It’s Not Just a Man’s World

​​Deborah Gruenfeld: For a woman going into a room like this, there are very few things that we can fully control. One of the things we can control is where our attention goes, and we can make the choice to think about the situation we’re entering in a way that makes us feel small or ashamed to be there or unsure whether we belong.

Darius Teter: Female entrepreneurs have to deal with immense, but often invisible, challenges. They’re faced with social pressure and unconscious bias, both in their colleagues and themselves. So how do you succeed when the deck is stacked against you?

​​Deborah Gruenfeld: Or we can choose to interpret the situation in a way that’s empowering and makes it easier for us to show up in the way that we want to.

Darius Teter: Welcome to the second season of Grit & Growth from Stanford Seed to show where Africa and South Asia’s intrepid entrepreneurs share their trials and triumphs with insights from Stanford faculty on how to tackle challenges and grow your business. Women make up about 50 percent of the global population but only about a third of the world’s business owners, and worldwide women are still paid almost 40 percent less than men in similar roles. Is that because men deliver more value or are inherently better at running businesses? Of course not. So why is there so much inequality and what can women do to close the gap for themselves and for all women? In two of our recent episodes, we spoke with professors Deborah Gruenfeld and Margaret Neale about power and negotiation. These are social phenomena that are experienced differently based on who you are. So we invited them back to discuss how power and negotiation are different for female entrepreneurs. We also wanted to see how these issues are experienced in context. So we reached out to an entrepreneur who’s been navigating them for years.

Georgette Barnes: So my name is Georgette Barnes Sakyi-Addo. I am Ghanaian. I have a mine support service company. We do supplies to the mining sector in West Africa. Our range of products is mainly for exploration and drilling.

Darius Teter: So what are they mining for in Ghana with your consumables?

Georgette Barnes: It’s mostly gold in West Africa. It’s mostly gold and I think we have a couple of clients that are doing copper, I think, and lately we have a client that’s drilling for lithium.

Darius Teter: Mining in West Africa is traditionally a male-dominated industry and Georgette ran into difficulties even before she got the job.

Georgette Barnes: They called me for an interview. It was like: You? Yeah. I mean —

Darius Teter: Who are you?

Georgette Barnes: Yeah. I mean, who are you? I mean, where have you been? Where have you worked? Who do you know? I had no idea about the mining sector and so they said, “Well, you don’t have any experience. How can we go with you?” And I said, “Well, I mean, nobody wants to give me opportunities. Nobody wants to give me experience, the experience that you are asking for.”

Darius Teter: Dr. Gruenfeld says that this reflects a broader trend of who gets opportunities and why. A big challenge for women entrepreneurs is that the research shows that women are judged on results, but men are judged more on potential. Could you say a bit more about what that means?

Deborah Gruenfeld: What it tells us is that because of what most of us see in the social world, which is that there are more men in positions of power than women, we tend to think a leader looks like a man. So it’s very easy to see leadership potential in a man because a man looks like what we expect to see in a leadership role. With women, we don’t make the same kind of assessment. A woman doesn’t actually look to us like what we think a leader’s supposed to look like. So there’s a tendency to default more to, “Does she have the experience? Has she earned the expertise? Is she qualified based on prior results for this role?” So that’s a way in which women are sometimes held back and not chosen first for leadership roles, because we’re not given the benefit of the doubt because we don’t fit the type. People need to see more evidence of accomplishment in order to feel confident that we will be successful.

Darius Teter: So they’re not going to get the job because someone says, “Oh, I love her. She’s a risk-taker.”

Deborah Gruenfeld: Right. That’s right.

Darius Teter: That’s not cool.

Deborah Gruenfeld: I think that’s right. I think that’s right. It’s just less likely to happen.

Darius Teter: Fortunately, that’s not where Georgette’s story ended, and ironically, it had a lot to do with her willingness to take a risk.

Georgette Barnes: And after I had opened my little mouth at that time to say that, I realized that, oh my goodness, how can you say this to all these people sitting here?

Darius Teter: Were they … Sorry, I love this story. Were they Ghanaians?

