 This is such a great way to end this conflict. I always try to do something really interesting and vibrant. And I know these two men are very short while, but they've written this book, A Theater Rising, how and why they should mentor women. I think it's so current and when we're talking about moving forward with women peace and security, this is one of the main areas in the court. They do a fantastic job. Their bios are in the bio book, and I just want to turn it over to you. Enjoy this one. All right, well thank you Mary. Thanks for having us here today. And congrats to all of you, we were just talking about, wow, it's pretty impressive that 215 on a Friday afternoon that we've still got this many people in the room. So I'm not sure if that's us or just the whole conference, but thanks for being here. So we're really delighted to be here today with all of you. All the rising Atheas in the room and the sprinkling of male allies out there too. It's great to see you here today to focus on, for just a little while today, during our time, to focus on how to be more deliberate and strategic in forming mentorship with men at work. As a sociologist, I'm Dave Smith. All my research is in gender work and family. And so this is how I came upon this topic. And my colleague Brad Johnson, when we worked together at the Naval Academy, Brad's a clinical psychologist who focuses on mentoring and mentoring relationships. And it was clear to us as prior naval officers that not just within the military, but society broadly today, we're seeing this in civilian industry, just about everybody in business out there today, that we have, especially in the more traditionally male professions, that we're having challenges with not just recruiting, because we are doing better recruiting today, but really retaining and promoting women up into the upper echelon of our organizations of leadership. And it was clear to us that having watched some of that go on in the military, we give a lot of great instruction and process on how to do gender integration, for example. My experiences of having watched gender integration happen at the Naval Academy as a student back in the early 80s. And watching that happen into the combat exclusion law change in the early 90s and watching us integrate, in particular for me, into naval aviation and being a part of that, seeing it on the carrier and the squadrons. And then just recently, opening up all of our occupational specialty, women today. And so the challenges we're seeing, most notably the Marine Corps making the news more often lately. And so seeing all these things, one of the things that was clear to us that became kind of obvious was that we're changing the dynamics and the relationship of the culture in the workplace. But we've never really given any thought to how do we do that? What are the effects on the people that are already there? How does it change that? And most importantly, if we're going to do this right, we need to start engaging men in this conversation. And so that's where Brad and I came along with this. And the evidence as we go through this, we'll talk a little bit about the research that we did and what we're bringing together here. But really, the research is very clear that when women are mentored by men, they have more promotions, they have higher salaries, more professional skill development, better confidence, identity development, higher satisfaction in their jobs, and more commitment to the organization. Which again, all leads to retention, right, into advancement in career eminence out there. Right. And much of that has to do with the fact that there are just not enough women in the echelons that can serve as mentors for junior folks. Let us go ahead and start. I'm Brad Johnson. Let's go ahead and start with a definition. Because when we talk about mentoring occasional and age, people have different thoughts about what that is. You know, there's coaching where I maybe focus on just one skilled deficit and try and develop that. There's sponsorship where I maybe give you a window in to some opportunity. All of that's important. Mentoring is really a broader idea. It's sort of a relationship. And it really is over time a relationship that focuses on both career development and personal development, hopefully in kind of an integrated way. But if I'm your mentor, I'm really committed to your broad growth and development. I'm usually with you kind of walking alongside for a longer period of time. This is a relationship. The very best mentorships are reciprocal, mutual, and a collegial relationships. And ironically, I don't know if this shocks you or not, but women seem to get that more than men who sometimes struggle with the hierarchy in mentorship and have a little more difficulty letting that go and allowing more collegiality to develop in the relationship. So that's something we need to work on. Now, next slide. You may sort of ask yourself, if you're like a lot of folks, why can't women just mentor other women? It's something that comes up a lot when Dave and I talk to men. Why can't women just do this, mentor other women? Well, there are a number of reasons. I think one thing's very clear. Women are not generally reluctant or unwilling to mentor junior women because many of you have internalized the warning from Madeleine Albright years ago. You remember this stern warning, a special place in hell for you to ignore junior women. Really, that's not it. Really, there are a number of other factors. Number one, that the math doesn't work. There just are not, in the military, great example, there's just not enough senior women to mentor junior folks. If guys don't step up, it's just not going to happen. A lot of junior folks are going to go un-mentor. Often, there can be other dynamics in the workplace. So if there are very few positions open for women, it breeds competitiveness. If I know only a few of us are going to make it up the chain, it can be tougher for women to do that. Women are also under the microscope. There's some brand new research, Dave and I have just come across. If you are a woman and you champion a junior woman in your organization, what do you think happens to your evaluations at the end of the year? They actually go down just a little bit on whole because you're biased, you're showing favoritism toward junior women. Now what happens if a male mentors a junior woman in terms of his evaluations? He actually gets a little bummed because he's an advocate. He's a gender advocate. So there's even disparity about who mentors and what the effect might be on their overall assessment. I don't think you could read that. But it says I think I'm supposed to have a mentor, but I don't know why. So one of the things that we find is that women, sometimes it's hard to find that male mentor out there. And even if you do, what should I expect out of a good cross-gender relationship like that? Mentoring relationship. And so I think it's helpful to kind of understand why it could be a little bit challenging for the guy side of this. So one of the things we found in all the interviews we did with men and male mentors was we keep a lot of the