 major global talking point. It's clearly on the agenda here in many of the discussions around Davos and on the panel here today. Today with me we have Joanne Lippmann, journalist most recently at USA Today and author of That's What She Said, which is coming out on Tuesday for all in a bookstore, hopefully near you. And we have Gary Barker who is CEO and founder of ProMundo. There are two men and one woman on this panel. Some people might ask whether that's the right ratio. So let's ask it, is that the right ratio? I'm delighted actually to have men on the panel, men in the audience, men watching us. And the reason is actually the subtitle of my book That's What She Said is what men need to know and women need to tell them about working together. And the reason that I wrote the book and the reason why I think that this moment has exploded in the way it has is because all of the issues that create an environment, that it's extreme lead to sexual harassment and assault that we've been hearing about, all of those issues that lead to that are the things that women face every single day. So not every woman has been sexually assaulted at work, but every woman, every woman in this room, every woman watching knows what it feels like to be marginalized, ignored, interrupted, underestimated, disrespected. And the issue is that women actually talk about these issues amongst ourselves all of the time. And it's been going on for years that we talk to ourselves, we have books, we have conferences, that's all terrific, but it's half of a conversation. And if women only talk to ourselves, 50% of a conversation can only lead at best to 50% of a solution. So if we really want to close the gender gap, what we really need is to bring men into the conversation. And the book, that's what she said, is about how do we bring men in? What are some strategies that men can employ? But it's also, I think, in this particular moment, the reason why this has exploded. And I think it could be a positive outcome from the sexual harassment scandals is that we do have men who are suddenly aware and engaged in the issue and really want to change it. So this, I think, could be a very positive outcome. And I'm delighted to be on a panel with two men. All right. Gary, you've been working, Pramunda has been working in this field, Evolving Manhood for the last 20 years. You're the founder of the organization. Some might say it's quite a strange calling. Why did you choose this as an area in which to create a startup, I guess? Yeah, that is a good point. I mean, when I present my passport, and if they ask in a given country, what do you do for a living? And I said, I try to overcome patriarchy from within. It's not a conversation starter with most border guards. But I think whether, so I grew up in Houston, Texas, witnessed a school shooting, saw what versions of manhood meant for myself and other young men. And said, there's something that doesn't quite work here. And listening to girlfriends, friend girls, all had stories of the kind of harassment that is part of, unfortunately, the daily experience of women and girls. Years later, working in the reproductive health and sexual health field, it was kind of, we didn't really have a conversation with men. This amazing feminist revolution changing women's lives. But it was as if men were the bringers of harm, but there was no conversation of what stake we as men have either in repeating this, so we kind of perpetuate patriarchy all the time. But what was the stake that men could have in also trying to be allies with women to overcome it? And so Primundo started with that premise that we, certainly we need men on board with gender equality and ending sexual harassment because it's right, that should be enough. The sentence should end right there. Men, you should do this because it's the right thing to do. And then we can say, well, it's also right because actually your business does better and countries thrive. But there's also, and we've now done data in many countries on this, that men who believe in a more and live a more equitable version of what it means to be men are healthier, happier men. So we have a stake in this, not only because it's right for women and girls and it's right for the world, but I think increasingly we find that this conversation allows men to embrace a version of manhood that allows us to be who we wanna be. So kind of closer to our true selves. So at the end of a conversation with that border guard, I've convinced him that actually this is in his interest to embrace gender equality and overcome patriarchy. At least that's where I try to get. We have data to back it up and I'll share that later. Great. Joanne, that's what she said is a very timely book and to that extent you've been lucky and at the same time you've been at it for quite a while. Why this topic? Right, so actually I've been working on the book for three years. So it's not a reaction to the sexual harassment issues that came up, but the reason I've been working on it is I grew up in the first 20 plus years of my career I spent at the Wall Street Journal and most of my career I have been surrounded by men working with men, writing about men and the guys who I worked with, these are good guys. These are men who actually would want to be part of the solution, who want to be allies with women, but because they haven't been part of this conversation there and women haven't included them in the conversation so they've been sort of