Tag: generation y

Categories
Start-ups

Solving the Gen Y Woman’s Career Problem

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Levo League launched last week by founders Caroline Ghosn and Amanda Pouchot. It’s a professional social network for Gen Y women, and is funded to the tune of $1.25 million by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Ning founder Gina Biancihini, and Gilt Groupe’s Susan Lyne among others.

Oh, and it sucks.

Big connections mean big expectations and I’d say with the exception of some fantastic and probably un-deserved PR (Can you say privilege? Co-founder Caroline Ghosn is the daughter of Nissan and Renault CEO Carlos Ghosn), the launch has fallen spectacularly flat.

The site is confusing and manages to mash up bad and outdated UI simultaneously, while not making it clear that you need to be “accepted” to use the site. And let’s stop right there and point out that applying to be accepted flies in the face of Generation Y’s most basic principles, the team-building generation that gives everyone a trophy. We like to flatten hierarchy, not build it. While I understand the tactic is more about marketing, creating false scarcity around a demographic that puts inclusion first is lame.

After sign up, you are dumped into an environment with limited content – although what content is there is solid – a teeny tiny job board, a deserted community “lounge” (already?), and a directory of companies with no job openings.

Except, wait, the joke is on you. When you are accepted into Levo League, the content and pages on the site? Exactly the same.

Totally bizarre, to say the least. Let’s not forget, similar, if not identical sites have tried and failed. Damsels in Success, also described as a social network for professional women, launched back when I was a wee beginner of a blogger. Founder Harleen Kahloon also had major connections, lots of press, and good content. And yet, the site no longer exists.

Safe to say, the future of women and careers online is not a directory of companies, job listings, and a social network tacked on. It’s almost as if Levo League should have launched in the late nineties along with Careerbuilder and Monster. But these days, those guys are failing. Monster recently laid off 400 people and just last week, put itself up for sale.

(Sidebar and disclosure: Ryan’s company was also a professional social network for Gen Y at one point. And it too failed. I’ve watched the painful progression and pivots over three years to Brazen’s current, successful iteration that allows recruiters and job candidates to connect in a useful and innovative way.)

The funny thing is, I’m pretty sure Levo League’s founders know this too.  The number one thing you can do for career opportunities and advancement (read: dream jobs, meaningful work, more money, better titles) is to network, network, and network. Eighty percent of job openings are filled through networking (you know, actually talking to people), and certainly Ghosn and Pouchot are masters in this regard. These founders are exceptionally smart and likeable, and engaging to watch to boot.

But managing your career and building a start-up are different. At some point the relationships that give you money, press, and maybe even your first few thousand users will do nothing to retain your users, build loyalty and create rabid fans. PR is only an attention-based mechanism. It does nothing for engagement, retention or product strategy. It is one thing for friends to support you to your face, but it is quite another for them to use the product you’ve built and integrate it into their daily or weekly life. Friends aren’t users.

The Levo League site just isn’t set up to support networking and mentorship between ambitious women. There is an interesting opportunity there, however. Why not create a mentorship site that matches mentors like dating sites match mates? Or even simply match like-minded career women? That sort of algorithm would be awesome and totally useful.

I have no doubt Levo League will be successful, eventually. Their smarts, that kind of money, and their high-profile backers mean Ghosn and Pouchot will have the luxury to pivot, iterate and learn from their mistakes. Let’s just hope they fail fast. I’m ready to see what’s next.

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What do you need to succeed in your career? Networking, support, advice? What’s missing on career sites today? 

Categories
Education

The (Online) Self-Educated: Doing What Colleges Can’t

Education is stuck at all levels. Increasingly so the older a student gets. College students not only face back-breaking debt, but also come out of their four-to-six year sojourns with little to no increase in their abilities or knowledge.

In one recent study, a group of students were asked to take a standardized test covering skills students are expected to garner from an undergraduate education, and 45 percent of students “did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning” during the first two years of college, while 36 percent of students “did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning” at all over their four years of college.