Georgette Barnes: Yes. There were Ghanaians and there was an American as well.

Darius Teter: Were you the youngest person in the room?

Georgette Barnes: Yes.

Darius Teter: Were you the only woman in the room?

Georgette Barnes: Oh, they knew … okay, to me … but I was, yes.

Darius Teter: So you were the youngest, you were the only woman in the room. There’s this American guy. You walk in and were you just nervous as hell?

Georgette Barnes: I started getting a bit nervous because I realized I was being ambitious. I was being over-ambitious. I was getting over myself, yeah. And I said, “Well, you’re looking for somebody. I think I can do this work.” But I had one thing going for me. One of the main countries that they wanted to go to, I had been there and I had been to the university and so I had that going for me. But even still, Darius, I left there knowing that there’s no way I would get the job. Well, surprisingly, I did get the job and that was my introduction to the mining industry.

Darius Teter: As Georgette progressed throughout her career, she frequently encountered resistance, which won’t be surprising to female leaders. [To Deborah Gruenfeld]: You had a quote here that I wanted to read to you, “When you look at people in positions of power, what you find is that men and women do not actually behave differently in these roles. They’re perceived entirely differently doing exactly the same things.” I love that. But what does it mean?

Deborah Gruenfeld: It’s true. So what that means is that we have a lot of ideas in our head about how male and female leaders are different and behave differently. There is a lot of research to suggest that when male leaders are very decisive, are argumentative, challenge others, express a lot of confidence, interrupt others, they’re just viewed as very competent and strong. And when women exhibit those same behaviors, they are viewed in a way that’s much more negative because they’re seen as violating the gender expectations, which is that we expect women to make the rest of us feel better all the time.

Darius Teter: According to Margaret Neale, these gender norms affect negotiations as well.

Margaret Neale: Women negotiating face a lot more challenges than their male counterparts. They do so because there is a social expectation about how women should be in society and it really goes across many cultures. That is that women should be accommodating, women should make other people feel good. So what happens is that when, for example, as a woman, I try to negotiate, that makes my counterpart uncomfortable.

Darius Teter: Consciously or subconsciously?

Margaret Neale: I think consciously and that means that the response is: they perceive me as being greedy and demanding and not nice even if I’m doing exactly the same thing that my male counterpart, equally qualified, would do. So if we had the same script, I asked for it, they asked for it. They aren’t perceived as being greedy and demanding, but I am because my role is to make people feel good.

Darius Teter: Are they perceived as being greedy by just men or by men and women?

Margaret Neale: Men and women., We’ve all drunk the same Kool-Aid. So don’t think that there’s going to be like, oh, women are going to be like, “Oh, okay.” Come on. No, we all do this.

Darius Teter: Georgette has to wrestle with these social expectations in all her negotiations even after decades in the business.

Georgette Barnes: We were approached by an international company and we are negotiating to represent them locally. So when they approached me, I said, “Bam, here it is. I’m going to do this, but I want to do it for West Africa.”

Darius Teter: So that was your … when you were thinking about this conversation, you had a clear goal in mind: “I want to be their distributor for the whole region.”

Georgette Barnes: Well, before we went into the meeting, I had already told them our ability and our capacity and where we had already been in the West African market. So I did not expect that they would reject us having the whole region. I wasn’t expecting that. So when we went into the meeting and they kept pushing for that, I was a bit surprised, but instead of pushing and pushing them, I just said, “Okay, it’s okay. I will take the Ghana.”

Darius Teter: Why? If that wasn’t your aspiration, why did you agree?

Georgette Barnes: I have been in situations where people, especially in this region, people would insist and say, “No.” They would not give it to me and they want to split it. And then they split it. I’ve been in situations, they split it and then they come back looking for me because it’s a very difficult region to work in. So I decided that, well, I needed to prove myself. I needed to prove myself.

Darius Teter: Georgette has gotten used to proving herself, but this endless pushback that women experience can have a chilling effect on their own aspirations.

Margaret Neale: Also, what happens is because of life experiences or whatever, women have systematically lower expectations for what they can achieve in negotiations than their male counterparts.

