The Men Tell All: Gender Equality panel exceeded all of my expectations. Honestly, I’m still processing all the goodness, but by popular demand, I wanted to provide some QUICK takeaways…
Our incredible male panel below were asked their take on gender equality in the workplace, its status, and what we do to improve it.
The first question I threw out – How would you rate gender equality in the workplace?
- Andy Fruhling, Executive – 4
- “My focus is on the unconscious bias – making sure as men, that they don’t realize that something that they do is not treating women as equal.”
- Youssef Chaker, Entrepreneur – 0
- “It’s binary. There is either equality or there is not. I am not interested in a little bit. I want the full thing.”
- Marc Nathan, Funding Strategist – 6
- “I was the highest rank at 6 and that’s not good. I do see women making bigger and better strides in the workforce but there is a lot of work to do.”
- Mike Erwin, Investor – 3
- “Men in the workforce are not holding each other accountable, they are not saying something, and if they do it’s too quiet. We need to challenge other men.”
Ten cent RECAP –
- Lots of talk on confidence – Key thing here is I believe, based on the panel and interaction, that men and women have different definitions of confidence. Is it confidence or experience? More on this in a later post.
- Shadowing/mentoring MAY help – My takeaway was that men in the workplace need to be more vulnerable to women about their failures, lessons learned, and insecurities. We’re all people, we all have them, why are they this big secret?
- COMMUNICATION is key – This conversation of what is and isn’t appropriate, what is and isn’t messed up, what is and isn’t okay for both men and women, bottom line, it needs to be had. So much so that Prowess Project is kicking off a series. Our next panel will be mid-August. Join our newsletter to be the first to be the details.
Much more after we digest 🙂
Ashley
P.S. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that we uncovered an accountability issue. Again, more to come.