Traditional models of education don’t deliver a quality education at a realistic or reliable scale – we would need thousands more teachers to appropriately educate everyone, and no one wants to be a teacher because they get paid like crap and are blamed for the dismal future of our kids and the next generation.

So when young people graduate college, the education they receive is mostly useless; we can all get the same education or better online. If we’re self-motivated.

“But how many people really have what it takes — the courage, the stamina, the native smarts, the willingness to admit mistakes without blaming others, the sheer and extreme initiative — to learn that way? The entrepreneurial gene is not widely distributed,” argues Alan Jacobs.

Indeed, MIT offers many of its computer science classes online, but many of us are not likely to start one, let alone finish it, despite any express desires to learn programming. Not to mention the field of computer science has a myriad of resources on the Internet, all of which are free, to teach yourself how to learn math, javascript, html, ruby, and so on and so forth.

And we really need programmers to fuel the next phase of innovation. I work for a start-up, and my company is looking to hire multiple engineers. At every tech meetup I attend, non-technical founders are practically begging to partner with developers. And those who do hold these elusive titles are often recruited with incentives and bonuses.

Seems like a bunch of us would want to jump on the self-education boat and get after this opportunity to become one of the most sought-after titles in the world. But most people don’t follow-through (even when they have the express goal to learn programming). There is still a dearth of developers, despite the wide availability of knowledge on the Internet.

Which begs the question, is web education really the future?

In real life, we idealistically view education as “a dynamic and interactive environment in which students have daily real-world encounters with faculty and with one another, encounters which, unlike Google searches, are not limited by what you already know to search for,” argues Jacobs. “In many cases, those schools also require you to take classes you would never choose on your own, to read books you’ve never heard of, to articulate thoughts about issues so challenging that left to your own devices you’d just go do something else.”

True. But while Jacobs ultimately concludes that DIY education is “parasitic on existing universities,” (he is a University professor, after all), web education will be a force to be reckoned with.

First, we need to come to terms that free education and distributed knowledge is largely useless. Yes, a small cohort of people will take up the cause to learn a new skill or dive deep into a topic of study, but the rest of us will watch TED videos contentedly in our cubicles as our educational fill for the day.

The availability of free information is not enough. It needs to be organized appropriately, with content that is delivered sequentially over time instead of all at once. Each lesson or module needs to build upon the last in a clear path of knowledge. The information needs to be available in different formats and platforms to accommodate different learning styles and technologies (i.e., videos, transcripts, mobile, tablet, etc.).

And web education has to go beyond exceptional content. It needs leaders with expertise and authority, as well as a passion to teach. It needs learners that can use comments or live chats to ask questions and throw out ideas to see what sticks. And those learners need the opportunity to speak individually to the teacher through group coaching calls or individual mentorship.

In essence, online education needs to mirror the best of real-world education. Can it be better than an in-person experience? By far, yes. You can watch video-based lectures over and over again. You can pace modules to your rhythm. And, teachers won’t speak from theory, but success and experience. Not to mention an amazing community that will want to learn with you.

Web education can do what colleges can’t – deliver knowledge at an impressive scale and at an affordable price to change the direction of knowledge for the better. Log on.

Categories
Women

The Buck Stops With Generation Z

Gender inequality exists, but only in the workplace. Young women grow up believing in equality, but when she enters the workplace, she hits a brick wall.  That will stop when Generation Z joins the workforce. Not because gendered roles will somehow evolve in the next decade, but because technology will.

Generation Z is the most technologically immersed and advanced generation ever. They are known as “digital natives”  because they have never known a world without iPhones, laptops, video games, chat windows, tabs and texts. On airplanes, toddlers are abated with digital shows and video games instead of stuffed animals and paper coloring books.

Such tech-ubiquity means Gen Z holds the following traits above and beyond any other generation, all of which will eliminate gender inequality:

1. Multi-tasking. Gen Z are innate multi-taskers, and are primed to want instant and immediate outcomes. It also means that Gen Z wants clarity and simplicity – some say they tend to oversimplify – but this is good for inequality. Gen Z won’t have the time or patience to engage in the nuances of gender, and thus, will simply allow people to just be “who they are.”