reasons why guys in some cases may be more hesitant to sit to engage in this cross-gender relationship and may be on the sidelines a little bit. So I'll just kind of run through these real quickly with you. Together we call these the reluctant males in the RMS. It's going to have a good acronym. And so why men are reluctant? Well, you've heard a lot about this lately and certainly private industry is doing the same thing. You see a lot of unconscious bias training. And unconscious bias and stereotypes are certainly out there and they are certainly a part of it. So if I hold the stereotype as a man that a woman can't be a leader, she doesn't have that leader potential, she doesn't have what it takes, why would I invest my time in mentoring her? Because it takes a lot of time and effort and energy to do that. So we can see where if guys are looking at women that way with that particular bias or that stereotype, they might be hesitant to engage. So unconscious bias and stereotypes are certainly out there and they are part of the equation, but they're not the only reason. So other reasons might have to do with the relationship itself. So as men, most of us are pretty comfortable. I'll give myself as an example, I have a mother. I know what that relationship looks like. Very comfortable with that. I have a wife. Very comfortable with that relationship. I even have a daughter and I have that. I understand that. I know what that looks like. But sometimes, some men, when it comes to work, having a professional relationship with a woman at work, this, again, intimate, non-sexual relationship with a woman, is kind of like, ah, what is that? And guys can have a little anxiety about that, right? And we'll talk some more about that as we go through this. So that can be one of the reasons too. Some other aspects. What happens with perceptions? So we all know people talk, right? So guys are worried about, hey, what are my colleagues here, my co-workers, my bosses? What are they going to think if I suddenly start spending a lot of time with this junior woman at work? And some of them, depending on their relationship at home with their significant other, they may be concerned about what their partner thinks about that relationship as well. So those perceptions are out there. And then finally, some guys want to help and want to be part of the solution, but they're just afraid that, gosh, if I say the wrong thing, if I do the wrong thing, I just put my foot in my mouth and next to you know, I've got some sort of an EO complaining, such a harassment complaint against me. Just can't afford to do that. So there's a host of these reasons why guys could be on the sidewalk. So if you think, we had a great presentation, by the way, on one of the panels. Yesterday on Unconscious Fias, is that person still here? It was really a good presentation as well. But you know, unless you think these things are kind of going by the wayside and they're no longer particularly prevalent, let's just share with you something that we use with men when we're talking about bias related to gender. And I'm a psychologist, so I love tests. So I'm going to just give you a quick sentence completion test. And what I'd like you to do is just answer fill in the blank and don't micromanage your response. Just first thing that comes to mind, how would you finish that sentence? And then as soon as you do that, and I'll give you maybe 10 seconds to do it yourself, no, two seconds to do it yourself, then I'm going to ask Dave to just be a typical dude in national security and I'm going to ask for his responses, typical dude. And what I want to just draw your attention to is that women, believe it or not, can internalize many of the same biases that men have got. And so listen to yourself when you give your response. And we'll talk about them, but let's go ahead and do the first one here. So I'll just read the sentence. Most women are quick response. Smart. Smart, wow. Okay, I wasn't even going to ask you to say it out loud, but this is awesome. Let's go to the next one then. You're going to make me look bad at the end. Women usually need a lot of sleep, a lot of self management. A man. A man. Compared to boys, girls. More mature. What's that? Intelligence. Next one. Work, women. And last one, female bosses. I'm going to ask Dave to kind of give you a sample of what we usually hear with men when we put them on the spot. So Dave, most women are. Most women are, we get a lot of responses around knights. And this is nice. It's great to have them there. Pleasant. And this centers around what we've talked about for a long time and social site is the women are wonderful. And you've probably heard this in different ways. It's the positive aspect of different kinds of sexes. And is this women are wonderful? And you will hear this come up often. Sorry, come back. So the women usually need, what do you think the stereotype of bias is there? Helped. Helped in support. Cannot do it on their self. And then one step further down the path for some people is it might even be protection depending on. And we'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute. Compared to boys, girls are fragile and delicate. And I've actually heard this, not in a test like this. I've heard this conversation going on certainly around military officers and training sessions and things like GMT. You hear this about how women are to be handled and treated differently. But at work, women... Don't speak up. Cry. One. Don't speak up. Gossip. That in biases, that boys have been socializing many cases and learning and held onto as men in some cases. I mean, I don't necessarily ascribe to them, but they do know them in many cases. And then certainly, we get into the double bind. I'll talk a little bit more about this in a minute with female bosses. Yeah, pick your favorite B word, right? And that's your boss. So the problem with these, of course, that they're all stereotypes, they're all lurking. If you've read Malcolm Gladwell's book of Link, you know, this is implicit knowing it's unconscious bias. The beauty of a stereotype is it's a shortcut. Let's just make really quick assessments of somebody else. But the downsides are often wrong. They're often incorrect and they're incomplete. And they disable and disenfranchise, in this case, an entire half of the population. So remember, this is lurking with men. Sometimes with mentoring, they've got to be more aware of this. But women can internalize this. And we'll come back to this a little bit later. I want to talk a little bit more about the perception piece of this. And the woman you see here, this is one of our prior students at the Naval Academy. This is Lieutenant Virginia Brody. She's on my team. Oh, really? I had it. So you can correct me here if I need to correct you. So either she was a rogue. She was a coxswain with me on the crew team. She's one of my best friends. Awesome. So I'll let you tell her her story. But I'll tell you from our perspective you can add. So Brad and I both had her as students in our classes. Virginia, when you first see her, the first thing that may come to your mind may not be this warrior