Gender and Identity – Episode 7 of This Human Business

The following is a full text transcript of the final episode of the first season of This Human Business, on the topic of gender and identity in business. The audio of this podcast can be found on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and Castos.

Jonathan Cook: Hello, and welcome to This Human Business, a podcast exploring the growing call among business professionals to counter the dominance of digital, algorithmic technology with renewed appreciation for the human contributions to commerce.

I began this podcast with an episode celebrating the House of Beautiful Business, an annual gathering of executives, consultants, artists, and researchers dedicated to the idea that business can be beautiful. Beautiful business is a wonderful ideal, but if we are to achieve it, we will have to confront some ugly realities about how business is often practiced.

One of the ugly sides of business has been exposed by the #MeToo movement. About a year ago, people began disclosing their experiences of sexual assault and harassment by people in positions of power, and often, those abuses of power have been enabled by a larger culture of sexism pervading the business world.

This episode, the last of the first season of this podcast, will focus on issues of gender in business, and the larger questions of identity that they imply. The discussion will begin with Aditi Khorana, a journalist, Hollywood marketing executive, and author of two novels, Mirror in the Sky and The Library of Fates. She is scheduled to speak about issues of gender at the House of Beautiful Business a few weeks from now, and when I asked her about the ideas she’ll be bringing to that work, she framed it in terms of a story, the mythology of Lilith, the first wife of Adam.

Aditi Khorana: You rise out of the ashes of your own destruction, and it’s cyclical. You keep doing it again and again and again and again, and the Lilith myth kind of speaks to that, where you sort of see this character breaking apart an old life and creating a new one for herself, which I think is kind of like how a lot of women I know live. We come up with conditioning through the society that we live in through our parents, through our friends, our peers.

This conditioning really has nothing to do with us, and I think our job as the heroines on our own journey is to destroy that conditioning and to light it on fire and often that means kind of lighting your own ego on fire, and lighting your own identity on fire, or the identity that you have sort of been framed with, in order to come to sort of a truer version of who you are, even though it’s like an intensely painful process that requires and involves a lot of loss and a lot of fear and facing your fears.

It is kind of like engineering your own identity, and after rejecting one that was never really yours to begin with.

Jonathan Cook: Aditi’s story centers around women who become heroines by destroying their own identities, ones that aren’t doing the work that they need, in search of new ones that offer better terms. The #MeToo movement, as she sees it, involves the expression of pain and loss in order to create the materials and space for the growth of an improved overall social identity.

Aditi Khorana: You know, we’ve spent the past year with the #MeToo movement and Time’s Up sort of taking women’s experiences and their narratives into account. And I think that women in the workplace, I mean, I worked in marketing. I worked as a journalist, and that entire time, like most women I was aware of the fact that this world is not really constructed for me or by people like me, and that sort of makes you, it makes you want to construct a better world.

So, I actually think, and again I hate to sound gendered about it, but I’m going to, that women are better visionaries than men, because they have to be, because they have to consider a better world, because they live in a pretty compromised world. The workplaces that we enter were not constructed for us, or by us. They were constructed for and by men, and you could take even sort of a minutiae of it, like there was a piece in The Times a couple of years ago about how thermometers with the temperature in office buildings is set to the body temperatures of men.

Just now, we’re talking about breastfeeding stations in more places, but we’re all talking about flexible hours, maternity leave, but also just kind of this idea of women being taken seriously, women being harassed in the workplace, women having this right to basic dignity in the workplace.

I think that this businesses will only improve if you raise the bar, and the only way you can raise the bar is really by listening to women and their experiences, and realizing that men don’t really have a lot of incentive to kind of change what is already essentially working for them on a lot of levels. To be honest, I don’t think corporate America is really working for anybody, but it’s working better for men than it is for women. Women actually have an incentive to sort of actively participate and create change.

Jonathan Cook: It’s a huge historical moment, Aditi says, and Martina Olbertova, the founder of Meaning Global, explains that it’s about much more than just sexual harassment.

Martina Olbertova: It’s basically signaling a much larger macro-trend happening on a much higher level which is all about striving for transparency and authenticity and free speech and women finally reclaiming their voice and having a sense of empowerment to talk about their own authentic experience of business in order to give way to making it better in the future.

It’s just a classic thing. It’s so hilarious actually, because I’m talking about authenticity and transparency, and women are reclaiming their voice, and yet I’m at a loss of words because I don’t want to sound impolite. So there’s still this fundamental way that women keep self-censoring themselves to not come across as bossy or bitchy or vulgar or something.

But basically, what I wanted to say is that it’s emblematic of the ‘shit leaving the system’, because it’s been a part of our system for many decades and women are now feeling empowered and safe to talk about what actually has been happening to them. And they’re starting to realize that they’re not the victims in this narrative – because it is a cultural narrative that we live in – the fact that you are a victim of something and you keep silent, and that’s the way it is, and it only gives more power to the perpetrator, because no one will believe you. And they are realizing it is a narrative, and if we want to shake that narrative down and open it up and give it transparency and start talking, that we absolutely have all the power that we want. But it’s up to women to stand up and decide for their own, and I think that that’s exactly what’s happening now.

Jonathan Cook: Like Lilith, Martina wants to shake down the traditional narrative of gender in business, open it up, and make something new in its place.

Aditi and Martina have focused on the status of women in business culture, but Julia von Winterfeldt, the founder of SoulWorx, opens up this vision of a revolution of gender roles in business to something that’s even bigger than that. For her, it gets down to the gender identity of business itself.

