Wendy Murphy shares that many senior male managers are reportedly responding to the #Metoo movement with a better-safe-than-sorry attitude and are pulling back from mentoring women. This reaction is both biased and shortsighted she says.
Repercussions of depriving female employees of the counseling, developmental opportunities, exposure, and visibility that come from mentoring relationships have serious consequences for the future of the organization.
Source: Harvard Business Review, March 15, 2019. Link. So how should men approach mentoring in today’s workplace? Murphy offers these five suggestions:
- Intentionally seek out women mentees
- Be transparent in your developmental practices
- Listen with empathy to ask good questions
- Acknowledge gender issues exist
- Actively sponsor her and help her connect with other sponsors
Also see: U.S. Men Less Concerned Than in 2017 About Sexual Harassment, Gallup, March 18, 2019. Link.
Less than a year and a half after the #Metoo movement took America by storm, men in the U.S. have become less likely to say that sexual harassment is a major problem in the workplace and that people in the workplace are not sensitive enough to it. Still . . . most Americans, including a majority of men, still think workplace sexual harassment is a major problem.