Darius Teter: So they’re coming in with an anchored aspiration that’s too low.

Margaret Neale: So think about that, though, for a minute. I’m going to get pushback if I negotiate. I really don’t expect to get very much. So really, why should I try?

Darius Teter: So they negotiate less.

Margaret Neale: They negotiate, well, and that was certainly the notion — that women don’t ask, right? Well, that was probably more true 10 years ago, five years ago. We now have a lot of research that finds that when women do ask — and a lot of women do ask — they still get less. So it’s not parity.

Georgette Barnes: The truth is, in this particular negotiation I was actually tired. I was really tired. You have to be in a good space because it’s a mental strength. You think that, oh, it’s not tiring, but it’s tiring. And talking about that particular situation, I felt so tired that I think it also contributed to my saying that, “Okay, that’s okay. Let’s give it a try.”

Darius Teter: Unfortunately, it could be a double-edged sword because women are also punished when they hold their ground and ask for what they want.

Margaret Neale: We had a recent study, just got published. What we found was interesting because — so what we did was, we had 2,500 executives, MBA students, people from around the world, because we went to various countries and we collected data, and we had 2,500 people negotiate. They had either a really good alternative or a modest alternative. What we found was that when women with a good alternative negotiated against someone with a good alternative, they reached impasse six times more often. A woman with a good alternative, regardless of whether the counterpart was male or female, but had a good alternative, six times more likely to reach impasse. While a man, doing that same thing, reached a deal.

Darius Teter: Why?

Margaret Neale: Women were behaving in ways that were inconsistent with being nice and cooperative and accommodating. We checked. They didn’t behave any differently in terms of their reservation price, their aspirations, than their male counterparts. But what happened was … they were … both men and women punished them for demanding too much.

Darius Teter: It makes me wonder: What does that tell you about your strategy for going as a woman leader, CEO, going into a negotiation where the other party has a good alternative?

Margaret Neale: It means you may want to really embrace my collaborative problem-solving approach because when you know you’re negotiating, when women act as agentically as men, there’s pushback.

Darius Teter: Georgette continues to encounter that resistance in her ongoing negotiations.

Georgette Barnes: So even though I accepted that, okay, let’s start with Ghana, I wasn’t happy after the meeting. I wasn’t happy because I had opened myself up for even further negotiations for them to even now say that, “Oh, they have existing clients in Ghana.” So with that one, they would like to give you a reduced commission. Of course, I refused.

Darius Teter: So they said, once you gave away your real objective and your power, then they said, “Fine. We also want you to share Ghana with others and get paid less.”

Georgette Barnes: I can’t do that for Ghana. I can’t do that. It’s going to be difficult. So anyway, to cut a long story short, we haven’t signed.

Darius Teter: Still negotiating?

Georgette Barnes: Still negotiating. I’m holding out.

Darius Teter: You’re holding out for what?

Georgette Barnes: For all of Ghana.

Darius Teter: The lowered aspirations that Margaret described can go beyond your negotiations. Georgette experienced similar self-doubt when she explored the idea of starting her own business.

Georgette Barnes: I knew I wanted to set up my own company, but I didn’t think I could do it and I didn’t think that a young girl like me, a young African Ghanaian woman, should have that dream of doing something that was really reserved for international companies. But anyway, I said, “Let me give it a go. I don’t want to be a giant. I just want to make a point and I just want to try this.” So without any financial backing, without very much, I decided that — what did I have? And I said to myself, I had my name. Georgette Barnes. The name Georgette Barnes had become quite known in the exploration and drilling side. So I said, “Well, maybe if I used my name, people would at least recognize my introduction letter or my invoice.” Over the past 12 years, I am quite certain that we have made supplies to every mine in West Africa because we’ve done business in Mauritania, Senegal, Niger, Mali, Togo, Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Cameroon, Nigeria, and of course the biggest is Ghana. In Ghana, all the mines we have done supplies to.

