Bookshelf: That's What She Said
What Men Need to Know (And Women Need to Tell Them) About Working Together
The Ars Pandemonium Bookshelf
Thoughts and musings on mainstream business literature through my own prism of managing and leading teams of creative professionals. These are not “book reviews!” See more here.
That’s What She Said: What Men Need to Know (and Women Need to Tell Them) About Working Together
Joanne Lipman; 2018, William Morrow
I found myself frequently delighted at how simply enjoyable this book was to read…and then, of course, I would remember that I am literally the intended audience of the book. It’s written — quite specifically and explicitly — for men in management positions.
Well, okay, then. I guess I’m easy that way.
Part of the framing of the book is the notion that men don’t like to be yelled at or made to feel like villains. While I agree and think that’s true, I also don’t have much patience for crybabies who can’t take criticism or are not interested in trying to be better. Be better, assholes. But anyway, while I didn’t feel I needed my hand held like that…maybe it worked on me after all.
That’s What She Said is a big book with a wide purview. It’s more narrative and less concise than, say, The Good Boss (Kate Eberle Walker) or Jerks at Work (Tessa West), which I’ve also read recently and are nominally similar in subject, but which take a pithier, bullet-pointier approach to the material. I don’t mean that as a qualitative judgment in the sense that I think one is better or worse than the other, but it is notable. The narrative here is compelling and brisk.
But the book is also deceptively dense. My study process tends to go like this: while reading, I put sticky notes at passages I want to return to, then go back through and type up the notes only after I’ve finished the book. I feel like this helps me develop context for important passages. It also allows me to “unmark” the book in a way I couldn’t with highlighters and notes in the margins. I just peel the stickies out.
With that said, this book read along at a good clip. But when I went back to type up my notes I had a sticky on almost every page — sometimes more than one! I used an entire pack of them on the book. It’s a lot.
“Men, even the most enlightened of them, often remain oblivious to the issues facing their female colleagues sitting in the next cubicle.”
A particularly striking section of the book is dedicated to examining unconscious bias training, its origins, and its effectiveness…or lack thereof. I’m a big fan of the training and found this material challenging, but as with everything in the book, really well researched and convincingly presented.
In discussing diversity and unconscious bias training in the tech industry, Lipman begins with research done at Google, and their realization that “they had to try to change the way people act, even though they couldn’t change the way people truly think,” by training them to be aware of their own biases. Then she goes to Facebook and actually takes the training course as an employee might.
The description of her experience makes it clear that she was at what we would have called “Classic” campus, and she describes precisely the training that I took a couple of times while I worked there. She speaks pretty highly of it! I also quite enjoyed the training (or, well, maybe enjoy is the wrong word; found it useful anyway) and it was quite interesting to see it presented in a journalistic way.
But Lipman doesn’t shy away — at all — from some of the training’s more problematic aspects.
“Harvard organizational sociology professor Frank Dobbin surveyed diversity programs at 829 companies over 30 years starting in 1971 and concluded that ‘in general, training doesn’t do much of anything.’ The only exception was for white women and black women and men: for those groups, it actually made things worse. In other words, companies that introduced diversity training would actually employ more women and blacks today if they had never had diversity training at all.”
“In an even more troubling development, it turns out that telling people about others’ biases can actually make their biases worse. Researchers have found that when people believe everybody else is biased, they feel free to be prejudiced themselves.”
She also notes some of the…maybe somewhat cynical…motivations behind offering training in this form in the first place.
“Undoubtedly, the popularity of these programs has soared in part because they intentionally don’t cast blame. They do away with the cudgel and the finger-wagging…No more white-guy guilt. Bias is a lot easier to swallow when it isn’t your fault.”
And she takes a good look at the realistic limits of what even the best training can accomplish, quoting a woman engineer who left Facebook after a year of feeling isolated. This engineer said:
“There is a lot of effort and thought put into diversity at a company level but at individual levels, there are a lot of micro cultures. Diversity did not trickle down to the team I was on.”
The ultimate message doesn’t seem to be that the programs are completely useless or should be canceled, but their limitations and unintended consequences should be very well understood. I found this to be some really interesting insight.
“As Gloria Steinem has observed, ‘I’m glad we’ve begun to raise our daughters more like our sons, but it will never work until we raise our sons more like our daughters.’”
Lipman notes that often men tell her that they don’t speak out for fear of being ousted from the “in-group” or for a sense of being embarrassed. I don’t doubt it. But I would also say I’ve observed — and personally experienced — another reason. It can also happen that speaking leads to an accusation of being insincere and performative. That’s a concern I have about this very channel, and this very article. It’s a notion that the book also backs up:
“Researchers have found that people are actually resentful of men who promote women’s rights, because it isn’t viewed as their fight.”
I don’t want to whine about this — oh, woe is me, my benevolent enlightened-ness isn’t fully appreciated! But I think it’s worth noting anything that slows down or sidetracks the important project at hand.
The book also touches interestingly on trans folks and the way that they are able to see some of these gender issues from multiple perspectives. Regarding Martine Roghtlbatt, a trans woman:
“She transitioned in 1994, when she was already known as a successful male executive. As she told Fortune magazine, ‘I’ve only been a woman for half of my life, and there’s no doubt that I’ve benefited hugely from being a guy.’”
“As the researchers concluded, ‘Sometimes it does hurt to ask.’”
