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April 21, 2015 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
32:46
TEDx： The New White Man's Burden
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Ah, TEDx, it has been a while, hasn't it?
I've got a confession to make.
I have always wanted to be the mother of a daughter.
I'm going to put money on the fact that your child had the misfortune of being born a boy.
And I think this goes back to when I was role-playing with my Barbies and my baby dolls growing up.
I'm pretty sure that they only made female dolls in those days.
So that's probably where the root of the bias came from.
Really?
I think the root of the bias comes from the fact that you're a female primate.
And this desire really intensified when I was learning about gender identity issues in women's studies classes at the University of Richmond.
I think we've identified the problem.
I decided that I wanted to be the role model for a girl.
And I'm sure you will be a wonderful role model.
I mean, you've led the way by not going into a STEM field and going into gender studies.
I really wanted to have a daughter so that I could help her build her self-esteem.
I could help her build her confidence.
Wow, it sounds like someone's kind of projecting themselves onto their child.
But you know what?
That's not unreasonable.
I've always wanted a son.
And importantly, I really wanted to help a daughter learn how to succeed in what is still a predominantly male world of work.
And you did your part to stop it from being a predominantly male world of work by going into gender studies.
Brilliant.
But, as luck would have it, 16 years ago, I gave birth to my only child, a son.
I'm so sorry for your loss.
Maybe you should resent the poor boy for being born into the wrong gender.
And after a little bit of consideration, I decided I wouldn't throw him back.
Jesus Christ, it's like your mother Teresa or something.
And I'm glad I didn't, because he's actually turned out to be pretty kind and funny and smart.
You see, this is how I know that gender studies degrees are about poisoning the well against boys because you said actually.
He's actually turned out to be kind and funny and smart.
Most men are kind and funny.
At least, you know, you can be sure that they're kind.
Really, I swear to God, most are.
Most really actually like being good people.
But you think it's actually a surprise that he's actually kind and smart.
I mean, what an astronomical coincidence, am I right?
And I'm thinking now that he's made my life infinitely better.
So perhaps he can also make life better for all of the women that he encounters along his way.
Fucking hell, is this the new white man's burden or something?
Why should he have to?
So what lessons do I owe a son?
How can I teach him to be a colleague, a boss, a spouse who will really work to make the world better for women?
That sentiment was just fine until you added for women to the end.
Just make the world better for everyone.
Why wouldn't that be perfectly satisfactory?
Now I started thinking about this actually a few months ago.
He was doing an assignment for his history class.
They had a unit on the women's movement.
And so the assignment was to interview someone in your family, a female in your family, about the challenges that they had had in life.
What, when they were part of the suffragettes.
So he says to me, well, mom, I guess it makes sense for me to interview Nana, who's his grandmom, because chances are she's had a lot more challenges than you have had because, you know, those were in the older times.
Your son sounds like a surprisingly smart young man.
All right.
There's some logic to that.
But you're still going to feel put out about this, aren't you?
If you go back to my son's great-grandmother, my grandma, she was actually a secretary in a textile mill.
But how could that be if women weren't allowed to work?
They were shackled to the home and unable to earn their own money.
And it was not a career.
It actually wasn't even a choice.
Your grandmother was a slave?
She simply had to work to pay the medical bills from a child who had died after a really lengthy hospital stay.
Oh, she's in the same boat as almost everyone else since the dawn of time.
She needed money and she had to work to acquire it.
And she and I never talked about it, and I regret that.
But I imagine that if we had, that she probably had some pretty good stories of what it was like to be a secretary in a small town in the 1930s.
Now, my son's grandmother and I, my mom, we have talked about it.
And I do know some of the very overt challenges that she faced.
She was a minister of education in a church.
I can't believe all these women were working such a long time ago.
I feel like I've been lied to by feminism.
And she had a male boss.
Patriarchy.
And male colleagues.
Double patriarchy.
Who felt that a woman, even a woman who had graduated summa cum laude from Wake Forest University.
What?
A woman going to university before feminism?
How could that be possible?
Couldn't be allowed to handle a budget or to lead a meeting.
What did she graduate in?
I mean, it's not like a male janitor would be allowed to do the budget or lead a meeting either.