left out. So you have these good guys who are potential allies who really are essentially clueless about a lot of the issues that women face. There's actually research on this catalyst of a non-profit organization, actually interviewed men a few years ago and found and said what are the barriers to you becoming a champion for women? And more than half, it was 51% said it was actually lack of knowledge about what the issues actually are which is astonishing as a woman because again these things are in our face every day 100 times a day and we talk about them all the time. The other thing that the men said and I think this is really important is a vast majority something like 74% of the men who were interviewed said it was fear. They had the fear of saying something wrong but also the fear of being embarrassed of losing status among other men. And that's incredibly important. That's the piece of this kind of cultural issue that we really need to get over and that I think that you're working with as well. 20 years you've been at it. What have you learned over that period about the nature of manhood? Yeah, I mean one is that it's a pretty fragile armor. I mean it's quite brittle. If we can get men starting a conversation around that I think the issue of fear, right, we are part of this way that we're raised to be men is that we don't stop and question what it means and that we're fearful of being judged by other men of do we live up to this idealized version of what it means to be a man? And all of us will have to acknowledge that we're not quite as strong or as virile or haven't had as much sex as we have. Part of it is this illusion of who we are as men. Part of what we try to do in a group setting is make it safe for guys to go yeah, it's not quite working out the way that I thought it did. There are aspects of it that, or I'm fearful of what happens about this or I'm expecting a child and I'm scared out of my wits of whether we've got enough income or I can be a good parent or a good partner and all the rest. So one is creating that safe space that men can talk about this stuff. It's okay too and we don't lose face and status. The other is to try to change the rules around men. So if in countries where men have been ignored for example in a prenatal visit, but we have 80% of men in Brazil coming to that prenatal visit, training a healthcare worker to say, talk to him, say we want him there. Invite him to come back to do that HIV testing that he's otherwise not done. And if we change the world around men we find that we get them to change. Print a leaf stuff that the Scandinavian countries have done to say we offer it to you, we expect you to take it. And a boss who comes and says, I know you're expecting, you've got three months leave, shakes your hand and says I expect you to take the leave versus no hard worker would actually take the leave even if we offer it. So I think it's that changing the rules, making it safe and like your book does, identifying the men who already buy into this. Any setting we do this. So we work in low income areas of Brazil. The US parts of South Asia, the Middle East, we find the men who already believe in this, who are kind of already on our side. And no matter where we've done this in some of the most conservative places there are already men who get this. So another part is turning up the volume of their voices to say, look there's men who look like you who believe in this, who are doing it, who are showing the way and engaging them as kind of our first point of contact. I think that's so important actually. What I did in my report, I interviewed hundreds of people but I actually went and sought out men who were trying to close a gender gap and I talked to them about what are the things, what are your frustrations, what perplexes you about your female colleagues and what might be some strategies that you've employed successfully to try and close the gap. And that has been remarkably successful for a lot of men because once they become aware of some of these issues there are things that once you see them you cannot unsee them. So as a for instance, women, the research shows are interrupted three times more often than men are. And this goes for women of all levels by the way. There's been research done on the Supreme Court. Female Supreme Court justices are interrupted three times more frequently than male Supreme Court justices. Christine Lagarde here at Davos last year actually talked about this, how men sort of don't pay attention in a meeting when a woman is speaking. But you know, so for example I talked to a very successful television writer who realized that in his writer's room, he was a television producer of The Shield and of The Walking Dead, and he said in the writer's room he was realizing that women who had ideas were failing. None of their ideas were coming through. And he said it took him a little while but he suddenly eclipsed for him. What was happening is every time they tried to pitch an idea the men in the room interrupted them. And so he created a new rule. The new rule was no interruptions for anyone while you're pitching, man or women. And suddenly after he did that the women's ideas started coming through. The women started to succeed again. One other thing that a number of men talk to me about is when women make up less than a third of a group which is very, very typical in certainly in most Crippert settings, their voices tend to not be heard. And I think every