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Blame it on "diversity" for SVB's downfall

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Blame it on "diversity" for SVB's downfall

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That giant slurping sound on Friday was Silicon Valley Bank imploding. America's 16th-largest bank had some $175 billion in deposits and disappeared by breakfast. It wouldn't have happened if not for management mistakes. This was a 21st-century bank run-customers tried to withdraw about $42 billion, a quarter of all deposits. But what triggered the collapse?

Let's go back. In January 2020, SVB had $55 billion in customer deposits on its balance sheet. By the end of 2022, that number exploded to $186 billion. Yes, SVB was a victim of its own success. These deposits were often from initial public offerings and SPAC deals-SVB banked almost half of all IPO proceeds in the last two years. Most startups had relationships with the bank.

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Opinion | Who Killed Silicon Valley Bank?

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That giant slurping sound on Friday was Silicon Valley Bank imploding. America's 16th-largest bank had some $175 billion in deposits and disappeared by breakfast. It wouldn't have happened if not for management mistakes. This was a 21st-century bank run-customers tried to withdraw about $42 billion, a quarter of all deposits.

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Citing Accessibility, State Department Ditches Times New Roman for Calibri

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There’s more to font choices than what looks nice, and some experts said it would make for easier reading.

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What would a city designed by women be like?

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Parts of modern Barcelona show what a city designed by women, rather than men, might look like.

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[“MOIRA FORBES AND MAGGIE MCGRATH WITH NICOLETTE JONES AND ERIKA BURHO”]

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The World’s 100 Most Powerful Women 2022

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Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine was a defining moment for Europe. European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen rose to the challenge. A week after the war began, she announced three major economic sanctions against Russia—banning transactions with its central bank, closing airs…

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"To be nobody-but-yourself - in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else - means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight," E.E. Cummings offered in his advice to aspiring artists. "You've got to tell the world how to treat you," James Baldwin argued two decades later in his fantastic forgotten conversation about identity with anthropologist Margaret Mead. "If the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble." Both the vulnerability and the courage of that world-telling are in direct proportion to our sense of otherness - to how far the teller diverges from society's centuries-old, dogma-proscribed, limiting ideas about the correct way to be a human being.

A lovely celebration of the courage to tell the world who you are comes in Julián Is a Mermaid (public library) by Jessica Love - a sweet story of loving acceptance and the jubilant inner transformation that takes place when one is welcomed to be and to dream beyond society's narrow templates of being and dreaming.

Whenever Julián goes to the swimming pool with his grandmother, he dreams of being a mermaid.

One day, on the subway ride home, he glimpses three beautiful women dressed as mermaids. He is instantly entranced.

"Abuela, I am also a mermaid," he tells his grandmother shyly, the way one whispers a closely guarded innermost truth.

When Julián's grandmother goes to take a bath, an idea alights to his enchanted mind: He sheds his boy-clothes and fashions a headdress out of a fern. Like a miniature Scarlett O'Hara, he transforms the window curtain into a long skirt, tying its end to resemble a mermaid's tail.

Just as he is rejoicing in his self-creation, grandma returns from the bath, frowns, and walks away.

But she quickly returns to unsink Julián's heart by handing him the perfect finishing touch for his mermaid regalia.

Julián takes her hand and follows her out of the house, through the streets, wondering where she is taking him. "You'll see," she says.

When they turn a corner near the boardwalk, Julián gasps at the sight of mermaids - throngs of them, of every size, shape, gender, and color.

New Yorkers would recognize the glorious spectacle as the famous Coney Island Mermaid Parade, which celebrates the beginning of summer. Under the sunshine of his grandmother's unconditional love, Julián celebrates a different kind of personal beginning as they join the mermaids in the parade and an ecstatic sense of belonging washes over him.

Julián Is a Mermaid makes a fine addition to the best LBGT children's books. Complement it with the immeasurably wonderful Jerome by Heart, then revisit Oliver Sacks on how narrative shapes our identity.
Illustrations © Jessica Love courtesy of Candlewick Press; photographs by Maria Popova

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Julián Is a Mermaid: A Tenderhearted Story of Identity, Belonging, and the Courage to Be Yourself

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"To be nobody-but-yourself - in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else - means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight," E.E. Cummings offered in his advice to aspiring artists.

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British Prime Minister, Liz Truss, resigned earlier this week after only 6 weeks in office, the shortest tenure for any PM on record. There was even a

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The inauguration marked a new presidential administration and a couple of other important firsts: Vice President Kamala Harris became the first woman and the first Black and South Asian to hold that office. First Lady Dr. Jill Biden became the first president’s wife to hold a paying job outside the White House. Despite these women’s career achievements, they’ve both been subjected to a common form of workplace gender bias that continues to play out in many organizations.

Recently, the author of a Wall Street Journal op-ed suggested that the First Lady drop the “Dr.” before her name. The backlash was severe, with many people labeling it “sexist” and “misogynistic.” Douglas Emhoff, the husband of Vice President Harris, tweeted: “This story would have never been written about a man.”

Even when titles are not used, it is diminishing to refer to women by their first names alone when using first and last names for men. After the vice-presidential debate in October, commentator Matthew Dowd referred to then-Senator Kamala Harris as “Kamala” while referring to her opponent as “Mike Pence.” When pointed out to him, Mr. Dowd owned his mistake and vowed to “be careful.”

U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also noted that it is disrespectful “calling women members of Congress by nicknames or first names while using titles and last names when referring to men of [equal] stature.”

Omitting titles for women while using them for men diminishes women’s perceived authority and credibility. Until now there has been no name to describe this phenomenon, making it difficult to draw attention to the problem and nearly impossible to search the internet for information. We propose a new term for this behavior: untitling.

Untitling happens repeatedly to women with professional titles, such as doctors (medical, research, and professional), professors, clergy, government officials, military personnel, and coaches. Recent research of 321 speaker introductions found that when female physicians introduced other physicians they almost always used their “doctor” titles (for 95% of male doctors and 97.8% of female doctors). However, male physicians introduced other male physicians as “doctor” in 72.4% of the cases, but only 49.2% of the time when introducing female physicians.

Most instances of untitling are not as deliberate as the one in the Wall Street Journal op-ed but can be just as damaging. As Professor Claire Hopkins pointed out, omitting titles when introducing women is “a subtle form of unconscious bias that may appear trivial, but can adversely affect their perceived authority.” Professor Hopkins described being introduced as “Claire” in front of a 2,000-person debate audience, while her male opponent was introduced as “Professor Blogs.” In another example, Dr. Susan Fong, who holds two doctoral degrees—M.D. and Ph.D.—was mistakenly referred to as “Ms. Fong” in an article in a physicians’ magazine for which she was the lead author. Her male coauthor was referred to correctly as “Dr. Kossoff.” Similarly, female professors report that students address them using their first name or as “Miss/Ms./Mrs. Lastname,” even when these professors have introduced themselves and signed emails with their professional titles.

Even women in the military may find themselves untitled, according to Dr. David Smith, a sociology professor at the U.S. Naval War College and coauthor of Good Guys: How Men Can Be Better Allies for Women in the Workplace. Military titles are typically forgotten and unacknowledged when the women are not in uniform, while their male counterparts in civilian clothes are addressed appropriately.

Uncredentialing, another new term we offer, occurs when academic credentials are used for a male professional but omitted for a female professional. For example, a hospital newsletter recently included “M.D.” credentials with the names of three male physicians, but not after the female physician’s name.

Because this type of bias is so common, it’s easy to slip up. Recently, when speaking to a colleague about two consultants, a man and a woman who both earned doctorates, one of us (Dr. Diehl) inadvertently untitled the woman, referring to them as “Dr. Jones and Mary.” Catching herself, Dr. Diehl corrected the mistake: “I meant to say, Dr. Jones and Dr. Smith.”

There are several strategies that can help prevent untitling and uncredentialing of female professionals.

Responsible leadership: Those in authority (C-suite executives and managers) should set the example by using titles and credentials for women in formal and public settings. They can also communicate guidelines for the expected use of titles and credentials, including consistent use in written materials. Bias is best addressed from the top down, by leaders who set expectations and norms for the rest of the organization.

Polite correction: Executives and managers can correct others who have untitled or uncredentialed someone. A gentle comment such as, “Let’s hear more about what Dr. Malone thinks” can signal that titles matter in professional settings. If your boss or someone above you in the organizational hierarchy untitles a woman, gently follow with, “Yes, Dr. Collier’s comments were helpful.” Sometimes just using the title will remind others of its importance.

Positive reinforcement: If you’re the one being untitled, it can be tricky to call it out. If you feel comfortable, speak privately to the individual not using your title correctly. Also, consider setting up a buddy system. Both of you can reinforce titles, by using them when naming the other.

Apologize and correct: If you catch yourself untitling women, as Dr. Diehl did, apologize and correct the mistake. Owning up to our own mistakes can be a powerful example for others.

Call it out: Finally, no matter what level you are in an organization, if you hear or see untitling or uncredentialing, respectfully call it out. While these behaviors can be deliberate slights, many times they are unconscious and inadvertent. After Twitter users pointed out the errors, the physician magazine which untitled Dr. Fong corrected the online version, and the hospital which uncredentialed the female physician apologized and promised to “do better.”

The United States has elected its first female vice president and the incoming First Lady holds an educational doctorate—EdD. Let’s be sure to call them “Vice President Harris” and “Dr. Biden.”

Amy Diehl, PhD, is an information technology leader and former associate vice president at Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania and an expert on gender bias in the workplace. Find her on Twitter @amydiehl.

Leanne Dzubinski, PhD, is associate dean of the Cook School of Intercultural Studies and associate professor of intercultural education and studies at Biola University and a prominent researcher on women in leadership.

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We need to stop ‘untitling’ and ‘uncredentialing’ professional women

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Amy Diehl, PhD, and Leanne Dzubinski, PhD, propose new terms for an old practice of omitting titles for women while using them for men that diminishes women’s authority and credibility.

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Bigender Pride Flag

The Tumblr user no-bucks-for-this-does created the original version of the Bigender pride flag; the creation date of the flag is unknown but is assumed to have existed before July 30th, 2014. It features different shades of pink, blue, and purple. The meaning of the colors is unknown, but it is often speculated that blue represents masculinity, pink represents femininity, and purple represents a mix of genders or androgyny. The white at its center symbolizes the nonbinary nature of bi-gender.

There is, however, another commonly used variation of the Bigender pride flag, which features four horizontal lines in four different colors - pink, yellow, white, purple, and blue. The creator is unknown, and so is the colors' meaning - but it is assumed that the colors have the same meaning as the original flag and that yellow is added to represent non-binary. It was created either before or on August 23rd, 2015.

A bigender individual is a person having or experiencing two different genders of any combination. For example, a bigender person could be both a woman and a man, or be agender and a woman simultaneously. The genders may be binary or non-binary, can be experienced simultaneously or alternately, and may not be experienced equally or in the same way.

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LGBTQ+ Pride Flags and What They Stand For

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June is #Pridemonth. This is the most colorful month of the year since the LGBTQ+ pride is celebrated. The RAINBOW flag is used widely but it is not the only flag that people in the community connect with. Did you know that there are more than 20 different Pride Flags?

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hen Lord Browne was in charge of BP, had anyone told him he would one day invite a journalist into his home to discuss his sexuality, he would have said they were insane. Homosexuality was the last thing he expected to talk about in public; after all, he never spoke of it even in private. The former CEO spent half a century in the closet, so terrified of letting his secret slip that he never talked about himself at all, confining his conversational repertoire instead to "the news, and politics, and business. That's what you'd talk about."

But since a Sunday tabloid outed him seven years ago, his life has become a series of unimaginable surprises. For Browne, the revelation has been how much less homophobic the world is than he had always feared. He has now written a book about homosexuality within the business world, and the revelation for many readers will be how homophobic that world still is.

The Glass Closet tells the story of Browne's 38-year career and double life, which began when he joined BP in 1969, and ended with a single phone call from the Mail on Sunday in January 2007, informing him that it was about to publish a kiss'n'tell by a former Brazilian escort, Jeff Chevalier. He had been Browne's first and only boyfriend; the pair met in 2003 on a gay escort website and were together for almost three years. But in public, Browne was a heterosexual bachelor.

In a panic, he applied for an injunction, but told his own lawyers a fateful lie, that he and Chevalier had met jogging in Battersea park, which, once submitted to the court, could constitute perjury. Browne soon retracted the untruth, but by then it was too late; the injunction was quashed, the story was printed, and Browne resigned. Six months before his 60th birthday, and for the first time in his adult life, he was suddenly no longer Mr BP but instead a very publicly out gay man. His reason for writing The Glass Closet is, he says, quite simple. "I wouldn't want anyone else to go through what I went through."

This motivation to spare others is common among victims of injustice who become campaigners, but it's about the only thing Browne has in common with a typical activist. He lives in a town house on Cheyne Row in Chelsea, where a butler leads me through rooms that could pass for an art gallery and out across a courtyard to a private library purpose-built to hold his antique book collection. A chauffeur-driven Bentley is waiting to whisk him off to the launch of a Matisse exhibition when we have finished (he is a Tate galleries trustee). Browne is meticulously groomed, courteous and so flawlessly formal that I get the impression he wouldn't even know how to be casual. To call him an activist feels like an implausible label, and he agrees at once.

"I've never thought of myself as a gay activist. It's a very grand title. There are people who've done some extraordinary things as activists, such as Peter Tatchell. I'm not in the same class as them."

When Browne talks about the fears still keeping businesspeople in the closet, he is a powerful advocate, applying the same logic he once used on mergers and markets. Yet talking about his own emotional world, he sounds like someone trying to learn a foreign language. It's not that he's reluctant to talk about his feelings, but after a lifetime of self-censorship, it's as if he hasn't a clue how to.

Browne knew he was gay by the time he left boarding school, and didn't tell a soul. His mother, a Roma Jew, was an Auschwitz survivor and passed to her son an abiding fear that to be different was to invite persecution. "I internalised that to mean being gay was basically wrong, because if you got caught it would be very dangerous." He studied physics at Cambridge, but clocked up none of the social or romantic experiences most students take for granted, and graduated straight to a job with BP. His first posting was to the wilds of the Arctic Circle, where the brutal machismo of oil industry culture became abundantly clear to him.

In Browne's mind, there was no choice. He had to keep his sexuality secret, or his career would be over. "You had to blend in, be chameleon-like, so no one would notice your private life. But you could be noticed in your work life, so you sublimated a lot into that. People say minorities have to overachieve, and I guess I did." Once in a blue moon he would sneak into a gay bar, which was thrilling and terrifying, but his public identity became subsumed in BP. "Eventually it became very much two lives, and it was quite exciting."

He began to think of himself as a sort of spy - "James Bond-style" - and became quite addicted to the jeopardy. "It became exciting, and I would say to myself that it taught me skills that were useful in other parts of life." He told himself that hyper-vigilance and steely self-control made him a better businessman - "but this is probably quite a self-justification." He grins. Does it sound crazy now? "Totally. But back then it obviously looked pretty sensible."

To be fair, I don't think it was entirely fanciful. I've seldom met anyone who gives so little of himself away (I would hate to play him at poker), so he must have been a nightmare to negotiate against in business. Then again, the psychological isolation that made him so inscrutable may well also explain why at times he could be staggeringly obtuse. How else to explain why he thought he would deflect speculation about his absence of a spouse by living with his mother, and taking her as his date to company events? He was, he smiles, blissfully unaware that deploying one's mother for cover was a well-known gay cliche.

Early in his career, he thought perhaps he could quietly come out once he was further up the ladder. But the higher he climbed, the bigger his public profile grew. In 1995 BP was just a struggling national company, but its new CEO launched a series of audacious takeovers and mergers that turned it into the second largest oil corporation on the planet. Browne became known as "the Sun King", described as Britain's most successful businessman, and almost certainly its most highly paid. Critics accused him of pursuing a reckless cost-cutting regime; budget cuts were linked to an explosion at a Texan refinery in 2005 that killed 15 workers, and to the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, even though this happened on CEO Tony Hayward's watch (Browne left BP in 2007). An earlier spill, in Alaska in 2006, might have meant curtains for a less revered leader, but Browne's reputation made him all but unassailable.