Time and again, as with The Good Boss, the prescriptions suggested here to make the workplace better for women would, in my opinion, just make the workplace better, full stop. I suppose there’s a small contingent (but a very vocal and powerful one, to be sure) of obnoxious bro-turds who might be put out by some of it.
“Nancy Lee, a former Google head of diversity, estimates that while a third of employees embrace diversity efforts, an equal amount are ‘resistors’ — those like the author of the Google ‘manifesto,’ who later described the company’s bias training as ‘lots of just shaming.’”
But again, I’m a cis-gendered heterosexual white man and even I think those clowns need to shut the hell up. Sigh. (Note: if you’re unfamiliar with the Google “manifesto” you can read a story about it here. Or don’t. It’s awful.)
Lipman identifies the underlying failure of the once-ascendant prescript that the workplace should be “gender-blind” — that men and women should just be treated “the same”:
“In practice, this meant treating women as if they were men, since the de facto culture of the workplace was — and still is — male, created decades ago in a post-World War II era that used the military hierarchy as a model. In 1973, organizational psychologist Virginia Schein even coined the phrase ‘think manager — think male.’ She made the observation that successful managers tended to have stereotypically male traits.”
I’m really taken with the idea, which I’ve also read elsewhere, that the real solution for the problem is not to teach women to handle the environment better, but to change the damn environment. I like this for two key reasons. One, because I too think the environment sucks. I think most of what I read about making it better for women would just make it better for everyone. I mean, I’m good at it; it was basically built for me. But I don’t like it. And two, the inverse doesn’t work anyway:
“Researchers…found that women who tried to act like men didn’t gain the same benefits as men, and in fact were punished for acting counter to social norms.”
“It also helps when diversity is baked into the incentive system -- not just as a pat on the head, but as a measurable goal with a financial reward for success.”
Speaking generally about the men whom she interviewed for the book, Lipman notes that,
“most don’t view their attempts to close the gender gap primarily as a political statement. These men don’t walk around calling themselves feminists. They aren’t compelled by grand goals like reversing centuries of male domination, or atoning for their forebears’ discrimination, or righting history’s wrongs. They see gender equality simply, instead, as a business imperative.”
That’s a pretty damn broad brush to paint these folks with, but I don’t doubt it’s largely true. However, irrespective of how accurately it captures the motivations of any one or another specific male leader that she spoke to, it’s quite powerful as a rhetorical device in the book. If the book is primarily trying to persuade, then helping to construct permission structures for those who are skeptical is very valuable. To those folks this is saying, hey, doing this makes you a better businessman. Don’t worry, you won’t be woke. (Heaven forfend.)
You can see yet another reason why this might be necessary by contrasting these two pulls (they aren’t actually juxtaposed in the book, but I found it a fascinating contrast):
“Researchers have found that work-life balance is perhaps the best indicator of how satisfied women are with their jobs. According to one survey, 93 percent of women who don’t feel like they have a good work-life balance are extremely unsatisfied with their jobs. On the other end of the spectrum, the vast majority of women who believe their life is in balance are extremely satisfied.”
And quoting Eric Schmidt, Google’s Executive Chairman:
“‘A successful life is not completely balanced,’ he declared. His vision of a great leader, he went on, is one who will ‘go quiet for a few hours while they’re busy taking care of the family or whatever it is they’re doing, and then they emerge at 11 o’clock at night, working hard to make sure that their responsibilities are taken care of.’”
So! I guess those women who’d prefer some balance just aren’t “great leader” material. Huh. Fancy that.
“It isn’t just men who make these assumptions; women are just as likely to show less respect toward other women.”
With some evident frustration, Lipman discusses the persistent lack of respect that women are granted in the workplace.
“The studies are persuasive. But in truth, we don’t need academic research to prove what we see every day in real life. The fact that women get less respect than men is so routine that there’s really no debate about the issue. There’s a reason that ‘manterrupting,’ ‘bropropriating,’ and ‘mansplaining’ have all entered the lingo, with the last even being formally inducted into the Oxford Dictionaries in 2014.”
“When I meet with executives around the country -- asking men what flummoxes the most about their female colleagues -- they almost inevitably mention tears. They dread them.”
The book has a handy reference at the end labeled as a “cheat sheet.” Just some of the key recommendations from throughout the book bundled up in bite sized chunks: “Would you say that to a man? If not, you probably should not say it to a woman, either.” It’s helpful!
Notwithstanding that I don’t intend the Ars Pandemonium Bookshelf entries to be reviews, I’d be remiss in not calling out that I found this book strikingly well edited — perhaps it helps that the author was editor-in-chief at USA Today and a veteran Wall Street Journal editor.
And finally, That’s What She Said seems very thoroughly cited, which I appreciate. But I’m going to use it to complain about something I see in mainstream — that is, not specifically academic — non-fiction these days: the practice of not including footnotes on the page or even endnote references within the text is infuriating. All of the citations are just tossed together at the back of the book, and you have to go find a partial string from the text in there and then the citation will be next to it. As you’re reading, you can’t tell which things are even cited!
I’m not trying to fact-check the book or anything, but sometimes I’m just curious what’s being referenced. This book has forty nine (49!) pages of citations at the end! It’s a real slog, and very distracting, to access them while reading. Again, this book isn’t unique — or even an outlier — in this, but it’s the one I’m writing about here, and so it shall be the subject of this ire.