woman knows that feeling where you speak up and you have an idea. It's kind of a good idea and it's crickets, right? Nothing, nobody seems to hear it. And then a man repeats it two minutes later and suddenly Bob's a genius and he gets the credit. And so the men who realize this tell me that now what they do, they vary consciously and by the way you don't have to be a boss, you just have to be a colleague, right? The men who have realized this told me they now listen for that. And when that happens, they amplify the woman's point. They repeat it. They say, oh, Olivia, you made a great point. They repeat the point and that does two things. It first of all, it keeps the idea alive instead of the idea dying away. And secondly, it gives credit where it's due. And little things like this, again, they make an enormous difference in the life and livelihood of women. Let me interrupt you there. And I do actually want to come back and talk about some other practical things that men and others can do in the workplace and at home. What I'd like to ask about though is with the Me Too movement last year and all the discussion that's happening, it seems that this is an extremely widespread problem. It's a spectrum of course. You've got sexual assault down one, down the very severe end, all the way through to unconscious bias and social structures that create the kind of work environments that you're talking about. How widespread is this? So we've just in a survey last year, representative sample of 18 to 30 year olds in the US, the UK and Mexico and found that one in five to one in three had carried out some kind of harassing or bullying behavior against women or girls or against other men in the last month. So only in the last month. And that's self-reported. Self-reported stuff, but we practiced a lot of what the best way we could ask those questions. You could probably guess that some of that's under reported but that's already astounding and frightening. So how do you ask that question? So what we'll say is in the last month, have you done one of these things? We won't call it harassment or we'll have a list of behaviors that you've done such as posting a picture of a girl that you didn't ask her permission such as a comment about her body. So we won't use harassment necessarily but the description of that behavior and guys will say yes. So we think that's probably under reported but it's already quite high. And then the next thing we did with the data is to say so which young men, what factors? Education level didn't matter, income level didn't matter, ethnicity didn't matter, urban world didn't matter. The single most strongest factor that came out was how much you believed in a series of 17 attitude questions that we call the man box. So how much you believe in a version of men are in charge, that's the way the world is, I have to use strength to show who's in charge. That tough guy version of manhood, the more you believed in that, the more likely you were to report one of these harassments. And the chart basically goes like that. The most if you're in the highest quintile of being in that box. If you're a Rambo. If you're 10 times like her to do it. So the point is we need to in this me too moment and it is a tremendous moment. But if all we think we need to do is to make lists of men who've harassed and if we think it's just a handful of men at the top, we've missed the broader question. So I mean I think and you said this as well, sexual harassment is a symptom of gender inequality. And I think we have to be careful that we don't just focus on the symptom but say it's the whole package that we need to do. And so we also believe that what we've got to do to prevent it and keep it from happening is yes, adequate reporting and protection of women who report it. That we take seriously women's accounts. But we've also got to go way upstream and have conversations with our sons. We've got to do adequate hiring so there's enough women in any workplace that it feels, do I have a long list there? But you can interrupt me, it's all right. So we're gonna come back again because at the end of it we're gonna have a list of things to do for men and for women. I'd like to ask you, Joanne, about some of the data points that you discovered when you were doing the research for your book. Sure, well there's a ton. But I mean, to your point this starts so young. It starts very, very young. And we've all heard about unconscious bias and how we have these biases deep within us that we don't even know about. Men have them as well as women have them. But these things start very, very young. So for example, one of the things I found out was that mothers of infants routinely will overestimate how quickly their sons learn how to crawl, but they underestimate how quickly their daughters learn how to crawl. You go up to the two-year-old age. Google has crunched the data on this and has found that parents who put the question about their two-year-olds who ask Google, is my child a genius? Two and a half times more likely to ask it about a boy than they are about a girl. You go to first grade. There was a really interesting study done about math. Okay, so math seems like it should be black and white. They had first graders take a math test. It was graded by teachers, all of whom were female, by the way. The math test, the first set was with no names. It was anonymous. And when the math tests had no names on them, the girls outscored the boys. Then they put