His devotion to the job left little time for friends. His father, an army officer, had died in 1980; an only child, he was overwhelmed by loneliness when his mother died in 2000. For the first time in his life, aged 52, he risked a relationship with a man.

To anyone of Browne's generation, what happened next may be perfectly recognisable. To anyone under 25, it will sound incomprehensible. When Browne fell in love with Chevalier, he didn't announce their relationship, nor even acknowledge it to his closest friends. The words, "I am gay" had passed his lips only twice in his life, and when Chevalier moved in, Browne didn't even mention his new domestic arrangement to his butler.

"Life back then was a series of non-statements - not understatements but non-statements - that everyone walked around with," he tries to explain. For example, when Browne was invited to appear on Desert Island Discs in 2006, he and BP's head of press worked together for weeks on what to say if the question "Are you gay?" came up, without either ever asking or answering it themselves. Chevalier would sometimes accompany Browne to social events, and met Tony and Cherie Blair, Jude Law and Sienna Miller, Elton John. "But it was done very, very carefully. If I thought the host would ask any questions, I'd avoid the situation." Amazingly, no one ever did. "This may sound bizarre," Browne says, smiling, "but it's surprising how people behave. If you say nothing, often they say nothing, and nothing will happen. It's a series of non-statements and people draw their own conclusions. But nothing is clear. Nothing is said."

Browne thought he was being careful, but now sees it differently. "A friend said, 'Well, of course what you were really doing was daring people to pull you out, and you didn't know you were, but you shouldn't have been surprised when it happened.' And I think, now, that probably the time was coming when what I was doing, and who I was, was becoming unsustainable."

It never occurred to him that Chevalier might betray him. After they broke up, Browne continued to support him financially for nine months, but once the funds stopped, Chevalier demanded more. The implicit threat in an email - "I do not want to embarrass you, but..." - should have been obvious. Yet Browne, who had lived his whole life in a state of high paranoid alert, failed to notice. "I simply didn't register what was going on. I couldn't believe he'd sell our story, so I ignored him." How could he have been so naive? "Probably just because I'd never experienced it. My level of naivety in this area must have been incredibly high." But he must have been aware of the tabloids' enthusiasm for a kiss'n'tell? "Well, yes. But you can always say to yourself, that won't be me."

Yet fear of exposure had overshadowed his whole life. "Absolutely. And in business, I would have been well aware of any possibility of risk. But in my private life, an entirely different approach took place, and I think it's because of my lack of experience in relationships."

He was still in shock when he instructed lawyers to apply for an injunction, but that wasn't why he told them a lie. He'd been telling the lie for years, if anyone asked how he and Chevalier met, because the truth felt too embarrassing. "I think I deluded myself that actually it was such a well-worn excuse that it was almost real. I only realised 10 days later the sheer stupidity of what I'd done."

He told BP's chairman that he wished to resign immediately, but was legally forbidden to discuss the case, so couldn't say why, or tell anyone what was happening. He spent the next four months ostensibly preparing to hand over to his successor while secretly battling through the courts to block publication, until eventually the injunction was lifted in May. He resigned within the hour.

Did he have to? No one told him to - and some colleagues urged him not to. Could he have survived the scandal? "I don't know, but I knew I wanted to go. In my own mind I was very clear. There were the two things that were wrong: I lied on the court paper, and the circumstances were going to create a furore. I didn't want to get into the situation where someone was saying, 'When will he go? Resign, resign, resign.'" He has never regretted the decision? "No, absolutely not. I'm very pleased that I took the moment as a full stop. I was ready to change everything."

Seven years on, he still looks stunned by the avalanche of supportive letters and emails that came pouring in, his first intimation that the world might not mind him being gay after all: "It was just amazing." Friends, former colleagues, politicians, journalists and strangers offered support and advice; there were "tragic letters" from men who had been imprisoned for importuning in Hyde Park, and luminaries including Chris Patten, Norman Foster and Lord Puttnam wrote a public letter of support to the Financial Times. "I had no idea they were going to do that," he marvels. "Just extraordinary." He has since encountered a few "tight smiles" from businesspeople who clearly "want to avoid me", but the disapproval he used to dread now barely seems to register. One of the many strangers who wrote to him was a 32-year-old Vietnamese banker. They met for a drink, fell in love, and have been together since. For the very first time, Browne is one half of a public gay couple.

He remains firmly part of the establishment. Ennobled in 2001, he sits as a crossbencher, advises ministers on the appointment of nonexecutives to government departments' boards, and wrote the review of tuition fees that led to their trebling under the coalition. (In fact, Browne recommended going even further and abolishing any cap on fees.) At the same time, he is chairman of Cuadrilla, the shale gas exploration company, and thinks public fears about fracking are a "bit like coming out really, you know, just worst fears. Fears that perhaps don't materialise." There was controversy late last year when he appeared to contradict the government line that fracking would reduce UK energy bills; and, though Cuadrilla has never said it would frack at Balcombe in West Sussex, the scene of fierce protests, the company was given the go-ahead last month to test for oil. So he certainly isn't turning into Peter Tatchell - yet the simple act of coming out has made him feel like a completely different person.

"The transformation was quite extraordinary for me, because I had to confront who I was, and talk about who I was. I'd never done that before - I always talked about myself just as someone who represented a business. And now I have changed."

Had we met before May 2007, in what way would he have seemed different? "Well, everybody says I smile a lot more. I used to be more reserved but now I'm relaxed talking about any subject; sexuality is something I'm very happy to talk about any time." He and his boyfriend went whitewater rafting in Patagonia recently, "which was unbelievable for me, wonderful". He'd quite like to get married, but his partner objects that this is too conventional; for now, a wedding remains "a work in progress".

Had Browne's story been unique, he would not have written the book. But the statistics indicated to him that the corporate closet must be crowded. British attitudes towards homosexuality have undergone such a sea change in the past 15 years that in many professions - politics, the media - inclusivity is now taken for granted. The less widely reported, more troubling story Browne decided to tell is how little the corporate world has changed.

Only half of all LGBT employees in the US are estimated to be out at work, and in this country a third are estimated to be in the closet. There is only one openly gay CEO of a FTSE 100, and only one in America's S&P - and these are meant to be two of the world's most progressive countries. Browne is a businessman first and foremost, so he recognises that other professions have changed, but it is industry leaders who, he hopes, will read his book. He was taken aback by the culture of fear and prejudice he uncovered. Interviewees were offered a guarantee of anonymity, and even then closeted businessmen and women told him they were too frightened to talk.

You begin to see why when you read it. In 2011, an American sociologist made fake applications for 1,800 advertised vacancies, submitting two essentially identical applications for each job, except that one mentioned membership of a gay student organisation. Gay applicants turned out to be 40% less likely to get an interview. An entrepreneur in North Carolina created the world's largest retailer of china and crystal, with annual revenues in excess of £80m, but was boycotted and abused by customers and churches when he came out. A 2009 survey asked closeted workers why they didn't come out: because they feared they would be sacked, replied one in five. Yet when prejudice is exposed in high places, there is public outcry: last month Brendan Eich, the CEO of Mozilla Firefox, resigned after it emerged that he had donated to anti-gay rights political movements and users threatened a boycott.

Homophobia isn't just a problem for gay employees, Browne argues - it's a problem for business. He doesn't concern himself with appeals to morality or equality, but instead keeps hammering home his unshakable conviction that firms that allow their staff to be open and honest are more profitable than companies that make gay employees live a lie. Browne used to think he was doing BP a service by staying in the closet. It was only after he came out that he realised what a colossal waste of energy it had been, and how much more of himself could have been devoted to BP had he been able to be open.

In the book, he quotes a gay businesswoman making the case for introducing a non-discrimination policy to cover sexual orientation. "I want you to go back to your offices," she told her heterosexual bosses. "I want you to remove all vestiges of your family, particularly your spouse. Put the pictures in the drawer and take off your wedding band. You cannot talk about your family, and where you were on vacation. And if your spouse or partner is seriously ill, you are afraid to acknowledge the relationship, because you are afraid you might lose your job. Do all of that - and see how productive you are."

In the UK and US, Browne found most leaders professed at once to agree. "It's not often the arguments that are countered; it's the execution that gets messed up. Everyone says, 'Absolutely! That's the right thing to do.' And you say, 'Well, fine, let's do it.' Then nothing happens." More than 90% of Fortune 500 companies, he points out, already have anti-discrimination policies. "So I think we've got to move on from the policy, or philosophy, into, 'How do you get this done?' Business can make it much easier for people to come out, and feel safe to be who they are."

The classic mistake, he says, is to devolve responsibility to an HR department. "HR managers are not CEOs; they're not there to set the tone; the tone has to come from the very top." It's no use simply saying their business is gay-friendly. Chief executives need to give speeches about inclusion, make the diversity officer's role an executive one, create LGBT resource groups and run "allies' programmes", where heterosexual employees sign up to support colleagues who want to come out.

The key, he argues, is to make it easy for gay employees to come out at the beginning of their careers. By the time attitudes in Britain began changing in the 90s, Browne had been living a lie for so long that the deceit itself had become as much of a secret as his sexuality, and the prospect of disclosure even more unthinkable. "You invest in the duplicity to the point where you can't disinvest. You know, it just builds one layer on another and then the time is never right. So how do you back out of it? The answer is, you have to take one step. If in doubt, come out. But come out early, before you've made this investment."

Gay sex between consenting adults is still outlawed in 76 countries. On a recent visit to the Middle East, someone Browne knows well was highly critical of the book. "He said, 'Why did you write this? It's not a good idea because it's nobody's business, and societies are bigger than individuals, and really individuals should keep it to themselves if they don't conform with society.' A fairly classic portrayal, I think," Browne says with a smile, "of society in the Middle East."

He thinks Uganda is probably the worst place in the world to be gay right now, but Iran and Saudi Arabia come a close second, and he is anxious to be clear that he is not encouraging anyone to risk their life or liberty by coming out. "What you cannot do is inadvertently expose one of your employees to danger, to the point where they could die. And business cannot change the law. But I think it can occasionally nudge things along, by demonstrating codes of behaviour, and by giving people a safe place to be themselves."

Had somebody else written The Glass Closet while Browne was still in charge of BP, would it have persuaded him to come out? "Probably not," he admits. "I would probably have said, 'Well, this will be very helpful to others, but doesn't apply to me.' I mean, I wish I'd come out. But I don't think I would have."

Browne seems to be enjoying his new identity as, if not an activist, then perhaps a gay business advocate. He hasn't become a member of the gay glitterati, and I don't see him on a gay pride float with a megaphone any time soon. But he radiates contentment, and thinks if his mother could see him now, it would "take her a little while" to get used to having a gay son, "but she would be happy".

Is there anything about life in the closet that he misses? Browne lets out a great hoot of laughter. "Absolutely nothing, no. I'm just very pleased to be out."

Decca Aitkenhead spoke to Lord Browne in April 2014.

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Lord Browne: 'I thought being gay was basically wrong'

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Do you have to be straight to get ahead in business? For 38 years BP boss Lord Browne thought so - then he was outed by his first boyfriend. He talks to Decca Aitkenhead about power, politics and homophobia at the top

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How physical spaces can perpetuate exclusion

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How physical spaces can perpetuate exclusion

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Bolts installed on the front steps of a building to discourage sitting and sleeping

Hostile architecture is an urban-design strategy that uses elements of the built environment to purposefully guide or restrict behavior. It often targets people who use or rely on public space more than others, such as youth, poor people, and homeless people, by restricting the physical behaviours they can engage in.

The term hostile architecture is often associated with items like "anti-homeless spikes" - studs embedded in flat surfaces to make sleeping on them uncomfortable and impractical. This form of architecture is most commonly found in densely populated and urban areas. Other measures include sloped window sills to stop people sitting; benches with armrests positioned to stop people lying on them; water sprinklers that spray intermittently; and public trash bins with inconveniently small mouths to prevent the insertion of bulky wastes. Hostile architecture is also employed to deter skateboarding, BMXing, inline skating, littering, loitering, public urination, and trespassing, and as a form of pest control.

Although the term "hostile architecture" is recent, the use of civil engineering to achieve social engineering is not: antecedents include 19th century urine deflectors and urban planning in the United States designed for segregation. American urban planner Robert Moses designed a stretch of Long Island Southern State Parkway with low stone bridges so that buses could not pass under them. This made it more difficult for people who relied on public transportation, mainly African Americans, to visit the beach that wealthier car-owners could visit. Outside of the United States, public space design change for the purpose of social control also has historic precedent: the narrow streets of 19th century Paris, France were widened to help the military quash protests.[better source needed ]

Its modern form is derived from the design philosophy crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED), which aims to prevent crime or protect property through three strategies: natural surveillance, natural access control, and territorial enforcement. According to experts, exclusionary design is becoming increasingly common, not least in large cities such as Stockholm.

Consistent with the widespread implementation of defensible space guidelines in the 1970s, most implementations of CPTED as of 2004 were based solely upon the theory that the proper design and effective use of the built environment could reduce crime, reduce fear of crime, and improve quality of life. Built environment implementations of CPTED seek to dissuade offenders from committing crimes by manipulating the built environment in which those crimes proceed or occur. The six main concepts according to Moffat are territoriality, surveillance, access control, image/maintenance, activity support and target hardening. Applying all of these strategies is key when trying to prevent crime in any neighborhood, crime-ridden or not.

Beyond CPTED, scholarly research has also found that modern capitalist cities have a vested interest in eliminating signs of homelessness from their communal spaces, fearing that it might discourage investment from wealthier individuals. In England, much of their hostile architecture has been attributed to a desire by the government to combat an anti-social street scene, taking the form of begging and street drinking.

Some forms of hostile architecture are easy to identify, while others could be interpreted as either exclusionary or non-exclusionary, such as spaced-out singular chairs constructed at a playground in Sweden, which may appear intentionally designed to dissuade homeless sleeping, or as an acknowledgement that Swedes consider it impolite to sit near strangers. Some researchers have said that hostile architecture should be evaluated within the wider context of the community, and should recognize the social and political forces motivating a particular design choice, such as anti-homelessness legislation or sentiments.

Boulders installed along a freeway ramp in Portland, Oregon, United States as a hostile architecture to deter transient camps.

The "Camden bench", used in London, has a design that is stated to discourage sleeping, littering, skateboarding, drug dealing, graffiti and theft

Benches with metal pipes at a train station in Vienna.

Anti-homeless spikes in New York, designed to prevent sitting.

Anti-homeless object in Shinjuku Station underpass.

In Seattle, Washington, United States, the city government installed bicycle racks to prevent homeless people from camping.

Since 2013, the Oregon Department of Transportation in Oregon, United States deployed large boulders at eight locations that had been the site of transient camps in Portland. These boulders were installed to deter illegal camping near the freeways.

Fence under the stairs of the City Archives in Kungsholmen in Stockholm (2015).[25]

Fences or grates are a common form of exclusionary design, often used to prevent access to places where there is protection from the elements, for example under stairs, bridges, or near fan systems that blow out hot air.

In the spring of 2015, the City of Stockholm, Sweden, erected a 200,000 kr fence to prevent homeless people from seeking shelter under a staircase in Kungsholmen.

In many large cities, for example Tokyo and London, benches have been designed to prevent people from sleeping on them. These benches have been constructed so that the seat slopes at an angle, which requires the user to support themselves entirely with their feet; such benches are ubiquitous on bus stops across the United Kingdom. Another deterrent design is to include armrests placed down the center of the bench, preventing the user from lying down across the seats.

Camden Borough Council in London commissioned concrete-block benches (dubbed " Camden benches") designed to discourage uses such as sleeping, skateboarding and placing stickers. There are other variants, in which level differences are absent but they tend to be either too short to lie on, or have iron pipes placed two-thirds of the way in, or multiple armrests placed along the entire length of the bench. Such benches are common in airports.

When the City Tunnel in Malmö, Sweden, was opened in 2010, the design of the benches on the new train platforms was reported to the Equality Ombudsman because the benches were tilted so much that they were difficult to impossible to use for sitting. The Swedish state-owned real estate company Jernhusen has also used so-called "homeless-proof" benches at the train station in Luleå, with seven iron bars at 47 cm (19 in) intervals per bench. Jernhusen's press officer maintained that they "put in the armrests primarily to make it easier for the elderly and disabled to sit and stand up" but admitted in an interview that the perceived orderliness problems at the station building influenced how the benches were designed. Another example of a company that has installed such benches is Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe, Berlin's local public transport company.