Darius Teter: Can I ask you a quick question here? So you said that it didn’t even feel right to have that dream, wrong gender, wrong country, wrong age, whatever, wrong industry. Were people telling you and your family or your friends, “Hey, Georgette, you’re nuts”?

Georgette Barnes: At that point in my life, Darius, I didn’t even know about wrong gender. It didn’t occur to me.

Darius Teter: Good. That’s good.

Georgette Barnes: At that point, it really hadn’t even occurred to me. My whole thing was because the whole thing was — mining was really very, very foreign. It was foreign-owned, in my world, from the exposure I had had. I hadn’t seen any indigenous businesses per se, for me to even attempt. Maybe there were some, but luckily for me, my mom always used to encourage me. Anything I wanted to do, she would always be, like, if other costs are covered and that’s what you want to do, you should do it. So she had really raised me up to be a very independent woman. As a single mother, I had seen her go through stuff and I had seen her struggle. So even though I kept having those doubts, I just one day decided that, okay, I am going to do this.

Darius Teter: God bless strong mothers.

Georgette Barnes: Yep. God bless my mom especially.

Darius Teter: The support that Georgette received from her mother, both as a champion and a role model was crucial and it’s a similarly communal approach that Dr. Gruenfeld sees as a way to shift the paradigm. You can’t change people’s subconscious biases. So how else can you get them to be more comfortable with you breaking their subconscious gender-norming?

Deborah Gruenfeld: Yeah. I mean, this requires a bit of cooperation and coalition building. It’s very difficult for any of us to change someone’s stereotypes through our own behavior. But what can make a difference is when we surround ourselves with people who treat us as though we’re worthy of respect and admiration and competence. So that’s what changes the norm. If people are always looking for cues about whether they should trust a person or not, and the way they figure that out often is by looking at how other people treat them. So, yeah, it’s actually a much quicker path to change, to not just surround yourself with people who will help, who will vouch for you, but also to look for opportunities to lift others up. This is something that I talk with women about a lot, which is to say, “Look, you may not be able to stop people from interrupting you. You may not be able to get someone to treat you in a way that’s more respectful. But you can behave in a way that makes it seem like it’s more appropriate to treat another woman with respect.”

And eventually, that will change things for all of us. It’s also the case that if you look at what predicts status and influence in groups, we’re much less likely to get credit for defending ourselves than we are for defending other people. So it’s a better way. If I intervene on another woman’s behalf, I get credit for that. I took a personal risk to protect somebody else. But if I protest at the way I’m being treated, it just looks self-interested and defensive. So it’s a quicker path to try to change the way others are perceived than to try to change how others perceive us.

Margaret Neale: So the finding that we had before — which is, on average, men do better when they negotiate for self than women — still holds. And that is even if they ask or don’t ask, right? But when women negotiate for others, they outperform their male counterparts by 14 to 22 percent.

Darius Teter: That’s huge.

Margaret Neale: It is huge. I have kind of a tongue-in-cheek statement that I make. I said, “Look, what this suggests is you should hire women lawyers.” Seriously, they’re going to be cheaper and they’re going to do a better job —

Darius Teter: Going to do a better job.

Margaret Neale: And if there are any women lawyers in the group, I’m happy to talk to you about how to get more.

Darius Teter: So can you help me understand that finding? Why do women do better negotiating for others?

Margaret Neale: Because nobody calls me greedy and demanding if I’m negotiating for other people. Women take care of others, that’s what I should be doing.

Darius Teter: So I understand that part, but you’re also outperforming.

Margaret Neale: Because it turns out that we’re not bad negotiators. We just understand the social pressures that we experience and so it limits — and women are great problem solvers. Men are great problem solvers too, but they don’t have the social pressure to sort of be a certain way that women do.

Darius Teter: This focus on others doesn’t just build community. It redefines what society expects of women into professional strengths. It gives female entrepreneurs a whole new framework to unlock their personal power. So thinking about our audience, a lot of women entrepreneurs, aspiring entrepreneurs, what should be their strategy given these biases?