person, right? Because Virginia stands maybe about 5'2". Maybe on her tippy toes when I'm 5'2". And she's just not this huge presence. And when you see her in uniform, that may not be the first thing that comes to mind. But just an incredibly gifted student and leader and perceptive person that we just really enjoy working with Virginia. And I still to this day keep in touch with. But one of the things, because we came up with the term Athena and for the title of the book, one of the things that we found at the Naval Academy was very helpful to think about are the female students there as these Athenians, right? These rising Athenians. You think about the goddess Athena. So both in terms of the goddess of war, right? And just warrior, but also as a diplomat, right? And reason and the arts. And so this blend of both. And we felt that, you know, that was a great way to think about how do we perceive the women we work with. You know, they can, if we think about them as Athenas out there that they do have the potential to be all those things, to be the leaders, to be the warriors. At the same time, they can embody all those things about being the diplomats. So we have to address this issue right off the bat. It's one of the things we have to always deal with. And it is a whole issue of attraction. Whenever you start talking about cross-gender mentoring, this often comes up. It comes up with groups of men that we talk with in particular. And, you know, there's almost this phobia, you know, what if I'm attracted to her? And you could just sense the anxiety. Maybe they've had that experience before. And so, you know, we talk about the fact that, yeah, let's just put it right on the table. There is all this evidence on evolutionary biology and psychology. And if you happen to be a heterosexual and you're in a cross-gender mentorship, chances are pretty good. But sometimes, if you mentor quite a bit, then you'll feel attraction for somebody. There are many things about mentorships that I think develop some attraction occasionally. You spend a lot of time together. You rely on one another. You do a lot of talking and disclosure. As a relationship goes on, you meet more. There's some intimacy in the relationship. You share interests and values often. And so, we shouldn't be shocked occasionally when we notice, well, I'm a little attracted to that person, or I find that person attractive. There's also all the architecture we have from our evolutionary forebears. And, you know, if you look at the evidence, it's pretty clear men still, unconsciously, are looking for fertility markers in the other gender, especially if they're heterosexual. So, apparently, we're looking for full lips and facial symmetry and a certain hip to waist ratio. And all of that's kind of going on, you know, unconsciously, not particularly aware of it. So, we want to acknowledge that attraction happens. And I just have to say, when we're talking with men, I'll often say, wouldn't life be a lot more dull if you didn't ever find anyone attractive? So, I think we need to get over that. So, to put amenities, we do have a huge new neurologic breakthrough that we do like to share with them. And I didn't get clearance because this might be a secret, Mary. But we're just going to go ahead and share. We have a brand new FMRI of the male brain that we hope puts men at ease. So, let's go ahead and share. So, it turns out men have a frontal lobe. And that, of course, allows judgment, decision-making, I can reason my way through life and not be impulsive. So, that would suggest that we're capable of recognizing attraction, taking appropriate steps to not allow that to intrude on a relationship, be thoughtful about it, maybe seek consultation if I really need to do that. But experiencing attraction need not lead to inappropriate behavior. And so, if we can just deal with the attraction thing right off, we find that very helpful. One last thing we'll share with men. There's a whole other stream of social psych research on perceived mutual attraction. Essentially, if I feel attraction to somebody, to what extent do I believe that a person is also attracted to me? Well, when you look at all the studies, it turns out there's a remarkable gender effect. Any idea which sex tends to move or estimate? So, we tell guys, look, don't embarrass yourself, she's just not that into you. Take the research and don't let that ruin or intrude on a good mentoring relationship. So, certainly as we come into any sort of mentoring relationship, we bring our own baggage, our own experiences in life. Now, one of the things we found throughout is how men are socialized today in our society specifically. There are some common themes there that can play out in mentoring relationships. Some of them are not necessarily completely helpful, although they sound very positive and helpful in lots of ways. So, we'll talk to you a little bit about these. For the guys, they tend to follow these scripts. It's a script, a social script that they follow. We call these the man's scripts, because these are ones that we find guys fall back on. Why do they fall back on these scripts? Because sometimes we get a little anxious, we have a little anxiety about having an interaction. We fall back on what we're comfortable with. It's the same way stereotypes work. We follow you, fill in the missing information of what you know and you're comfortable with. So, let me tell you about a couple of these, that we talked to men about, hey, be careful with these and just try to be self-aware. And certainly, hopefully women in a relationship, you can at some point be comfortable to talk to your mentor about this if you see these things happening. So, I mentioned I have a daughter, and so I have a relationship with my daughter. I think it's a very good relationship that might be unique to us, but that father-daughter relationship in particular can translate into the workplace. Where, again, if you have an older man who is the male mentor, a younger woman, it can look kind of, you know, maybe the age difference there could be close to a father-daughter type age difference. And sometimes men will fall back on that. Again, to relieve that anxiety that they're feeling about this relationship that they're having. And again, I think that's a positive thing for me with my daughter, but it may not be a positive thing for my female mentee. Why? Because there are times when I, as a father, I'm going to step forward and I'm going to become the protector and I'm going to do things for her that, again, as a dad and as a father, I think it might be appropriate. We tell the guys, you know, your female mentee does not need protecting. She does not need you to take one for her. She does not need you to hold her back because you are not empowering her. Right? We're over-protecting and we're keeping her from the opportunities and the same challenges that the men are getting. So if I do this, if I did it with my male mentees and I did it with my female mentees at the same time, that might be one thing, but generally that doesn't happen. The father-daughter relationship with a male mentee. Another one that