Some examples of sleeping deterrents take the form of temporary changes to buildings. An example of this occurred in a Liverpool building, previously the Bank of England headquarters, in December 2016. A blue sloping steel structure covered in oil was placed over the stairs at night, so that the homeless who used to sleep and rest on the stairs would not stay there.

Hostile architecture can occur as spikes, bumps or other types of pointed structures. They are typically placed on ledges outside buildings, under roofs or other places where people seek rest or shelter, and also around shops. The property management company Jernhusen uses a variant by placing pipes instead of spikes in several places at Stockholm Central Station. In 2014, images circulated on the internet of a place in London where homeless people used to sleep. The ground had been fitted with sharp upward-pointing spikes to get rid of people who used to sleep there, but after widespread protests, the anti-homeless spikes were removed. There are also anti-homeless spikes which are intended to ensure that people do not, for example, sit against a house wall, or stand in a particular place. It is difficult to adequately assess how many different types exist, but it is certain that there are many types of the phenomenon, including split bricks which form cracks, various forms of bent metal pipes, and plates welded upwards to form spikes. Former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has called the spikes "stupid".

One of the most common forms of hostile architecture takes the form of surveillance. Indeed, while security cameras do not physically prevent people from engaging in certain behaviors, they can restrict actions in public spaces through enabling remote oversight and increasing the fear of retaliation for socially taboo actions. In cities like Cincinnati, there has been a noted sharp increase in the number of CCTV cameras in public spaces since the 1990s.

In a corner of the Priory Gatehouse in Great Malvern

A urine deflector is a device for deflecting the stream of urine during urination. These may be part of a chamber pot, latrine or toilet intended for the purpose, or they may be deterrents, installed in the sides or corners of buildings to discourage their casual use as urinals by passers-by. They may be constructed in various ways from a variety of materials but are typically designed to have an angled surface which catches and redirects the stream.

A large, sturdy flowerpot outside a building in Stockholm.

This type of exclusionary design may involve, for example, displaying a large flowerpot where homeless people previously used the pavement to sleep. Other examples that have occurred include a stone painted in rainbow colours, putting out blocking shrubbery on a sidewalk, and "fun" shaped seating.

Music and noise

In Sweden, loudspeakers in Finspång have played music in order to get addicts to leave certain places. In the UK and Germany, so-called anti-loitering devices (see The Mosquito) have been installed to ensure that young people do not stay in places where they are installed. The devices work by emitting a monotone sound at such a high frequency that most people after adolescence lose the ability to hear it. Critics have stated that the devices constitute a violation of human rights and also comment that the phenomenon would create a "dangerous gap" between young people exposed to it and older people who can avoid it. In Germany, classical music has been used in an attempt to keep drug users away. In Berlin, a plan to use atonal music at S-Bahn stations has been withdrawn after criticism.

Sometimes exclusionary design is not about adding features, but rather about taking them away. Fredrik Edin, who has written a book on exclusionary design, says that removal is the most common type of exclusionary design, where, for example, benches used by the public are removed precisely because they are used by the public. One example is when representatives of the New York City Subway announced via social media in 2021 that "benches were removed from stations to prevent the homeless from sleeping on them." The agency later said the tweet was a mistake. Benches at certain locations at Stockholm Central Station were removed in 2015 in favour of chairs and benches were also removed at Luleå railway station. Their press officer stated that they had problems with the station being used as a warming shelter. Many public toilets have begun to be removed in the UK in places considered to be untidy.

Sprinklers can be found in areas where spikes are considered too permanent; this solution involves spraying water on those staying in a particular place at a particular time. In New Zealand, Auckland City Councillor Cathy Casey described sprinklers being used by businesses in the city as "inhumane".

The Strand Bookstore in New York used such a system in 2013 to deter homeless people sleeping outside the store at night. Bonhams in San Francisco was criticised for an external sprinkler system that it claimed was used to clean "building and perimeter sidewalks during non-business hours intermittently over a 48-hour period", and which was also a point where homeless people gathered.

Public reception (Copied)

Opposition to hostile architecture in urban design states that such architecture makes public spaces hostile to all people and especially targets the transient and homeless populations. Proponents say that clearly establishing a sense of ownership over the space helps maintain order and safety and deter crime and unwanted behaviors.

In 2018, British artist Stuart Semple created a social media public awareness campaign encouraging the public to place identifying stickers on instances of hostile design in their environment.

Examples of hostile architecture circulating within UK media have led to negative reception. Nonetheless, types of hostile architecture have increased. For example, Selfridges in Manchester installed metal spikes outside their store for the purpose of reducing "litter and smoking," which suggests hostile architecture may be implicated for one reason but explained by another.

In 2001, Nils Norman published the book The Contemporary Picturesque, which contains photographs he has taken of exclusionary design since the 1990s.

In 2003, two Parisians, Stéphane Argillet and Gilles Paté, filmed the film Le repos du fakir (The Fakir's Rest), which shows them attempting to rest on various objects that characterize exclusionary design in Paris.

In 2005, American artist and researcher Sarah Ross documented exclusionary design in Los Angeles in her series Body Configurations Testing Resistance. Her 2006 follow-up, Archisuits, created clothing that was designed to work with exclusionary design - to make sleep possible.

In 2013-2014, an installation in Norrköping, Sweden, called "Modified Social Benches" by Danish artist Jeppe Hein took place.

In 2015, artist and architect Johanna Nenander drew attention to the phenomenon through her project "Urbana proteser" (lit. 'Urban prostheses'), in which she placed seating that was deliberately positioned to make it difficult to sit down on. For a few days, a pair of sheet-metal foundations on the slab, which were impossible to sit on, became a bench for the public.

In 2018, British artist Stuart Semple created a social media platform to encourage the public to place identifying stickers where they spotted exclusionary designs in public spaces.

Making the built environment hostile to undesirable people, such as skateboarders or people without stable housing, also has the effect of making it hostile to elderly people, people with disabilities, tired workers, pregnant women, people caring for young children, and other desirable people.

Up to this point, there has not been a wide scale empirical study that has measured the impact of hostile architecture on the wellbeing of homeless people or other targeted populations. Some members of England's homeless community interviewed by researchers have noted that hostile design contributes to their displacement and feelings of insignificance, as it appears that local business interests are prioritized over their survival.

Spikes added around fountain in Government Center, Miami, in 2011 at downtown transit center

Ledge with skatestoppers preventing skateboarders from grinding

Spikes on a ledge in Boston to prevent sleeping or sitting

Spiked handrail, presumably preventing users from sliding down

Floor spikes in Shoreditch, London, U.K, designed to prevent people from sleeping on the ground.

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Hostile architecture is an urban-design strategy that uses elements of the built environment to purposefully guide or restrict behavior. It often targets people who use or rely on public space more than others, such as youth, poor people, and homeless people, by restricting the physical behaviours they can engage in.

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"What is your Brown Number?" is Vinnie Ann Bose's graduation film from National Institute of Design, India. The film was produced by Studio Eeksaurus, Mumbai, in 2015.

The film is a humorous depiction of the Indian obsession with fair skin and their prejudices regarding skin colour. 

Credits : 
Film by : Vinnie Ann Bose 
Creative Director : Suresh Eriyat 
Executive Producer : Nilima Eriyat 
Guide : Dhiman Sengupta 
Music Director : Rajat Dholakia 
Music Arrangement : Jolly Jose 
Sound : John Chittilapilly, Pulz Studio 
Voice Over : Sonia Nair, Soman Nair, Saattvic, Ram Menon, Adithya Antony Mathew, Alpesh Singh Jadeja 
Post Production Coordinator : Jivan Gaikwad
Special Thanks : Cyrus Sasoori, Famous studio 
Thanks : 
Rajib Mandal, Sunita Kathiwada, Paul Mathew, Tintu K Philip, Bargav Sridhar, Alpesh Jadeja, Shreeya Dixit, Studio Eeksaurus team, Anoop Sathyan, Anend C Chandran, Mihir Lele, Neha Lele, Mathew Antony , Divya Mary Cyriac, Family and Friends, NID community. 

Awards : 
10th Tehran International Fiolm Festival , Iran 
World Houston Festival, USA 
IDPA, India 
Chitrakatha,2017, India 
World Fest 2017, US 
Drunken Film Festival,United Kingdom 
Interfilm International Shortfilm Festival, Germany 
Deoul International Extreme , South Korea 
Indie Anifest, Korea Republic 
SENE Film Festival, USA 
Muse Creative Awards, USA 
6TH Dada Saheb Phalke Film Festival, India 
Flying Elephants Competition 

Official Selections : 

2019 California Women's Film Festival, California 
International Kid's Film Festival, India 
Ojai Film Festival, California 
Buddha International Film Festival,India 
Tokyo Anime Awards Festival, Japan
Krok Film Festival, Ukraine 
57th Zlin Film Festival, Prague 
Bogota Short Film Festival Festival De Cortos De Bogota
Construction Film Festival, India 
World Houstan Festival, Houstan USA 
Animayo 2017, Prague
Great Lakes International Film , Eerie, USA 
Chitrakatha 2017, India 
24th International Adana Film Festival  , Adana Turkey 
Ile Courts International Short Film Festival , Mauritius 
New Chitose Airport International Animation Festival­­ 2017
Seoul Indie Film Festival, Italy
Anifest India 17, India 
New Orleans Film Festival, USA 
AniFilm, International Festival of Animated Films, Czech Republic 
Word Fest, USA
Animakom Fest 2017
Cortoons Festival GandiA, Spain, 
Drunken Film Festival, United Kingdom 
Animafest Zagreb, Croatia, Europe 
Edinburgh Short Film Festival, United Kingdom 
New Delhi Short Film Festival, India 
In Palace Festival, Bulgaria 
19th Digicon Asia Awards 2016
5th Mumbai International Film Festival 2017, India 
Be there Fest- Corfu Animatiopn Festival 2017, Greece 
Cartoons on the Bay, Venice 
SENE film Festival, Unitred states 
Muse Creative Awards, USA
6th Dada Saheb Phalke Film Festival, India 
Speechless Film Festival- Minnesota, US 
Flying Elephants Competition, India 
FICCI BAF Festival, India 
Taichung International Animation Festival, Taiwan

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Snail, Caterpillar, Ladybug - how are you going to make it to the party?

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Snail, Caterpillar, Ladybug - how are you going to make it to the party?

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Why You Should Invest in Unconventional Talent

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The importance of building diverse organizations has been well-established. Diversity is linked to greater innovation and performance, and research has shown that more diverse companies have higher profits than their more homogeneous counterparts. But building teams with different skill sets and lif…

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"If you lead this, Kelli, you will get so much exposure to senior leadership," my manager told me.

Every year, the organization I worked for would host an annual fundraiser and select an individual to chair the efforts. One year, my director let me know that her boss was going to be the executive sponsor for the initiative, and asked if I would chair the committee to organize the events for the nonprofit fundraiser.

I answered her honestly: "If I'm being truthful, I'm not really that interested in leading it."

As soon as those words left my mouth, I felt a twinge of guilt in my gut and a lump in my throat. I was a relatively new leader at that point in my career, and eager to climb the corporate ladder - I was flattered to be asked, but hesitant to commit. I knew the amount of tasks and meetings that would go into leading an organization-wide effort like this.

My manager was supportive of my feelings of hesitancy but encouraged me to reconsider, as saying no could reflect poorly on my desire to be a team player and keep me from being considered for future promotions. Taking her point about exposure and future opportunities, I agreed to lead the initiative.

As soon as the annual fundraiser kicked off, I started spending at least five hours per week on the project. Not only did I have to select department leads, set goals and communicate with my contacts at the fundraising organization, but I also had to attend meetings to coordinate fundraising events and brainstorm ideas to get people excited about donating money.

My time was eaten up crafting emails to the department leads about status checks and goal updates. I ghostwrote emails that the executive sponsor would send out as his own. I spent time each day ironing out the logistics of the fundraising events ― everything from how to decorate the event space to what door prizes should be given out.

It wasn't just the work itself that consumed my time - worrying about the work, fielding questions and dreading meetings also zapped my energy. Despite the energetic toll of leading the initiative, I put in my best effort. Because if my name was going to be attached to something, I wanted to exceed the goals I'd set for myself. We did raise slightly more than our target number.

At the final fundraiser celebration on the executive floor of the company, all of the executives and people involved with the fundraising efforts came to celebrate the money that was raised. I still remember the moment the executive sponsor got up to make his remarks. As everyone circled around him, I tried to peer over a group of mostly male leaders and executives. The sponsor talked about the importance of fundraising and how much money was raised, and thanked everyone for their involvement and support.

"Oh, and also thank you to Kelli for coordinating this event."

After weeks of planning and stressing, the "exposure" I was supposed to receive amounted to barely a two-second mention. I felt like a balloon deflating. I had put in 50-plus hours, and no one was going to leave that event and remember my name or my face.

However, I hoped that maybe someday this exposure would pay off financially or in my career progression (spoiler: it didn't), and I felt relieved that the fundraiser was over and could be led by someone else next year.

It wasn't until eight years later, when I left corporate America, that I had a name for what I'd experienced those previous years - the unpaid workload of women. Studies show women spend an extra two hours per day outside their normal shift at work cleaning, carpooling, cooking, laundering, parenting, helping family and more. They do the extra tasks that aren't actually paid but are essential to society - and this additional work is taking our time, our energy and our effort.

In addition to the two hours of unpaid labor women take on at home, research from Harvard Business Review found that women get 44% more requests than men to volunteer for "non-promotable" tasks at work. Non-promotable tasks are those that benefit the organization but likely don't contribute to someone's performance evaluation and career advancement.

These tasks include traditional office "housework," such as coordinating parties and office events, as well as filling in for colleagues and serving on low-level committees. Men tend to get requests for and accept more strategic projects with higher-level networking or visibility. When the requests for non-promotable tasks are made, according to HBR, men say yes 51% of the time and women say yes 76% of the time.

The toll of this unpaid work has real costs. W omen are contributing more, but they are often less recognized, according to the 2021 Women in the Workplace Report by McKinsey. Burnout is at an all-time high. While women have been resilient over the past two years, leading the emotional response to the COVID-19 pandemic as well as diversity and inclusion efforts, the report revealed that 4 in 10 women had considered leaving their companies or switching jobs, and the turnover data in the months following this report indicated they followed through.

Organizations need to continue evaluating their policies in order to keep working moms and other women in the office, ensuring equitable distribution of unpaid office work and volunteer opportunities. Women's work is worthy of being rewarded, whether it's with extra paid time off, a spot bonus or a higher performance rating.

Women also shouldn't feel pressured to be the person who's constantly rushing in and volunteering to save the day, at home or work.

For all the women who are being crushed under unpaid workload, it's not about hustling to be seen or hoping someone will recognize our efforts. There is still no award for how much you can tolerate. In fact, as you accelerate in your career, saying yes to too many things will keep you stuck in the weeds, not leading at the strategic level you are capable of.

But ultimately, the onus for change rests with the companies and patriarchal systems that keep female employees overworked and overwhelmed.

Do you have a compelling personal story you'd like to see published on HuffPost? Find out what we're looking for here and send us a pitch!

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Women Do The Most 'Invisible Work' At The Office - And It's Getting Us Nowhere

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"If you lead this, Kelli, you will get so much exposure to senior leadership," my manager told me. Every year, the organization I worked for would host an annual fundraiser and select an individual to chair the efforts.

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In a world of smarts, screen for 'intellectual humility'

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In a world of smarts, screen for 'intellectual humility'

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If ignorance is bliss, does a high IQ equal misery? Popular opinion would have it so. We tend to think of geniuses as being plagued by existential angst, frustration, and loneliness. Think of Virginia Woolf, Alan Turing, or Lisa Simpson - lone stars, isolated even as they burn their brightest. As Ernest Hemingway wrote: "Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know."

The question may seem like a trivial matter concerning a select few - but the insights it offers could have ramifications for many. Much of our education system is aimed at improving academic intelligence; although its limits are well known, IQ is still the primary way of measuring cognitive abilities, and we spend millions on brain training and cognitive enhancers that try to improve those scores. But what if the quest for genius is itself a fool's errand?