Margaret Neale: So, one thing that I say to a lot of the women’s audiences is that their strategy to try to overcome this should be, number one, think about people, things, items — who are you negotiating for? Are you negotiating for your organization, for your team, for your family? Or maybe you’re negotiating for all the other women who come after you who may not have to suffer this problem. So you need to think about who you’re negotiating for because that may empower you to be more assertive in the process.

Deborah Gruenfeld: The other part of it for a woman really has to do with how to deal with the narrative in your head about the fact that you’re a woman going into a male-dominated arena, that people may not respect you, that people may underestimate you in certain ways. That’s really a separate part of working on your personal power that I think is very important for women, which is making sure that you take charge of how you interpret the situation that you’re in. So just to give you a great example of how this can work — a few years ago, Oprah Winfrey came to the business school and she was in our View from the Top. Someone in the audience asked her how she handles going into a room where she knows she’s going to be the only woman and the only person of color in the room.

And she described, she said, “You know that’s actually not how I go in. What I do before I go into a room like that is I go into a closet or close a door and I mentally call up all the women and people of color who’ve been in this situation that I’m in before, all of the women and people of color who cleared the path for me to enter the space that I’m entering. And when I go into the room, they’re with me. So I feel like I’m coming in as part of an army. I’m never going into a room alone.”

Darius Teter: This conceptual framework can liberate you from all sorts of gendered expectations, like what Professor Neale calls the competence-liking paradox.

Margaret Neale: So competent women aren’t likable and likable women aren’t competent. Men can be both competent and likable, but women can be either competent or likable. So as you move up in the organization, every person who moves up in the organization has to push and basically, oftentimes, gore a few oxen on the way up, basically make changes, and changes are uncomfortable, and so what happens is that people become less likable as they go up through the hierarchy. Not everybody loves you anymore and for women, we have been so inculcated that we need to be likable that a lot of times women will choose not to take that promotion because they don’t want to lose that likability.

Darius Teter: Fortunately, and despite being incredibly likable, this isn’t something that Georgette struggles with.

Georgette Barnes: I really don’t want to be likable. I want to deliver that good-quality job. Everything is done properly. Yes. I don’t want to be likable.

Darius Teter: Including in a meeting? In a negotiation?

Georgette Barnes: No, I don’t want to be likable. Already being female puts you in a position where everybody’s thinking, “Let me be protective of her.” I don’t want to go on that emotional journey.

Darius Teter: And Professor Neale has found her own way to free herself of the paradox.

Margaret Neale: I’m on a trip right now and if I come home, my husband will say to me, “Hey, how was your trip? How was your talk? Whatever.” And then he goes on about his life. But I walk in, I have three dogs, those dogs look at me and like, “Oh my God, you are back. We are so excited. I mean, the world wasn’t even worth living because you weren’t here.” So if you want to be liked, get a dog — or, even better, get a rescue and save two lives.

Darius Teter: This process of unlearning and reframing, it takes a long time. Even Georgette, who has decades of successes under her belt, is still working on it.

Georgette Barnes: We have a proverb or a saying which means that when you are made of good quality, you don’t blow your horn. My grandmother always used to tell me: people will find out. I mean, it’s old-fashioned because the world is not like that anymore and you don’t know what is out there. So it is something that I keep doing, but I don’t think that I should continue doing that. I feel like I need to be bolder. I need to push more.

Darius Teter: But it’s a long road. So while you push for more, remember to cut yourself some slack.

Georgette Barnes: Especially when I started having my kids and motherhood and working in the sector, it wasn’t easy. But I’ve always liked work. So I’m one of those people who was eager to go to work, even though I’m supposed to be on maternity and stuff like that. But sometimes it did get stressful. I remember one day I was so stressed and so upset with myself over something that had happened at work. And as I was leaving the office, we had an old security man, a Ghanaian man. And he said to me, “Oh, small madam, why are you feeling so low? You shouldn’t feel so low. You’re going home. Work is work, and home is home. And when you get home, the work people cannot come to your house. And so, please, before you leave this gate, just leave the thing that is not making you happy. Leave it with me. In the morning when you come, I’ll give it back to you.”

Darius Teter: Man, I like that guy.

