What's Power Got to Do with It? Seeking Gender-Equity in Organizations through Male Ally Initiatives

With the persistence of women's limited advancement into senior leadership, organizations have employed an arsenal of diversity, equity, and inclusion strategies such as implicit bias training, intentional mentoring, and efforts to authentically support work-life policies.  Male allyship has emerged as a recent strategy aimed at gender equity.  The asymmetric power between advantaged and disadvantages groups is central to the concept of allyship in studies across disciplines, such as sociology, social justice and economics. Management scholars have identified power, specifically the requisite sharing of or fear of diminishment of, as a barrier to men participating in gender equity initiatives to advance women.  To examine how organizations might address the power inherent in the male ally role, we employ the Bolman and Deal Four Frames Organizational Model.  We propose that while male ally programs reside in the Human Resources Frame, the success of that strategy depends on managing the Political Frame.  In promoting gender equity, organizations are seeking to distribute power more broadly to enable both men and women to fully contribute. By considering organizational politics, the competition for scarce resources, power and influence, we argue that practitioners will benefit from a realistic assessment of the role that power plays in both hindering and advancing male ally endeavors.   We draw on the literature, survey data, and ongoing work with men and women engaged in male ally initiatives, and use the Bolman and Deal model to make recommendations for practitioners, male allies, and women in using power while building gender-equitable organizations

A Model for Strengthening Mentors: Frames and Practices

The extensive body of literature on mentoring has largely ignored the developmental needs of mentors themselves. This conceptual and practice-oriented paper asks mentors and others to consider the needs of mentors who may or may not arrive ready to deal with the challenges of being effective mentors. The authors ask: how should mentors think about their own growth and development? Drawing on a broad spectrum of academic literatures, three frames are proposed for guiding mentors’ thinking about themselves and four practices to spur their continuous improvement. The three frames are a simultaneous dual focus on people and tasks as mentors exercise leadership; an inclusive mind-set that works across the multidimensionality of identities in others and themselves; and a keen sense of the threats and rewards of managing the perceptions of others. We recommend the use of four practices for self-examination: engage in structured self-reflection; participate in standardized assessments to see others and one’s self differently; build peer support among colleagues; and ask for feedback in concrete terms. We conclude by offering the benefits and challenges as mentors engage in the difficult work of acquiring in-depth self-awareness

Understanding Women's Career Goals across Ethnic Identities

Research on women's careers has been evolving over the last 50 years. Initially, research on men's careers was used to explain women's goals, barriers, and strategies; then White women's careers were used to explain all women's careers, regardless of race and ethnicity; finally, contemporary research breaks the homogenous, monolithic group of "women" into meaningful ethic groups. This study of 860 U.S. managerial women extends that research by comparing the career goals of White women, Black women, Asian women, and Latina women. Factor analyses show differences across all ethnic groups in how women strive for different career goals: contemporary goals (self-actualization and impact on the community), balance goals (claiming life outside of work), and conventional goals (measuring success by money and position). We offer explanations for the differences, directions for future research, and implications for women seeking leadership

The Importance of Peer Mentoring, Identity Work and Holding Environments: A Study of African American Leadership Development

Mentoring is well-known for its positive impact on diversity and inclusion across a wide variety of organizational contexts. Despite these demonstrated advantages, efforts to develop diverse leaders either through access to informal mentoring relationships or via formal mentoring programs are often complex, expensive, and frequently produce mixed results. We examine the unique impact of peer mentoring to support and develop African American leaders using a formalized program approach. Our findings show that peer mentoring is effective in providing a safe environment for the necessary work of identity to take place among African American leaders. This identity work takes the form of holding behaviors such as enabling perspectives, empathic acknowledgement and containment that are critical for the development, support and validation of diverse leaders. Our findings clearly show the benefit of external identity peer mentors for providing support and validation for African American leaders that can be absent within traditional hierarchical mentoring. By examining the outcomes of an actual leadership development program over time, we provide recommendations on how to enhance diverse leadership development by recognizing and cultivating the positive impact of identity-based peer mentoring