The first steps to answering these questions were taken almost a century ago, at the height of the American Jazz Age. At the time, the new-fangled IQ test was gaining traction, after proving itself in World War One recruitment centres, and in 1926, psychologist Lewis Terman decided to use it to identify and study a group of gifted children. Combing California's schools for the creme de la creme, he selected 1,500 pupils with an IQ of 140 or more - 80 of whom had IQs above 170. Together, they became known as the "Termites", and the highs and lows of their lives are still being studied to this day.

As you might expect, many of the Termites did achieve wealth and fame - most notably Jess Oppenheimer, the writer of the classic 1950s sitcom I Love Lucy. Indeed, by the time his series aired on CBS, the Termites' average salary was twice that of the average white-collar job. But not all the group met Terman's expectations - there were many who pursued more "humble" professions such as police officers, seafarers, and typists. For this reason, Terman concluded that "intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated". Nor did their smarts endow personal happiness. Over the course of their lives, levels of divorce, alcoholism and suicide were about the same as the national average.

As the Termites enter their dotage, the moral of their story - that intelligence does not equate to a better life - has been told again and again. At best, a great intellect makes no differences to your life satisfaction; at worst, it can actually mean you are less fulfilled.

That's not to say that everyone with a high IQ is a tortured genius, as popular culture might suggest - but it is nevertheless puzzling. Why don't the benefits of sharper intelligence pay off in the long term?

A weighty burden
One possibility is that knowledge of your talents becomes something of a ball and chain. Indeed, during the 1990s, the surviving Termites were asked to look back at the events in their 80-year lifespan. Rather than basking in their successes, many reported that they had been plagued by the sense that they had somehow failed to live up to their youthful expectations.

That sense of burden - particularly when combined with others' expectations - is a recurring motif for many other gifted children. The most notable, and sad, case concerns the maths prodigy Sufiah Yusof. Enrolled at Oxford University aged 12, she dropped out of her course before taking her finals and started waitressing. She later worked as a call girl.

Another common complaint, often heard in student bars and internet forums, is that smarter people somehow have a clearer vision of the world's failings. Whereas the rest of us are blinkered from existential angst, smarter people lay awake agonising over the human condition or other people's folly.

Constant worrying may, in fact, be a sign of intelligence - but not in the way these armchair philosophers had imagined. Interviewing students on campus about various topics of discussion, Alexander Penney at MacEwan University in Canada found that those with the higher IQ did indeed feel more anxiety throughout the day. Interestingly, most worries were mundane, day-to-day concerns, though; the high-IQ students were far more likely to be replaying an awkward conversation, than asking the "big questions". "It's not that their worries were more profound, but they are just worrying more often about more things," says Penney. "If something negative happened, they thought about it more."

Probing more deeply, Penney found that this seemed to correlate with verbal intelligence - the kind tested by word games in IQ tests, compared to prowess at spatial puzzles (which, in fact, seemed to reduce the risk of anxiety). He speculates that greater eloquence might also make you more likely to verbalise anxieties and ruminate over them. It's not necessarily a disadvantage, though. "Maybe they were problem-solving a bit more than most people," he says - which might help them to learn from their mistakes.
Mental blind spots
The harsh truth, however, is that greater intelligence does not equate to wiser decisions; in fact, in some cases it might make your choices a little more foolish. Keith Stanovich at the University of Toronto has spent the last decade building tests for rationality, and he has found that fair, unbiased decision-making is largely independent of IQ. Consider the "my-side bias" - our tendency to be highly selective in the information we collect so that it reinforces our previous attitudes. The more enlightened approach would be to leave your assumptions at the door as you build your argument - but Stanovich found that smarter people are almost no more likely to do so than people with distinctly average IQs.

A tendency to rely on gut instincts rather than rational thought might also explain why a surprisingly high number of Mensa members believe in the paranormal; or why someone with an IQ of 140 is about twice as likely to max out their credit card.

Indeed, Stanovich sees these biases in every strata of society. "There is plenty of dysrationalia - people doing irrational things despite more than adequate intelligence - in our world today," he says. "The people pushing the anti-vaccination meme on parents and spreading misinformation on websites are generally of more than average intelligence and education." Clearly, clever people can be dangerously, and foolishly, misguided.

So if intelligence doesn't lead to rational decisions and a better life, what does? Igor Grossmann, at the University of Waterloo in Canada, thinks we need to turn our minds to an age-old concept: "wisdom". His approach is more scientific that it might at first sound. "The concept of wisdom has an ethereal quality to it," he admits. "But if you look at the lay definition of wisdom, many people would agree it's the idea of someone who can make good unbiased judgement."

In one experiment, Grossmann presented his volunteers with different social dilemmas - ranging from what to do about the war in Crimea to heartfelt crises disclosed to Dear Abby, the Washington Post's agony aunt. As the volunteers talked, a panel of psychologists judged their reasoning and weakness to bias: whether it was a rounded argument, whether the candidates were ready to admit the limits of their knowledge - their "intellectual humility" - and whether they were ignoring important details that didn't fit their theory.

High scores turned out to predict greater life satisfaction, relationship quality, and, crucially, reduced anxiety and rumination - all the qualities that seem to be absent in classically smart people. Wiser reasoning even seemed to ensure a longer life - those with the higher scores were less likely to die over intervening years. Crucially, Grossmann found that IQ was not related to any of these measures, and certainly didn't predict greater wisdom. "People who are very sharp may generate, very quickly, arguments [for] why their claims are the correct ones - but may do it in a very biased fashion."
Learnt wisdom
In the future, employers may well begin to start testing these abilities in place of IQ; Google has already announced that it plans to screen candidates for qualities like intellectual humility, rather than sheer cognitive prowess.

Fortunately, wisdom is probably not set in stone - whatever your IQ score. "I'm a strong believer that wisdom can be trained," says Grossmann. He points out that we often find it easier to leave our biases behind when we consider other people, rather than ourselves. Along these lines, he has found that simply talking through your problems in the third person ( "he" or "she", rather than "I ") helps create the necessary emotional distance, reducing your prejudices and leading to wiser arguments. Hopefully, more research will suggest many similar tricks.

The challenge will be getting people to admit their own foibles. If you've been able to rest on the laurels of your intelligence all your life, it could be very hard to accept that it has been blinding your judgement. As Socrates had it: the wisest person really may be the one who can admit he knows nothing.
Read more:

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The surprising downsides of being clever

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If ignorance is bliss, does a high IQ equal misery? Popular opinion would have it so. We tend to think of geniuses as being plagued by existential angst, frustration, and loneliness. Think of Virginia Woolf, Alan Turing, or Lisa Simpson - lone stars, isolated even as they burn their brightest.

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Many people take their sight for granted every day. We use our eyes all the time to learn, discover, and enjoy the world around us. We use our sight to help us navigate to different places, complete different tasks, do our jobs, and take care of ourselves. Take a second to think about what happens when you don't have your sight to get you through the day-to-day. How do you enjoy simple things we have come to take for granted like videos and performances?

There is an accessibility tool for the blind and low vision called audio description. This tool is the key to revealing detailed information to blind and low vision viewers that their seeing counterparts consume without a second thought. Audio description strives to provide information on visual content that is considered crucial to the understanding of the program. For instance, it is used in cases where failing to provide these description would inhibit blind and visually impaired individuals from gaining a complete understanding of the given program.

Audio description is an audio track that narrates the relevant visual information in media. Audio description assumes that the viewer cannot see, and therefore depicts the key visual elements that are necessary to understanding the content as an accommodation for blind and low vision viewers.

Extended Audio Description

Videos can vary quite a bit. TV shows will be different than movies, which will be different from training videos, music videos, and so on. One type of tool cannot be expected to always work for every video. That's why there are two types of audio description - standard and extended.

Standard audio description allows snippets of narration to be interspersed within the natural pauses in dialogue of the original content. The descriptions must be kept concise enough to fit into the allotted time in order to ensure that they enhance the original piece rather than distract from it. Having overlapping audio tracks would make it very difficult to understand. This type of description works well for content with frequent pauses or a small amount of detail that needs to be described.

In some cases standard audio description is simply not suitable, and extended audio description may be a better option. Contrary to standard audio description, extended audio description is not constrained to the natural pauses of a video, but rather allows you to pause the original source content to make room for extended description, as needed. When utilizing extended audio description you will experience the video and description begin playing. Then, the source video pauses temporarily, while the description continues. After that portion of the description is complete, the video resumes playing again.

Extended audio description allows the source video to be paused to create room for lengthier descriptions when necessary. This is typically utilized when there are not significant pauses in the original content, or when there is a lot of key visual information that must be described.

How do You Choose?

In simple terms, if your video has a lot of space to describe, standard audio description will meet your needs. If your video doesn't have a lot of natural space to add narration snippets, extended is the way to go. While it may be easy to tell for certain files, for others it might be unclear. To help you determine which type of description is appropriate for your file, we've created a short quiz. Take a few minutes to discover what type of description your video could use!

The Many Names for Audio Description

Tomato, tamahto, potato potahto. What's the difference between English descriptive audio, described video, and audio description? It's not REALLY a trick question. English descriptive audio is simply another name used for audio description.

Similarly, both Described Video (DV) and Audio Description (AD) have generally the same function. They are both an audio track that narrates a program's visual elements to make it more accessible to blind and low vision viewers. In each case, the description may include information about actions, characters, scene changes, surroundings, costumes, body language, and on-screen text, all of which help to describe the visual elements which are essential for comprehension.

While the terms are practically synonymous, each term is used in different parts of the world. This may seem like an unimportant distinction, but it is crucial to know what tool you are talking about, as audio description refers to two different things in the US and Canada. Despite the differing terms, both are crucial tools for video accessibility, and are required under several federal and local laws.

Canada is home to the most progressive accessibility law in the world - the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA). The country also passed the Accessible Canada Act in May 2019 with the goal to create a barrier-free Canada by the year 2040.

In 2001, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) implemented requirements for audio description on specific programming by certain broadcasters. In 2009, it addressed the issue with a specific policy requiring DV for many programs, and to use the DV logo. More recently, the CRTC's Let's Talk TV initiative has resulted in a decision to further increase the availability of described video.

In the US, there are three major federal laws that impact audio description - The Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act.

The Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Ac t is the most progressive accessibility law in the world. It sets accessibility requirements for organizations in Ontario, Canada with the aim of creating a universally accessible province by 2025.

The country also passed the Accessible Canada Act in May 2019 with the goal to create a barrier-free Canada by the year 2040. This new accessibility legislation extends to all of Canada and provides a framework for employment, transportation, information and communication technologies, and more.

With 3.5% of the world's population living with vision loss and blindness, audio description is a critical accommodations. As our society continues to consume a growing amount of video content, and our population continues to age, this accommodation will become increasingly important.

To make audio description more attainable, you may consider some of these innovative ways to approach English Descriptive Audio.
1. Technology

Traditional description requires human labor for the entire workflow. Once the description transcript is written, human voice actors are hired to record the description. This method is extremely costly and quite time-consuming. Yikes!

However, utilizing a combination of humans and technology can bring down the cost of audio description significantly and speed up turnaround time. In our workflow, certified human describers write high-quality descriptions, while advanced synthesized speech technology is used for the output. This option provides many benefits, including user control, more precise language, and faster production times. And, many blind and low vision viewers are accustomed to the more robotic output because they often use a screenreader that has a similar voice.

2. Describe while you go

You might consider this more of a way to avoid adding audio description, rather than a way to describe. Either way, this method is super cost-effective! If you are creating a talking-head video, simply be sure to include a lot of description during the initial recording so that you won't have to go back in and add audio description in the post-production process. The recommended best practices for creating accessible video for blind and low-vision viewers include describing what is happening in the video as if you are recording a podcast or are on the radio, rather than taking a videotape. In other words, assume that all of your viewers are only listening, and not seeing the visuals. Remember to take pauses and leave room for any additional description when necessary, and always identify who is speaking and describe any participation or action from the audience or other members.

3. Write it all out

When in doubt, you can write it all out and create a text version of description. If you want to make this type of description more accessible, you can then create a time-coded text description, just like you would time code a caption file and use it to create a WebVTT. This will have to be read aloud by a screen reader.

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The Ultimate Guide to Audio Description - 3Play Media

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Many people take their sight for granted every day. We use our eyes all the time to learn, discover, and enjoy the world around us. We use our sight to help us navigate to different places, complete different tasks, do our jobs, and take care of ourselves.

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Consider the unspoken yet widely-held perceptions we all have about "high achieving" women

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Consider the unspoken yet widely-held perceptions we all have about "high achieving" women

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Idea in Brief

The Research

A comprehensive survey of Harvard Business School graduates-men and women-suggests that the conventional wisdom about women and leadership needs to be rethought.

Some Findings

Men and women start out with similar goals, which are adjusted over time-but men are likelier to achieve them.

Few women are "opting out," but men and women alike believe that women advance more slowly because they prioritize family over career.

Most men expect that their careers will take precedence over their partners'-which they usually do. Most women expect their careers to be as important as their partners'-and they are often disappointed.

Women are consistently less satisfied than men with their careers and with the compatibility of work and family.

As researchers who have spent more than 20 years studying professional women, we have watched with interest the recent surge in attention paid to women's careers, work-family conflict, and the gender gap in leadership. Among the most visible contributions to this public conversation have been Anne-Marie Slaughter's 2012 Atlantic article "Why Women Still Can't Have it All" and Sheryl Sandberg's book Lean In, both of which ignited fierce public debate.

A lot of ink has been spilled on these topics, and both individuals and organizations have focused on gender gaps in business and other sectors. Can anything more be said? The 50th anniversary of the admission of women to Harvard Business School's MBA program inspired us to find out-specifically, to learn what HBS graduates had to say about work and family and how their experiences, attitudes, and decisions might shed light on prevailing controversies.

We trained our analytical lens on these graduates for two reasons. First, attending a top-tier business school is a reasonable indication of high levels of achievement, talent, ambition, and promise, and by looking at men and women who graduated from the same school, we had a level playing field for gender comparisons. Second, HBS graduates are trained to assume leadership positions, so their attitudes and experiences-interesting in their own right-shape the policies, practices, and unwritten rules of their organizations.

We surveyed more than 25,000 HBS graduates altogether; in this article we focus on MBAs, by far the largest proportion. Because we are primarily interested in the experiences of those who are still in the workplace, we report on Baby Boomers (ages 49-67), Generation X (ages 32-48), and Millennials (ages 26-31), also known as Generation Y. What our survey revealed suggests that the conventional wisdom about women's careers doesn't always square with reality.

Essential Background

Why making diversity a priority doesn't often translate to real results.

Do Men and Women Want the Same Things?

The highly educated, ambitious women and men of HBS don't differ much in terms of what they value and hope for in their lives and careers. We asked them to tell us how they defined success when they graduated from HBS and how they define it now, and they gave similar responses. Career-related factors figured prominently in their early definitions of success: Men and women mentioned job titles, job levels, and professional achievements at roughly the same rates.

When reflecting on how they define success today, both men and women cited career-related factors less often-unless they were Millennials, who mentioned those factors with about the same frequency across time. (This is unsurprising, given that only a few years have elapsed since they graduated, and most of their working lives are still ahead of them.) Today, however, family happiness, relationships, and balancing life and work, along with community service and helping others, are much more on the minds of Generation X and Baby Boomers. Two examples are illustrative. A woman in her forties, who left HBS about 20 years ago, told us: "For me, at age 25, success was defined by career success. Now I think of success much differently: Raising happy, productive children, contributing to the world around me, and pursuing work that is meaningful to me." These sentiments were echoed by a man in his fifties, for whom success early on was "becoming a highly paid CEO of a medium-to-large business." And today? "Striking a balance between work and family and giving back to society." Indeed, when we asked respondents to rate the importance of nine career and life dimensions, nearly 100%, regardless of gender, said that "quality of personal and family relationships" was "very" or "extremely" important.

With regard to career importance, men and women were again in agreement. Their ratings of key dimensions of professional life, such as "work that is meaningful and satisfying" and "professional accomplishments," were the same, and the majority said that "opportunities for career growth and development" were important to them, with women actually rating them slightly higher.