Julia von Winterfeldt: We have evolved business into being a more masculine form of being in organizations. I think all of us whether the male or female carry masculine and feminine characteristics and we have that in us. We are all complete humans, and only because we carry a certain gender doesn’t mean that we can’t have access to more feminine qualities or more masculine qualities.

We have everything in us, but I think with most of us, we pick up on a certain set of qualities that can be more masculine, or can be more feminine, and when we are working in the world of business, we’ve kind of learned that we need to embrace the masculine, so, being directive, being competitive, being top of the game, coming out first, and sort of having a more driven kind of format, and we’ve kind of lost what I like to call the feminine in this world of business. Unfortunately, or fortunately, we as women can actually access these feminine qualities when we really allow the feminine to emerge in us. We can access those a little bit more easily than men.

And yet, we hold ourselves back, or at least I did, hold ourselves back from bringing this into the world of business because that’s not how we’ve learned to know a business or how to carry out business, but these feminine qualities are just so important, and I, when I talk of feminine qualities, I believe that you can reduce that to two things. One is people-driven or drivenness, and the other is purpose-led.

When I ask people what do you think is feminine leadership, then I often get the answer, ‘Well it’s all about empathy, compassion, balance, deep listening, equity, selflessness, humility exactly intuition.’ Those are what we, at least when I ask these questions, what we associate with more feminine characteristics or even feminine leadership, and when I think about it, I think yeah, it’s really difficult for us in the world of business to embrace intuition. It’s like, no, I’ve got to do facts and figures and be data driven and data growth, numerically driven, so intuition, as an example, is really difficult.

We hardly think of business as being selfless because you know, we’re competitive. We’ve got to make it to the top of the market. Now, for me, it’s the time to really embrace this feminine, and as I said I think women leaders are more apt to accessing these parts than our male leaders, but I absolutely believe that both genders, and anything in between obviously, carry both feminine masculine qualities.

Jonathan Cook: As Julia continues to talk about the problems of gender imbalance in business, it becomes increasingly clear that, from her perspective, restoring balance isn’t just about what happens to women. There’s work for men to do as well.

Julia von Winterfeldt: To lead with kindness, and kindness not to say be soft as we often like to believe, but actually kindness in that we strengthen the ability in others and really look to support or be a catalyst to support someone else. And that I think if we can do that and we’re under the aspect of being people-driven and we access these more feminine, for me, qualities, I think we will do, will transform so much more in businesses. I think women are able to respond to that or resonate with that far more intuitively than are male colleagues, so yeah, there is work to be done on both sides, ultimately.

How can you access that? How can you be real with yourself? It does need as with all, but now let’s stick with our male leaders, it does need this openness for introspection and I actually do believe that it’s quite, it’s not quite, it’s actually very supportive to have a male group of leaders come together. I don’t actually think it is always successful when you have a female or females in the group, but instead really have this male coming together in a way where, when you are brought to a place of truly unraveling yourself and getting to know yourself, not just from this, to use your words, the aggressive, the competitive, or even the abusive side that I can carry, or maybe even have. Because having man-to-man be so vulnerable is the most heart-opening experience a man can have.

Now obviously, I haven’t experienced this. I don’t know this, but when you have mixed groups and you bring leaders together to unravel themselves when there’s always a sense of I think humaneness in males as there is a females of this all DNA that we have to be someone you know, a cool guy, and the woman is all, I’m going to be a cool woman, and you know you try and attract the other on a different level or on some level. But when you just have men it’s like when you have just women groups. And I think there’s even more power in really transforming the male to acknowledge and accept and to go through these maybe even tearful experiences of seeing, ‘Wow, I don’t have to be strong and as aggressive as I’ve thought to have been to be a real man.’

Jonathan Cook: When Julia talks about opening up people’s identities to encompass something more broad than what the traditional gender stereotypes in business allow for, she isn’t just speaking abstractly. These are tasks that she engages in on a regular basis in her work with business leaders.

I was struck by the knitting metaphor Julia used as she talked to me about these interactions she fosters at SoulWorx, with the unraveling of our conventional identities as a goal, rather than as a disaster to be avoided. I pictured in my mind at that moment the image of our gendered professional identities as a kind of sweater that we put on to create a presentable cover for ourselves at work. Whether the yarn is soft and comfortable, or woolly and itchy, it bears changing from time to time, a cleaning, even a reknitting, perhaps, as our shape changes over the years.

It’s not an easy thing to expose our vulnerabilities, of course, or to call into question the fundamental strands from which we have woven the fabric of our professional identities, but if we’re honest, we will admit that there have been holes growing in the old, masculine-centered way of doing business for some time. The yarn is stained and stretched. It isn’t comfortable any more, and maybe it never really was a good fit for many of us.

So, the choice is not really whether unraveling of the fabric of the masculine identity of business culture will take place, but whether we will take control of the unraveling in a purposeful way, or just continue to deny that the whole arrangement is on the verge of falling apart under its own sagging weight. The Emperor is on the verge of having no clothes, and the #MeToo movement is calling attention to that.

When I asked researcher Andy Akester about his impressions of this moment of cultural exposure, he framed it as an opportunity, perhaps along the lines of of Aditi Khorana’s allegory of Lilith.

Andy Akester: It is presenting an opportunity for us to kind of look at the cultural norms that have dominated art, science, industry, society for so long and calling into an account. I need to examine some of the some of those foundations and then to really ensure that we are kind of progressing as a species that way that we are truly holding dear as a value the potential of all people, men and women. I think we as a culture are, through this, also kind of refining and committing ourselves to an ethical humanism that undergirds this too, which is you know that idea that all life is valuable, all human life is valuable independent of gender – maybe because of gender.