you'll often see is kind of the, this comes from different places in our country where we see chivalry, certainly in the south, certainly in the military we see a lot of this where the man, the male mentor might become a little bit of the knight in shining armor. The woman is the damsel in distress, that's the man's script. And again, it is generally right, and most people are comfortable with it, right up to the point again where you are holding her back from experiencing something that she needs to experience, from a challenge. We're going through something developmentally that it might be kind of hard to watch her grow and maybe fail a little bit, or stumble along the way, but that's how we grow, that's how we learn, that's how we get to the next step, that's how we advance in life. We all didn't get here today because we didn't have a whole land in protecting us. So we encourage guys to kind of become more self-aware and understanding about these man's scripts, so that if you see them, you know you can kind of pull them in right away a little bit. So we've been kind of giving you some background intel just about gender and cross-gender dynamics. We just want to kind of give you a background about this project and the research that we did, and then we'll get into the toolbox, these are the things we try and tell men about what you want to do if you want to be an effective mentor for women. So these are the behaviors you want to try and enact and we'll share a few of those with you. When Dave and I were putting our heads together and thinking about cross-gender mentoring, a few things were going on. I don't know if you remember some of these events. Tim Hunt, Nobel Prize-winning scientist in Britain had just come out in the media in an interview when asked, well do you work with women in your research? Oh no, I never would do that. Three things happen, they fall in love with you, you fall in love with them, or they cry if you try and give them any kind of criticism, so I would never do that. And then shortly thereafter, I think, a story leaked in the Washington Post about congressional staffers. So women congressional staffers were implicitly informal policy, but a powerful policy, not allowed to ever meet with their male congressmen after hours. So after five o'clock, no, male staffers could do that, but not females. Why was it for their best interests really to protect the reputation of the male congressman? Because we don't want him to be seen with a woman after hours. It could stir some goss up and that might affect his re-election. Then when they followed up and looked at salaries, you know, no surprise women staffers made far less than their male counterparts. Those male staffers were getting all the evening events, all the networking, all the connection that happens in those important networking moments. No one was talking about the effect of women who were not at those events. And then the coutographer, Dave and I working with Marines and sailors was right about the time that we were just starting to write the book that one of the very first women to be the CEO of a Marine or boot camp was fired. This is somebody that we know and the reason that was given for her firing was she was too aggressive. And, you know, Dave and I just looked at each other and said, really, I'm a Marine, too aggressive. And we worked with these guys all day. It just the absurdity of it. I was not lost on us. But just so many of these gender moments in the media were happening right at the time that we were sitting down to work on this. Now, as we started to share with people, we want to write about how men can mentor women, a book on mentoring women. One of the first things people would say to us and we understand it now was, really, you guys realize your dudes. Are you aware of that? And we are. We're aware of men. And so they were pointing out that maybe you want to get some consultation. And so all the research for this book involved going to interview women. And we interviewed women that had kind of made it to the top of their profession leading off with Cheryl Sandberg at Facebook and we had a four-star admiral, four-star general, I think both Marines and the Army. We had women who were CEOs of Vice Presidents and they kindly gave their time for an interview and we asked them, did you have male mentorship and almost all of them did. And then we asked, well, what went well? What was a great example of what was very effective and what didn't go well? And then we put together this toolbox combining that with the literature on cross-gender mentoring. So that's what we've got. We want to just kind of share with you some of our favorites, the things that women told us. If guys could just get this it would be so much more helpful in mentoring what we should do. So we'll share sort of the top in our women's group. Number one on the list was listening. Uniquely every single woman we interviewed said that their male mentors, the thing that they did best was they actually listened to it and they listened to what they were saying and they weren't just making assumptions or going off the stereotypes and bias out there. Some of that was a learning process along the way but one of the things we find with guys and I know that, you know, I can relate to this and I know Brad probably does too that, you know, we have this the other thing you didn't see that brain scan up there was we have this extremely large fix-it gene sometimes about problem solving. I think sometimes my military upbringing even made it worse that, you know, I'm always looking to solve problems. It's always about problem solving. So when somebody comes to me, especially in a mentoring relationship, it would be really easy to sit there and listen. Listen to Mary and she's going to tell me what the problem is and then I'm going to fix it for her. Right? It's going to be great. And that's not what mentoring is all about. Yes, there might be some of those out there that we do need to pay attention to but often, sometimes we just need to listen to a firm that maybe you just want to affirm that you belong in the organization that you can compete you got here on your own merits that you can rise to the highest levels and we can just, we can affirm that as mentors out there. So it's not always about us looking and listening for a problem and solving it but just actually listening, not assuming what she needs, what she wants right, but what she's really telling is listening to what her dreams or aspirations are and then helping her to achieve those long-term. So following on maybe the second most frequent thing we heard was please don't make assumptions about me because of a woman. Don't assume what I want to do what I'll not want to do my career trajectory. Don't make those quick assumptions about me on one factor, my gender. This is Robert Lightfoot, he's a current director of NASA we got to Robert because we interviewed Janet Petro who directs the Kennedy Space Center and she said Robert Lightfoot was such a terrific mentor we then tracked him down and got an interview with him and he said, you know, honestly guys I really got this wrong often