the names back on. When the names were on, the boys outscored the girls. And this is in math. That's in math? In math. And so the boys were getting sort of credits, partial credit. They were getting the benefit of the doubt and the girls were not. And this goes all the way up at every grade level. By the time you get to college, a girl needs to have a B in order to be seen, I mean a girl needs to have an A in order to be seen on level as a boy with a B. There's been some research in the workplace that shows that women need to be two and a half times more competent than a man to be seen as the equal of that man. So again, it starts literally from birth. And so these are the kinds of things that we really need to start. This isn't something that we can just fix in the workplace. It's not something we can fix by weeding out the bad apples at work. This is something that starts at home early. It starts in schools and we need to kind of educate our kids and our parents and start this at home before it gets to the point where we have created this environment where at the extreme we can have these sorts of incidents that we've been writing and talking about now. I'd like to talk a little bit about the nature of feminism. Because clearly we are now entering a whole new phase. If you take, I guess, the first wave of feminism was the suffragettes, second wave of feminism in the 1970s, and then things seem to have gone off the rails a little bit. Are we in a, is this going to be a very practical period? Or will we find ourselves, are things going to change in the next five or 10 years? Will my children and my children's children live in a different world for women? I mean, it's already changing. The last 20 years in terms of women's participation in the workplace in many parts of the world, advances in girls' education around the world, it's already, the shift is there. I think the holdout, which is, I think your book is touching on it, is how do we get men on board with this? And so if, and I think, and men to realize that our lives are going to get better with this as well, is I think, let's take the issue of caregiving. So while we need to do all the push to get women in the workplace, we also need men to do our share of the work at home. Women do, on average, three times the amount of, around the world, three times the amount of daily care of children, elderly, and our houses, our homes. Little recognition for that, we know what that means in women's lives. The changes when men start to do half of this, when men are hands-on caregivers, when we get men into caregiving professions, we also see a shift in men being more likely to listen, care for their own health, worry about, have the connections with others that make our lives much more interesting. So I think part of this shift does have to be time to bring men along with this. And we've got to be really careful that it's not men stepping up and go, oh yeah, let me now drive this feminist revolution now. I think the other part is to say, we need both men listening in that meeting, but also saying we're following what the women's rights movement started with this. We're with you at the Women's March to say give us some ideas on where we should go, but we're also finding a stake that men have that our lives get better as we embrace this. I do think it's a great question of will it last, right? Because we're in a great moment now, and there's this awareness among men, there's awareness among all of us, and it's being taken seriously in the media. I think back to when Bill Cosby was first, the reporting on Bill Cosby, who was drugging and sexually abusing women, was primarily on the entertainment pages. And you think about now, and all credit, and kudos to the New York Times and the New Yorker for getting that Harvey Weinstein story out, getting that on the front page, and putting this out there not as an entertainment story, but as a story about society, and how society needs to change. So, however, all that said, I think there's a serious question about will it last, because in 1991, Anita Hill was the first person who brought the phrase sexual harassment into the popular vernacular. Those of us who started in the workplace before then didn't really think of that phrase. There was, you know, if sexual harassment meant rape in the workplace, the way, so she kind of, the modern sexual harassment was brought up by Anita Hill in 1991, but we see here we are more than 25 years later, and so much has not changed. And so, you know, my hope is that we can hold on to this moment and propel it, but I think it is probably too soon to have a definitive answer on that. Okay, I've got my pad out. We've got five minutes left, and we're gonna have a list of things to do for men and women in the workplace and at home. So let's start with men in the workplace, and we'll start with you, Gary. Yeah, what do we need to do? Well, I mean, I can start a little bit with what not to do. The 45-minute PowerPoint on Don't Harass and why it causes harm at the workplace doesn't work. So we know that the conversation does have to be about what manhood means, how we interact, and very practical. So I think the kind of listening activities you do, we do an activity with young men called the talking stick, where you wait for the other to speak, so you actually hold an object and wait for the person, and you can't interrupt until they have passed it on. So trying to make active listening part of it. Print a