Now, in my 25-year-plus career at companies like Frito-Lay, Yahoo, Nintendo, Kidzania, the challenges that I have faced have been less overt than that.
Okay, you're going to have to forgive me because I'm not really seeing what specific challenges you've just laid out.
Your grandmother worked as a secretary and your mother has a university degree with honors.
What exactly have they had to overcome?
But they've been every bit as real.
And in some ways, I think they've been just as difficult.
Because they're happening to you.
Because I've been trying to push further ahead in my career.
Yep.
But I've realized that until lately, I've been pretty hesitant to share those stories with my son.
And I think that that's natural.
As parents, we really don't like to tell you guys about painful and difficult things that we face.
That's just natural.
Sure, maybe.
But I've started to wonder: is that really fair to my son?
And importantly, is that really fair to the women that he's going to work with?
You know, I think that that's true.
I think that what you should do is completely waffle on for hours on end and overblow every little problem that you've had in your life so your son feels guilty about it when dealing with other women.
That sounds like the healthy thing to do.
To pretend like the battle's been fought and won.
But hasn't it though?
I mean, you've got the right to vote, you've got equal pay, you can obviously own property, but then women have always been able to own property.
I mean, what exactly are you missing?
And to pretend like equality and meritocracy already exist today.
Of course, we don't live in an equal meritocratic society, which is why you're on stage telling us about how you were disappointed you had a son and that you have to now teach him how to be good to all women for his school project about the history of women's liberation.
You know, change doesn't happen until you first realize that something is broken.
This is going to be good.
And then you're much more likely to take action if somehow you personally feel impacted by what's broken.
Yes, we can definitely agree that feminists are all acting out of self-interest.
So if I want my son to be an advocate for women.
Well, look, if we're choosing arbitrary physical categories, can't he be an advocate for, you know, people with blue eyes or blonde hair or Germans?
I think maybe it starts with taking the time.
To teach him not to rape?
To tell him my stories.
Well, it's more boring, but at least it's less demeaning.
So my son knows, for example, that I graduated from Harvard with an MBA.
Sorry, and you're actually going to tell me that we don't live in a meritocracy.
And he has gone to reunions with me and he sat in that very intimidating HBS classroom.
But I need him to know.
Because this is all about you.
That of the 200 women in my graduating class.
Worst patriarchy ever.
Only 75% are still working full-time.
Only the vast majority are still working full-time.
But why is that?
I mean, did any of them choose to drop out of the workforce for any reason, just out of interest?
And that compares to 95% of the men.
Yeah, but is that because nobody's going to give a man a free ride?
And I need him to know that that is not because those women were less ambitious.
How do you know?
This sounds like you are projecting.
And it is certainly not because those women are less talented.
This is about you, isn't it, mum?
But mostly because they found it too difficult to juggle the demands of a full-time career and family.
And there we go.
They made the choice to choose family over career.
Call me cynical, but I would say that that does mean they aren't ambitious, but carry on.
You know, my son knows that I've had the opportunity to work for some pretty cool companies.
He has been to lots of take your kid to work days with me, and he's actually been very helpful on a lot of work projects that I've done.
I can't help but feel that the question we should be asking is, has this been good for your son?
But I need him to know.
Listen, love, at this point, we're all well aware that this is all about you.
You can stop saying, I need him to know.
About how many times I've been the only woman in the meeting.
But not because women weren't allowed in the meetings, because women made different life choices.
And I need him to know.
I'm pretty sure he already knows just how self-centered his mother is.
How it felt to be asked to get the coffee or to take the notes, even when there were men who were a lot more junior than me in the room.
Was it part of your contract or something?
Because if it wasn't, you could have said no.
And I need him to know how incredibly lonely it is to be the only woman at that business dinner and hear jokes and comments that are really inappropriate.
Get another job or grow a thicker fucking skin.
And to not know how to respond in a way that doesn't make the situation even more uncomfortable.
From the sound of it, they weren't directed at you.
So you could probably have just ignored them.
Now, my son knows that as EVP of sales and marketing at Nintendo, I had the opportunity to present in front of thousands of people up on stage at E3.
But I need him to know.
Really starting to grade.
As much as honestly, I'd even like to forget about it.
About the hundreds of hateful, misogynistic comments that were written about me online, simply because I'm a female.
