How Leaders Can Better Support Women, with Leanne Dzubinski

Dave Stachowiak (0:00)

Most of us recognize that bias exists in the workplace for many underrepresented leadership groups, including women. In this episode, how devaluation shows up, and how leaders can do a better job at removing it from their teams and organizations. This is Coaching for Leaders, episode 805

Leanne Dzubinski (0:20)

Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Dave Stachowiak (0:28)

Greetings to you from Orange County, California. This is Coaching for Leaders, and I'm your host, Dave Stachowiak. Leaders aren't born, they're made. And this weekly show helps leaders thrive at key inflection points. One of the charges of leadership is to ensure that we are leading well for everyone in our organizations. And one of the places I know so many in the listening community have a hard for is thinking about how we can support every population of leaders and employees, and particularly this conversation today, what leaders can do to better support women. And I'm so pleased to welcome a guest expert that's going to help us look at some of the common biases that are out there and what we in leadership roles can do to do so much better. I'm so pleased to welcome Leanne Dzubinski to the show.

Leanne is an expert on naming and eliminating gender bias in organizations. She is the Dean of Faculty Development and Global Education at Westmont College and a sought after speaker, consultant, and expert witness who shares tools and strategies that enable women to thrive and organizations to improve their practices. She is the co-author along with Amy Diehl of Glass Walls, Shattering the Six Gender Bias Barriers That Are Still Holding Women Back at Work. Leanne, such a pleasure to have you.

Leanne Dzubinski (1:49)

Thank you, Dave. I'm really happy to be here.

Dave Stachowiak (1:51)

I'm so glad we're having this conversation because I know there are people who saw the title of this episode are thinking about just what they've heard in your bio and thinking, we're almost three decades in on the 21st century. Is this still a thing that bias is showing up so prominently in the workplace on gender?

When you hear that kind of maybe direct wondering question or maybe you hear it subtly, how do you respond to it?

Leanne Dzubinski (2:23)

Well, Dave, my first response would be, I so much wish they were right and this wasn't still showing up in our workplaces.

Dave Stachowiak (2:30)

Yeah.

Leanne Dzubinski (2:31)

But unfortunately, it is. The form of it shifts and is kind of fluid over time. But even in these last couple of years was some of the shifts culturally that we've seen, these issues are becoming more prominent again rather than less. So I think this conversation is more important than ever that we'd be having it. So I'm grateful that we're here today to talk about it.

Dave Stachowiak (2:55)

Were you look in, you and Amy in your work, look at six biases that come up most prominently when we think of gender bias that shows up. We're going to look at one of them today. But before we get into just looking at one, how did these six emerge and how did these come up and be identified through both research and practice?

Leanne Dzubinski (3:15)

Yes. So Amy and I have been working together on this topic for well over a decade now.

We started by just combining our dissertation research. She had researched women in higher education and I had worked research women in conservative religious organizations. We put that together and were able to name and surface about 26 different things that women were encountering when they went to work. But 26 is an awful lot. It's hard to remember. It's complicated. And so we enlisted a couple of quantitative researchers to help us develop a survey. And we sent that out to women in medicine, in law, in higher education and in faith-based nonprofits to get their input. And from that survey, we had well over a thousand responses. We were able to analyze and come up with these six main categories of things that women encounter when they go to work.

Dave Stachowiak (4:08)

We're looking at one of the six in detail in this conversation. They're all important. They're all critical. When I looked at the six and considered them, the one that really came up for me so prominently, not because it's more important than any of the others, but just when I think about what do I hear and see from the women who are in my life, our clients, our members, what kind of feedback do I get from the podcast? This one comes up a lot, perhaps more prominently than some of the others just in regular conversation and things that I notice and see.