early in my career I had multiple issues with making assumptions I thought I was being very benign and gender-aware and then it turned out I had snuck an assumption in there and it led to that outcome he said, here's a great example I was on an executive selection committee years ago at NASA far and away the best candidate was a woman and as the selection committee was sitting around the table on the last meeting giving our last two cents about who to offer the job to I tried to show how gender-aware I was and I said, well you know this job does involve a lot of travel and she did just have a baby and he said luckily a woman was sitting right across from him at the selection meeting with flames coming out of her eyes and she said Robert, I'm really pretty sure she knows that it involves travel and I'm really sure she knows she had a baby so if we don't make that decision for her we let her decide the candidate offered her the job and let her decide he said, it was such an epiphany now in retrospect it seems so silly of me but I didn't get it initially he said, I still struggle with this I've got a male and female happening to be a husband and wife on my senior executive team at NASA I know they have high school kids I know there are events at school and I find myself saying to her hey, you don't need to be at this meeting for that event and then the light bulb goes on and you realize I never say that to him I never say the same thing to him so kind of a very gendered assumption about who should be home who should be at the events and he said I have to learn sometimes painfully to just talk about the pros and cons let her decide but I'm not going to make a decision paradoxically, her not being at that meeting may undermine her success in the organization one other area where I really think I've learned to be a better mentor for women is in the whole area of not taking for granted immediate reluctance to be put forward for promotion he said I've got a job open at NASA, there are eight criteria I advertise it and I get all these guys throwing their hat in the ring and they only meet three criteria and they're like yeah, male Roboto and then I've got all these talented women that meet seven and three quarters and they don't apply for the job and I will go to them and say why are you putting your name in for this and they're often very reluctant careful and not sure you know I'm ready they've got maybe messages about being an imposter not being prepared trying to be very careful with the criteria and he said I've got to encourage them and let them know what other folks in the organization are doing go ahead and put your name in the hat because I really think you're the one for this job so I've really got to work at that a little bit more so one of the things we talked about with the Nobel scientist Tim Hunt he said in one of the three things that happens if you work with women is that if you give them critical feedback they will cry and lots of men become very uncomfortable when it comes to the expression of emotion at work or anywhere and certainly they're worried about giving saying something that's going to make her emotional or cry and so I think it's appropriate and we talked to the guys about this all the time that it's important to understand what is the biology and where is the cultural and social aspects of crying come from and so if you look at and the biology of it women produce more proactive which is also one of the things that produces tears so do women produce more tears than men? Yes are they expressed in the same way? No it's different, that's a social construct about how tears are expressed there's even research out there again using real functional magnetic resonance energy where we take men and women we show them pictures show them photographs of things that should evoke a reaction some sort of an emotional reaction in this case things that are kind of sad or negative and you know what we find in the FMRIs the brains light up just about exactly the same right so we're seeing it occur in the brain the same, the reacting but the emotional the expressive aspect of it is very different and again if you look at western society in particular and it varies by cultural aspects in societies out there in western society that our boys and girls raised so as a little boy if you start to cry very quickly we learn that hey that's not okay and we're told don't cry don't be a little girl and the same thing for girls it's the opposite not so much it's socially acceptable boys are shamed when they cry so we find that again they're not comfortable with doing that way when they're working with other little boys along the way playing sports doing whatever they do that it's not okay to show emotions like that and that goes on into their adult life and that's why men become a little more uncomfortable sometimes with the expression of emotion tears the other aspect is tears can mean different things so let me give you a story about this so we had the privilege of interviewing General Dana Moore from the Air Force Dana she's up at Harvard now but one of the stories that she told us that we like to tell about in this section is you know when she was coming up through the ranks she had a boss and was also a mentor and you know when they worked together on a project when she got really excited about it very passionate about a topic she would kind of tear up and I think a lot of us probably felt that at times we get really excited about a passion about something but you can see the emotion you can see the tears a little bit it made her boss or male boss really uncomfortable to the point that eventually he came in one day and said Dana, work on this project here I want to know what you think about this unemotionally and it was just like this really is that what this is this relationship is going to be all about and it was really hard to work with them at that point you're giving to the team we have to tell you about it unemotionally in different areas we also find that we work with special operations folks and the women in particular in special operations today they don't like us to even talk about this topic because tears are not okay and they specifically asked us not to say that tears are okay it's okay to cry don't go down that road because they just get the women are almost harder on themselves and the men are about this because it's part of their culture and special operations another reason why why is this a problem with men in particular is that we learn that we get uneasy about the tears and the emotional aspect of it and then so we tend to over protect or even not even challenge women in the same way or provide the right kind of critical feedback that you need to develop and to grow and what it is you need to do so kind of the pull, you're pulling punches when you need to be giving them everything so one of the examples we have here in working with our Sears School in the military the Survival Levation Resistance Escape School when women were first integrated into that I will find you probably remember some of this that you know when women went through the program there's a part