Yeah, is that really the reason you were getting comments, though?
I mean, wouldn't every woman on earth be getting comments like that all the time if that were the case?
Who is speaking in what is a dominantly male video game industry?
So, I mean, you would think that every woman in the video game industry is having the same problem, wouldn't you?
Now, my son knows that I serve on a number of public boards, mainly because we eat at Red Robin a lot, and we shop pretty exclusively at Nordstroom.
I don't know what either of those things are, but that's probably because when I was young, we used to eat at Wimpy and shop at Premark.
But I need him to know that only 17% of the 5,000-plus board seats in the SP 500 are held by women.
And he'll be like, so women can hold board seats then?
And you'll be like, yeah, of course they can.
And he'll be like, well, so what's preventing them from getting there?
And you'll be like, well, they kind of choose not to.
A lot of them choose to have families or just aren't really that ambitious or whatever.
But I mean, it's not like there's something preventing them from getting there.
And that that number really hasn't shifted much in the past decade.
Because that number is probably representative of the number of women who are ambitious enough to sacrifice to get to the top.
Now, like I'm sure all of you, most of his generation, my son absolutely appreciates how far women have come.
Because women literally won't stop talking about it.
But I need him to know.
Every time you say that, my opinion of you drops.
How far there is left to go.
Do you know?
I think that we could get there a lot quicker if we closed gender studies degrees.
If we just closed them.
So they weren't an option.
So women had more incentive to go into STEM fields so they could end up climbing the ladder in situations and companies where it's relevant.
My son absolutely believes in equality.
So does everyone else.
So much that it has been signed into law for over 50 years.
He believes that women should have the same opportunities.
And they do.
But a lot of them tend to study gender studies.
And that actually reduces your opportunities because it's not very useful.
Women should make the same pay for the same work.
They do.
And if you think that you don't, you can report it to the authorities because that would be illegal.
He believes that mothers can be as successful as fathers.
Yeah, I believe that mothers can work hard too.
You are, in fact, living proof of that.
He believes that everyone should be evaluated on their performance, that it should be a level playing field.
So he is not in favor of quotas.
And you know, actually, that's a really great start.
Research by Catalyst has shown that a strong belief in fair play is one of the leading indicators of how much a man will support women in the workplace.
What?
You're a fucking idiot.
Why would a man support a woman in the workplace?
I don't know whether you've noticed, but you're trying to make men and women equal with equal opportunities.
That means they are equally competing against each other.
That means there is every chance a woman will get the job ahead of him.
And so he has to out-compete the women as well as the men.
And so now he doesn't need to support anyone.
This is the whole point of the feminist revolution.
You're strong, empowered women who don't need no man, like fish need bicycles.
So why the fuck would your son have to support women?
But I need my son to know that the playing field is far from level.
You're right, it seems to be weighted very much in women's favor.
I mean, he is going to have to act as a second-class citizen to help women get ahead.
And I want to inspire him to be the kind of man who will actively work to make it so.
I love the way you're not going to qualify your assertion that this just is just not a level playing field.
Women just don't have the opportunities.
I mean, I know that I clearly have the opportunities, but women don't have the opportunities.
So, along with raising his awareness through my stories, there are three lessons that I'd like to teach my son.
Go on.
The first is that I want him to be a colleague that encourages women around him.
I'm not sure what annoys me most about this.
I'm not sure whether it's you want him to treat women like children or that you want to put women you don't even know before your own son.
Encourages them to speak up, to share their ideas, to go for it.
This starts now in the classroom, and it'll continue in college and throughout his career.
Which will likely be stunted because you don't know what a fucking meritocracy is.
I want him to be like my friend Kirk Schroeder.
Now, in college, I studied really hard, and I make good grades, but like a lot of women, I tended to underestimate myself.
And so sometimes I just shot too low.
It was Kirk who said to me, Cammy, you've got to run for student government.
You've got to apply for that internship, that scholarship that everyone wants.
And you know what?
When I won that election, when I got that scholarship, all of a sudden my confidence started to grow and I started to aim higher.
That isn't on anyone else.
That's on you.
And that was just that guy being a good friend.
Now, this confidence gap between men and women is completely unquantifiable and varies on a case-by-case basis.