These results indicate that Harvard MBAs aimed for and continue to value fulfilling professional and personal lives. Yet their ability to realize them has played out very differently according to gender. Among those graduates who are employed full-time, men are more likely to have direct reports, to hold profit-and-loss responsibility, and to be in senior management positions. Setting aside those measures of success, since not everyone aspires to them, we found that women are less satisfied with their careers. Whereas about 50% to 60% of men across the three generations told us they were "extremely satisfied" or "very satisfied" with their experiences of meaningful work, professional accomplishments, opportunities for career growth, and compatibility of work and personal life, only 40% to 50% of women were similarly satisfied on the same dimensions.

Among HBS graduates working full-time, men were significantly more likely than women to have direct reports, profit-and-loss responsibility, and positions in senior management.

Given the gender gap in career outcomes, gaps in career satisfaction and in successfully combining work and family are unsurprising. A deeper analysis revealed that some prevailing beliefs about why women's progress has stalled are unsupported. We also found that certain expectations regarding how couples will distribute career and family responsibilities may contribute to women's stymied goals and lesser satisfaction.

Are Women Opting Out?

The pull of child rearing has long been a dominant explanation for the small proportion of women in corporate boardrooms, C-suites, partnerships, and other seats of power. For years before Lisa Belkin's 2003 New York Times Magazine cover story added the term "opt out" to the cultural lexicon, senior executives were assuming that high-potential women who quit their jobs were leaving to care for their families. In the early 1990s Mike Cook, then the CEO of Deloitte & Touche, thought this was why only 10% of partner candidates in his firm were women, even though Deloitte had been hiring equal numbers of men and women for the preceding 10 years. But when Cook convened a task force to look behind the numbers, he learned that more than 70% of the women who had left the firm were still employed full-time one year later. Fewer than 10% were out of the workforce to care for young children. The vast majority of female employees who left Deloitte did not jettison (or even pause in) their careers; they simply went to jobs elsewhere. (For more details, see our colleague Rosabeth Moss Kanter's case "A Hole in the Pipeline," written with Jane Roessner.)

Men were significantly more satisfied than women on four key dimensions.

Fast-forward 20 years, and this mistaken thinking persists. Despite the fact that men and women actually have pretty similar career priorities, the belief that women value career less is widespread. We found that 77% of HBS graduates overall-73% of men and 85% of women-believe that "prioritizing family over work" is the number one barrier to women's career advancement. (We saw essentially the same numbers when we restricted the analysis to graduates who are in top management positions and when we included Executive Education graduates, suggesting that this conviction packs some punch.)

As one alumna in her mid-thirties noted, a key factor is still "deep-rooted attitudes that a woman should be the primary caregiver, so it is 'understood' that her career may have to take a backseat for a while as similar male colleagues move ahead at a more rapid pace."

But here's the kicker: It simply isn't true that a large proportion of HBS alumnae have "opted out" to care for children. When we asked Gen X and Baby Boom women (who are most likely to have children under 18 living with them today) about their current status, we learned essentially what Mike Cook's task force did: Only 11% are out of the workforce to care for children full-time. The figure is even lower (7%) for women of color. (In that group, black and South Asian women are at the lowest end of the spectrum, at just 4%.) Seventy-four percent of Gen X alumnae are working full-time, as are 52% of Baby Boom alumnae (some of whom, like their male counterparts, have retired or are cutting back on their hours), and they average 52 hours a week. When we saw how few women were out of the workforce, we wondered whether those who were might have been disproportionately less likely to respond to the survey. But a number of checks turned up no evidence of response bias.

Even for HBS women who are currently out of the workforce to care for children, "opting out" is not an accurate description of their experience. Our survey data and other research suggest that when high-achieving, highly educated professional women leave their jobs after becoming mothers, only a small number do so because they prefer to devote themselves exclusively to motherhood; the vast majority leave reluctantly and as a last resort, because they find themselves in unfulfilling roles with dim prospects for advancement. The message that they are no longer considered "players" is communicated in various, sometimes subtle ways: They may have been stigmatized for taking advantage of flex options or reduced schedules, passed over for high-profile assignments, or removed from projects they once led. One alumna, now in her late fifties, recalled, "I left my first job after being 'mommy-tracked' when I came back from maternity leave."

Another, in her forties, said, "The flexible part-time roles I have taken [while raising my child]...have never been intellectually fulfilling." A third told us that even finding such a role proved impossible: "I thought success would be combining career and family successfully at the same time. I thought I could scale back to part-time, and I'd ramp back up as the kids grew...[But my] industry offered few if any professional part-time positions." Yet another recounted leaving the workforce in response to unfulfilling work: "I last quit three years ago because I could not seem to get new challenges and became bored by the work. I had great reviews and the company liked me. There appeared to be preconceived notions about part-time women wanting less challenging work, off track, when I was seeking the more challenging work, on some sort of track. And being part-time took me out of the structured review and promotion ladder."

Do Family Responsibilities Push Women Out of the Leadership Pipeline?

We also wanted to consider how taking time off for parenting might affect the trajectory of women's careers. We asked survey respondents about any breaks they had taken over the course of their careers and learned that 28% of Gen X and 44% of Baby Boom women had at some point taken a break of more than six months to care for children, compared with only 2% of men across those two generations.

Time out of the workforce could account for the fact that women are less likely to be in senior positions. After all, it's often argued that because being in senior leadership is directly tied to years of professional experience, women are less likely to be in those roles precisely because they are more likely to have taken such breaks. So we delved deeper, with controls for variables such as age, industry, sector, and organization size, analyzing a range of factors related to family status and parenting, looking for a link to women's lesser representation in top management. But we found no connections. We considered not only whether graduates had gone part-time or taken a career break to care for children, but also the number of times they had done so. We asked about common career decisions made to accommodate family responsibilities, such as limiting travel, choosing a more flexible job, slowing down the pace of one's career, making a lateral move, leaving a job, or declining to work toward a promotion. Women were more likely than men to have made such decisions-but again, none of these factors explained the gender gap in senior management. In fact, both men and women in top management teams were typically more likely than those lower down in the hierarchy to have made career decisions to accommodate family responsibilities. We even looked at whether simply being a parent-aside from any career changes or decisions related to parenting-made a difference. It did not. Again and again, our core finding-HBS alumnae have not attained senior management positions at the same rates as men-persisted.

The gap between men's and women's advancement to senior positions has endured, despite increasing numbers of women with the credentials and the experience to assume top roles across industries and institutions and despite the efforts of many organizations to develop their high-potential female employees. In the business world, women make up 5% of Fortune 1000 CEOs, and only a handful of them are women of color. The gap is narrower but still significant in professional service firms, where 20% of CEOs are women. And despite much interest in and attention to women on boards, women hold fewer than 20% of board seats at Fortune 500 companies, and their representation has increased only incrementally in recent years. Even fewer women of color (below 5%) occupy Fortune 500 board seats. Scholars are studying a range of topics-from the career paths of highly educated women, to the experiences of female leaders, to how organizational structures and cultures create barriers to advancement-in an effort to better understand why the gender gap persists and how it can be closed.

We don't think these findings-which are, frankly, surprising-are the final word on the subject. Indeed, they suggest that we need much more nuanced data about how professional men and women navigate their family and career decisions and how their lives unfold if we are to understand the impact that family responsibilities have on both women's and men's careers. We don't mean to suggest that no relationship exists between individuals' choices regarding work and family and their career outcomes. But what is clear is that the conventional wisdom doesn't tell the full story. We will explore this more deeply in subsequent surveys, and we hope other researchers will take up this question too.

Are Women's and Men's Expectations for Work and Family at Odds?

We also wanted to better understand the gender gaps we found in satisfaction with career and with the combining of work and the rest of life, so we looked at what respondents told us about their expectations when they launched their post-HBS careers and what they had experienced in the years since. Ultimately, we uncovered some disconnects that may illuminate why women and men are not equally fulfilled.

More than half the men in Generation X and the Baby Boom said that when they left HBS, they expected that their careers would take priority over their spouses' or partners'. The vast majority (83%) of the graduates in these generations reported being married, and because we don't have reliable data on sexual orientation, we assume that their partners are of the opposite sex. Thus we call this expectation "traditional," to denote an arrangement whereby the man's career takes precedence over the woman's. Notably, this expectation was less prevalent among men of color than among white men. Forty-eight percent of the former-compared with 39% of white men-anticipated that their spouses' careers would be of equal importance. Meanwhile, the vast majority of women across racial groups and generations anticipated that their careers would rank equally with those of their partners. (Only 7% of Gen X and 3% of Baby Boom women, and even fewer of their male counterparts, expected that the woman's career would take priority over the man's-an arrangement we call "progressive.")

A strong majority of men expected to be in "traditional" partnerships, in which their careers would take precedence. Their expectations were actually exceeded. A distinct minority of women expected their partners' careers to take precedence, but for about 40% of them, that's exactly what happened.

Different Expectations-and Results-Regarding "Traditional" Child Care

A large majority of men expected their partners to take primary responsibility for child care. Those expectations were met and exceeded. (Across the two generations, black men's expectations and reality were somewhat lower, at 68% and 72%.) Half the women expected to take primary responsibility for raising children, and more than two-thirds of them actually did so. (Among black women, however, 53% were the primary caregivers.)

Most graduates went on to lead fairly traditional lives on this score. Close to three-quarters of Gen X and Baby Boom men reported that their careers had indeed taken precedence-more than had originally expected this arrangement. Meanwhile, many women's expectations for career equality were disappointed. Though majorities of Gen X and Baby Boom women reported that they were in egalitarian or progressive partnerships, the remainder found that their careers took lower priority. That figure-40%-is almost double the proportion who left HBS expecting a traditional arrangement. This outcome varied significantly among racial groups, with black women being the least likely to end up with a partner whose career took precedence.

Further Reading

Work-Life Balance Feature

Data on how top executives reconcile their personal and professional lives.

We had asked a parallel set of questions about child care: How had graduates who were expecting to have partners and children (91%) anticipated dividing child care responsibilities when they left HBS, and how did they actually divide them? Across the board, we found expectations on this dimension to be much more traditional than those regarding career priority. At the time they graduated from HBS, more than three-quarters of men expected that their partners would do the lion's share of child care. Black men were somewhat less likely to expect such an arrangement. Meanwhile, about half the women expected that they would take on the majority of this work. Latinas were the least likely, at 40%, to have expected to shoulder most of the child care.

These expectations about child care may help to explain the more traditional career arrangements of graduates who had expected otherwise. About half the women who had egalitarian career expectations also assumed that they would perform most of the child care in their families. But if women are primarily responsible for child care, their careers are more likely to become secondary in importance to their partners', perhaps helping to explain their lesser career satisfaction.

Ultimately, more-traditional arrangements did win out. Healthy majorities of Gen X and Baby Boom women took responsibility for most of the child care in their families. Even higher percentages of Gen X and Baby Boom men reported having spouses who did so. Black men and women were the least likely to have a traditional arrangement; their numbers were lower by roughly 15 to 20 percentage points.

So although a much larger proportion of women expected a traditional division of child care responsibilities than expected a traditional career priority, men and women sharply diverged on both dimensions. Women were more likely to have egalitarian expectations-and to see their expectations dashed. As we've also seen, men are more successful in their careers, which no doubt plays a role in the difference between expectations and reality as many women watch their partners' careers take off and eclipse their own.

Whatever the explanation, this disconnect exacts a psychic cost-for both women and men. Women who started out with egalitarian expectations but ended up in more-traditional arrangements felt less satisfied with how their careers have progressed than did women who both expected and experienced egalitarian partnerships at home. And in general, women tended to be less satisfied than men with their career growth-except for those whose careers and child care responsibilities were seen as equal to their partners'. Conversely, men who expected traditional arrangements but found themselves in egalitarian relationships were less satisfied with their career growth than were their peers in more-traditional arrangements, perhaps reflecting an enduring cultural ideal wherein men's work is privileged. Indeed, traditional partnerships were linked to higher career satisfaction for men, whereas women who ended up in such arrangements were less satisfied, regardless of their original expectations.

The Millennials Are Rising-Is Change on the Way?

It is tempting to think that people launching their careers today will change the game. After all, it was only a few generations ago that women were barred from higher education and many professions. Won't gender parity develop with the passage of time? Unfortunately, we don't think it's quite that simple, given what we heard from Millennial MBAs. What these men and women expect at this early stage in their careers and lives looks as incompatible-and unrealistic-as it was for earlier generations.

It's not that things have stayed the same. Among HBS graduates, Millennial men are somewhat less likely than older men to expect their careers to take precedence. They're also less likely to expect that their partners will do the majority of child care: A third anticipate doing an equal share, as compared with 22% of Gen X men and 16% of Baby Boom men. (This generation looks different in other ways, as well: When we asked Millennials to define success today, they cited job titles, being in the C-suite, and similar status concerns less often than did older generations.)

Nevertheless, like their predecessors, the youngest men have expectations more traditional than those of their female peers. Whereas three-quarters of Millennial women anticipate that their careers will be at least as important as their partners', half the men in their generation expect that their own careers will take priority. And whereas two-thirds of Millennial men expect that their partners will handle the majority of child care, just under half-42%-of Millennial women expect that they themselves will do so.

We can't help noting that 42% is still a sizable proportion, and these young women may find-as Gen X and Baby Boom women apparently did-that shouldering most of the child rearing hinders equal career importance. Only 10% of the Millennial graduates have children, and they are still early in their careers, so we do not yet know how these mismatched expectations will ultimately play out. But if previous generations are any indication, change won't occur soon.

Half of Millennial men expect their careers to take precedence over their partners'. Only a quarter of Millennial women expect their partners' careers to take precedence.

Two-thirds of Millennial men expect their partners to take primary responsibility for raising children. Fewer than half of Millennial women expect that they will take primary responsibility.

Overcoming Myths and Changing Reality

At a certain point the belief that a woman's primary career obstacle is herself became conventional wisdom, for both women and men. From "opting out" to "ratcheting back," the ways we talk about women's careers often emphasize their willingness to scale down or forgo opportunities, projects, and jobs. The very premise seems to be that women value career less than men do, or that mothers don't want high-profile, challenging work.

Yet framing the conversation like this doesn't reflect reality-at least not for HBS women, and not, we'd venture, for many other highly educated, career-oriented women. Alumnae set out from HBS placing considerable value on achievement and fulfillment at work and on having careers that are valued as much as their partners' are. Life outside work, including family relationships, is also important to them-just as it is to men. So why do we see a gender gap in top management even in this high-achieving group? The answer doesn't seem to be that women have simply left the workforce, because very few are caring for children full-time. Nor does it seem that women's (or men's) efforts to accommodate personal and family obligations, such as by working less than full-time or making lateral career moves, explain why women are less likely to be in top management.

Our findings call for more-comprehensive organizational solutions to address gender disparities in career achievement. Companies need to provide adequate entry points to full-time work for women who have, for instance, recently been on a part-time schedule or taken a career break. Our results make equally clear that companies need to move beyond regarding flextime and other "family-friendly" policies as sufficient for retaining and developing high-potential women. Women are leaning in. Most women who have achieved top management positions have done so while managing family responsibilities-and, like their male counterparts, while working long hours. Women want more meaningful work, more challenging assignments, and more opportunities for career growth. It is now time, as Anne-Marie Slaughter has pointed out, for companies to lean in, in part by considering how they can institutionalize a level playing field for all employees, regardless of gender or caregiver status.

Companies need to be vigilant about unspoken but powerful perceptions that constrain women's opportunities. The misguided assumption that high-potential women are "riskier" hires than their male peers because they are apt to discard their careers after parenthood is yet another bias women confront. As one 30-year-old alumna reported, "I have thought about going to interviews without my [wedding and engagement] rings on so that an interviewer doesn't get a preconceived notion of my dedication based upon where I might be in my life stage."

The "Life and Leadership After HBS" survey was conducted from December 2012 through February 2013. The survey sampled more than 25,000 graduates of the MBA, DBA, and PhD programs and the comprehensive leadership programs offered in Executive Education. This article focuses on our findings about MBA graduates-by far the largest proportion.

All alumnae (approximately 12,000) were surveyed, along with a stratified random sample of about 14,000 men. Approximately 10,000 Baby Boomers and 10,000 Generation Xers were surveyed, along with smaller numbers of Millennials and graduates over the age of 67. The survey had a 25% response rate, which is high for a survey of its kind. Response rates were similar across the generations. In accordance with standard reporting procedures, all percentages included here have been weighted. For this article we also analyzed the results to understand how views and experiences varied for graduates of different races; distinctive variations among racial groups are noted here.

