Male CEO meditates in a breastfeeding room, male panel tells women to ‘speak up’: Common sense goes MIA - Women's Agenda

Male CEO meditates in a breastfeeding room, male panel tells women to ‘speak up’: Common sense goes MIA

A male CEO asked me what more he could be doing to retain the talented women in his workforce.

So I mentioned this eBook that we’ve just published, featuring five ideas for shifting the dial on women at work. Then I suggested that simple common sense is essential, and shared two examples of where such common sense had gone astray in the actions of two global CEOs this week.

The first one came courtesy of Uber, which has developed an interesting record in supporting women at work – if that record means driving female engineers out of the company faster than you download their app.

Uber’s CEO Travis Kalanick, who has faced a barrage of negative press in recent month following allegations of systemic bullying and sexual harassment in the organisation, has recently taken up meditation.

Fair enough. Meditation’s known to clear the mind and must surely be beneficial to a busy CEO, especially one who’s previously been caught on camera arguing with one of his own Uber drivers, and is being urged to move swiftly on fixing his company’s toxic culture.

The problem is where Kalanick has been meditating.

According to CNBC board member Arianna Huffington, he’s been (on at least one occasion) doing it in one of Uber’s lactation rooms.

“Literally, it was an amazing moment last week when we were in the office and he said, ‘I really need to go meditate in order to be in a place to make good decisions right now,'” she told the iCONIC conference in New York City on Wednesday.

“And literally [he] went into a lactation room that happened to be open, because they don’t have meditation rooms yet. This is part of the change coming.”

Yes, a lactation room.

We only hope there weren’t any lactating mothers actually using the room at that time. But given the tiny number of women who actually work at Uber, that was probably unlikely.

The good news, according to Huffington, was that Kalanick returned a changed man. “You could see the change in the way he was and the way he could process making decisions.”

The second example of common sense going MIA came courtesy of the recent Hall Of Femme event which, according to PR Week, featured some advice to women from Richard Edelman, the CEO of Edelman PR, the largest PR firm in the world.

He told the New York audience that women need to speak more loudly if they are trying to get heard. While acknowledging that it might seem “silly” to tell adults to “speak up”, he said it’s something many professionals struggle with.

He added that when he asked a number of women why they were quiet during meetings, they said it was because of the macho culture. “I asked them, ‘How are we going to fix that? Either you’re going to speak up, or I’m going to have to hammer the guys,’” he said. “They said, ‘Hammer the guys first,’ and I said, ‘You speak up first.’”

Interesting advice.

Made even more interesting by the fact that Edelman appears to have given the advice while appearing on an all-male panel, at least according to the picture published with the piece in PR Week.

 

Edelman added that the number of women on his senior leadership team has increased from 30% to 40% in recent years.

It’s a good result, but in an industry like PR, where women hold somewhere between 61% and 85% of all roles, why is it not at least 50/50? And why does a macho culture still exist at all in such boardrooms?

Common sense goes a long way.

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