I think a part of my, what I’m taking away from that is my my responsibility my obligation to really make sure that I have a clear cut ethic for what it means to interact with women and to believe in women and to champion women and to recognize even my status of privilege culturally that way, and make sure that I check that, but also that I use that as a vehicle for no longer just like complicitly sitting alongside women but actually kind of making sure that we’re guarding and creating opportunity for them to step into the fore.

Jonathan Cook: What stood out to me was the way that Andy identified a responsibility he holds in this moment, as a man in business.

Earlier in this episode, Aditi Khorana suggested that the role for men in business who care about gender issues right now is to listen to women as they talk. If what Andy is saying has any merit, though, listening is not enough.

It’s a tricky balance, because men can’t take charge of the effort to fix things in business. Men taking control of everything has been part of the problem, after all. It can’t be our job to rescue women, to be paternalistic about it.

On the other hand, men stepping back and letting women take care of all the dirty work of cleaning up sexism has been part of the problem, too.

The way I see it, there’s too much work to be done for men to sit this one out, and allow women to do all the cleaning up.

Andy Akester: We don’t have a clear definition for what masculinity is. It’s all based on assumptions and cultural tropes and stereotypes and in our culture, it’s so muddy, and it’s so dominated by these archetypes that feel increasingly divorced from the realities that we’re living in, right?

I’m reading this book. It’s called It’s Better Than It Looks by Greg Easterbrook, and it’s sort of this counter narrative towards the doomsday scenarios that we’re in right now, and his main point being that like we’re and you know a season of remarkable change much more rapid than human civilization has ever advanced before. So, it’s to be expected that we react out of fear, but he goes through these different aspects of society where the narratives are very doom-and-gloom and kind of offers a counter narrative where actually progress is being made.

But, a piece of the first element that he talks about in the very first chapter is the impact of urbanisation reorganization of society. More Americans live and more people throughout the world live in cities than they have at any other point before. There was kind of a corrective after the 50s and 60s and now people are going back into the cities and the trend is only looking to accelerate all that much more. So we’re moving away from the agrarian frontiersmen hypermasculine ideal. All of those narratives which have dominated our colonial and post-colonial culture for so long aren’t going to be as relevant, because there’s a new urban identity that’s going to need to form along with it, and that urban identity is going to be one that involves constant interaction with people of all stripes but certainly between men and women.

So, I think that kind of upends the narrative with the question of what masculinity is all the more. If it’s not about the hunter gatherer provider strongman, then what does it take? How do you how do we define what a man is within the context of some figure within a deeply multicultural, broadly diverse, community overall? And I don’t know, I mean, again it’s impossible and so not only do we not have a clearcut definition of masculinity today that is independent of those cultural tropes of the past, then the need that we have to define is in rapid flux all the more, right now.

We don’t have, really, voices that are moving to the fore and being able to offer that definition and that exploration in a way that doesn’t feel quite, that doesn’t feel as gender exploitive as as maybe it has in the past. I would hope that we would start to find empowerment through our courage to be people on a messy journey of self-awareness, which I think is sort of like a counter narrative to what toxic masculinity is, you know.

Jonathan Cook: Andy’s reflections show us that gender issues aren’t just women’s issues. The Center for Gender in Organizations at Simmons College defines its focus on issues of gender at work as follows: “Rather than viewing gender as a problem that individual women face at work, we analyze how gender is embedded in an organization’s work practices and culture.” That’s the approach that I’m aiming for in this podcast as well.

The identities of many men in business are mismatched with the narrow expectations we have for what men are and what men are capable of being. The tropes about success in business are the same as the cliches about what it takes to be a real man: Dominance, aggression, and the suppression of emotion.

The masculinity of business culture is riddled with hollow, exaggerated displays that cannot be sustained and don’t reflect the complex, nuanced experiences that shape men’s authentic emotional lives. Men in business spend a lot of time pretending to be something that they’re not, and that’s bad for business, because it leads to critical misalignments in both organizational culture and customer relationships.

There are many men in business who find ways to personally profit from sexist systems of oppression. As Aditi Khorana has pointed out, these men have little interest in changing gender dynamics in commercial culture. At least as many men, however, are suffering from patterns of abuse that are associated with sexist organizational culture, even if their suffering is not sexist in itself. A sexist business culture is more likely than others to be racist, homophobic, intolerant of cultural differences, and generally disrespectful of individual needs. These attitudes are bad for most people outside of the corporate pinnacles of power.

Getting men to recognize the ways in which sexist business culture harms them will bring more people into programs for equitable gender dynamics, and as my grandmother taught me, many hands make light work. Professor Ronit Kark of the Department of Psychology and the Gender Studies Program at Bar-Ilan University writes that, “If we want men to join in constructing an equal and inclusive organization, we need to portray gender equity as an issue that affects and pertains to them as well.”

Unfortunately, many men aren’t responding well to the #MeToo movement. There are those, of course, who denounce the entire thing. A more common, and more subtle, problem is for men to shift into a position of defensive inaction, a position in which the most they’re willing to do to improve the situation is to offer brief statements of verbal support to #MeToo, and then simply hunker down and concentrate on not doing anything bad.

I asked Andy about this, and whether this response might be due to a kind of panic. Andy countered that instead, men in business might be following another masculine stereotype: A withdrawal from emotional engagement.

