Andie & Al, Author at Andie & Al

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Advocating for Yourself, Fighting Stereotypes & Breaking Biases, Life Balance & Positive Mindsets, Office Politics

Career Reentry

If you have been out of the workplace for a significant period of time, restarting your career can be frustrating and disillusioning. Only about 30 percent of the highly qualified women who want to resume a full-time executive or professional career are able to do so. This is a sobering statistic, but you can significantly increase your chances of a successful career reentry with proper planning and preparation. Prepare To Reenter Before You Exit Before you leave full-time employment, you should start...

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by Andie & Al

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Advocating for Yourself, Fighting Stereotypes & Breaking Biases, Gender Communication Techniques

Getting Out From Behind the Modesty Veil

Women often (unconsciously) default to traditional gender stereotypes when they think about themselves and their abilities. The problem with relying on such stereotypes is that these stereotypes unnecessarily limit a woman’s career choices and restrict her advancement opportunities. One of the most career-damaging stereotypes is that a woman should be modest. If you hold this stereotype, you are likely to believe that simply because you are a woman, you should be unassuming, self-effacing, and reluctant to put yourself forward. And...

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by Andie & Al

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Fighting Stereotypes & Breaking Biases

How to Recognize Bias Against Working Mothers

The biases you are likely to face in your pursuit of career advancement as a mother with children still at home are rooted in a pervasive American assumption that mothers should be committed to their children without restraint or reservation, that children’s emotional health and academic achievement depend on their mothers being available to them 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Never mind the time a father, relative, friend, or trained caregiver spends with a child — it...

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by Andie & Al

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Fighting Stereotypes & Breaking Biases

How Self-Limiting Beliefs Can Sabotage Career Success

We normally think about stereotypes as preconceptions we have about other people because of their gender, race, economic status, education, dress, domestic situation, and so forth. But we also hold stereotypes about ourselves because of the categories we fall into. This means you are likely to have stereotypes about your own talents, capacities, opportunities, and appropriate goals and activities because you are a woman. These gender stereotypes operate as unconscious assumptions you have about yourself. Such assumptions can be quite...

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by Andie & Al

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Fighting Stereotypes & Breaking Biases

Agentic Behavior: Why ‘Acting Like a Man’ Won’t Work for Women

Career gatekeepers who hold traditional gender stereotypes ascribe communal characteristics to women because they are women. These gatekeepers are likely, therefore, to view the women who work for them as pleasant, warm, and likable but not particularly competent or good performers in challenging, competitive situations. What would happen, however, if you work for such people and you behave in a strongly agentic way? Suppose, for example, you forcefully argue that your organization should radically change its strategic course or you powerfully...

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by Andie & Al

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Fighting Stereotypes & Breaking Biases

When Gender Bias in the Workplace Is Hidden by Kindness

Men often treat the women who work for them with (apparent) kindness and consideration. They express concern for the women’s welfare, are solicitous about their difficulties in managing work and family responsibilities, and take steps to be sure they do not have to stay late in the office, travel out of town, or take work home. Too often, however, these apparently kindly attitudes mask an underlying benevolent sexism, a paternalistic view of women as weak and in need of the...

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by Andie & Al

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Fighting Stereotypes & Breaking Biases

Negative Bias: When You’re Judged Just for Being a Woman at Work

We use stereotypes to simplify our thinking. Stereotypes allow us to ascribe characteristics to people based on one of their other characteristics. Thus we think we know what people are like — strong/weak, friend/foe, skilled/not skilled, and competent/incompetent — because of their sex, race, age, education, wealth, job, accent, dress, domestic situation, and so on. By classifying people in this way, we know the “sorts” of people with which we are dealing and how we should relate to them. That...

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by Andie & Al

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Equality & Diversity, Fighting Stereotypes & Breaking Biases

The Goldilocks Dilemma

Women start out in virtually all high-status, high-paying careers in numbers comparable to men (with engineering and information technology the conspicuous exceptions). As they move up the career ladder, however, women are increasingly underrepresented at every rung, with the greatest gender disparity at the senior leadership level. The explanations for this typically involve some variation on “it’s women’s own fault” or “it’s the fault of workplace practices and policies.” But the root of the problem lies entirely elsewhere. Women fall...

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by Andie & Al

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Et al

Who We Are and Why We Write and Speak About Gender Stereotypes

We are both partners in major law firms; we are married to each other; and we have a daughter who is now 25. For many years we have participated in fundamental decisions about women's and men’s careers -- their hiring, assignments, supervision, compensation, and promotion -- and we have mentored and coached many women in a variety of professions. While Andie has been writing and speaking on gender stereotypes and biases for almost 20 years, we began to do much...

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by Andie & Al

Get in touch with Andie & Al

Latest blog posts

How Measures of Gender Inequality Quantify Workplace Bias

How Gender Inequality Hurts Men—and How to Stop It

7 Ways to Reduce Bias in the Hiring Process and Elsewhere

How to Design Workplace Systems That Work for Everyone

Why Anti-Bias Training Doesn’t Work

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