Sarah Kaplan

Today we’re facing a whole slew of social, economic and environmental crises – gun violence, climate change, gender inequality, job dislocation, food insecurity, plastic pollution and the opioid epidemic, to name just a few.

The responses from governments are often inadequate. Indeed, the problems are so complex that no single sector can address these challenges alone. Policies may not go far enough, or simply cannot address the entire issue. And, as we are seeing in the United States, governments may actually be pulling back on regulations meant to address these crises.

What’s interesting is how often corporations are stepping in to fill the void.

In the wake of a recent wave of mass shootings in the U.S., Walmart announced it would stop selling most types of ammunition. Dick’s Sporting Goods took guns off its shelves in many stores. CVS, Walgreens, Wegmans and Kroger joined Walmart in asking customers not to openly carry weapons into their stores.

When the U.S. announced it was withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, more than 2,200 companies, large and small, signed on to the We Are Still In declaration, stating: “In the absence of leadership from Washington, states, cities, counties, tribes, colleges and universities, health-care organizations, businesses and investors representing a sizeable percentage of the U.S. economy will pursue ambitious climate goals, working together to take forceful action and to ensure that the U.S. remains a global leader in reducing emissions.”

When North Carolina introduced a bill to prevent transgender people from using restrooms that did not match the gender on their birth certificates, 68 corporations, including American Airlines, Apple, Cisco, eBay, General Electric, IBM, Intel, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Nike and Salesforce signed an amicus brief aimed at blocking the bill.

Corporations stepping up

In other words, corporations are stepping in to support and invest in social and environmental change when governments cannot or do not.

Says former Unilever chief Paul Polman about the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals that are meant to address a wide range of global challenges: “Over the next 10 years, more responsibility will be put on business to move faster to implement the sustainability goals simply because of financial flow that needs to happen that cannot come right now from government.”

In constitutional democracies, we often talk of the checks and balances created across the three sources of power. Today, these are the executive branch or Crown, the legislature and the judiciary.

The news media became known as the Fourth Estate because it was a means to hold the other three sources of power accountable.

Now, we are starting to talk about social media as the Fifth Estate in that its power can rival these other powers.

Increasingly, corporations are coming to play an equally powerful role in our society. They are a part of the system of checks and balances, both to check abuses of power and to be checked by others.

Too powerful

There are many risks, of course, that come from corporations being too powerful. When the Federal Aviation Administration largely left Boeing to establish and administer its own safety tests, it contributed to the 737-Max crashes.

In July, members of a Senate subcommittee in the U.S. clashed with Federal Aviation Administration officials, contending the agency was too deferential to Boeing in approving the 737 Max airliner (photo by Ted S. Warren/AP)

After the Rana Plaza and Tazreen factory disasters in Bangladesh, corporations such as Canadian Tire, Hudson’s Bay, Costco, Sears and the Gap created the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety. But it was immediately criticized by labour leaders as serving the interests of the companies, not the workers.

The 2008 financial crisis has been attributed to corporate greed of the big banks. And there is an appropriately robust debate about how to tame corporate power.

However, there’s also an increasing interest among the people who work in companies to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem. The U.S. Business Roundtable, an organization that periodically issues corporate governance principles, recently announced it was rejecting shareholder primacy in favour of a commitment to create value for all stakeholders.

Larry Fink, head of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, now writes to the CEOs of the companies in which he invests that they must pursue purpose as well as profit. Most of the S&P 500 companies (and slightly more than half of Canada’s S&P/TSX firms) produce corporate social responsibility reports.

Stockholder responsibility

Some might argue that this attention to creating value for all stakeholders runs against the responsibility of the corporation to the stockholder. Up until the recent announcement, the U.S. Business Roundtable claimed that stakeholders interests were subsidiary to financial performance.

In Canada, the guidance from the Toronto Stock Exchange is still: “Directors have only one constituency and that is the corporation and its shareholders generally.” Some worry that having more than one objective provides no clear way to choose when faced with trade-offs.

But there is potential in these pronouncements and reports. Signing a statement, such as the CEOs of the Business Roundtable did, is a means of holding one’s feet to the fire. It is a commitment mechanism. Producing a corporate social responsibility report requires companies to analyze the data, understand the trade-offs created by their business models, and demonstrate progress over time.

To make good on those promises, it won’t be enough just to sign statements and produce reports. Companies are going to have to transform how they do business. In doing so, businesses can address the many environmental, economic and social crises we face, and also counterbalance the forces that might slow down action.

Sarah Kaplan is a professor of strategic management at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management and director of the Institute for Gender and the Economy.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Mansplaining: U of T expert on new solutions to a tiresome old problem

noreen.rasbach — Wed, 17 Jul 2019 13:50:36 +0000

Mansplaining: U of T expert on new solutions to a tiresome old problem

noreen.rasbach Wed, 07/17/2019 - 09:50

Cutline

Most women have been mansplained at work. Rather than women figuring out ways to handle it, men should stop doing it and organizations should step in (photo by Shutterstock)

Sarah Kaplan

Topic

City & Culture

Institute for Gender and the Economy

Gender

Rotman School of Management

The Conversation

Subheadline

The Conversation with Rotman's Sarah Kaplan

In 2008, author Rebecca Solnit’s now famous essay, Men Explain Things to Me, set off a firestorm.