The research team conducted several analyses to identify any nonresponse bias (systematic differences between those who participated in the survey and those who were invited but did not participate). We found no evidence of such bias, and we are confident that these results accurately reflect the views of HBS graduates.

Admittedly, wading into this territory is difficult and emotionally fraught. Decisions about family life and relationships are always deeply personal. "Lean in" is a rallying cry for women trying to navigate the workplace, but our survey results make us think that Sheryl Sandberg's other slogan-"Make your partner a real partner"-is every bit as crucial, and perhaps more apt for young, achievement-oriented women who aspire to have meaningful, fully valued careers. The fact that HBS alumnae are finding themselves in relationships in which their careers are subordinate to their partners' more often than they anticipated strikes us as meaningful. Our findings indicate that ending up in less-egalitarian partnerships is disappointing-perhaps especially so when a career has stalled. In fact, women may be doing more and more child care because their careers have hit a wall, leading them to default to a support role in which their jobs are secondary. Meanwhile, men feel pressured to demonstrate their family devotion by performing as breadwinners, even when that means more time away from home. In our research we heard from many men who feel harshly judged by their companies and the culture at large for wanting to spend less time at work and more with their kids. One 42-year-old alumnus reported, "I struggle with balancing family and work life, and so far my reputation is suffering both at work and at home."

In the end, we found not just achievement and satisfaction gaps between men and women, but a real gap between what women expect as they look ahead to their careers and where they ultimately land. The men and women who graduate from HBS set out with much in common-MBAs, high ambitions, and preparation for leadership. Perhaps it's time for more-candid conversations-at home, at work, and on campus-about how and why their paths unfold so differently.

A version of this article appeared in the December 2014 issue of Harvard Business Review.

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Rethink What You "Know" About High-Achieving Women

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On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the admission of women to Harvard Business School's MBA program, the authors, who have spent more than 20 years studying professional women, set out to learn what HBS graduates had to say about work and family and how their experiences, attitudes, and decisions might shed light on prevailing controversies.

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Women outperform Men on all Leadership Skills, except ONE

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Women outperform Men on all Leadership Skills, except ONE

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For the first time in history, a major political party in the United States has several women who have declared their candidacy to be their party's presidential nominee. But TV pundits have been questioning whether, despite the progress indicated by the huge influx of women elected into Congress last fall, the U.S. is ever going to elect a woman to the country's highest leadership position.

This is baffling to us, especially in light of what we see in our corporate research. In two articles from 2012 ( here and here) we discussed findings from our analysis of 360-degree reviews that women in leadership positions were perceived as being every bit as effective as men. In fact, while the differences were not huge, women scored at a statistically significantly higher level than men on the vast majority of leadership competencies we measured.

We recently updated that research, again looking at our database of 360-degree reviews in which we ask individuals to rate each leaders' effectiveness overall and to judge how strong they are on specific competencies, and had similar findings: that women in leadership positions are perceived just as - if not more - competent as their male counterparts.

Still, the disturbing fact is that the percentage of women in senior leadership roles in businesses has remained relatively steady since we conducted our original research. Only 4.9% of Fortune 500 CEOs and 2% of S&P 500 CEOs are women. And those numbers are declining globally.

There are of course many factors that contribute to this dearth of women at senior levels. For centuries, there have been broad, cultural biases against women and stereotypes die slowly. People have long believed that many women elect not to aspire to the highest ranks of the organization and take themselves out of the running (though recent research disputes that). Lots of research has shown that unconscious bias places a significant role in hiring and promotion decision s, which also contributes to the lower number of women in key positions.

Our current data presents even more compelling evidence that this bias is incorrect and unwarranted. Women are perceived by their managers - particularly their male managers - to be slightly more effective than men at every hierarchical level and in virtually every functional area of the organization. That includes the traditional male bastions of IT, operations, and legal.

As you can see in the chart below, women were rated as excelling in taking initiative, acting with resilience, practicing self-development, driving for results, and displaying high integrity and honesty. In fact, they were thought to be more effective in 84% of the competencies that we most frequently measure.

According to our updated data, men were rated as being better on two capabilities -"develops strategic perspective" and "technical or professional expertise," which were the same capabilities where they earned higher ratings in our original research as well.

According to an analysis of thousands of 360-degree reviews, women outscored men on 17 of the 19 capabilities that differentiate excellent leaders from average or poor ones.

Interestingly, our data shows that when women are asked to assess themselves, they are not as generous in their ratings. In the last few years we created a self-assessment that measures, among other things, confidence. We've been collecting data since 2016 (from 3,876 men and 4,779 women so far) on levels of confidence leaders have in themselves over their careers and we saw some interesting trends.

When we compare confidence ratings for men and women, we see a large difference in those under 25. It's highly probable that those women are far more competent than they think they are, while the male leaders are overconfident and assuming they are more competent than they are. At age 40, the confidence ratings merge. As people age their confidence generally increases; surprisingly, over the age of 60 we see male confidence decline, while female confidence increases. According to our data, men gain just 8.5 percentile points in confidence from age 25 to their 60+ years. Women, on the other hand, gain 29 percentile points. One note: This is what we see in our data though we recognize that there are studies that come to different conclusions on whether women truly lack confidence at early stages in their career.

These findings dovetail with other research that shows women are less likely to apply for jobs unless they are confident they meet most of the listed qualifications. A man and woman with identical credentials, who both lack experience for a higher level position, come to different conclusions about being prepared for the promotion. The man is more inclined to assume that he can learn what he's missing, while in the new job. He says to himself, "I am close enough." The woman is inclined to be more wary, and less willing to step up in that circumstance.

It's possible that these lower levels of confidence at younger ages could motivate women to take more initiative, be more resilient, and to be more receptive to feedback from others, which in turn makes them more effective leaders in the long run.

We see a similar trend in women's perceptions of their overall leadership effectiveness, with their rating rising as they get older. This data is from a study that includes 40,184 men and 22,600 women and measures the overall effectiveness rating of males and females on 49 unique behaviors that predict a leaders effectiveness. Again, women at younger ages rate themselves significantly lower than men but their ratings climb - and eventually supersede those of men - as they get older.

This data continues to reinforce our observations from our previous research - women make highly competent leaders, according to those who work most closely with them - and what's holding them back is not lack of capability but a dearth of opportunity. When given those opportunities, women are just as likely to succeed in higher level positions as men.

Keep in mind that our data is mostly perceptions of current and past behavior and performance. That's different than a promotional decision that involves movement to a higher position and involves taking a bigger risk. If 96 out of 100 people currently serving in comparable positions are male, and you are making the decision about who to promote, and you have a highly qualified female and a highly qualified male, what are you inclined to do? It may seem safer to choose the man.

Leaders need to take a hard look at what gets in the way of promoting women in their organizations. Clearly, the unconscious bias that women don't belong in senior level positions plays a big role. It's imperative that organizations change the way they make hiring and promotion decisions and ensure that eligible women are given serious consideration. Those making those decisions need to pause and ask, "Are we succumbing to unconscious bias? Are we automatically giving the nod to a man when there's an equally competent woman?" And, as our data on confidence shows, there's a need for organizations to give more encouragement to women. Leaders can assure them of their competence and encourage them to seek promotions earlier in their careers.

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Research: Women Score Higher Than Men in Most Leadership Skills

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Recently updated research shows that women in leadership positions are perceived as being every bit as effective as men. In an analysis of thousands of 360-degree assessments, women were rated as excelling in taking initiative, acting with resilience, practicing self-development, driving for results, and displaying high integrity and honesty.

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An anthology of stories on bias - from around the world!

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An anthology of stories on bias - from around the world!

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Between: Us Stories of Unconscious Bias - Podcast Trailer

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Between: Us Stories of Unconscious Bias is a society and culture-based podcast hosted by Smita Tharoor. Between: Us Stories of Unconscious Bias connects with guests from all over the world, asking them to share their stories and to reflect on their life experiences with unconscious bias, with an end…

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Are we REALLY splitting care-giving responsibilities equally?

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Are we REALLY splitting care-giving responsibilities equally?

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As we head into 2022, Worklife is running our best, most insightful and most essential stories from 2021. When you're done with this article, check out our full list of the year's top stories.
Organising a playdate, or booking the kids' medical check-ups. Working out how to hide vegetables in their evening meals, or ensuring there's enough on the shopping list. Worrying about whether your son is on track at school, your daughter needs new shoes and when to replace your washing machine. On their own, these may all seem like small tasks - but they mount up. And if you ask heterosexual couples with children which partner is most likely to handle them, it is probable that most would offer up the same answer: the mother.

Numerous studies show that women in heterosexual relationships still do the bulk of housework and childcare. Many couples aim to split their responsibilities 50:50, yet for various structural and socio-economic reasons, end up allocating tasks along typically gendered lines. Even in couples who think that they have achieved an equal division of labour, the more hidden forms of care generally end up falling to the woman.

In fact, an increasing body of research indicates that, for household responsibilities, women perform far more cognitive and emotional labour than men. Understanding why could help explain why gender equality has not only stalled, but is going backwards, despite being more discussed than ever. And a broader understanding of this behind-the-scenes labour could help couples redistribute the work more equally - something that, while initially difficult, could play a significant role in helping mothers lighten their load.
Invisible, unlimited work
Experts say that this hidden work comes in three overlapping categories. There's cognitive labour - which is thinking about all the practical elements of household responsibilities, including organising playdates, shopping and planning activities. Then there's emotional labour, which is maintaining the family's emotions; calming things down if the kids are acting up or worrying about how they are managing at school. Third, the mental load is the intersection of the two: preparing, organising and anticipating everything, emotional and practical, that needs to get done to make life flow.

Research shows much of a household's emotional labour, such as calming distressed children, is part of the load that generally falls on mothers (Credit: Getty Images)

This hidden work is hard to measure, because it's invisible and performed internally, making it difficult to know where it starts and ends. In 2019 Allison Daminger, a doctoral candidate in sociology and social policy at Harvard University, found that while most participants in her study on cognitive household labour realised that women were doing the lion's share, this wasn't yet a "normalised form of work". In the study of 35 couples, she found that men referred to their wives using terms such as "project manager", or said they were "keeping track of more".

In fact, Daminger identified four clear stages of mental work related to household responsibilities: anticipating needs, identifying options, deciding among the options and then monitoring the results. Mothers did more in all four stages, her research showed; while parents often made decisions together, mothers did more of the anticipation, planning and research. In other words, fathers were informed when it came to decisions, but mothers put in the legwork around them.

This hidden work has various impacts; we know, for instance, that women are more likely than men to worry about childcare even when they are not with their children. It also causes additional stress, because it is always present - even when you should be concentrating on other things.

"The mental load is that thread that brings the family into your work life," says Leah Ruppanner, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Melbourne and author of Motherlands. It's the constant low-level worry about whether we're doing enough and the impact our parenting will have on our child's future. "You're always trying to mitigate future risk."
'Maternal gatekeeping'
One thing that puzzled Daminger was that this uneven allocation of mental labour did not seem to create much conflict among her participants. To understand why, she conducted a follow-up study a year later that showed couples explained away some of these gendered behaviours. Both men and women suggested that the unequal division of mental labour was because one partner worked longer hours, or stated that women were "temperamentally interested in being organised" - that they were simply good at planning ahead.

This showed participants believed personality differences and work constraints were driving these inequalities. These were well-educated participants who agreed to take part, so they may not be fully representative, but it still gives an interesting insight into a misconception that other studies have debunked - women aren't naturally better at planning, organising or multitasking, they are just expected to do it more and so eventually become better at it.

Yet there are other structural reasons why women continue to take on more of the mental load. Women often find a way to work flexibly, whereas men's jobs are seen as more rigid, their careers more traditionally linear. This means women are more available for childcare, do more of it - and as a result have to think about it more. More powerfully, gendered expectations that start from birth can explain why ideas around who does the housework and childcare are so ingrained. Daughters are known to do more housework than sons, for instance.

Motherhood ideals also feed into this equation. For instance, the home is often seen as a woman's domain. We know that women are judged on neatness more harshly than men. One study showed that if an identical room for a prospective rental property was said to belong to Jennifer rather than John, Jennifer was rated less likeable, less competent and less hardworking than John. The conclusion? The state of a woman's home was literally linked to her worth.

Mothers doing tasks like picking a child's outfits are examples of "maternal gatekeeping" - subtle tasks that fall to mums to take the lead on (Credit: Getty Images)

These ideals can be self-perpetuating. Because women are judged more on how a household runs, it's essential they display "maternal gatekeeping". This means taking on childcare tasks that could be shared like writing meal plans or picking outfits, subtly signalling that it's a mother's job. Think of the old joke, "Well, her father dressed her". It's funny when dads do it badly, but implies bad mothering if mothers do things wrong. Despite progress we've made in normalising men doing childcare, there's still "this sense that women are ultimately responsible for family outcomes", notes Daminger. "There are more costs to a woman if these things don't go well or don't happen."
Impacts, at home and at work
The fact that mothers end up assuming this mental load has consequences, however.

Mothers are more stressed, tired and less happy than fathers, who are happier during childcare, research shows, in part because they tend to do the fun, recreational activities more often. One Swedish study showed that when women thought the distribution of the more obvious housework was unfair and perceptions of each partner's contribution differed, it led to marriage problems and increased the likelihood of a split. The risk is also exhaustion for the mothers, who might initially ask for help, which can come across as nagging if it has to be repeated again and again. "And then that wears on relationships," says sociologist Daniel Carlson of the University of Utah, who found that unequal distribution of caring responsibilities in couples can also lead to less sex.

If women are over-stretched at home, moreover, that means many feel they cannot physically or mentally put in the extra hours demanded by many workplaces, so the gender pay gap continues to widen. Women make up the majority of part-time workers, for instance, and in turn are less likely to get pay rises or promotions after having children, making it even harder to pursue top jobs. Many leave the workforce altogether.
Talk more, do less
Since the pandemic hit, the link between gender equality at home and women's workforce participation has been more in the spotlight than ever. While there are many systemic issues at play, tackling hidden household labour within couples could help ease the burden that falls on women and deters them from other activities.

Men helping tackle hidden household labour that disproportionately falls on women could help lighten the load on mums, and create more equal households (Credit: Getty Images)

It's clear that most men want to get more involved in their children's lives, so to ease this on an individual level, couples could explicitly talk about who does what, end to end - it's no good taking the kids out on a playdate if someone else has already planned and organised the activity. To foster new habits to help share the load, we have to make the invisible more visible. An awareness of it is a good first step, agrees Daminger, and constantly being clear about who is managing which task, including the planning.

If we explicitly state how much planning is involved in every aspect of childcare and housework, it will become clearer just how much hidden work we do. Fortunately not all couples have unequal divisions of care: same-sex couples, for instance, have a much more equal distribution compared to heterosexual couples, as they are not beholden to expected gender roles. This shows that the load can clearly be shared when it is more openly talked about.

On a societal level we also therefore need to reframe some very deep-seated beliefs about what a man or a woman's role is. Carlson, who led research showing that egalitarian views on task-sharing contribute to sexual frequency, says that we also need to consider the "structural factors that are inhibiting a lack of workplace flexibility", like breadwinning norms for men and "an ideal worker culture that pushes men into the labour force and keeps them out of the home". Policy could help too - research shows that men who take paternity leave do more childcare later.

But in the absence of policy, perhaps the best way for women to reduce the mental load is to do less. Initially there may be pain to achieve any form of long-term gain, says Carlson. If the mother stops thinking about what needs to be done and the father does not anticipate these needs, it may initially cause stress or judgement - but that could allow learning for next time. "It's kind of classic operant conditioning. We're not putting men through mazes or shocking them for food pellets... but it's kind of like, 'Oh, I didn't remember to do this last time and there was a negative consequence'."

Over time, doing less could increase our partner's involvement and, in turn, free up more of our mental energy to focus on ourselves. At first, we might get judged for it, but it could lead to greater happiness later on. We all learn from doing, after all.
Melissa Hogenboom is the editor of BBC Reel. Her upcoming book, The Motherhood Complex, is out 27 May 2021 in the UK. She is @melissasuzanneh on Twitter.