Andy Akester: Are men prone to panic? I feel like men seek to continually guard themselves from panic. I don’t know that, really, most men let themselves feel panic. They don’t want to believe that panic is an option. Yeah, I think that that’s going to be like an element of masculinity that is less than helpful in our current culture. I mean, I think it’s true of a lot of things in life. Numbness is sort of our friend. We don’t want to feel too much, but I think the fear of not knowing, the fear of not being in control, I think especially for a lot of men, is a very real motivator. So there’s a lot of self-preservation that and I think happens to gird themselves from that.

Business culture throughout the world has long been dominated by the narrative of male leadership, you know, about focusing on the bottom line. You can look at the business world and see that it’s very much driven by the bottom line, deliver, deliver, deliver, you know, but we’ve lost, a lot of businesses, at least, have lost the beauty of the process.

Jonathan Cook: Hypermasculine business culture is dangerous because it seems strong, even as it creates pervasive weaknesses. For one thing, masculine habits lead people in business to express levels of confidence that aren’t in accord with actual conditions. This October, researchers at the University of Bath concluded that excessive optimism is a major factor in business failure.

Cracks in the standard masculine identity that’s been made the default in business environments haven’t received as much study as they deserve. Designer Gunter Wehmeyer observes that this lack of attention has perpetuated a narrowing of the range of masculine identities, often leaving men in business to conclude that they must choose between following along with abusive masculine practices on the one hand, and being ostracized for not being ‘real men’ on the other.

Gunter Wehmeyer: I was thinking about the the scripts that women and men play in society, also in business, and you know, women, they had their feminism movement, they had their liberation and they got offered a new identity and a new script to create, like women created an inclusive vision and focus for women and especially for women of color. There were other movements, ones like the LGBTI movement, advocacy for an identity right for people, and I think these are important developments to play, but what I’m missing and what I kind of I think which is lacking in society and especially in business is that there is no new script for men.

Men are still working with an ancient script where they are supposed to be in charge, and to where they need to be self-sufficient and if you think about leadership, that masculinity has become synonymous with traits like leadership and strength, while femininity is connected with passivity and gentleness. So, I think men are still working with an ancient script which they haven’t overcome yet. I think if we are discussing what masculine leadership means, we need to find out what does it mean to be a male in current society.

Jonathan Cook: As Gunter points out, while men in business are all too eager to talk about innovations in technology, they have accepted without question downright archaic traditions of what it means to be a man. That’s lazy. What if men were willing to hack their masculinity, to give it a long overdue system update, to innovate it to match a cultural reality in which the equal presence and participation of women is the norm, rather than an aberration? It’s hard to argue that an organization that embraced and supported this kind of project wouldn’t have a creative advantage, and foster a culture of heightened engagement from employees of all genders.

Martina Olbertova urges us to work together on creating a business world in which gender doesn’t matter. The implications of this approach can be confusing, though. How can we work together on gender issues, when gender differences by their very nature suggest the honoring of difference?

Martina Olbertova: I think it’s something that we have to do together. I think that we need obviously we need men who condemn this kind of behavior to make women feel safe, because the last thing that should possibly happen is for this to create an even bigger divide between men and women, and for women to fear men, and for men to think that all women are possibly going to call them out for something they may or may not have done. So, it cannot breed this culture of distrust.

So, I think that the first instance obviously is active compassion: listening and actually making sure that I am not doing anything harmful. But at the same time, I think it needs to go way beyond that. I think that we need to create a culture together, men and women, where we can collaborate and almost make gender much less of an issue or much less of a topic, because in the business world I honestly don’t know why that’s such a prominent topic.

I don’t understand why women in business is a standalone thing, because men in business isn’t. I don’t understand why you have female entrepreneurs when male entrepreneurs are just entrepreneurs. There isn’t any reason why we should genderify women more than we genderify men.

Jonathan Cook: Martina is presenting us with some difficult questions. Why do we consider gender issues to be only women’s issues, when everybody has a gender? Men, as well as women, need to deal with their own gender identity in relationship to the gender identities of others.

As Tim Leberecht, author of The Business Romantic and co-founder of the House of Beautiful Business explains, revelations from the #MeToo movement have made it plain that men’s behavior needs to change. But how?

Tim Leberecht: The #MeToo movement, I mean it’s probably one of the most significant social transformations and movements that we’ve seen in a long long time with already enormous impact.

We’d like to address it in a very you know in a way that we hadn’t maybe done before at this year’s House. So we’ll have sessions about that. We have sessions on gender extensions on fluid identities. We have sessions and vulnerability and power, and how that power expresses itself in subtle and not so subtle ways in business.

The other related aspect is really the notion of male identity which is I think very much undergoing a transformation right now, especially with automation and AI threatening many of our jobs. You know, the question is also like what will that do to those who have defined themselves mostly through work as the centerpiece of their lives. Many of them happen to be men. Given our current economic circumstances so I think that’s another really really important question. What does it mean to be a man in the 21st century in the age of machines, you know, when old so the ways of expressing oneself manifesting one’s identity are shifting very rapidly?

Jonathan Cook: Tim’s question – What does it mean to be a man in business? – is deceptively simple. It’s one thing to establish rules and guidelines for what behavior will be tolerated, but another thing entirely to establish an identity that will support those codes.

Right now, the focus is on bad behavior, but negative changes, ones that merely remove unwanted behaviors, won’t be sufficient or sustainable. If men in business retain the same identity, merely controlling their degrading attitudes, emotions, and impulses, then the maintenance of a healthy working environment will depend on eternal vigilance.

