Harvey Weinstein is guilty. We can now add his guilt to what seems to be an ever-growing pile of bad behaviour coming from the shadows across our country. At a YW Calgary lunch on Wednesday with @JodiKantor and @MeganTwohey, authors of the Weinstein expose titled She Said, Jodi reminded us, “This is not about sex, it’s about work and power.”
It’s about every workplace.
And yet with all the hand-wringing about diversity and inclusion, Calgary ranks 23rd out of 25 of Canada’s largest cities to be a working woman. According to the study by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives women earn 65 per cent of what men earn in Calgary.
Nationally, there’s still a lot of work to do. Years of McKinsey & Company studies show we will be paid less, promoted less and more likely to experience some form of micro-aggression at work. From their 2019 report:
- At the VP level, women are 5 times more likely than men to need to prove their competency and 3 times more likely to hear demeaning remarks made about themselves.
- Women at the senior manager/director level and above are 2.5 times more likely than men to be the only person of their gender in a room at work.
- So what lever needs to be pulled in order to shift this culture?
According to Jodi, we need to look at who is narrating our culture in the first place. In the case of America, she said, for 100 years the (male) titans of Hollywood narrated the culture of America. Their stories became the American story and narrated the American dream. Stories of war heroes, corporate heroes and even romantic heroes, all told through the lens of Hollywood men.
I asked Jodi and Megan what the women in the room (at the Ranchmen’s Club of all places) could take from their experience “outing” Weinstein, into our day-to-day efforts in Calgary workplaces.
Jodi’s answer: Consider who is narrating your culture.
For example, recently an Alberta company published a decal showing an illustration of a 17-year old female activist in what looks like a violent sex act. They went so far as to include their company logo. What does it say about our culture that a company can be so blatant about its behaviours and face no recrimination?
So today, please sit for a moment and ask yourself, who is narrating our culture? Who is narrating the culture of your organization? Do the people charged with narrating your culture represent your employee base, your customer and your community? If not, there’s a good chance your culture is lost in translation.
Comfortably Unsettled 