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Why Good Women Struggle To Be Great Allies

Why Good Women Struggle To Be Great Allies

Katie.Dix / 13 Mar 2020

About E2W coach, Dr Alessandra Wall

I specialize in working with professional women who aren’t showing up the way they want to. My clients are smart, savvy, successful professionals in key senior and leadership roles. Despite all their talent, drive, and hard work, these women feel undervalued, overwhelmed and lack the confidence to consistently do what’s right for them.

My coaching process is simple and effective, you can view my packages here and arrange a free 20 minute call to chat through how I can help you. Please contact katie.dix@e2w.co for more information.

Why Good Women Struggle to Be Great Allies

A couple of years ago I debuted my keynote speech "Speak Up: Bridging the Gap One Conversation at a Time". After the presentation, several women walked up to me to share feedback and personal stories, nearly every single one of them talked about the push back and resistance they received from women, rather than men.

If women experience and recognize the negative impacts of bias and discrimination on a daily basis in the workplace, why is it that so many of us fall short of being the best allies to other women out there?

We're all part of the same system

Our specific biases are not innate, although the human tendency to form quick, easily generalizable and replicable judgments about any group is. The biases we hold today are learned, modeled, and reinforced through personal experience and interactions with others. Men and women are raised in the same system. We are implicitly taught the same lessons. We unknowingly express and reinforce the same beliefs.

We don't mean to, but we're irked by that confident unabashed colleague who is clear about her contribution to a project and her worth.

Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice

Girls are taught from a very early age that we should be all sugar and spice. Nice is the default expectation for little girls, helpful, modest, unassuming, pretty as a picture. You might not have heard those exact words or think that you expect this from girls and women today, but you do. As women, this shapes our ability to speak up, articulate our value confidently and unambiguously, and it prejudices us against other women who share their accomplishments, boldly acknowledge their skills, and step-up to ask for more. We don't mean to, but we're irked by that confident unabashed colleague who is clear about her contribution to a project and her worth.

We're taught that Black women are angry and we quickly judge our co-worker when she vents her frustration about being passed up for a promotion; even though we would feel the same level of ire were it us in that position. We implicitly believe that men have more expertise and value, so we more closely pay attention to the ideas of our male colleagues over those of our fellow women. We don't like being on the other end of these experiences, but those beliefs weave themselves in are unconscious and what we think becomes our reality. We act with bias because we are all part of the same system.

It's All a Game of Musical Chairs

Another reason good women struggle to be great allies has to do with scarcity. Rising up in the professional world can sometimes feel like an elaborate game of musical chairs. Round and round we go, working hard, trying to prove ourselves, putting in the hours, the lost personal time, building up that long list of degrees and certifications. The hope, that we will be able to snag a seat at the table based on our merit and output. The problem remains that although there might be plenty of seats available at the top, there are only a few reserved from women. So we push, shove, and trip each other in the hopes that we can be the ones to be safe once the music stops. Again, most women don't actively recognize how obstructive they can be to other women rising on the corporate ladder. We think of ourselves as a sisterhood, but we tend to act like a pack of wolves trying to elect a new alpha.

The Hazing Mentality

According the vast majority of women I spoke to, lack of sisterhood and allyship is most significant as you move up the ladder. It's women in the early to middle stages of leadership who tend to display the most punishing and obstructive behaviors. From micro-managing to constant criticism, intolerance to displays of emotion to unrelenting standards, there seems to be what I like to call a hazing mentality. The message "I had to fight this to get here, you will too," is coupled with a fierce instinct to protect the position they worked so hard to get. It results in unduly harsh treatment and unrealistic expectations enforced by women towards women. Interestingly, by the time women have reached the highest levels of leadership and success, we tend to see this disappear. Maybe it's because their positions are secured and the threat of loss doesn't loom so large. Or perhaps it's because self-awareness and emotional intelligence are qualities often required to make it to the top.

Me Too

The hazing issue brings up one last, but very significant way in which we as women fail each other. There is a tendency to overgeneralize our experience, to assume that what we go through is the same for all women. This blinds us to intersectional factors like race, sexuality, age, ability, body type that layer themselves to make other women's reality far different and possibly harder than our own. We forget that our experiences at work are not uniform, that gender is NOT the single most salient factor in determining how we are treated and what opportunities come along. When we dismiss women of color's unique challenges, on account that we too have to fight to be heard and valued. When we ignore that the bias against obesity means that overweight women are automatically perceived as less disciplined and capable and that they have to work much harder to be recognized and valued, then we go beyond not being good allies, we actively contribute to maintaining the problem.

Better Women

We all recognize that women are impacted by bias and discrimination. As women we know exactly how that feels, how much harder we work to be seen, how much louder we must speak to be heard. We bear a special responsibility to not perpetuate these patterns with one another.

Being a better ally starts with acknowledging your actions. Take a minute today to think of at least one woman you work with who you approach differently, less fairly. What are your assumptions about her? How do your actions hold her back? What's one thing you can do tomorrow to not act on the beliefs, history, and pressures that bias you?


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