there at the very end 24 hours in the prisoner of war camp where you get the whole experience and part of that is to really take people to that emotional brink of breaking down and to see how they're going to react to that how they're going to handle themselves and learn from it and become stronger so that God forbid if and when it ever happened to you you could handle it in a better way and come back and return with honor well the first time women were going through this program we found that the male instructors the women got emotional they just backed off it was like whoa time out we got to pull everybody in let's talk about this and kind of refocus the male instructors like no you can't do that you were denying them the same opportunity the same challenges to grow and to develop you're hurting them you're hurting their people and hurting our country and so this is one of these ones where we have to think about it as guys why might we pull punches and not give critical feedback we talked with senior vice president at Walmart Susan Chambers and Susan said that she would not have been where she was running their whole global people division HR she would not have been where she was but it hadn't been for a couple of really important male mentors that she had that provided this really great heart she called it just kind of brutal harsh truth right this critical feedback she helped her to see who she was and what she could become and they said these almost she felt like they were almost impossible standards but they just saw in her the ability to grow and to develop and climb to reach that and that really helped her get there and we had another senior vice president it's a Dexo, Rohini Anon Rohini was telling us I was one of her complaints about her male mentor she felt like she just didn't get challenged enough by them but they didn't provide that same type of critical feedback so she had to go elsewhere for that so this is a great conversation to have about this balance between protection and empowerment as we go through this so to change it up a little bit someone just several of you just tell me what's going on this is an after work picture it's out of the bar so just tell me what's happening here what's going on it's mentoring what else would it be now let's look at the next picture here mentoring you were a little slower on that one though so the whole perception issue has got to be addressed we talked about attraction a bit but also if you're in a cross-gender mentorship you've got to be honest about perceptions people talk they're going to continue to talk you have to be thoughtful about that men I think sometimes get themselves into trouble here with perceptions they're phobic about perceptions and run the other way when it comes to mentoring a woman or they're negligent in thinking about this and then it does cause trouble either for them or for her people are going to start gossiping about her sleeping her way to the top or he's showing favoritism because he's attracted that's the kind of gossip we're concerned about so there are some antidotes to this one of the people we got to hear from was the vice president of Goldman Sachs he said you know I realized at some point that almost all my mentees were men and then I realized well where do you do most of your mentoring you're really busy during the day almost all my mentoring happened to drinks or dinner in the evening after work and women weren't comfortable with that and I hadn't been very thoughtful about it for different reasons maybe she's afraid of the gossip maybe she if she has a family we know in 2017 she's still doing more work at home than he is even if she's got a partner so for various reasons women were not coming to him for mentoring then they weren't following up so he said I changed it up I now have a breakfast lunch only policy he said I'll own I have my assistant schedule all my mentorships only for a breakfast or lunch meeting at a cafe right near Goldman Sachs it's very transparent and he said in the last year or so since I've implemented this I've totally changed the landscape so men and women are really kind of equally you're seeking me out couple of things guys have to be thoughtful about don't be sneaky about mentoring a woman be very transparent be thoughtful mentor lots of women don't mentor just one if you're a guy who doesn't mentor women and you suddenly start spending lots of time on a woman people might find that odd and that you might be offering them some risks for the mill be sort of that guy who's talking about mentoring and doing it very publicly and just be cautious about what you're doing one of the other things we all know if you're new to an organization it helps to have that insider knowledge the hidden politics and you need somebody to kind of show you the ropes along the way there very helpful and certainly the same thing happens even when you're climbing up in the organization right you get to that next level and maybe you're in the civilian world you get into the C-suite finally academia or get to the dean's level or whatever it might be right there's still more again that insider knowledge and sometimes hidden politics about relationships and things there that you need to know where does that get shared in your organization how is it how is it done certainly many of you probably have heard the dean where often sometimes business is done on the golf course right which can be okay kind of depends on your organization your people there's other places again times and places where access right access to this information is not equal and it's not shared in the same way so as mail mentor we need to be thoughtful and be thinking about that it's like so alright so who had access who was included wasn't included in ways that you know what maybe not intentionally but again because we really weren't being completely thoughtful about how we were organizing it so I'll give you an example Kathy Hannon who was with KPMG brand new partner excited for her first woman partner there and Kathy was telling us a story which was so excited they were doing this two day offsite and it was set up by a guy who was done well in advance and it was done at a golf course which is fine Kathy was happy to play golf with the guys and do all that the problem was that it was set up at an all male exclusive golf club everywhere she went she had to have an escort right and and then when the guys retired to the cabin at night to have their brand in cigars or whatever they were doing you know she wasn't included right so this is again where as a group as a team you know alright with the organization you're not giving full and equal access and we have to be thoughtful and be thinking about those in different ways the same way that we Brad mentioned with the female the congressional staff again it's a informal policy but it has huge ramifications for the advancement and the opportunities for everybody Dave I just checked in with our commander chief here at the conference and we should please talk to 315 so to leave lots of questions each pick our favorite one last one wrap it up I want the Cheryl Sandberg slide so