But I am going to have no shame in declaring it the confidence gap.
It's really well documented.
Let me just give you a simple example.
If I share with you the notion of applying for a job, then research suggests that the average man, when looking at the list of job requirements, will say, awesome, I've got three out of five.
I'm a shoe-in.
Whereas the woman, looking at that same list of requirements, is more likely to say, I've only got four out of five.
There's no way they would ever choose me.
I guess I better wait to apply for something that I'm more qualified for.
This is undoubtedly men's fault.
So what can your son do for women you don't know?
When my son sees women around him underestimating themselves, I want him to encourage them.
I want him to be the one to say, you got to apply for that job.
You got to go after that grant.
You got to start that new business.
I'm sure he will say that to his female friends.
The women who he is friends with are not in direct competition with.
Now, another way that this confidence gap shows up is in women's reluctance to speak up.
And again, there's tons of research that documents this, but I think that we all observe it in the classroom and in the work environment.
I've had loads of jobs, loads and loads and loads of jobs, most of them office jobs.
Most office jobs are staffed predominantly with women in the UK anyway.
And I tell you what, love, if there is one thing I have never noticed is women having a problem speaking.
If anything, I would say they do it too much.
Women don't speak up.
And what's worse is sometimes when they do, they're interrupted or they're ignored.
Sometimes and other times they're not.
What's your point?
My son can make a difference in this by being the kind of man who never interrupts a woman, never interrupts anyone.
And just sits there quietly, hoping the women give him a chance to speak.
And who actively listens to them and encourages them to share their ideas.
Now the second lesson that I want to teach my son is I want him to be a boss that champions women and mentors them.
He can't just be a boss that champions and mentors people who deserve it, regardless of their gender, regardless of how they were born.
He can't look at them and say, hey, that person's worked really well, worked really hard, but has fallen short of the mark.
With a bit of mentoring, I could help that person achieve what they're trying to achieve.
But oh, no, I can't.
That person was born wrong.
Male bosses have had a significant impact on my career.
One of my first bosses, longtime mentors, John Compton, was the one who championed aggressively to get me into my first general management position early in my career.
And I was one of the first women in this position, and I came from a non-traditional marketing background rather than the more traditional sales background.
So I wasn't an obvious choice at all.
John had to stick his neck out to push me into the job.
And you know what?
I rewarded that risk by being the top performing general manager in the country both years that I was in the job.
I like how you keep bragging about how well you're doing and yet keep undermining the concept of a meritocracy by saying women need to be given special treatment.
My first assignment to a public board of directors came because another influential male, Dusty McCoy, had the courage to say that he wanted a woman on his board of directors.
Was it courage or was he pressured into it by gender ideologues?
I mean, you know, you were arguing for a meritocracy earlier.
You keep bragging about how great you're doing, and yet you keep giving examples of people using quotas.
Now, he didn't compromise at all on the requirements for the job.
He demanded very rigorous functional expertise and experience, but he told his governing and nominating committee to discriminate on the basis of gender that he wanted them to push further to find a female in that role.
Now, once women get into these leadership roles, it's really important that they get good feedback and good coaching.
You don't generally have to coach people who are good leaders.
You sound like you think they need their hands held all throughout their careers.
That same boss who pushed me into the general management role was great at giving me feedback.
He told me what was good and he told me what was not so good.
You mean bad?
Bad, awful, negative shit.
Not ungood, you freak.
And when he had some criticism to deliver, he didn't soft-peddle it.
He smacked me right between the eyes with it.
But he did it in a way that I knew he cared about my success.
Are you sure he didn't soft-peddle it?
Because it really sounds like he may have done.
And I also appreciated that he didn't mind when I shed a few tears in his office.
He just kept the box of Kleenex right there.
And he knew that that just came because I was emotional because I was so passionate about doing well in the job.
You know, that reminds me of an anecdote.
Just after the Mongols had conquered the northern Chinese, Genghis and Subedai sat down.
And Subedai had a good weep.
He was just like, oh, God, this is so tough, Genghis.
I don't know whether I can do it.
And Genghis was like, come on, Subedai, have some Kleenex.
Dry those eyes.
You know you've got the stuff what it'll take to go and invade Europe.
Subedai smiled through his tears and said, Thanks, Genghis.
