‘Women at Work: Building Your Career’ Webinar Summary and Recording
jobs.ac.uk were delighted to unite again with Dr Suzanne Ross to bring you a webinar on ‘Women at Work: Building Your Career’.
In the current challenging environment, as we begin to see evidence of a rolling back of hard-won gains for women in the workplace, it’s more important than ever for women to take ownership of their careers. This year’s International Women’s Day theme of ‘Accelerate Action’ is a call to do that.
Overview
- The broader landscape
- Developing your career
- What can hold women back?
- Recognise and navigate the ‘double bind’
- Build your own personal boardroom
The broader landscape
Suzanne sets the scene with the broader landscape of women’s equality to give context to women in the world of work and more specifically in the Higher Education (HE) sector.
In 2023, the UN released an article on ‘The 11 biggest hurdles for women’s equality by 2030’. Including the following –
- Lack of women in leadership
- Poverty and lack of economic opportunities
- Workplace discrimination and inequalities
- An imbalance in unpaid care work
- Inadequate access to education and health care
- Inadequate funding for gender equality initiatives
Suzanne highlights the imbalance of unpaid care work by reflecting on the COVID-19 pandemic where it was estimated that women took on the equivalent of a part-time job in care duties. Further, by 2050, the UN estimates women will be taking on 2.3 hours more per day of unpaid care work compared to men.
There is a sense that we are moving backwards in terms of women’s equality. This is reflected in the recent US administration’s roll back of EDI.
This roll back does not exist in a vacuum, it effects countries outside of the US as seen through global organisations changing their policies to be in line with the US and anti-EDI rhetoric on social media.
Suzanne says this is an opportunity for the UK Government and organisations to reaffirm their commitment to EDI, as we are seeing from many HE institutions.
Challenges for women in HE
The broader landscape informs the specific challenges women face in HE
- Gender pay gap
- Under-representation in leadership positions
- Work-life balance and family responsibilities
- Gender based discrimination and harassment
- Lack of mentorship and support networks
Suzanne like to take the optimistic approach, by encouraging you to take ownership of your career amid these challenges.
Defining Success
The first step of taking ownership of your career is to find out what is success to you and your values.
Ask yourself –
- What does it mean to me to be successful?
- What values are important to me?
- What’s important in how I live out those values?
Defining what success means to you informs your ‘work/life balance’, a term Suzanne prefers to refer to work/life choices. Now you can start to decide what you can say yes and no to in your professional and personal life that aligns with this definition and values.
This then leads you to developing your career.
Developing your career
There are two ways Suzanne discusses to develop your career, navigating and pioneering.
Each way has the same steps just with different approaches.
- Making intentions known
- Strategies
- Outcome
- Identify work
For navigating you are setting a desired role.
Then for the strategies, following the rules of advancement and being a self-advocate to gatekeepers.
You will have the outcome of getting the role or not.
Either way you will have identity work to follow, if successful this is new insight into the role and if unsuccessful new self-insight into skills, knowledge and capabilities needed for the role that you are lacking.
A challenge of navigating is the inevitable competition with others.
Most organisations are structured like a pyramid, with less roles in senior positions.
Pioneering is another route you can take, often suited to part-time workers, those developing a portfolio career or for career shifts.
This way is not about obtaining a specific role but an opportunity, change or goal you want to achieve.
Strategies include getting recognition for this goal, by doing so this positions you as the natural leader.
The outcome is your role might be expanded or elevated. Then you can focus on self-insight into pursuit of other strategic ideas.
If not successful, then the identity work is around how can you bolster your support network and gain more buy-ins.
What are successful women doing?
Often is it the same as men.
Women at the top of the organisation pyramid do several things.
They are confident in their career decisions as they have a strong sense of what success means to them and how they want to develop their career.
Developing self-awareness which ties into the ability to opportunity scan.
These women are change catalysts and are able to lead and manage change, which is critical in senior roles.
Next, building relationships and network.
Then building resilience and a feature of that tends to be pioneering versus and navigating.
The most successful people have ‘boundaryless’ career, rather than climbing the ladder straight up they are operating through a jungle gym, making moves in different directions.
Suzanne recommends the book Squiggly Careers, which looks at pioneering rather than navigating.
There is also a Squiggly Careers podcast.
What can hold women back?
Suzanne highlights the book How Women Rise which is about breaking the habits holding you back from furthering your career.
Some of these include –
- Reluctance to claim accomplishments
- Expecting others to notice your contributions
- Minimising
- Building rather than leveraging relationships
- Failing to enlist allies
- Putting your job before your career
- Letting your radar distract you
- The perfection trap
- The disease to please
- Ruminating
- Over valuing expertise
Communicating our accomplishments
How you communicate your accomplishments impacts your presence.
Suzanne cites a study that lists ways to communicate your successes.