We need men in business to be better, not just to behave in better ways. Lasting improvements will come from changing what men do by enabling them to change who they are. This means that men in business are going to have to grapple with the fundamental conceptual components of their identities, confronting in all its difficult complexity the more profound dimensions of Tim’s question: What does it mean to be a man?

This isn’t just an important question for men. It’s an essential question for anyone who is working in the business world, because the default identity in business culture is masculine. The practice of business has traditionally been seen as an inherently masculine practice. That means that if there’s a problem with masculinity in business, it isn’t just a problem with individual men behaving badly in business. It’s a problem in business itself.

By confronting masculinity, working to understand it, and finding ways to expand and reform its vision, we can also find ways to expand and reform the practice of business. Facing up to the problems and limitations in masculinity, we can find ways to transcend those problems and limitations in business as a whole. We can open up business, so that it can be practiced in new ways, ones that aren’t masculine at all, and ones that remain masculine, but defy the traditional rules about how masculinity has to work.

When I spoke with anthropologist Thomas Maschio, he unpacked this association and explored its implications.

Tom Maschio: There’s a kind of baserock series of dimensions of masculine gender ideology which we see coming up again and again in various cultures, even relatively egalitarian ones like the Bushmen of the Kalahari and then more hierarchical ones as well. I think, you know, so, you know, kind of the foundations of masculinity have been performance in a work role, measured by sacrifice and service to family needs.

Worker responsibility never can be questioned by a man. There is a moral compunction to provision kith and kin. Now you may, that’s kind of a positive dimension of masculinity. I wouldn’t call that toxic in any sense. That’s a kind of universal dimension of it.

Other dimensions are not so positive. Cross-culturally, physical and moral courage, dignity and a courageous stoic demeanor in the face of any threat is something that men have had to exhibit, maybe not for their own good, and whatever restraint and violence they practice was always based on an intimation that there was a capacity for violence. You had to be a man to be reckoned with. That’s an aspect, the threat of violence is perhaps more problematic but it’s there in cross-cultural constructs of masculine gender.

There’s activity. You know, men have to be convinced to be active rather than passive. They have to be out in the marketplace performing. They have to be extroverted versus introverted. They have to strive for autonomy versus dependence. There’s an agonistic, the Greek word for contest, anger in the marketplace, you know, which touches on your questions about masculinity and business, which has traditionally been viewed as a kind of competitive you know mano-a-mano field.

Jonathan Cook: These ideas reminded me of something that David Altschul said, back in the 2nd episode of this podcast, about the metaphors that form the skeletons of the stories we tell about what business is. One of the core metaphors of business, he told me, was the metaphor of business as war.

When we activate the war metaphor in business, Maschio suggests, we are activating a form of masculinity that regards threats and violence as legitimate tools for getting what we want. Is it any wonder that, with the warrior’s masculinity so prevalent in the business world, men feel that they have license to harass and assault women to get what they want?

Is this the way things have to be? I don’t think so. Men certainly are born with some potential for making war, but that doesn’t mean that they’re born warriors. Men have to be made into warriors, and in business, as in our wider society, they have to be made into abusers. Violent, abusive masculinity takes some elements of instinct, to be sure, but in its finished form, it’s a social construction.

Tom Maschio: All of human society and culture seems to a lot of it seems to be aimed toward convincing men that this is all meaningful and this construct of men’s masculinity is worthy and meaningful for them to strive for and they have to, they have to make themselves men they have to strive to realize this ideal. Are the series of ideals within themselves? And, society’s big problem has been, a big problem for society has been convincing men that it was worth it.

I think there’s the intuition that men are made by themselves and others. They’re not naturally men and have to go through these tests to achieve their gender identity and society is very worried historically that they won’t do that, that they won’t sign on, that they won’t do these things, that there’s something unpleasant about it, and I guess in the word of the day, toxic, and you know, I could go on and on about rituals and strategies of persuasion that men are subject to, or boys in various cultures, hazing rituals that can be quite horrific or challenging, anyway, but sometimes beautiful at the same time, some of those rituals. I think lying at the back of them is a perception that men are made, not born and that they have to be convinced to accept this responsibility or this gender identity, and where we are at now is: No. You know, that that leads to problems, certain aspects of it, for men and especially for women. So, we’re really in a time of re-evaluation of this this whole series of constructs of gender, especially the male gender.

Jonathan Cook: As Maschio says, we are in a time of re-evaluation of the constructs of gender, and that applies to women as well as men. If we don’t accompany the critical reformation of gender with a parallel reformation of business identity, though, people in business, whether male or female, will likely be trapped in the same old traditional models of aggressive masculinity that have been causing so much trouble.

One of the things makes traditional masculinity such a trap is that the competitive nature of it demands that men not show any vulnerability. Men often look at a vulnerability as something that competitors can take advantage of, to destroy us, rather than as an opportunity to learn how to be better, and to change.

So, something that you’ll often hear is men condemning the abusive sexism of other men, while loudly asserting that they haven’t taken part in abusive sexism themselves. Actually, we often later find out that those same men have engaged in some kind of sexist abuse of power. They didn’t want to admit it before, because they didn’t want to make themselves vulnerable to attack. The truth, however, will come out, and so the trouble that comes when men in business don’t want to admit that they themselves have been involved in the culture of sexism, is that it breeds mistrust that makes actual progress impossible.

These issues are not easy to talk about. When I interviewed people for this podcast, and the topic of technological innovation came up, everybody wanted to talk about that. Technology is a safe subject for discussion, because it’s all about objects outside of ourselves, emotionless things that don’t hint at our own imperfections.

