How to Support Women in Your Network

I remember sitting in the company-wide meeting and chuckling at the super-hero theme. Every presenter that came up had their opening title slide accompanied by someone from the Marvel or DC universe. I know the presenters themselves didn’t choose the imagery, because I also was a speaker that week and had to give my slides to the marketing team. As someone who likes cohesion, I appreciated this attention to detail. Unfortunately, as the week went on, I started to notice a frustrating pattern. Every image, on nearly every slide, was a man.

Why Just Hiring the Right Person is More Complicated Than We Think

Have you ever heard someone say something like - it shouldn’t matter what gender someone is, let’s just hire the best person for the job. Or maybe it was something like - we're trying to be more diverse and inclusive, but we just don’t have enough qualified candidates. These are statements that I used to say too because it seems perfect. All that should matter is getting the most qualified person. Period. This idea is called meritocracy: “the holding of power by people selected on the basis of their ability.” Over the years, as I learned more, I started to realize that line of thinking was reductive because unconscious bias makes true meritocracy a lot harder to achieve than we realize…