do you want to do this one or I'll let you choose so last couple will share with you and I want to have time to interact with you one of the things Cheryl Sandberg really kind of drove home in our discussion with her was the importance of talking out loud and kind of opening doors and creating opportunities for women and mentoring sometimes men are a little reluctant to do this for various reasons she told us when I graduated from college my very first job was as the assistant to Larry Summers secretary of the treasury and she said everywhere I went with Larry Summers in that first year he would introduce me to folks and say this is Cheryl Sandberg who graduated top of her class in economics at Harvard she is just a rock star I couldn't do what I'm doing without her you really ought to get to know her and maybe find out what she's working on and after the third or fourth time Cheryl pulled Larry Summers aside and said Larry that's embarrassing stop and he said I'm not going to stop because that's what mentors do I am opening doors and networking for you when I talk to people they're going to get to know you they're going to want you to work for them this is how your career launches and you need to let me do that for you and just let me be a mentor Betsy Meyers said the same thing about David Gerrigan that she calls him a raving fan for her and bottom line what these folks are doing is talking about her while she's not even in the room so it's one thing to talk about her when she's right there how great she is when she's not even there and often if you're a senior male that's going to really carry some weight when you're championing somebody that way you need to be willing to do it last thing I want to share related to this is Cheryl Sandberg said even now with all that I've achieved I still occasionally question myself and I have the imposter syndrome occasionally and I'll just share a final personal story my sister Shannon is a Navy captain absolute rock star she's the exo at Balboa Naval Hospital right now and she is she is just amazing her last job she was director of mental health at Portsmouth and they had a fun run on a Friday with all the director staff and Shannon's older than many of the other people on the executive board and most of them are men and she was kind of sad and I said Shannon what's up she said well I went to that fun run yesterday and I won he said great she said well I I was really thinking and I just went for it Shannon's really fit and so there she is kind of stretching and doing her warm down at the end and these guys are coming across the finish line many of them younger than her and they're all kind of startled to see Shannon blew their doors off and then she started to feel bad because a lot of them were coming up to her yeah my Achilles you know I had a cramp they were coming to explain how a woman beat them at this race and then she was internalizing the bias thing I shouldn't have pushed it that hard I didn't want to make them feel bad and it led to a great discussion about you know no matter what you achieve you still are struggling a bit with gender socialization we all are we all carry that with us into our career no matter how accomplished we are yeah my last one I'll leave you with I think this is important for the men to hear too women in the room as you think about your male mentors and those relationships think about what this looks like so one of the things that we talk to men a lot about is how to approach this type of relationship and not necessarily from what many of us have heard stereotypically about the male mentors they all know a guru and I'm here to part upon you all my knowledge and guidance and fix all your problems right and that's not what Brad stated at the very beginning that is not what we're talking about we're talking about a good two way mutual relationship right and so we ask guys to think about it from a learning orientation and to approach each of your mentoring relationships a little bit of humility that again I have something to learn from my mentees in particular we talk about gender humility in the book and that you know hey we're guys you know and I've never I don't know what it's like to live the life of a woman I can't I put myself in your shoes as a woman and to say that I've experienced that I can't do that but I can listen and I can appreciate and I can empathize with what you're telling me if I listen and do that so to approach each of those across gender relations a little bit of gender humility that I have something I listen for a little bit I'm going to learn something I'm going to learn something maybe about a part of my organization part of my team that will put me more in touch maybe more helpful, more useful and maybe more productive than what we're trying to accomplish so maintaining that learning orientation I think is really important and almost to a T almost every single mail mentor we talk to somewhere along the interview they came back and they said about this I kind of feel guilty about this whole thing I was like why wouldn't you even and I said no you know I think I learned more and I got more out of this mentoring relationship that my mentee did and it was really interesting to see that come up as a theme over and over again with all the mail mentors I did a presentation a few weeks ago with the Marine Corps on gender bias and it was really interesting we were talking about mentoring relationships and the biases within them that I had a three-star Marine general stopped me in the middle of the talk and he stood up and he goes I just want all of you to know that in all of my mentoring relationships and especially the ones with women or people who are different from me not just old white guys like me when he said it I feel like I've learned so much more than I I didn't get a given and I was like well thanks gentlemen I mean you couldn't have made the point any better for me in that way so maintaining that learning orientation approaching a little bit of humility goes a long way out there and with that I think we're going to stop and take some questions I'm wondering if when you talked to Cheryl or any of the other women if you asked them about their relationships mentoring men at their companies yeah that was no focus of our interviews with them you know very often many of the people we talked to were prolific mentors I think sometimes the very saying hurdles and biases and you know internalized kinds of impediments affect the relationships the other direction as well the research on question or mentoring suggest that men have traditionally been less likely to seek women mentors and many of I think the biggest explanation for that is in history women have held less power over organizations so they just haven't seen women as good mentors for that sort of advancement but in terms of the dynamics we didn't I would just tell you that not so much the interviews but now there's research coming out especially as we're focused more on the millennial generation now and the work that we've been doing around male allies as well what we're finding is now there are more junior men who are getting