In the “Becoming Chaz” documentary, Chaz Bono remarked it was the youngest members of his family that took his transition from female to male the easiest. In fact, these youngsters said it wasn’t a big deal at all. That’s just “who he is,” they said.

2. Globalized empathy. Part of their ease with gender is that Gen Z is well-educated. “They are much more connected to the outside world than previous generations,” says Alec Mackenzie, an eighth-grade Spanish, language arts and film teacher. “They know what is hanging in the Louvre because they’ve seen it on the Internet. They know more about the world because they visit it on the computer.”

As such, they are much more empathetic and knowledgeable to the plights of their peers. Generally known to be wise beyond their years (“12 has become the new 22,” says one Gen Zer) and living in a fully postmodern era, they are especially aware that everything is a social construct, particularly gender. They shy away from sharp classifications such as male versus female, straight versus gay, white versus black.

3. Lack of ambition. Their elders are already bemoaning Gen Z’s lack of ambition, but that is really their dis-enthrallment with traditional power structures and control. Gen Z is growing up in a world where the old power structures have already fallen apart (marriage: divorce, wealth: financial meltdown, security: terrorism), so there is nothing left to put on a pedestal.

Climbing the ladder will become less important as a result. Gen Z will job-hop in their careers to find satisfaction, just like they multi-task in their daily lives. They’re expected to have at least five careers and more than 20 employers in positions that don’t even exist today. It’s hard to be ambitious when you don’t know what the future will hold.

“They are very collaborative and creative. They will change the workplace dramatically in terms of work style and expectations,” argues technology professor Larry Rosen. While Gen Y strived for team-oriented work approaches and collaborative environments, it will be Gen Z who really reaps the benefit. As old power structures melt away, and the status quo becomes working together instead of in competition, women and men will find themselves on an even-playing field.

4. Pleasure-seeking. Those power structures will shift from the workplace to personal lives. Previous generations have paved the way for a workplace that was first live to work (Boomers), then work to live or work/life balance (Gen X), and is now live with work or work/life blur (Gen Y). Taking this to it’s natural conclusion, Gen Z will live. Work will take a backseat to Gen Z’s hedonism.

Already Gen Z has a reputation as pleasure-seeking and consumerist. Not to mention anyone can be a star now and have their own following due to the decentralized web. Consumerism used to confer status (which was traditionally wrapped up in a man’s success and career), but Gen Z will buy things simply to feel something. When that happens, when men and women care less about power and more about pleasure, equality will be easier.

5. Remote workers. “Computers have blurred the line between the workplace and home for adults, and the same is true for today’s students,” argues Duane Mendoza, a technology resource teacher. Via web-based lessons, students in Mendoza’s yearbook class are able to work from anywhere.

Gen Y blurred work and life to work remotely because they wanted flexibility and fulfillment. But Gen Z will work remotely because they know no other way. They prefer to communicate via email and text. While replacing side-by-side and eye-to-eye human connections with quick, disembodied e-exchanges may seem counter-intuitive, it will allow sexual innuendo to stop. Not being in the same physical location alone will decrease harassment. And when Gen Z isn’t working in person, they won’t be able to see the perpetuity of men in power that keeps men in power.

Gen Y believes in equality, but can’t have it because they’re stuck in a workplace with outdated paradigms. Gen Z won’t be stuck there though. They’ll be at the coffee shop with their friends on their laptops. As a result, Gen Z will be the first generation where women and men are mutually respected not just in their personal lives and relationships, but also at work.

In the comments below, let me know me know the single biggest insight you gained from today’s post. Of course, if you have additional ideas or resources about Gen Z, technology, and the future of equality, share them below as well.

Categories
Future of Work

Fare Thee Well, Boss

The boss-employee relationship is defunct. Managers think young workers aren’t willing to pay dues, but really young workers aren’t willing to be employees. Managers dangle the lure of a raise or a title, but young workers just want to build something together as a team.

The new org chart shouldn’t be based on hierarchy then, but a horizontal ladder of peer-to-peer management, where employee and boss teach and learn from each other. They share, knowledge, experience and ideas.

