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A Tale of Two Universities

One of the ways that business schools and universities like to promote their contributions to society is to emphasize their external connections. These connections take many forms. There are formal relationships such as co-op placements for students, program advisory councils, and participation in external community and academic organizations. Less visibly, there are also connections such as researchers collecting data from or conducting research for organizations, and businesses providing opportunities for students to do class projects or case studies.

However, to paraphrase George Orwell, it appears that at some universities all external connections are equal, but some are more equal than others.

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A Pale Blue Dot

My friend Chris Gainor, who is a historian of space exploration and the president of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, has written a thoughtful blog post about the Covid-19 pandemic, and its effect on the “pale blue dot on which we all live.” You can read his post here.

Oh, The Things I See… — Paula Stone Williams

Some of the most insightful observations about the comparative workplace experiences of men and women have come from people who have gone through a gender transition. Paula Stone Williams recently gave an excellent TED talk about what she learned as a man and as a woman, and she has now written a blog post on the same subject. Her perspective is very enlightening, particularly in showing how men and women can be treated differently in small or subtle ways – but all those little incidents add up to create big power imbalances that can be damaging to individuals and to organizations.

In a Q&A session after a keynote presentation earlier this month, I was asked about my personal discoveries related to gender inequity. Off the top of my head, I could not formulate a list. It did not take long to do so afterwards. In no particular order, here are 12 of my discoveries: In a […]

via Oh, The Things I See… — Paula Stone Williams

What unemployment at 63 looks like — Campari & Sofa

A very insightful look at one woman’s experience with late-career unemployment – a perspective that often gets overlooked in reports of corporate downsizing and layoffs.

 

“It feels like a divorce. 31 years with the same man and then you are abandoned for a younger woman.” The “man” in question is, in fact, a corporation; Mattel,…

via What unemployment at 63 looks like — Campari & Sofa

Sigh…..

Mansplaining Event at PayPal via Francine Lipman (@Narfnampil) Feminist Law Professors

via Mansplaining Event at PayPal — Feminist Law Professors

Newspapers, Endorsements, and Legitimacy

When a newspaper endorses a political party or a candidate during an election, the public assessment of the endorsement tends to turn on two factors: the reasoning leading to the endorsement, and the perceived legitimacy of the newspaper itself. But, as in any kind of legitimacy judgement of an organization, the perception of a newspaper’s legitimacy isn’t based on a single event or piece of information. It’s based on multiple factors, including the perceiver’s beliefs about whether the organization’s actions “are desirable, proper, [or] appropriate within some socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs, and definitions”. And that is where the Postmedia newspapers in Canada went so spectacularly wrong with their endorsement of the incumbent Conservative Party in the upcoming federal election. (more…)

I, Too, Left the Tech Industry

A very powerful post by a woman who finally had had enough. Although her experiences were in the tech industry, a lot of what she went through – incessant work demands; colleagues who didn’t take the responsibility of addressing unfairness or injustice; terrible managers – is unfortunately all too real in many other industries and occupations.

Evgenia Got Free

With a nod to Cate Huston.

I have resigned from a 20 year career in tech. For many reasons, I decided to flip some tables in 2015. I have some not yet coherent observations on this that I will share in case they help others. I benefitted greatly from others’ posts on their decisions to leave tech and how they did so, and would like to pay it forward.

“This is my last tech job.”
A few months ago, a thought struck me out of nowhere. It was not a particularly bad day at work and there was nothing obviously awful going on. I simply thought “This is my last tech job” with absolute certainty. If I were a person of faith this might make more sense, in that it may have seemed like “a message,” but I simply observed it and thought “Huh! Ain’t that something.”

But from…

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When the Left Isn’t Right

Anyone who’s spent any time studying or participating in progressive organizations knows that, ironically, sometimes these organizations treat their own employees worse than the organizations they campaign against (as so brilliantly pointed out by this cartoon).

I thought about this paradox when I heard about the campaign asking five hosts of MSNBC television shows to (more…)

Malcolm Gladwell’s Weak Defense of the “10,000 Hour Rule”

The “10,000 hour rule” – the idea that 10,000 hours of practice is the amount needed to excel in an activity, as described in Malcolm Gladwell’s 2008 book Outliers – has been getting more attention than usual recently. The attention is partly because of the release of Gladwell’s new book, David and Goliath, but it’s also because of the discussion of the rule in another new book –  The Sports Gene, by former Sports Illustrated senior writer David Epstein. In his investigation of what leads to outstanding athletic performance, Epstein points out some contradictions to Gladwell’s rule – for example, that athletes at the same level of competition can have very different amounts of practice time or playing experience, and that success in sports isn’t determined only by how much an athlete practices.

A few weeks ago, in this article in the New Yorker, Gladwell responded to Epstein and to other critics of the “10,000 hour rule”.  Since I’ve written a blog post about Gladwell’s misinterpretations of the research cited in Outliers in support of the rule, I was very interested in what Gladwell had to say. But it seems that the article is full of  (more…)