mentored by more senior women and the numbers are shifting in the workplace and what's the early research is starting to show that the men, these junior men who are mentored by women have a much more gender inclusive perspective of the workplace they have better interpersonal skills and it often translates outside the workplace into the home as well so early research just starting to come out now it'll be interesting to see where that goes but certainly a lot of positives not people will be surprised when you see that one of the meta messages for guys we try to deliver is this isn't just good for her this is good for you and it's going to make you better in all kinds of areas of life it's going to translate for you as well there was a question in the back here yep so I'm one of those women that tear up when I get when something moves me I'm passionate about it so I just wanted to add to that conversation a little bit one of the ways that I've always approached the frying issue as a approach to the law of control so just like stereotypically when men get in the workplace when they have stranded when they lose control and they start yelling and throwing things which I'm sure many of us have seen and I'm certainly seen that on my shows I tell my folks that crime is the same thing like crime is okay but there's a time in the place for it so don't do it right now wait until you get into a appropriate place so you can resist those emotions that's healthy but work on your control so for me it's always been a control and that's what I like I absolutely agree with the audience we're guys released definitely some of the lots to prove that the other aspect though we talked about this momentary relationship perspective right so now you're with your mentor so you're not necessarily I mean it is professional but you're not necessarily like the truth there's a time and place where tears might happen they mean different things just like you said you get really excited about something you get moved by something it also depends how you were raised people are different for the guys we always joke with the guys do I have to get comfortable with this or like yeah you know maybe you need to do a little therapy exposure therapy is okay we'll watch some Oprah reruns you can sell a box of Kleenex and it'll be alright remember that she's a person just like you are we have a motion to reaction it doesn't necessarily mean you hurt her feelings it should rise you still need to order we'll be back on that side an interesting exercise at the beginning the title of your book I guess this question ties to some of the other questions how and why men should remember women is I understand the reason you did this study you could explain that very well still it could perpetuate the emotion in our society that men are always in the of color position of women and I wonder if you consider a sequel to the collective balance that and meet me in relation to what you said about the way boys are raised to suppress their feelings so we're going to do a five of the next stage we've got about four how am I so yeah people ask that a lot you're not alone people wonder what about flipping it and how about women mentoring men and what are those dynamics what are the outcomes in terms of why we started with this one the immediate need seems to be get guys to step up and until the gender balance changes especially in leadership we'd sure love men to be a bit more deliberate and thoughtful I think that's a huge missing ingredient in changing the gender landscape of work as things evolve and you know you would get more parity this is going to become crucial that we understand how the relationship works the other way and I have to tell you that the research isn't very good yet in that area so it's fairly limited maybe because there's just been fewer of those relationships to evaluate so far but it's interesting we do find that when women are in a mentoring role they tend to do a better job of doing both career and personal mentorship and so they give more of the psychosocial functions men sometimes struggle with women not doing as much psychosocial so they're good with career advice challenge you know all the career progression we don't do the relationship piece so much and that's equally important and T's will tell you so we know women are already doing a little better that way it will be interesting to see so yes look for that and book number four yeah and we talked about that we put that particular book to really think about it in terms of looking down the road the numbers and the percentages are going to shift and they are going to change and what does that do to the workplace right and the relationships and all the other aspects of the professional development that they'll do so we don't assume that it's status quo it's all about changing the status quo yep thank you for your presentation I just mentioned that there's any research to show not just men who are mentoring women but we know women are not all along with it they come from very different backgrounds such as economic backgrounds, religious backgrounds racial and ethnic backgrounds what are the numbers that are associated with to the three sergeant's point men who are mentoring women that don't look like them or their daughters or are the same those numbers even lower in terms of frequency or adaptability to women often you see that and then you can jump into the game but often you see that the research not take into account intersectionality very well so there are all these studies on gender and mentoring and studies on race and other kind of cultural variables although there are a lot of them but you rarely see the nice intersectional studies that take into account more variables and look at frequencies that way what you do find with other cultural diversity issues those relationships are slower to get started so for me to initiate a relationship with somebody who looks different racially or in some other cultural domain you find lower rates if you just wait for me to go ahead and initiate a relationship they're slower to get started when you pair those folks in a formal mentoring program you find that the effects are just as powerful the challenge seems to be getting people to initiate to initiate their relationship so if you can do that if you can create a culture of that sort of mentoring where people initiate relationships with someone who's culturally different you find the outcomes equally positive so I don't know that there's a great solution we look for people that remind us of ourselves yeah absolutely that's where those formal mentoring programs while often those mentorships maybe don't last as long as fruitful as the more informal hey we have a connection and we come together grassroots wise but for people who are not in the mainstream this is what gets started if you can create that culture of mentoring within the organization you can have leadership out there talking about it and holding other leaders accountable to show the value in it and reward it do we need to give us a shepherd's hug we'll be around we can answer some more questions stay away thank you