Working together in service to a larger vision is a more human way of employment, but it is antithetical to how businesses currently run. A business is successful – no matter what it’s product, salsa or insurance – because it can replicate a system to make that  salsa, distribute the salsa and find customers to buy the salsa over and over again. The 5,674th jar of salsa has the same chance at delighting a customer and turning a profit as the first.

Start-ups call this the secret sauce.

That’s why many people love working at start-ups so much (and why many people don’t). At a large company, you advance your career not on the originality of your own ideas, but because you can showcase increasing familiarity and understanding of the company’s secret sauce. You’re the company man.

At a start-up, particularly in the beginning, all ideas are equal. The secret sauce is unknown. It’s a mystery. The mode of work is to test, experiment and recycle constantly. Will it work to do it this way? How about this way? It is a puzzle, an unfinished essay, half of a log cabin. The end result is only known as something great in the mind’s vision. A large company buys a start-up because the start-up figured out the replicable system.

When a company finds the secret sauce, it is institutionalized because it works. A hierarchy is put in place to ensure it continues to work and that no one deviates from the system, because that would put the company’s success at risk.

Originality is siloed into its own department, but companies do have to keep pace with innovation, so orders to add to or subtract from the secret sauce are handed down from those who are most familiar with the company’s system, typically upper-management.

You usually have to advance through a company’s hierarchy to change the system, because factory workers don’t have their own widget factories to experiment with, for instance. In order to know all there is about creating a widget you have to continue to be promoted. Hierarchy makes sense.

But wait, we don’t make widgets in the knowledge economy.

The Internet gives everyone connected to it the same opportunity to experiment on the same platform, whether you’re a company or individual. Now low-level employees have front-level, do-it-yourself access to the tools that create the systems and sauce on a scale more omnipresent than ever before.

A blog is an experiment. How do you bring in consistent subscribers? Does commenting on other blogs work? What about guest-posting? Does emailing other bloggers work? Should you build relationships with Blogger A or Blogger B? Why? What is quality content? How do you write it? Does it matter?

An Etsy shop is a test. What headlines work? Does it matter how the crocheted plastic bag holder is photographed? Where do you advertise your products? Google? Facebook ads? What is good SEO? Which color is better? What is the customer’s feedback? Which shipping method is cheapest and fastest? Does including a personal note give you a better rating?

Expertise is no longer institutionally created, but self-made. And it is no longer systematized but shared in the open for the rest of the web to adapt, change and build upon.

There is no need for hierarchy. Decision makers, yes. Titles and responsibilities, yes. But hierarchy, no. Leadership is now inclusive and collaborative.

Fare thee well, boss. It was nice to know you.

Categories
Women

A Brief History of How We Fail Women

Women were raised with the idea that we have a choice – a choice to be single or not, to have kids or not, to delay marriage, to pursue a career or not, to have it all, to live our lives the way we want to… or not. Female empowerment by way of the pill, Sex in the City, and a steady backlash towards Marie Claire all created a compelling feminist march.

And choice sounded good until hitting the reality of biology.

Feminist back-tracking all the way to mainstream 60 Minutes and others inundated female consciousness with some alarming counsel:  career women risk infertility, miscarriage and general unhappiness. So don’t wait; there is a deadline for “having it all.”

It was a lose-lose situation. Choose a career and risk having a family, or choose a family and risk having a career. The biological clock guaranteed you couldn’t have both. Many women tried – and failed – to sneak marriage in at just the right moment to have a career without kids for a few years, but not too late that the fertility window closed. It turned out only women of privilege could pull that off, and only through the latest scientific advancements.

Despite reality, choice brought about certain expectations. Women were expected to fill the same categories as men. If men shot guns and went to war, women should not only be able to do the same, but with the same performance. Women could hold public office or play sports or fix houses just as well as men.

None of that happened in large numbers however. After 30 years, women today aren’t represented in positions where men have traditionally held power, and still can’t close the salary gap. Faced with such disheartening realities, scientists, journalists, and feminists decided the reason wasn’t because discrimination and difference are still rampant (apparently, society is too evolved for such a notion), but rather that men and women are different.