When I asked people to talk about gender in business, however, men and women alike became very apprehensive. They were worried that they would say the wrong thing. It’s easy to say the wrong thing when talking about issues of gender and identity, because the models for gender in business are intricately, thoroughly messed up, and no matter who we are, we find ourselves in the middle of that mess. When we talk about gender in business, we are implicated.

In order to move forward, we have to find ways to talk about these issues honestly. That’s why I’m serving as a co-host of a session on gender and identity in business at the House of Beautiful Business a few weeks from now. It’s also why I am establishing a web site at GenderAndBusiness.com, to encourage honest, fruitful discussions on the subject before the in-person encounter in Lisbon.

I want to make it clear, to model honesty on this subject, that I do not claim to speak as a model citizen on issues of sexism. I am in the middle of the mess of it all, just like everyone else, and I was raised to be a man, and that means that there are moments in my past that I am not proud of, in which I didn’t do the right thing, in which I was part of the problem.

As men begin to enter into discussions of gender in business, we have to resist the masculine competitive standard of covering up our flaws, and pretending that they don’t exist. I’d like to think that, as I have aged and gained experience, I’ve become better at interacting with people in a respectful way, but I still don’t have it all figured out. The point isn’t competitive perfection. The point is to try to make it better.

I believe that we can. I believe that men, as well as women, hold the potential within themselves to engage in cooperative, respectful, emotionally infused ways of doing business that get beyond the masculine cliches of battles in the marketplace. Thomas Maschio is looking for these cultural openings as well.

Tom Maschio: There can be more communal forms of business organization, business inter-relationships. I don’t want to use the essentialist discourse and call these more feminine, because they’re not. The more human aspect, there are different aspects of humanity, I think. Looking at discussions of leadership and business, you know, I see some of the same tropes about women leaders. They have to lean in. They have been to be active rather than passive and dynamic. They have to be extroverted. You know, they have to show their autonomy versus dependence. You know, they have to be tough enough to engage in the contest, the agon of life in business. I’m just wondering if we’re not reproducing a similar model here as as women increasingly assume leadership roles.

Jonathan Cook: Maschio’s ideas remind me of the reaction against the argument by Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg that, in order to become more successful in business, women need to become more like men, by learning to “lean in”. #MeToo has shown us the dark side of the “lean in” metaphor. The eagerness of business leaders to lean into the personal space of their underlings comes with consequences.

Thomas Maschio urges us not to be reductionist in the way that we think of gender. There isn’t a single masculine way of doing business, any more than there is a single strategy that women bring to business. We can’t reduce it to broad categories such as feminine and masculine, either, as women can adopt masculine modes, and men can adopt feminine modes.

What’s more, the last several years have brought a radically expanded awareness that gender isn’t just a matter of men and women. After years of being relegated to the margins, or even living in hiding, increasing numbers of people are publicly adopting transgender, non-binary, and fluid gender roles.

If you believe that transgender and gender fluid issues are marginal, and not relevant to the practice of your business, you’re missing the point, and you’re ignorant of the cultural history of commerce itself. I urge you to go back and listen to the special bonus episode of This Human Business that came out a few weeks ago under the title The Mythology of Hermes, God of Commerce. It’s in the strange divinity of Hermes, not in the arid philosophy of Adam Smith, that the commercial culture of business has its roots. In fact, the word “commerce” is nothing more than a Latin term that means “with Hermes”. The Romans referred to Hermes as Mercury, and the god’s cultural practices as “merx.”

It’s also from Hermes, and from the goddess Aphrodite, that we get the word “hermaphrodite”. In some parts of ancient Greece, Hermaphrodite was the child of Hermes and Aphrodite. In others, Hermaphrodite was none other than Hermes and Aphrodite in combination, for in these places, Hermes and Aphrodite were understood to be a single being, two aspects of the same divine power. The caduceus of Hermes, and the symbol of commerce to this day, is a symbol of fluid identity. Gender bending isn’t something made up by David Bowie. Gender fluidity and non-binary identity aren’t Millenial inventions. They’re concepts that are thousands of years old, and are at the very heart of what business is all about.

This revolution in gender representation isn’t just a liberation for a minority of people who stand outside of the mainstream. It’s a revelation of how we all experience identity, showing that what businesses once understood as firm and reliable points of data are actually much more ambiguous and unpredictable.

Learning to navigate the complexity of gender dynamics will help business learn how to deal with other complex identity issues as well… and human identity is always complex. We all balance multiple identities, because the social world that has been established through commercial culture is too rich and multidimensional to be navigated by just one true self.

Jonathan Cook: Too often, business algorithms are incapable of dealing with this ambiguity. In a fluid world, they remain rigidly digital, categorizing people as a one or a zero, when really, they move in the spaces between the numbers. Doug Grant, the founder of Inqui, has experienced the problems that result when businesses attempt to assign people into static types that don’t reflect the ambiguity of life as it is actually experienced.

Doug Grant: Sometimes you get people who are just, they just don’t make that connection with people as people and they start using broad, general terms. And so, ‘millennial’ has been a classic one where they start using it as this catchall stereotype about, you know, the millennials or whatever they’re lazy and they’re technology savvy and blah blah blah, you know.

They’ve got this whole batch of things that are complete nonsense, and you know you look at, if you were to put a bunch of photos together of a bunch of millennials, you’re going to see a wide range of people. If you were to interview them, they have a wide range of belief sets. I mean, to clump people together like that is just a little bit crazy.

