1

Don’t allow bullies to reign

Here’s a headline that grabbed my attention: “How bullying becomes a career tool.”

In a letter to the Nature Human Behaviour journal, Susanne Täuber and Morteza Mahmoudi summarized their concerns about bullying in academia, sharing numerous anonymized examples. They also explained,

“An emerging body of research suggests that mediocre academics in particular resort to bullying, to remove their competition. Experimental research has shown that when male hierarchies are disrupted by women, this incites hostile behaviour specifically from poorly performing men, because they stand to lose the most.”

Täuber and Mahmoudi describe some of the systemic behaviors that support bullying. For example, an organization that allows ever-changing performance criteria for what it takes to be promoted or gain tenure. Or one that encourages competition between employees.

Allies, here’s one idea to prevent bullies from thriving: Be transparent about the promotion process. Share the steps, the timeline, and the descriptions of responsibilities in your job ladder.

Also, ensure that the promotion process is objective and data-driven. As NielsenIQ found, revamping their performance management to be data-driven, and therefore fairer and more objective, has proven to be the most effective DEI strategy.

2

Share salary ranges

Next month, a new law in New York City will require companies to list salary ranges on job descriptions. Its goal is to address gender-pay gaps and provide more transparency on pay for new roles, promotions, and transfers.

Colorado has a similar law, and the state of Washington will also have one starting January 1, 2023. California is also considering such legislation.

That said, one concern raised over these laws is how to have conversations with current employees. As they learn about the ranges, some may wonder why they’re placed where they are within a band. I’ve been there myself.

I remember being promoted to vice president at a tech company years ago. Because of the widely known issues of gender pay inequity, I asked my HR partner about the salaries of the other (all male) engineering VPs. I didn’t want to know names—just the wages. Given I was new to the role, I wasn’t expecting to be paid at the top end, yet I wanted to make sure I wasn’t an outlier at the low end of the range. It turns out my salary was in line with several others, and I felt good about my compensation.

While some companies and public institutions go a step further and share everyone’s salary publicly, why not at least share pay bands? Sure, it may result in difficult conversations about pay philosophy and how employees are leveled within the ranges. But the transparency may have a positive impact, just as it did for me.

3

Build collaboration equity

In an article for Fast Company, Google’s chief diversity officer Melonie Parker shared what they learned about flexibility and inclusion with hybrid work. One of their themes is building “collaboration equity,” and Parker provided these suggestions:

• Use interactive tools for both in-person and remote participants. Think polls, chat, live captions, etc.
• Begin a meeting asking for input from folks who are not in the room first, so they feel welcome to contribute to the conversation from the start.

What would you add to Parker’s list? I’d love to hear more ideas for building collaboration equity in hybrid meetings.

4

Be an ally for Asian women

In A new report outlines some of the barriers facing Asian women in tech, Joan C. Williams, Rachel Korn, and Asma Ghani summarized their research findings:

“Asians are not underrepresented in tech, … but that doesn’t mean there aren’t still massive barriers to overcome. We found that Asian women reported worse outcomes than white women, often by a wide margin.

The most concrete takeaway is that tech companies should not misinterpret the increasing prevalence of South Asian men in leadership to conclude that no bias exists against Asians and Asian Americans at their companies.”

Here are some examples of bias uncovered by their research. South Asian women in their survey were 54% more likely than white women to report being given low-level work below their skill set. East Asian women were 42% more likely to report being left out of the loop and treated like they were invisible. And Southeast Asian women were 45% more likely to be seen as team players than leaders.

Whether we work in tech or another field, let’s look out for bias against our Asian women colleagues. We can ensure lower-level “housework” tasks are distributed evenly. We can perform everyday acts of sponsorship to help them grow their careers.

5

Don’t deceive with photos

After reading last week’s suggestion to feature diversity in slides and media, newsletter subscriber Laura Gonzalez asked an important question: “I recognize that representation matters and makes a huge difference…but when does inclusive representation cross the line into false advertising?”

Gonzalez pointed out an all-too-real scenario. Imagine a company where “All the media, training, publicity, slideshows, videos, etc. depict a beautiful and wide diversity of people… but it is grossly misrepresentative of how the company looks inside.”

Allies, we need to be genuine and authentic with our use of stock photos. Let’s not try to deceive anyone by showcasing more workforce diversity than we actually have or implying we have a more inclusive culture than we do.

Also, please don’t use stock photography on your careers page to represent your employee base. It may be a tempting solution, but candidates can easily do an image search online and find that your “employee” is a model who appears on many job sites. (Yes, this happens. In doing research for my book a few years ago, I quickly spotted a stock photo of a Black male model featured as though he were an employee on a Fortune 500 company’s careers page.)

That’s all for this week. I wish you strength and safety as we all move forward.

— Karen Catlin (she/her), Author of Better Allies®