Without your mentoring, I wouldn't be able to do this.
And do you know what he did?
He went on to invade Hungary.
And that I would take that feedback and I would really use it to improve my performance.
Now, the third lesson that I have for my son is that I want him to be a husband who supports his wife's professional dreams, both emotionally and with some elbow grease.
You know what?
Why not?
Your son has already put his career behind the careers of the other women in his office.
He may as well put the career of his wife ahead of his as well.
And he has a great role model in this.
My husband, his dad, has moved across the country with me three times for my career.
Is there ever going to be a point where you realize that everything is all about you?
He has been incredibly gracious when we've gone to sales conferences, my sales conferences, and he's been handed the spouse's itinerary with all of the spa treatments and complimentary fashion shows and makeovers circled.
Oh, it's a hard life being the wife of a career man, isn't it?
He was as incensed as I was when my son came home from elementary school and not here, by the way, but came home with the flyer that was encouraging the dads to sign up for the fathers, come talk about your career week, and moms to sign up for the mother's tea.
That's fair enough.
That's quite backwards.
He also has done more than his fair share of school pickups and overseeing homework and loading the dishwasher.
I hope this poor guy doesn't have to work.
I mean, if you're going to be the wife in the marriage, then the least you could do is be able to stay at home.
You know, 65% of men who were surveyed recently said that they believed that caregiving responsibilities should be handled equally between spouses at home.
But only 30% of them said that that was actually what was happening.
Did it turn out that most of them had to work?
For a woman to be able to bring her best self to work, she has to have help navigating all of the challenges outside of work.
The babysitting, the doctor's appointments, the broken appliances, and those damn school bake sales.
Sounds enough to give someone PTSD.
Actually, my son has a pretty good track record of bringing brownies to his school advisory group.
So I think we're on the right track with that one.
So in closing, why is this important to me?
Why do I think it should be important to you?
Well, first, some of my most gratifying moments in life have been when I have been part of high performance teams who have set big goals and made great things happen.
I want that joy for my son.
Really?
Because it sounds to me like you're sabotaging his career, just so you know.
And he is far more likely to experience that if he is working as part of teams, working for companies where there's an equal balance of power between men and women.
That's interesting because it sounds like some kind of bullshit that you use to validate having quotas.
In a recent article in the New York Times by Cheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant.
Yeah, how is the leaning in going?
They shared that companies' performance is significantly better when there are more females in leadership positions.
Correlation implies causation, totally.
I mean, it's the magic of a vagina that does it.
Where there is more gender diversity, companies have more sales, more market share, more customers, and more profits.
Are you going to show us any proof?
I mean, are you even going to tell us any figures?
Or are you just going to assert these things and assume that we believe you?
And lastly, I honestly believe that if my son works to make the world better for women, then he will make the world better for everyone.
Especially women.
And what a coincidence.
You're a woman.
It's not just the females.
It is for that quiet male engineer who has awesome ideas, but whose voice is getting drowned out.
But nobody is going to champion him because he was born with the wrong set of genitals.
I don't know whether you've been listening to your own talk, but a bunch of women are going to be speaking over him.
It is for that young father who is committed to his job, but also wants to make a commitment to coach his daughter's softball team.
How is that going to be affected by anything you've been talking about?
It is for that male executive who doesn't want to move his family across the country every other year in order to achieve very ambitious career goals.
Would you cut this fucking sophistry out?
How is that going to be affected by anything that you are saying?
You've said, you have fucking said that you've moved three times and your husband was gracious enough to move with you.
Because to achieve, you have to be flexible and ambitious.
You fucking said so yourself.
We can get to that meritocracy.
Putting people ahead on the basis of their gender and restricting other people on the basis of their gender is not a fucking meritocracy, you cretin.
That equality that my son so passionately believes in.
But only if he and all of you actively work to make that happen.
Jesus fucking Christ.
It is a scary future we're moving into if a room full of people applaud this kind of shit.
Hey, you were born a man.
Well, what you need to do is improve the lives of women.
I know they don't need you.
They have spent the last 30, 40 years with a social movement telling everyone how much they don't need men.
But now they need men.
And you're going to have to commit to women you don't even know aren't related to and put their careers above yours.
I know this is meritocracy.
Fucking hell.
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