What I’ve found is that what works much better is when we do our recruiting, we don’t recruit based on any kind of demographic set or any kind of age or household income, or anything like that. We always just recruit based on their behavior, because it’s much more telling into what people think.

Jonathan Cook: Even as digital businesses amass enormous mountains of data about what we do, they still don’t really understand who we are. There are those in Silicon Valley who insist that this doesn’t matter. They argue that people can be reduced to a combination of simple, objective measurements. When we expand our view beyond data analytics, we can see that it’s not that simple. Whenever businesses seek to cram our identities into neat and tidy little quantitative categories, their predictive models lead to predictably dysfunctional ends.

Silicon Valley’s data-driven systems tend to replicate traditional patterns of discrimination, because the perspective of automated analytics is grounded in prejudice, the idea that people can be organized into habit-bound, predictable types. Martina Olbertova points out that the facile personas that typify the design orthodoxy in business alienate businesses from the people that they serve, rather than bringing them into a closer relationship of true empathy.

Martina Olbertova: Creating a data-driven persona is basically creating a simulation of reality. So, the more they embrace this model, the bigger gap they’re actually creating with the lived cultural experience and with their own view of what people are like, because they’re basically only feeding the data that they deem is important for them. But they’re completely blind to the set of data that is actually important to the people, and actually quite deterministic in terms of how they behave and why they behave the way they behave, and what they believe and why that is the way that they operate. And that is all embedded in the culture.

So, unless culture is a part of that algorithm, you will create basically robot versions of people in a computer that are completely alienated from the lived cultural reality. By embracing technology and what it can do without embedding it in a real cultural context, you’re essentially creating a false reality. And then, if that’s the strategy that the corporations abide by, no wonder there is such a deepening gap between what we see that brands do and how people actually react on the other side of the conversation.

Jonathan Cook: Automated systems of predictive analytics work well in the aggregate, but they’re reliably off-base when it comes to individuals. So, even as businesses gain a temporary algorithmic boost from these data-driven systems, they’re alienating people, eroding the trust that is the foundation of any effective brand.

These problems don’t just exist between corporations and their customers. They’re present within the corporate world of work as well. Julia von Winterfeldt, the CEO of SoulWorx, experienced this kind of pain firsthand when her employer attempted to force her identity into a standard mold.

Julia von Winterfeldt: Having I think been in the corporate world for 20 years, I know I came to recognize that I was actually suffering. Let me try and put a little bit more detail to that. I was playing a role that I wasn’t necessarily equipped to fully do. I think I was very disciplined and ambitious, certainly inclusive or hardworking, but I remember even when I was in the leadership role or leading an agency at the time I often got feedback of well, you know, you’ve got to be more radical in your thinking, you should take more risk, you should assert yourself more, and yeah what else was there like, be more decisive.

That was kind of feedback that I was getting and I was suffering from this need to be someone who I am not really, and in order to then play this role that I was given. That didn’t seem to suit me, because I actually wanted to just be myself and not have to maybe take on characteristics that weren’t truly me.

The suffering sort of had me be quite exhausted, exhausted from playing this role and not being who I really am, and hence I stepped out of this and said, okay, I’m going to follow my inner calling, which is in a way associated with that being that I really want to embolden leaders to be who they truly are.

So, that is what I do today, with Soulworx, which is the name of my company. I work with leaders who have this urge to transform, first of all their organization, but then they realize they should also transform themselves and shift something within themselves towards becoming a more human organization.

Jonathan Cook: Julia suggests that one of the first steps we need to take to create businesses that are more human is to recognize that there’s more than just one way of being human.

Julia Von Winterfeldt: You need to be assertive and you know at some point I was even wondered, you know, are these just, without wanting to make this a gender topic, but are these male characteristics? Am I responding to, well that’s not really me, because I feel that that’s more masculine than it is feminine, or is that just how currently business is looked at, that this is what the leadership role is?

Then, I just started to think about what what is it, what is it that you want, Julia, if that isn’t how you see leadership being played out? What would stop your suffering? How would you want to play this, or rather, how would you want to really be in order to fulfill a leadership role? And then I just, for me, I started to see I’m very caring. I want to, I think I already said this, I want to be inclusive, I want to be very close to my team members, really listen, listen deeply, understand, feel more connected with them. I don’t want to be pushed on time. I don’t want to be just making decisions because I think they’re cool.

Jonathan Cook: Julia’s experience of the restrictive scope of male-dominated business culture wasn’t problematic just because it didn’t accept her feminine perspective. More broadly, that corporation created an alienating experience for both its employees and its customers because it was incapable of dealing with individual differences between the human beings it was working with.

Sexism is a problem for women because it discriminates against them. However, sexism in business culture is also a problem for everybody because it discriminates against difference itself.

For generations, corporate culture has been synonymous with conformity. Mark Williams of People First imagines a new kind of corporate culture that embraces the misfit in order to create a dynamic organization that is able to adapt with more flexibility than a conventional corporate system.

Mark Williams: When you meet someone, and you say, ‘Hello, who are you,’ your job defines part of who you are. I think that part of automation is going to be a really interesting change and it’s not going to be great, I don’t think, in the short term. So we’ve got to find ways, when money is off the table, to engage the humanness of everybody to connect in something meaningful.