leave, shifting the dynamic and saying, we expect men to do as much of the caregiving at home and have a life beyond the workplace that we do, and we support women in doing that as well. I think that definitely has to be there. I think quotas are not a bad thing. Businesses often react and push back on those, but I do think when you do the Norway model of 40% women on a board, the kind of thing that Iceland's just passed about looking at your pay and making sure you're off in equal pay, I think those are things that make men sort of look up and go, oh, I'm being made to take equality seriously, and I don't have a choice. Parent training is a key one, getting this into schools, coaches, religious leaders, others who shape everyday manhood, those folks that we train to be the deliverers of this message, we find that it works. And again, keeping the discussion on, it's about the manhood, stupid, I would say is kind of our, it would be our slogan. Okay, in the workplace, men and women. Sure, yes, first of all, all of the above. We talked about no interruptions, we talked about amplification. There are things that you can do in the management, those who have managerial responsibility. We kind of all know that you should have a mixed slate of people to interview for job openings. It is just as important I've learned to have a mixed slate of people who are doing the interviewing. If you have a mixed slate of men, women, and genders, and ethnicities, but all white guys doing the interviewing, you're still gonna have a problem. There's a respect gap between men and women. That's something that we need to be highly, highly aware of. A man and a woman who have exactly the same job title, the man actually gets more respect and has more power in the workplace. So that's something, again, we have to be aware of that to try and close that gap. The differing ways that men and women communicate in the office, I think, are also incredibly important. There's been some brain research that shows that because of the way male and female brains are wired, there's a misinterpretation that goes on. And one of the biggest is, has to do with men and emotion. Men, so women actually do cry more often than men. Young women cry significantly more than older men. Men in the office, when they see a woman crying, they generally think, oh my god, I've hurt her feelings. And you hear men saying, well, I'm afraid to give her honest feedback. I can't give her feedback. I can't put her on this project, whatever, because she might cry. They're deathly afraid of tears. Two things about that. One is actually the research shows that men's testosterone level falls when women cry. So it's actually a threat to the man. But secondly, he's wrong about why she's crying. When women cry at work, it's actually anger and frustration. It's not hurt feelings. And so there's just, we need to kind of understand that communication level better. So how should a man respond when a, how should a boss respond when a subordinate is crying? You should understand what it means. Okay, you're frustrated, you're angry, let's talk about that. And acknowledge that as opposed to, you know, trying to like, you know, make her feel better. One other thing in terms of the communication is there's just different ways that men and women communicate. Women, because even as children, little girls are taught to play by, you know, by being cooperative. Boys are taught to play by winning, playing games where they win. That translates into adulthood, where women use a lot of these qualifiers. They're, you know, I think, I believe, I hope. I just hope it's not too much trouble. And they use a lot of upspeak. And so I've been in news meetings where gas prices are rising and a female reporter or editor will say, gee, as anybody knows, gas prices are rising. I wonder why that is. A guy will like bang the table and say, we need a story on gas prices. When the woman uses the upspeak I've seen very often, a man in the room will just start explaining to her, like the mansplaining thing. But she's not asking you a question, right? She's making a statement. So it's really understanding the communications differences so that we can actually be better prepared to get along. And I'll mention- No, I need to interrupt your knowledge with my confidence at this stage because we're running out of time. So I might ask you, Gary, for one final 30 second statement and I'll let you have the last word being the woman on the panel. Yeah, maybe just one quick comment on the brain and the hormonal mix that our bodies are very malleable. And so it's also what we're taught. So boys who learn early on to use words for emotion, that we talk to our sons in more use of emotion, we can also change basically how our chemistry works and to the positive. So I think it's important to acknowledge these things exist in our bodies but we're highly malleable if we're raised in different ways. So we can make a better boy. It's called civilization. Yeah, we do know how to do it, right? Education, civilization and humanity. Yes. Yeah. I would just say that look, the number one thing that we can do is make sure that we have men who are engaged in leadership. It is simply not enough for a leader of a company or any organization to offload this onto the HR department or anywhere else. It has to come from the top and it has to set the culture of any organization and that's how we will affect real change. Thank you very much. Thanks for watching. Thanks.