According to a new survey from LeanIn.org, an unintended consequence of the #MeToo movement is materializing: the reluctance of male managers to interact with female subordinates. Over the last year, there has been a 33% jump in the number of male managers who feel uncomfortable participating in a common work activity with a woman (mentoring, socializing, etc.) — the number is now 60%. Senior level male managers in particular are more than 12 times more likely to hesitate in having one-to-one meetings with female coworkers. Many men reported avoiding being seen alone with female coworkers because of how it would look.
The problem with this development is obvious. In a corporate workplace, it is exceedingly difficult to be promoted to higher levels without the support and sponsorship of those higher up the ladder, and most of those higher-ups are still men. The mentorships, lunches and other social activities that go on in the workplace help to create bonds between managers and subordinates, and those bonds help the subordinates when it comes to promotions. The one-on-one work that managers and subordinates do together on important projects also help subordinates prove that they’re capable of moving up to a higher level. As LeanIn’s founder and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg says,
The vast majority of managers and senior leaders are men. If they are reluctant even to meet one-on-one with women, there’s no way women can get an equal shot at proving themselves,
So what is to be done? It’s a situation that calls for new approaches. A few thoughts I have are:
1. Acknowledging the concerns these men have. The behavior noted in the survey is basically hidden — it’s much harder to identify somebody not doing something than somebody doing something. Simply adding criticism won’t help and would deepen the problem. Just like women in workplaces, these men are concerned about their careers and how their coworkers perceive them. They may fear being falsely accused. More likely, they may fear that something they say may be interpreted as sexist or demeaning, even if they do not intend it to be so. You may not agree that these fears are valid, but they are valid to those who hold them.
2. Encourage more group activities in the workplace, that include everyone.
3. Mandate that mentoring relationships exist, with flexibility to change relationships that aren’t working out for personality reasons. If a male leader is having one-to-one meetings with a female subordinate that are required by policy, he has much less to fear about “how it would look.”
4. Foster one-to-two mentoring relationships, in which a male leader mentors and works on projects with two female subordinates, hopefully eliminating the perceived stigma of being “alone” with a female coworker.
5. Create leadership programs focused on women. Given the problem described in the survey, it appears women in leadership positions would be much more likely to be willing to mentor other women. The problem is that there are not enough women leaders. Creating groups where there is a one-to-many relationship between women leaders and women who want to advance their careers could be useful.
Other thoughts? There has to be a middle ground between a workplace rife with sexual harassment, and one in which women are trapped at the lower levels because men in managerial positions avoid them.