I think it comes back to not relating to the person. So again, we’re we’re still a bit Victorian about the way that we run companies like a factory where we’ve just brought everybody from the local area and not actually say what is it about you that kind of, when we piece you together as a group we’re taking those individual people and we look at personalization. Personalization in the consumer world, obviously we’re pumping millions into that so we can sell personalized ads and all sorts of things, but in the enterprise world it’s not even, it hardly scratches the surface.

Jonathan Cook: Corporations may now have digital tools to work with, rather than literal cogs and wheels, Mark points out, but digital business still have an industrial mindset, organizing their workers into categories of interchangeable parts. Mark is working on ways to use new kinds of digital tools to help businesses use the unique qualities of their employees’ individual identities. In this new way of working, being a misfit would become a unique professional advantage, rather than a liability.

Mark Williams: It goes back to the Taylorism thing in that a misfit is creative. It’s personal to you. You’re absolutely right in that a misfit is a term for me that’s good, but that means my own particular individual set of skills, the way I’ve been brought up, or everything that shaped me should be valued and valuable to somebody else, and it might not be, we’re not going to run the world or whatever, but in even in the small, and you know we tend to think of big jobs as important rather than you know, more even in the detail of care jobs and other things, it’s my value into that world.

When this big displacement of their job happens, how do people find their worth? And it’s in those moments, they can do it by the things that are individually great about them which we’ve never bothered with before because we just popped everybody into a category, it’s that, it’s that that’s going to be key, and in that sense, finding the kind of inner misfit is part of learning about yourself, finding what’s good about yourself and also you know the bits that you need to grow in, because we’d all get bored very quickly if we weren’t growing. There’s an overall feeling of openness, and openness of you as a person and not wanting to be suppressed either by what job I do or by who I am you know. So, society doesn’t think I fit in this box, and therefore, I want the kind of movement to break free of any of those boundaries.

Jonathan Cook: Mark tells us that when we find the way we don’t fit in, we find out something essential about our identities. In parallel, Aditi Khorana explained to me that, as she sees it, identity isn’t just about who we are. It’s also about where we belong, and where we don’t.

Aditi Khorana: Something that I think about a lot is this question of belonging. I think it’s a question that’s kind of central to my own identity, because I grew up all over the place, moving from place to place all over the world. So, I have always felt more of like a nomad or a global citizen than a citizen of any particular country, and so this idea of belonging is kind of central to my life. It’s like a major theme in my life, and I think it’s also a big theme that teenagers grapple with.

Where do I belong? Where is my tribe? Who are my people?

And so, Mirror In The Sky is a book about a young girl who like me, goes to a high school, I went to a school that was predominantly white in Connecticut, after years of attending international schools all over the world, and felt a tremendous sense of displacement. And at the same time, that’s the micro story of how do you find your place in an environment where you’re kind of an outsider and you’re different, and confronting these issues of otherness.

But, at the same time, the entire world is kind of grappling with this question of: Where do I belong? What is the right life for me and what is sort of this intersection of free will and destiny? How much of my life do I actually have control over, and how much of my path do I actually have some sort of say in, and how much of it is dictated by these various aspects of who I am that form my identity, like race, and class, and gender?

Jonathan Cook: Business needs to embrace the perspectives of a more fluid kind of landscape. Maybe it’s not a landscape at all, but an ocean of identities, not just in terms of gender, but also ethnicity, nationality, education, culture, and a range of possibilities that won’t even become apparent to business culture until it begins to open itself up to the idea that it has more to gain by opening to unexpected experiences of identity than it does from keeping the gates closed.

Andy Akester brings it back to a theme that’s found in every episode of this podcast: The advantage that comes from an honest acknowledgement of what we don’t know – about the identities of other people, but about our ourselves, too.

Andy Akester: We have so much more access to the idea of being able to understand the self and reflect upon the self. I think that’s maybe one of the great assets that comes again from living in the more urbanized multicultural society is that we’re continually confronted with the other, which gives us more opportunity, I think, to reflect on the self and and the individual, but to do that, it involves a discipline of reflection. It involves a commitment to allowing yourself to be in process, and it involves a certain embrace of the unknown while still not panicking.

Jonathan Cook: As we approach the end of this, the last episode of the first season of This Human Business, we find that we’ve circled back to where we started. The quest to restore respect for basic humanity in business relies upon our willingness to come face to face with people who are different from us, and to try to understand them on their own terms, even as we know that, for all the mountains of data we might gather about them, the most important things about them will be things that we still don’t know, and still don’t understand.

Hope for humanity in business doesn’t come from the project of reducing people into perfect predictability, so that we can cram them into commercially convenient categories, in a new kind of stereotyping on steroids. The most human moments are those that beautifully defy expectations. If we can’t step outside the algorithms, what hope do we have for the future?

In a month from now, I’ll be bringing some of the ideas you’ve heard about in this podcast to the House of Beautiful Business in Lisbon, Portugal. One of the most important projects there will be a session that builds on the material in this episode, a workshop on gender and identity in business. If you’re coming to the House, I urge you to join me in that work in particular.

I will close this season of This Human Business with the words of Fernando Pessoa, a businessman and craftsman of identity, a poet who constructed over 70 different identities for himself during his short lifetime, each one of them as real to him as the legal identity into which he was born. Pessoa wrote in favor of radical fluidity in identity, saying, “We should bathe our destinies as we do our bodies, change our lives just as we change our clothes.”

If these issues of gender and identity are at all interesting to you, don’t just let it end with the conclusion of this podcast. Head on over to GenderAndBusiness.com to continue the discussion.

There will be a hiatus before a second season of This Human Business returns, as we need those fallow times before we can find fertile ground again.

Thank you for listening. Keep it human.