encountered?
Michelle P. King:
What are some of the barriers you think you're going to encounter? So we're ready to do the work to understand inequality because you need that awareness and that understanding to do the third action, which is to be an ally. So you can't really be an ally unless you know what it is that you need to speak up against. You need to know when to amplify women, when to support them, how to mentor them and, you know, really encourage women in the workplace and to be a champion, to be an ally, to speak up, to take action. You can't do that without the awareness and the understanding. So for me,uthe other thing I'll say is it's not linear. You don't just have your witness on the standing and then you're this perfect ally, right? It's this ongoing process of deepening your understanding, deepening your awareness, and then, you know, making equality a practice. And that is something that all of us can do by doing the work upfront on the awareness and understanding piece. And then really thinking about how we're practicing this every day at work.
Martha Williams:
How do people get in touch with you?
Michelle P. King:
You can access my website at michellepking.com. On there you'll find a whole bunch of resources and you can also follow me on LinkedIn at Michelle P. King. And you can also access my podcast, The Fix. It's a weekly podcast where you can hear from me,
Martha Williams:
Michelle, thank you so much for joining us today for your commitment to this work and the research, the writing, the speaking, and the storytelling that you share today and in your book.
Michelle P. King:
Thank you. Thank you so much.
Martha Williams:
Thank you so much for joining us today on the Culture Shifts Podcast, where we dig into critical conversation with those who are shifting culture by defying the status quo.
Martha Williams:
The transcripts and links related to this podcast, as well as other episodes are available at cultureshiftagency.com.