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The hidden load: How 'thinking of everything' holds mums back

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As we head into 2022, Worklife is running our best, most insightful and most essential stories from 2021. When you're done with this article, check out our full list of the year's top stories. Organising a playdate, or booking the kids' medical check-ups.

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Asking why someone is 'still' single and assuring them they'll 'find their person soon' may seem like thoughtful, even sensitive, ways to check in on single friends. However, these simple phrases constitute 'single shaming' - and they're likely to be more harmful than helpful.

Single shaming results from negative biases about people who are not partnered: they must be sad and lonely for not having a partner; they're actively looking for one, but haven't found a match yet; and there must be something wrong with them that's causing to them to wind up alone. All these stereotypes are driven by pressures to conform to long-held societal standards: get the partner, shared home, 2.4 kids and dog, and a person has assembled all the ingredients they need for a happy life.

While people have been steadily re-evaluating these social norms for decades, recent research suggests single shaming is still going strong. Data from a survey by dating service Match, seen by BBC Worklife, shows 52% of 1,000 single UK adults reported experiencing single shaming "since the start of the pandemic", likely due to the increased focus on whom people could rely on during lockdowns. And even though 59% said they were "content with their relationship status", they still were the target of intrusive questions.

The persistence of these biases against singletons is not only demeaning, but also outdated in many countries. "Singlehood was once considered a transitional period, when people marked time until they were married or re-married," says Bella DePaulo, author of Singled Out: How Singles are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After. But now, she says, Americans spend more years of their adult lives single than married. In 1970, she points out, citing US census data, 40% of US households consisted of married couples and their children, while 17% lived alone as singles. By 2012, 27% of US households consisted of singles, and just 20% were parents and children.

But even with these changing statistics, it's clear both anecdotally and in the research that people who aren't in romantic relationships continue to get a hard time from their coupled-up friends and family - and also from themselves. Even as singles seem to increasingly embrace and choose their relationship status, the pressure to find dates isn't necessarily going away. But there may be at least some progress in the offing, as the growing representation of single people in the population may begin to outweigh the stigmatisation of singlehood.

In the film Bridget Jones's Diary, the titular character judges herself for her single status, despite her success (Credit: Getty Images)

The harms of single shaming
According to New York City-based psychotherapist Allison Abrams, single shaming is "negatively judging somebody for not being partnered up and not conforming to society's expectations... of being married at a certain age".

Shamers treat non-partnered people "differently" as a result, she says. "People tend to think that you're bored and alone when you're single," adds Paris-based Ipek Kucuk, dating expert with the dating app Happn.

In the study shared by Match, researchers asked about the common "shaming phrases" single people have heard from others, and 35% said they were told "you'll find someone soon". Twenty-nine percent heard "you must be so lonely", while 38% reported general pity over their relationship status.

DePaulo says myths around singletons include the idea that married couples have a special mastery of life that single people don't; that the lives of singles are "tragic"; and that being single implies being selfish. (Indeed, some research supports that these are myths, including a 2018 German study suggesting that stereotypes around miserable singles and happy couples are not at all correct.)

The stereotypes about singles aren't just wrong - they can also have damaging consequences. As psychotherapist Abrams says, internalised shame from societal attitudes towards singles can negatively affect self-image. Even if a single person's friends and family aren't shaming them for their status, not hitting big life milestones like marriage and children can take a toll - especially on someone who's actively looking for a partner - because it's what society tends to expect of them.

"Many times, I've seen that play a part in depression," says Abrams. A normalised 'script' for successful life can even force those who are happy being single to reconsider that attitude, and seek out something they're fairly sure they don't want, just so they can fit in with cultural norms.

And single shaming comes from many sources beyond nosy parents and friends. Governments play a part, by offering various benefits to those who are legally married, of which single people can't take advantage. Some people believe this sends a message about the "right way" to go about life, serving as positive reinforcement for partnered people and making it very difficult for singles not to internalise the idea that they're getting adulthood wrong.

In the US, for example, an employee can add their spouse to their health care plan - but single people can't do that for important people like siblings or close friends, points out DePaulo. Couples and families also get perks not available to singles in other realms, ranging from discounts on vacations to workplaces granting special allowances for those with nuclear families.

Spinster versus bachelor

Like any cultural stigma, single shaming isn't equally distributed. Women tend to endure the brunt of it, and certain cultures emphasise marriage and having children more than others.

First, consider the words to describe single women as opposed to men. While men are known as 'bachelors', women are called 'spinsters'. In the late Middle Ages, the latter originated as a term to describe women who spun wool professionally, most of whom were unmarried. The lower-status job was easier for them to get, since more desirable jobs were generally reserved for married women - who, through their husbands, could afford the materials required to do higher-status work. 'Bachelors', meanwhile, are often portrayed as fun, potentially suave (if not sleazy), living their best lives and carefree - these positive connotations go all the way back to Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales.

'Spinster' has taken on even more negative connotations over time, used to disparage unmarried (and young) women in popular culture, such as in Bridget Jones's Diary (the titular character is in her early 30s with a solid job in London, yet dwells on her 'spinster' status).

Plenty of singletons report being content with their status - yet still report experiencing single shaming (Credit: Getty Images)

"According to the conventional wisdom - which is neither wise nor even accurate - women care more about marriage than men do," says DePaulo. "So, I think single women are more often subjected to the annoying sorts of questions like, 'Are you seeing anyone?'" Anecdotally, Abrams says more of her female clients share experiences of being single-shamed than her male clients, but caveats that her overall client population skews female.

"Single men can get treated in disparaging and dismissive ways, too," DePaulo adds, such as people perceiving them as childish, unable to care for themselves or "obsessed with sex".

Cultural demographics can influence the prevalence of single shaming, too. In her practice, Abrams has found clients with certain backgrounds, like those with families from Korea, China and India, tend to experience more pronounced single shaming from family members, as do some of her clients who moved to New York from the middle of the US. These cultures tend to emphasise more traditional gender roles around marriage, and not complying with these traditions can appear particularly unconventional. "I've heard one [client] say to me something like, [their] family feels shame for them not having a child at... 30 or even younger," says Abrams.
The 'power of numbers'
What it means to be single is changing, and some experts believe the shifts, both in attitudes and demographics, could help normalise singlehood - and potentially diminish the jump to judge the unpartnered.

In recent years, influential figures on social media and traditional celebrities alike have spoken out proudly about their single status. Actor Emma Watson, for example, has publicly described herself as "self-partnered", encouraging others to view their own lack of a romantic partner as positive, not negative. "As more people are embracing their status as a single person, I think more people feel liberated to do the same," says Abrams.

Dating app Bumble's research from October 2021, seen by BBC Worklife, showed that 53% of the more than 8,500 Bumble users surveyed across Canada, France, Germany, India, Mexico, the Philippines, Australia, the UK and the US "realized that it's okay to be alone for a while", thanks to the pandemic. Additionally, since Covid-19, many singletons have reported positive feelings and outcomes regarding their relationship status. Per the Match survey, 42% said they "enjoyed" being single during the pandemic.

However, this statistic implies the other 58% of respondents did not; in fact, pandemic-wrought isolation affected many singles negatively, and increased shaming for some - Match reported 37% of singles surveyed said they got more questions from "concerned friends and family" about their love lives. Indeed, Abrams suggests single shaming is "still pretty rampant", even as the ever-growing numbers of singles in countries like the US suggest a possible movement away from this behaviour.

Still, experts are hopeful that these changing demographics will continue to evolve judgements around singlehood. DePaulo calls this uptick in singletons "the power of numbers", saying "just about every time the Census Bureau releases its latest statistics, the findings show that there are more single people, and a greater proportion of single people, than there were before".

She adds: "When whole swaths of the population are unmarried - in the US, close to half - it gets harder to insist that they all have something wrong with them."

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'Single shaming': Why people jump to judge the un-partnered

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Asking why someone is 'still' single and assuring them they'll 'find their person soon' may seem like thoughtful, even sensitive, ways to check in on single friends. However, these simple phrases constitute 'single shaming' - and they're likely to be more harmful than helpful.

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Jane Velkovski: The life-changing power of assistive technologies

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"This chair is my legs -- this chair is my life," says accessibility champion Jane Velkovski, who uses a wheelchair after being diagnosed with Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA). With clarity and poise, he shares how his first motorized wheelchair empowered him with independence and ability -- and why assistive technology should be available to anyone who needs it.

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Homophobia: Fed up, of putting up... so wont shut up

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Homophobia: Fed up, of putting up... so wont shut up

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All the little things | Panti | TEDxDublin

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Please, do not turn disability into "inspirational 🤬"

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Please, do not turn disability into "inspirational 🤬"

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I'm not your inspiration, thank you very much | Stella Young

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How far or close are we to achieving the radical vision of equality as stated in the Indian Constitution?

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How far or close are we to achieving the radical vision of equality as stated in the Indian Constitution?

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The Longest Constitution with Priya Mirza

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Listen to The Longest Constitution with Priya Mirza on Spotify. What did those three hundred individuals who drafted the Indian Constitution want India to be? How far or close are we to achieving that radical vision of liberty, equality, and freedom shown by BR Ambedkar?

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Shared via Kindle. Description: THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER and a Times, Spectator and Observer Book of the Year 'In the first decade of this century, it was unthinkable that a gender-critical book could even be published by a prominent publishing house, le...

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Why financial independence matters, especially for LGBTQIA+ individuals

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Why financial independence matters, especially for LGBTQIA+ individuals

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LGBTQ millennials have bigger financial struggles than anyone else

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LGBTQ millennials have more student debt and lower income than is average for their generation. Coming out and being economically successful are not mutually exclusive, but too many members of the LGBT community still struggle with finances.

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How is "reporting paralysis" making our workplaces less inclusive

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Are you a "caregiver" or a "breadwinner"?

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Are you a "caregiver" or a "breadwinner"?

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Explained | Why Women Are Paid Less | FULL EPISODE | Netflix

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Motherhood Bias: It affects women whether they are mothers or not

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Motherhood Bias: It affects women whether they are mothers or not

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We've all heard the anecdotes, and the numbers don't lie: In the United States, many working mothers face a "motherhood bias" that punishes them for having children, by inhibiting both their professional progress and also - since the two go hand in hand - their lifetime earning potential.

It shouldn't fall strictly to working mothers themselves to fix the issue: By pushing for progressive legislation that furthers equality in the workplace, helping to evolve workplace culture, and, yes, advocating for ourselves, working mothers and their allies can confront maternal penalties head on.

FACT: THE MOTHERHOOD PENALTY IS REAL

The education is there. The experience is, too. But working moms are still penalized in the workplace. According to nonprofit advocacy organization National Women's Law Center, in 2017 "women who were mothers were recommended for significantly lower starting salaries, perceived as less competent, and less likely to be recommended for hire than non-mothers."

The judgment that having children weakens mothers' commitment and performance in the workplace is not only false, it's harmful. And it directly impacts a woman's ability to be treated and paid equally to her male counterparts.

Women lose an average of four percent of hourly earnings for each child they have. This stems from assumptions by colleagues and superiors that being mothers makes them less able to perform and less dedicated to their position. Adding insult to injury, men becoming parents often results in a "fatherhood bonus." The New York Times reports that cultural prejudice against women drives this inequity.

FACT: MATERNAL BIAS EVEN AFFECTS WOMEN WITHOUT CHILDREN

The "motherhood penalty" also negatively impacts single women who are childless and have no plans to have children, or those married without children, due to the broadly held belief that women will become pregnant at some point.

Heidi Hartman, president and CEO of the Institute for Women's Policy Research, notes, " A pregnancy penalty doesn't just hurt mothers or expectant women, married women or even childbearing women, it's a bias that's applied to all women. "

The very notion that any working woman could become pregnant causes discrimination against her. Women are slammed with the maternal wall even before they choose to have children - or not.

FACT: THE MATERNAL WALL BLOCKS ACCESS TO SALARIES AND PROMOTIONS

The motherhood bias is most obvious when employers disregard working moms for salary bumps and promotions. But it's not for lack of asking! A 2018 Women in the Workplace study found that "women are negotiating for raises and promotions as often as men, but they do not always get the same outcomes."

Even though the workforce includes 70 percent of American women with kids, working mothers must hustle harder, perform better and constantly prove their commitment to their job. Often this comes with little reward, and salary impact that continues throughout their careers.

An October 2018 study by Goldman Sachs indicates that women returning to work after having children were often "downshifted," whether they wanted to be or not. Employers pushed working moms into more "family friendly" positions, ultimately leading to lower profiles, pay and opportunity for advancement. This is doubly galling, given that data shows that mothers in some fields are actually more productive than their child-free counterparts.

FACT: WORKING MOTHERS OUTPERFORM THEIR COUNTERPARTS

Here's the truth: Being a mom is an asset to professional growth, driving productivity, management skills and more. Researchers from the Center for Creative Leadership studied productivity of parents in the workplace, and found just what working mothers already know: "Raising a family helps develop skills such as negotiating, compromising, conflict resolution and multitasking."

Sarah Lux-Lee, founder of Mindr, sums it up best in her TEDxBushwickWomen talk: "Motherhood teaches us perspective and passion, focus and flexibility. It gives us humility and a hunger to achieve, provide and lead by example. Motherhood teaches us to be level-headed in the face of a crisis, dependable at every turn, and agile in the face of change. In short, motherhood makes us ninjas. And ninjas are an asset in any workplace."

FACT: RETURNING TO WORK CAN BE A DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD

In addition to workplace discrimination for simply being a woman, mothers returning to full time jobs after having children face another layer of bias: being judged for seeming more dedicated to their position than their family. A 2010 study by sociological researchers Stephen Benard and Shelley Correll found that "even if mothers were unambiguously committed and competent, they were still discriminated against, as they were perceived as less warm and less likable."

Judgment like this drove Lindsay Mitchell and Lauren Brandt to create The Returnity Project, a platform providing resources, community and support for moms reentering the workforce. The Returnity Project is "on a mission to change the experience of returning to work from maternity leave, and to normalize conversations about the triumphs and struggles of working, parenting and adulting." Mitchell and Brandt know that mothers bring essential qualities to the workforce, and the stories shared on The Returnity Project reinforce those beliefs.

So, what actions can you take today to fight against the motherhood tax?

PUSH YOUR REPS TO SUPPORT LEGISLATION THAT EMPOWERS WOMEN

Legislation like the Paycheck Fairness Act of 2019 continues to strengthen equal pay laws and practices on a federal level. But companies themselves must implement procedures to change office culture to address and eliminate the motherhood penalty.

BE AN EMPLOYER WHO REWARDS GREAT WORK, NOT LIFE CHOICES

Employers can begin actively working to do away with workplace discrimination and systemic bias, by putting into practice systems that don't penalize working moms for their life choices. Here are just a few ways companies, managers and even colleagues can show they value working mothers:

Create awareness If an employer acknowledges the challenges that women face when coming back to work after having children, it lessens the burden for working moms. Employers can start conversations about changing needs and expectations after returning to work. According to the Women in the Workplace study, 41 percent of employees are parents. When companies make it a priority to establish systems that create an empathetic work environment, they take important steps in confronting motherhood bias.

Include more paid parental leave The United States is one of the worst countries in the developed world for guaranteed paid leave for new mothers. When employers offer this benefit, they prove they value the worth of mothers. By creating a culture that welcomes mothers, these companies show they embrace the idea that a well-adjusted working mom equals a more productive employee. In addition to being more content employees, evidence shows that by working, moms can even give advantages to their children later in life.

Add job flexibility A 2016 employee benefits study by Fractl established that one of the most desired job "perks" is flexibility - in particular, more flexible start and end times and more options to work remotely. When companies acknowledge that parents must often adhere to stricter timeframes because of school and daycare schedules, they demonstrate an understanding of the pressure that working mothers face to "do it all." Accommodating employers give all employees a chance to handle family obligations more easily.

More and more companies - including well-known tech giants Genentech, LinkedIn and IBM - are leading the charge in gender balance policies. Lean In offers a course, 50 Ways to Fight Gender Bias, which pairs a card-based activity with a short video series that companies can use to combat workplace discrimination.