Though Solnit didn’t use the term “mansplaining,” the essay is credited with birthing the term that’s now part of regular parlance. Women (and other underrepresented groups such as people of colour and non-binary people) had finally found a way to articulate that phenomenon they routinely experienced, particularly at work.

Men feel the need to explain something to a woman, even if the woman hasn’t asked for an explanation and often pertaining to something that’s directly in the woman’s area of expertise and not at all in the man’s. Or when the topic is about a woman’s own experience and the man wants to explain her experience to her.

Even women who are famous for their mastery of a domain find themselves being mansplained.

Sallie Krawcheck is seen in November of 2011 speaking at the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association annual meeting (photo by Mark Lennihan/Associated Press)

Sallie Krawcheck, a former CEO of wealth management at Citibank and before that the CEO of Smith Barney investment advisers, says that venture capitalists interested in her new financial investment venture Ellevest mansplained financial advising to her.

We all have our own stories. Most women I know just roll their eyes knowingly when asked about mansplaining. Most of us experience it so often that we aren’t always even conscious it is happening.

‘Cluelessness’

Note, as Solnit does, that “mansplaining is not a universal flaw of the male gender, just the intersection between overconfidence and cluelessness where some portion of that gender gets stuck.”

But the mansplaining term has stuck. And research demonstrates that the feeling of being mansplained is, in fact, not just a feeling.

Studies show that in meetings, men speak more, and more powerful men speak even more. Men interrupt more, and are less likely than women to cede the floor when they are interrupted. Women worry (correctly) that if they fight to get their voices heard, they will experience backlash.

The blogosphere is filled with recommendations for how women should handle mansplaining when it happens: “7 Ways to Handle Mansplaining,” “How To Deal with a Mansplainer” and “How to Handle Mansplaining at Work.”

The recommendations are good – ignore the mansplainer, stand your ground, ask the mansplainer questions about their expertise and what they hope to accomplish by “explaining” the topic, explain mansplaining to the mansplainers, use other women as allies to stand up for you, and use as much humour as you can.

As with #MeToo and other efforts to point out the inequalities that women experience, many men feel attacked, even when women try to respond with humour, as feminist blogger Elle Armageddon did with her 2015 flow chart “Should You Explain Thing to a Lady?”

“Not all men” is the regular refrain. But, honestly, such protestations smack of an unwillingness to listen to the legitimate experiences of women in the workplace. And it’s unfair that while mansplaining is done by men to women, the solutions all seem to be about how women can address it – rather than how and why men should stop doing it.

It’s a further demand placed on women to solve the problems imposed on them by others. I’d like to take another tack.

Mansplaining eradication tactics

A mansplaining hotline would be great, but apparently it’s only available in Sweden (photo by Shutterstock)

In Sweden, a major union has set up a mansplainer hotline you can call to report offenders and receive advice and commiseration. But that’s not a resource available to all of us.

So what can potential mansplainers do? Armageddon’s advice is pretty good: If you aren’t an expert on a topic, maybe you don’t need to talk.

For those of you who fear you might be mansplainers, keep in mind – even if you are an expert, but the woman is an expert too and hasn’t asked for your advice – maybe you still just stay silent. What’s the harm in listening? You might learn something. Even if you speak a lot less than you do now, the research I cited above suggests that you still might be speaking more than the women in the room.

The point is, you can dial it back a lot and still speak your fair share about issues on which you are an expert and have something unique to contribute.

But mansplainers almost by definition can’t help themselves. The advice on self-restraint is bound to be ignored. So maybe we need to think about more structural solutions. In other words, what can organizations do to even the playing field?

‘High-testosterone settings’

As a professor of strategic management, I’ve thought about this a lot in my own teaching to MBA students. MBA programs have historically been pretty high-testosterone settings. I have an explicit practice to call on those students who are quiet, find out who the true experts are and shut down interrupters.

I also evaluate students on their contributions to the classroom learning experience, and those evaluations reward listening and building on the ideas of others (not just rehearsing their own lines in their minds while they are waiting to talk).

Organizations could replicate these practices. They could develop guidelines for meetings that require each person to share their point of view or instructions to the meeting leader to shut down mansplaining and support women who are speaking.

It is not enough, by the way, to simply extend the amount of time for questions or discussion with the hopes that women will speak up more or men will run out of things to say. Research experiments show that doesn’t work.

Further, performance evaluations could be adapted to sanction mansplaining and to reward listening and building on the ideas of other team members.

In short, we need to stop giving women advice on how to fix the inequalities and discrimination they face and instead look to the perpetrators to change their behaviour and to organizations to change workplace dynamics.

“Fixing the women” is a costly solution for women, and could result in companies losing valuable female employees. It will ultimately be ineffective without organizational change. Women shouldn’t be asked to “handle” mansplaining. Organizations should handle it for them.

Sarah Kaplan is a professor of strategic management at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management and the director of the Institute for Gender and the Economy.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.