Women must understand the dynamics of the workplace in order to make their ideas heard, according to Lisa Liswood, a senior advisor to Goldman Sachs who led an open discussion forum Thursday hosted by Women in Business. For an hour and a half, Liswood dissected the unconscious impact of diversity in people's interactions and cautioned the women in attendance not to be afraid to be assertive.
"Why is there a seven percent gap between male graduate students' first salary and female graduate students' first salary?" Liswood said. "It had nothing to do with discrimination or lack of qualification; it had only to do with propensity to ask for more money."
Diversity creates differences that become unconscious beliefs, and these beliefs place people on an uneven playing field in the workplace, she said.
"We sometimes think about diversity in the world as something like Noah's Ark," she said. "One of the problems is if the giraffe is looking at the zebra and saying, 'You know, she's just funny looking,' we don't end up having the kind of diversity we want in the world."
Race, socioeconomic level, religion, political ideology, sexual orientation, nationality and physical appearance are all areas where diversity fosters a particular unconscious ideology, Liswood said.
Gender is another one of these categories, and people often have a biased perception of people's leadership capability based on whether they are male or female, she said.
"I interviewed the president of Iceland; she had been the president for 16 years," Liswood said. "I also talked to children under eight and I discovered they all thought only a woman could be the president of Iceland."
These gender-based perceptions are formed and perpetuated by our peers and the media, she said. In Hollywood, for example, there are two kinds of movies -- the "hero's journey," where James Bond or Indiana Jones saves the day, and the "rescue me myth," with a Sleeping Beauty or Cinderella needs a prince to save her, Liswood said.
"What I hope is that you will be more conscious of some of the dynamics that are going on because as you get out there in the world these dynamics will start to affect you," Liswood said.
Women and men behave differently because of societal constructs, according to Liswood. Men speak directly, while women speak indirectly. Otherwise, she said, the men fear they will be perceived as too weak, and the women fear they will be seen as too aggressive.
Liswood recommended women ignore anyone who tells them they are "too anything."
Women are also less likely to receive good critical feedback because their evaluators are afraid of upsetting them, Liswood said. This feedback is critical, however, for a woman to improve in her job, she said, adding that women need to learn to request, receive and process critical feedback to achieve success.
Students in attendance said they found the forum informative as it opened their eyes to aspects of diversity in the workplace they were unaware of.
"I think it made me think a lot more carefully about the stereotypes that exist and I'll be more conscious about how women are perceived by the subtleties in action that we don't usually think about," Ali Flanagan '10, who attended the event, said.
Liswood is the secretary general of the Council of Women World Leaders, which strives to increase the number and effectiveness of woman leaders around the country.
She also directed the Women's Leadership Project -- where she interviewed 15 current and former women presidents and prime ministers -- and is the co-founder of the World Economic Forum's Women Leaders Programme.
