Men's Leadership Seminars in Technology

As technology industries struggle with gender equality, women need courageous men in the industry to teach other men how to build, retain, and manage gender-equitable teams. This peer-to-peer learning among men will reshape the fortunes of women.

I co-wrote the book "Innovating Women: The Changing Face of Technology," about barriers to women's achievement and how women are overcoming them. Women pay a high price for discrimination in the technology, but so do some men, as the departure of Uber CEO Travis Kalanick illustrates. Men of wisdom and integrity in leadership positions in technology have the ability to shape other corporate leaders and future leaders so we all benefit from gender equity.

I'm solving the broad problem of women's inclusion in technology by inverting the paradigm. Women are too often asked to fix gender problems in the workplace. Why don't we ask men to step up, and benefit from the peer-to-peer conversations that can transform gender equity from something women demand of men to something men demand of each other? That will produce measurable change at low cost.

A Harvard Business Review article drawing on data from more than 800 U.S. firms notes rather than scolding, "It’s more effective to engage managers in solving the problem, increase their on-the-job contact with female and minority workers, and promote social accountability—the desire to look fair-minded." The Men's Leadership Seminars offer room for men to learn best practices around gender equality, feel empowered to buck the negative aspects of "bro culture," and partner actively with women in their workplaces.

The Men's Leadership Seminars will foster better corporate governance around gender equality, which should lead to higher profits as well. It distributes the time and resource costs of championing gender equity, shifting the burden from women to a joint effort among women and men. (This presumes women-led gender equity programs in technology continue.) Women in technology (staff and management) should benefit; corporate retention and staffing will benefit; and male leaders who find themselves in a cohort of badass feminist men in management will benefit.

Get a "peer review" of management professionals like Harvard's Iris Bohnet to poke holes in the concept and design.

- Follow design thinking principles to develop curriculum for man-to-man gender awareness and management training.

Seek at least 60 percent participation rate from those invited... a slight "supermajority". If threshold not reached, reassess and revise. -

Get/curate 100 powerful male technology industry leaders to evaluate model; make suggestions; and [if in concordance] commit to hosting a seminar.

Count how many say they will; follow-through with metrics on who does. -

Get commitments from 1000 male technology leaders and managers to host male-to-male gender seminars.

Women have kept trying to make the world more gender-equal. Some people don't favor male-to-male leadership programs because the assumption is that they will be spineless and misdirected. We need to break through paradigms around gender that say that women have to do the strategic and emotional labor to create more equity. I believe together, men and women (and non-binary individuals) can design an approach for men to elevate their management and equity game in conversation with each other.

Structured peer-to-peer learning, with a curriculum to support it, is inherently human-centered.

After testing with vetted cohorts we'll assess the best ways to replicate the model across linguistic, regional, and cultural variances.

I have access to putting proposals before key nonprofit funders as well as mechanisms for evaluating for-profit business models for such trainings. Since this is in the concept stage we'll evaluate all options.

Willingness of the business community to test and adopt programs is the main barrier. Achieving the best design and evaluation process is also a factor.

http://innovatingwomen.org/

I've written six books, two of them which include research and reporting on gender in the workplace ("Innovating Women," about women in the technology industry, barriers to advancement and success strategies; and "The Episodic Career," about new models for careers in a time of increasing volatility.) I would like to help solve some of the problems of gender equity I track in my books, and have also worked as a VP of communications at a mid-sized technology company and seen some of the gender issues firsthand.

I am hoping to use my contacts as an MIT Media Lab director's fellow to help build a team, but this is in concept stage.

Every gender-equality initiative in technology is a potential collaborator more than competitor.