Georgette Barnes: Yes, yes, yes, yes. He was an amazing guy. One day I will have to tell you more stories about him.

Darius Teter: There’s one more thing that I’d like to cover and it involves personal safety. In their lifetime, many women will experience sexual harassment at work, be it verbal abuse, unwanted advances, or physical assault. It should not be incumbent upon women to change their behavior to avoid harassment, but what should be and what is, aren’t always the same. So while we work to bring the world closer to what it ought to be, I wanted to share what Dr. Gruenfeld had to say on harassment. Specifically, how to protect yourself from mental, reputational, and physical harm. I want to talk about the inevitable challenge that women face in a business or corporate setting, dealing with propositions from men, dealing with presumptions about who they are and what they’re willing to do to get ahead. What’s my toolkit? How do I arm myself to deal with that in a way that allows me to create the boundaries of respect that I deserve, but also allows me to succeed?

Deborah Gruenfeld: One of the really interesting things that you learn when you start looking really closely at misconduct and crimes in organizations is that people who violate norms and laws, they tend to do it in places where others won’t see it happening. So there’s no chance of being caught and there’s no chance of the victim being supported. There won’t be any intervention. One of the things that I’ve spent a lot of time talking with young women professionals about is controlling, to the extent that it’s possible, where meetings and interactions happen. You’re much less vulnerable in public than you are in private and I’m not convinced that there are very many topics that need to be discussed in a room with a door closed. So one piece of advice I would say is to try to have conversations in public professional places where others are witnesses.

So it just keeps everything more aboveboard. The other thing that I think is really important for people to understand is that one of the challenges in terms of women dealing with inappropriate overtures is being sure that a boundary’s been crossed. Sometimes it’s ambiguous or someone’s just complimenting you on how you look and you can’t tell whether you should be worried about it or not. There are places that people meet professionally where the norms of what’s appropriate are very murky.

An example would be a bar after work or in a hotel during a conference, where it’s kind of a work setting, but it’s also kind of a social setting. And it’s harder to tell in those situations whether a boundary is being crossed and it’s harder to know how to respond in a way that doesn’t seem overly unfriendly. Those are the riskiest types of situations, in my experience. I think it’s safer to do as much meeting as possible in a purely professional context where the norms of what’s appropriate and inappropriate are more clear so that it’s easier to recognize when boundaries are being crossed, and I think it’s also easier to respond in a way that makes it less likely that it will happen again.

Darius Teter: These are only some of the issues facing female entrepreneurs worldwide: inadequate child care and maternity leave policies, gender pay gaps, unequal access to funding and education. These are present to some degree across every economy — developing, emerging, or otherwise. Although we have seen some progress for female entrepreneurs, traditions, unconscious bias, and structural impediments remain. I urge all the men listening to this to inquire how they can address their own biases and create a more equitable working environment for women in your company, in your industry, and in your community. I promise you will only benefit from this. To the female entrepreneurs listening, I applaud your bravery and ingenuity in a world where the deck can sometimes be stacked against you. So I hope you find the strategies that we discuss in this episode useful. I’d like to offer a big thanks to professors Deborah Gruenfeld and Margaret Neale, who bring years of applied research and experience to helping women entrepreneurs succeed. And I’d like to thank Georgette Barnes, in particular, for showing us how it’s done.

This has been Grit & Growth with the Stanford Graduate School of Business and I’m your host, Darius Teter. If you like this episode, leave us a review on your podcast app. It really helps us to share the stories of these incredible entrepreneurs with as many people as possible. To learn how Stanford Graduate School of Business is partnering with entrepreneurs in Africa and in Asia, head over to the Stanford Seed website at seed.stanford.edu/podcast. Grit & Growth is a podcast by Stanford Seed. Laurie Fuller and Erika Amoako-Agyei researched and developed content for this episode. Kendra Gladych is our production coordinator and our executive producer is Tiffany Steeves, with writing and production from Andrew Ganem and sound design and mixing by Alex Bennett at Lower Street Media. Thanks for joining us. We’ll see you next time.