The differences extend far beyond having a penis or a vagina, and supposedly prove that women simply aren’t interested or wired to thrive in traditionally male-dominated areas like say, math.

Brain scans show that women aren’t good at math so women will never be engineers, technologists, or scientists. Women are too empathetic to be CEOs. Women aren’t competitive enough to be in start-ups. Career blogger Penelope Trunk exemplifies the prevailing attitude in a recent post: “It’s outdated to think there are no differences between men and women. And once we accept there are differences, we need to study them instead of downplay them.”

Trunk goes on to make the argument (with brain scan images and all) that “we can say, with a decent amount of certainty, that the average girl is as good at math as the average boy,” because of decades of data.

Author Cordelia Fine argues in her methodical and myth-busting book Delusions of Gender, that “[those] who argue that there are hardwired differences between the sexes that account for the gender status quo often like to position themselves as courageous knights of truth, who brave the stifling ideology of political correctness,” but these claims made by so-called experts are “simply coating old-fashioned stereotypes with a veneer of scientific credibility.”

And that veneer is easily cracked. The things that hold women back aren’t biologically wired, but socially and culturally ingrained. Fine methodically turns popular science on its head to punch a giant hole in neurosexism.

“Although it’s not yet clear what it is, exactly, about neuroscience that is so persuasive, it’s been found that people find scientific arguments more compelling when accompanied by an image showing brain activation rather than, say, a bar graph showing the same information,” reports Fine.

It turns out white versus gray matter in the brain is a relatively useless determination of what creates gender difference. The real cause is something that’s much easier to understand, but harder to accept – we create it, every day.

Gender is socially constructed to the point that simply asking a person to mark whether they are male or female, or having a person write their name, will prime their behavior and actions, and affect how they achieve on tests and in life.

Most data will show men test better than women in math. But when women are tested on their math ability and told that “despite testing on thousands of students, no gender difference has ever been found,” they “outperform every other group – including both groups of men. In other words, the standard presentation of a test seemed to suppress women’s ability, but when the same test was presented to women as equally hard for men and women, it ‘unleashed their mathematics potential,’” reports Fine.

Trunk isn’t alone in propagating neuro-falsehoods, however. We’re now told that to walk into a classroom or workplace without knowledge of how the brain works (and how certain abilities are biologically pre-determined) is actually detrimental in terms of treating both genders equally.

Well-loved VC Fred Wilson recently posted an interview with his wife Joanne Wilson in which she argued gender difference starts “from the time you come out of the womb. Boys gravitate towards blocks. Girls gravitate to the dolls. That’s a generalization but in general, its true. I look at my own kids – my son, gamer extraordinaire. My daughters used to play those games but then they lost interest.”

Wilson is wrong on both accounts – as a result of gender priming and salience, gender difference starts far before a child exits the womb.

“Women who knew the sex of their unborn baby described the movements of sons and daughters differently,” reports Fine. “All were ‘active,’ but male activity was more likely to be described as ‘vigorous’ and ‘strong.’ Female activity, by contrast, was described in gentler terms: ‘Not violent, not excessively energetic, not terribly active were used for females.’”

And the gravitation for young girls and boys towards certain types of toys is not because of a biologically ingrained or wired reason, but because children start learning the gender ropes early on. Fine reports: “As they approach their second birthday, children are already starting to pick up the rudiments of gender stereotyping.”

It is no mistake that having not achieved equality by choice, or through the impossible success of “having it all,” that women are now being told that they are just born that way (as women) with all the rules and limitations the gender entails.  It is no mistake these supposed biologically ingrained differences are too large to surmount. It is no mistake that while consciously reported beliefs are modern, progressive and indicative of an enlightened and evolved society that unconscious actions and behaviors are remarkably reactionary and indicative of the large discrimination, difference and inequality that still exist.

It is no mistake gender is one of the most salient social constructions. And it is no mistake the construct consistently fails women.