ADVOCATE FOR YOURSELF

The hope is that continuing legislation toward closing the gender pay gap, and companies like these reaching 50 percent women employees in the near future (with others following suit), will lead to lessening motherhood bias in the workplace. But change doesn't only begin with politicians or in the corporate boardroom. Working moms can advocate for themselves directly.

Be specific When a working mother is out of the office, there's a common misperception that she's dealing with family-related issues. Joan C. Williams, a professor at the University of California Hastings College of the Law who studies workplace discrimination, suggests that when working remotely, working mothers detail their whereabouts or provide precise reasons for their absence. In her book "What Works for Women at Work," Williams suggests that working moms should call out the motherhood penalty when it happens and ask, "I wonder if we'd say the same thing about a man."

Take initiative Williams also recommends being proactive upon returning from maternity leave. Meet with bosses and map out professional future plans and goals. Although continually providing proof of commitment can get tiresome, this transparency may help moms head off bias.

Band together In her newest book, "A Uterus is a Feature, Not a Bug," Sarah Lacy, founder and CEO of Chairman Mom, writes "stand up for someone who gets talked over during a meeting. Spend time with women and recognize their strength." It's likely someone else in the office has faced a similar bias. Tapping into that shared experience provides a chance to create change and demand gender parity.

From maternal bias cropping up before a woman even has a child to working moms being passed over for promotions or downshifted after coming back from maternity leave, it's clear the motherhood penalty is alive and well. But there's hope on the horizon: more laws to strengthen equal pay, more companies dedicated to achieving gender balance, more available resources for moms returning to the workforce, and more working mothers standing up to this type of bias. Here's to all the ninjas.
Hannah Fairbanks is a freelance writer living in San Francisco. When she's not writing, you might find her reading, packing bento box lunches for her two young daughters, and adventuring around the Bay Area.

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How Working Mothers Can Overcome Bias - The Riveter

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We've all heard the anecdotes, and the numbers don't lie: In the United States, many working mothers face a "motherhood bias" that punishes them for having children, by inhibiting both their professional progress and also - since the two go hand in hand - their lifetime earning potential.

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How can we disrupt the powerful internal forces that undermine women’s leadership aspirations and confidence

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How can we disrupt the powerful internal forces that undermine women’s leadership aspirations and confidence

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The Science of Women’s Leadership | Alexis Kanda-Olmstead | TEDxCSU

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Teenager Simon Spier hasn't told his family or friends that he's gay, and he doesn't know the identity of the anonymous classmate that he's fallen for...

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What is Assistive Technology, and how it helps Persons with Disability

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What is Assistive Technology, and how it helps Persons with Disability

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Erick Ponce works in a government communications department in northern Ecuador. The 26-year-old happens to be deaf - a disability he has had since childhood. Communicating fluidly with his non-signing colleagues at work, and in public spaces like the supermarket, has been a lifelong challenge.

In 2017, Ponce became one of the first users of an experimental app called SpeakLiz, developed by an Ecuadorian startup called Talov. It transforms written text to sound, transcribes spoken words, and can alert a deaf or hard-of-hearing person to sounds like that of an ambulance, motorcycles, music, or a crying baby.

Once he began using SpeakLiz, Ponce's coworkers - and his family - were able to understand him more easily. "You cannot imagine what it feels like to speak with your son after 20 years," his father told the app's engineers. Now a part of the Talov team, Ponce demos new products to make them better before they hit the market.

SpeakLiz and Vision are, by many measures, successful. Their software is used by more than 7,000 people in 81 countries and is available in 35 languages. The founders won an award from MIT Technology Review and a contest organized by the History Channel. Talov was named among the top 100 most innovative startups in Latin America in 2019.

But the startup is still struggling. Venture capitalists aren't knocking on its door. Jácome and Obando sold some of their possessions to raise enough money to launch, and the team has next to no funding to continue expanding.

Assistive technology is an umbrella term for the products and services that help improve a person's functioning and independence. The industry encompasses the development and manufacture of products like wheelchairs, hearing aids, prostheses, and, increasingly, tech-based solutions like chatbots and AI interfaces on phones and computers.

The market for this technology is massive. Over a billion people are estimated to have a disability, 80% of whom live in developing countries, making them the world's largest minority. And unlike many other markers of identity, disability is a fluid category - it's something that can happen to any person at any time.

Still, access lags behind demand. The World Health Organization estimates that by 2030, over two billion people will need at least one assistive product but that only 1 in 10 people in need have access to assistive technology today. For many outside of the U.S., high costs, inadequate infrastructure, and a lack of formal policies that mandate accommodations remain persistent obstacles to access.

Amy Gaeta, a researcher in disability studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, noted that big companies often shroud their accessibility initiatives in a rhetoric of pity. Their main motivation, Gaeta said, is "the social capital they get from looking woke. You don't see that as much in non-Western countries." Having a small project meant to keep engineers happy and maintain a sense of "doing good" is a different design motivation than, say, one driven by the necessity of making tech more accessible from its inception, said Gaeta. In many cases, she says, disability becomes an add-on to existing technologies rather than something integrated at the very start.

In Gaeta's view, "Big Tech is definitely not doing enough when it comes to disability." Companies "are really not incorporating the voices of disabled people," she said, "and a lot of the interventions that I've seen, such as the wheelchair that can help people stand, are not really assistive technologies so much as they are corrective technologies." In other words, the interventions attempt to change disabled people to conform to the world around them rather than the opposite.

Gaeta said that the best way to judge the commitment of a startup or a tech company to assistive technology is to ask if they hire disabled designers. Do they actively seek out the voice of disabled people in their iteration process without tokenizing them? Then: how well do those solutions work? What are the reviews from users like? According to Gaeta, having a relationship with the community and incorporating feedback is key. Tech companies must work with the community rather than producing for them. The most successful solutions, she argues, come when disabled people are invited to the table from the outset.

Gaeta identifies as a member of the disability community. She proudly claims being neurodivergent and has a long history of chronic pain and nerve issues. "My body does not fit in the world. So I am constantly thinking in this creative mindset," she added. "What can I do to make the world for myself?"

Despite the fact that it's difficult to turn a profit in designing tech specifically for the disabled community, Jácome and Obando have stubbornly persisted. Their latest app, Vision, relies on artificial intelligence to convert real-time footage or photos from a cell phone camera into words that are played through the phone's speaker. This enables visually impaired people to "hear" their surroundings - a banana, a siamese cat, a $20 bill - by pointing their phone camera in the direction of those things. The app also tells a person how far away each object is, names its colors, and can read text on a restaurant menu or a street sign out loud. An April update of SpeakLiz, the app that helps Ponce speak with his father, includes basic American Sign Language (ASL) recognition, using a cell phone camera. (Talov's team is currently researching ways that it can incorporate Ecuadorian Sign Language into its technology.) It's the team's first attempt to recognize sign language without third-party sensors. The technology is as much for the disabled community as it is for the people around them.

"Startups like ours are most concentrated in the long term, in making a long-term impact with different kinds of users that face different kinds of challenges."

Jácome and Obando's first source of external funding, $50,000, came in 2017 from Ecuador's "Extraordinary Entrepreneurs League 3" contest, organized by Ecuador's National Financial Corporation. In 2019, Talov placed second in a competition organized by the History Channel, winning $30,000.

The money was earmarked for very specific purposes. The first prize was used to build the AI platform behind their apps, which they were careful to build in a way that works offline. "We hired a lot of crazy guys that were geniuses in coding, very young kids that were very good at that," Jácome told Rest of World.

Most of the prize money from the History Channel went toward providing devices for disabled people in Ecuador that are preloaded with Talov's apps. Since launching, Talov has issued more than 200 free lifetime subscriptions. Globally, more than 20,000 users have downloaded their apps, and before the pandemic, Talov had 2,440 paid subscribers.

While these awards affirmed the concept behind their startup, relying on prize money from competitions isn't a sustainable business model. Jácome has watched fintech apps and food delivery services in Latin America raise venture capital easily, both products known for fast and profitable exits. "Startups like ours are most concentrated in the long term, in making a long-term impact with different kinds of users that face different kinds of challenges," he said. In a "food delivery service, you can include 100% of humanity, virtually, in your user space. But for us, disability accessibility is most concentrated in a smaller group."

Jácome acknowledged that this delineation is relative. Although the community of disabled people is large, their needs are not uniform, so the products tailored to each group are inherently niche. "Traditional VCs will never support a startup like ours," he lamented.

There is also the social stigma associated with disability to contend with. "In our country and possibly in all the region, accessibility is not a field that people consider often as a priority," Jácome added.

Jácome and his partner thought that national policy would follow, which would make their business easier to sustain. Four years later, that hasn't been the case. Moreno's government has been mired in corruption charges, and Jácome says his administration has taken little action to address Ecuador's issues, let alone made changes that would benefit disabled people.

"I don't know what happened," Jácome said. "Politicians are politicians."

The history of communication technologies, like the keyboard and SMS messaging, offers some clues about what might happen if investments in accessible technology were given priority. In 1575, Italian printmaker Francesco Rampazetto developed an early predecessor of the typewriter called the scrittura tattile, an instrument that could impress letters in paper, as an auxiliary device for the blind. And 233 years later, in 1808, Pellegrino Turri created the first typewriter so that his blind friend, Countess Carolina Fantoni da Fivizzano, could write letters to him more easily.

In the 1980s, a similar way of thinking led to the development of SMS messages. Finnish engineer Matti Makkonen wanted to create a system that would help hearing-impared people communicate on mobile networks. Makkonen pitched the concept in 1984, and the first SMS message - "Merry Christmas" - was sent in 1992. Today, texts are a part of our everyday lives; an estimated 3.5 trillion text messages were sent around the world in 2020.

Vidhya Yella Reddy is a research fellow at Microsoft Research India and the co-founder of the nonprofit Vision Empower Trust, which provides STEM learning resources for children who are blind or have low vision in India. She has experienced many of these tech shortcomings firsthand. In her daily life, Reddy uses Envision, an app designed for the visually impaired, created by a design team in the Netherlands that lets her use her voice to type.

Tech solutions often fail, Reddy said, because the people attempting to innovate have a limited understanding of what the community needs. "I have heard a lot from people; whenever they see me or when they talk about technologies, they will be like, Oh, something to help you walk, that cane thing would be helpful, right?" Reddy told Rest of World. These able-bodied people worry about her bumping into things, she says, and rarely innovate outside of iterating on existing aids, like a new cane.

Reddy says this concern comes from a lack of awareness. When she gives talks to technologists or research institutions, hardly anyone in the audience has heard of a screen reader, which is built into every Android and iOS system. "They're not aware that something like that exists even on their phone," she said.

While these are all important steps, they are just that: a beginning.

In India, polio was widespread until the mid 1980s, and while the WHO announced its total eradication in 2014, an entire generation of adults in India live with mobility impairments. Anita Ghai, disability rights activist and dean of the School of Human Studies at Ambedkar University Delhi, is part of this generation. Ghai was born in 1958, several years before the polio vaccine became commercially available in India. She contracted the virus at age 2 and has no memory of an able body. The aftermath of the virus made the use of a wheelchair necessary. Her daily life is difficult in many ways. Many grocery shops, for example, have two to five steps before the front door. She has to wait outside for someone to bring her bread or a bar of soap. The public gaze can be a source of discomfort.

Ghai advocated for years to get a standing wheelchair to use on the stairs in a movie theater that she frequents in New Delhi and, ultimately, was successful. "You have to fight. You have no other way," Ghai told Rest of World. "These are ordinary things." But the daily nature of these inconveniences is grating.

Unlike people with mobility impairment in the U.S., Ghai often finds herself in a city without even the suggestion of ease. Many parking lots in the U.S. have, at the very least, reserved spaces for disabled people, the result of a 1968 Congressional act. When Ghai goes out shopping, she contends with a crowded street that rarely has a functional sidewalk, let alone a ramp for her wheelchair. "Uneven ground, passing pedestrians, cars, buses, auto rickshaws, and cycles whizz past inches from me as I try, with rising panic, to desperately work out the kerb cuts," she wrote in her 2015 book Rethinking Disability in India.

When she attended a conference in San Francisco in 2005, she was amazed that basic tasks like shopping for food could be so simple. She was gifted a Quickie motorized wheelchair from mobility advocate David Richard, a tool she couldn't afford at home. (Previously, she had been using a manual wheelchair in New Delhi.) "Today, after two decades, my wheelchair has become the source of my liberation," Ghai wrote in her 2015 book.

As a disability rights activist, Ghai maintains that voices from the Global South need to be a larger part of any conversations about assistive technology design and development - the majority of the global population of disabled people live in the Global South.

Ghai has accepted the fact that India's megacities are not going to become wheelchair friendly anytime soon. A handful of assistive technology startups are developing products to fill the gap in access and ameliorate the wheelchair unfriendliness of public spaces. One of these products is TurnPlus, created by Anand Kutre, a mechanical engineer in Bengaluru. His startup, True Consultancy, retrofits cars so that the seats can be swiveled, making getting in and getting out of a car easier.

The technology behind TurnPlus is simple: The original seat remains intact, and a swivel mechanism is installed under the seat. TurnPlus doesn't require electricity or batteries. It can be moved with one pound of effort: the equivalent of exertion from a single finger. The intervention costs about $600 (45,000 rupees), including installation, and is advertised not only to help wheelchair users but also people with back pain, knee problems, arthritis, and chronic illnesses. It is also useful for those who have limited mobility after recovering from surgery.

True Consultancy's TurnPlus seat swivel mechanism can be used with one pound of effort.

"We came across senior citizens who avoid traveling simply because they find it difficult to get in and out of the car. Our product will help them hit the streets again," Kutre told in 2017. Before the article, Kutre had sold about five units through word of mouth. After the media hit, his sales increased. To date, he has sold 120 units. Though TurnPlus is not yet available outside of India, Kutre is in conversation with a network of car dealerships in the U.S.

Products like TurnPlus could make Ghai's life easier - to get from the driver's seat of her car to her motorized wheelchair, she currently puts her weight on the car seat or door handle, which can be unpleasant; sometimes, her shirt risks slipping off. "It's also a sense of shame, at this age," she admitted. When she spoke to Rest of World in 2020, Ghai hadn't heard of TurnPlus' swivel seat mechanism. "Our biggest challenge was awareness," Kutre said.

Although the pandemic put a strain on the country's economy, India's VC culture is thriving: In 2020, a record $10 billion in VC funding flowed into consumer tech, software, and fintech startups in India. The most recent Y Combinator had more startups from India than from any other country outside of the Western bubble. But Kutre says that venture capitalists often overlook disability entirely. Even if a firm says that they are interested in impact funding, "they still look at their standard of three times or five times returns in a certain period of time," Kutre said. "That mindset, I think, has to change. They will get the returns, but maybe the time period will be more." So far, he has funded his business with his own earnings from his consulting firm.

"The innovations are very few and they're starting now," said Reddy of Vision Empower Trust. "Before it was mostly charity orientated," she said, "but, slowly, the space is changing."

"It's much better than before. But still, it's the beginning. It has just started."

For Jácome and Obando, making fast money and having an impact are, perhaps, two different things. "Startups like ours are most concentrated in making a long-term impact with different kinds of users that face different kinds of challenges," Jácome said. "There are very few VCs or investors that are looking for something other than making a lot of money fast - that are looking for social and environmental impact," he added.

Traditional sources of funding aren't even on Talov's radar. "We are always looking for a different kind of investor, trying to search in big companies like Apple and Google and their accessibility programs [to find] the support that we often need," Jácome said. But compared to a delivery service, "it's harder for us."

Gaeta, the disability studies researcher in Wisconsin, went one step further. "I would go so far as to say that people don't see these kinds of assistive technologies as valuable," she said. "You get the sense from this kind of widespread permeated ideology that disabled people are of lesser social value. They're of lesser importance."

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Tech for disabled people is booming. So where's the funding?

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Erick Ponce works in a government communications department in northern Ecuador. The 26-year-old happens to be deaf - a disability he has had since childhood. Communicating fluidly with his non-signing colleagues at work, and in public spaces like the supermarket, has been a lifelong challenge.

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Women in corporate roles are even more burned out than ever

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Women in corporate roles are even more burned out than ever

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Women in the Workplace 2024: The 10th-anniversary report

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Now celebrating its 10th anniversary, McKinsey’s annual Women in the Workplace report is the largest study of women in corporate America. See our 2024 findings.