- Use of numbers
- Description of positive monetary impact
- Mentoring or team building
- Development of products and processes
- Position or longevity at a company
90% of men were found to use three or more of these metrics, compared to 45% of women.
This is something to consider going forward and reflect how you present your achievements.
Gender and job hunting
Reflecting on a report from LinkedIn, Suzanne discusses the different between men and women when it comes to applying for jobs.
This research shows that women feel they need to meet 100% of the job criteria while men usually apply after meeting 60%.
This goes back to navigating and climbing the ladder, it impacts a woman’s ability to progress to the next level if they do not feel they meet 100% of the criteria, they count themselves out before applying.
Recognise and navigate the ‘double bind’
The double bind is that communal characteristics tend to be ascribed to women and agentic characteristics are ascribed to men.
Communal
- Kind
- Helpful
- Nurturing etc.
Agentic
- Confident
- Assertive
- Independent etc.
The thought of think leader – think men, is still commonplace.
The challenge for women is them ‘needing’ to present as agentic if they want to be perceived as a leader but must also be communal or risk backlash for not conforming to perceived gender roles.
Suzanne notes research that showed a female politician’s career progress was hindered by the belief that she might seek power. Further, voting preferences for female candidates were negatively influenced by her power-seeking intentions (actual or perceived).
The way forward from this double bind is to challenge perceptions, not change who you are.
Suzanne brings up the exchange between a reporter and Jacinda Ardern and Sanna Marin who were the prime ministers of New Zealand and Finland.
They were asked if they were just meeting because they are similar in age and have things in common. They replied with asking if similar male leaders would have been asked that and reaffirming they are meeting because they are prime ministers.
Suzanne then goes on about how you challenge those perceptions, by being authentic.
She reflects on her time developing leaders in the late 90s, and early 2000s where she would walk into a boardroom, and it would be all men.
This then moved to include a single woman who had changed herself to adopt a more agentic demeaner, believing it was necessary for her success.
There has been a significant shift in this mindset in the last 10 years.
Women want to be authentic. They want to be successful as themselves.
This leads into the steps of being authentic.
- Defining success for yourself
- Increase self-awareness of your values and strengths
- Assess and evaluate
- Take action: Keep moving forward
- Get support
Imposter phenomenon
As it was a common question asked from the audience, Suzanne touches briefly on the topic of imposter phenomenon, what can cause it and how to combat it.
The causes –
- Perfectionism
- Growing up in a family that emphasizes achievement
- Self-worth contingent on achievement
- Societal pressures in individualistic societies (to achieve and compare)
- The pressure to ‘have it all’
- More susceptible when embarking on new challenges
- Minority groups may be more susceptible
- Organisational culture
The solution –
- Seek out mentors, build your support network of trusted allies
- Track, measure, evidence and celebrate success
- Realistic assessment of skills, knowledge and capabilities
- Challenge your ‘What If’ scenarios
- Develop emotional intelligence
- Visualize a good outcome
- Identify when something is ‘good enough’ rather than perfect
- Appraisal of cultural norms
Build your own boardroom
Using the work of Zella King and Amanda Scott and the idea of building a personal boardroom.
It is a strategic way of thinking about your network and your support group.
Your network fits into three categories.
- Development roles
- Power roles
- Information roles
These categories are further broken down into 12 roles with a variety of purposes.
The people who fill these roles don’t need to be women, it can be a combination of genders.
It is about surrounding yourself with a supportive network.
Final takeaway and summary
Suzanne reiterates her most important points and key takeaways from the session
Meet the Host
Dr Suzanne Ross MSc, BSc, FHEA
Suzanne has over 20 years global experience in talent and leadership development. In 2010, Suzanne founded 2thrive Consultancy, helping individuals, teams and organisations develop leadership capability. In 2019 Suzanne launched Women Trailblazers supporting talented female leaders and emerging leaders.
With a PhD in leadership talent, success and derailment, Suzanne is a part-time Senior Lecturer in Executive Education at Nottingham Business School (NBS). As Course Leader, she has been involved in the design, development and delivery of NBS funded and commercial programmes to support women in management and leadership roles to develop their careers including the Women in Leadership, Women in STEM Leadership and Women as Transformational Leaders short courses. She is the subject matter expert for the NBS Microcredential Inspiring Women Leaders: Purpose-driven leadership in business and society. She is Module Leader for the Leading People and Organisations module on the Executive MBA and the Professional Development module on the PG Certificate in HE Management and Leadership.
Suzanne is a qualified and experienced Executive Coach working with leaders up to and including CEO/Board level. A past delegate of the UN Women UK delegation on the 68th Commission for the Status of Women (CSW68) Suzanne is also a volunteer as this year’s UN Women UK delegation CSW69 and is passionate about education, leadership and entrepreneurship as pathways to empowering women globally.
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