Career Journey
Changing Corporate Culture to Better Accommodate Women
Interview with Eileen Scully, author, speaker and founder of The Rising Tides
April 2018
Interview with Eileen Scully, author, speaker and founder of The Rising Tides
April 2018
Eileen Scully
About Eileen and The Rising Tides:
In 2015, Eileen founded The Rising Tides, an organization dedicated to making the workplace better for women by driving cultures that support women regardless of life stage. She offers companies in-depth assessments, workshops and executive consulting services. She serves on the Board of The Get in Touch Foundation, which provides free breast health education to girls, and serves as an advisor to the Innovadores Foundation, an organization working toward solving challenges in Cuba through innovation. In 2016, Eileen was invited by the Obama White House to participate in the United State of Women as one of five thousand global advocates for women and girls. In 2017, she was named one of Irish America Magazine's 2017 Business 100 Honorees. Eileen's book, In the Company of Men: How Women Can Succeed in a World Built Without Them, will be released later this year. (Find link below to pre-order and for information about events.)
In 2015, Eileen founded The Rising Tides, an organization dedicated to making the workplace better for women by driving cultures that support women regardless of life stage. She offers companies in-depth assessments, workshops and executive consulting services. She serves on the Board of The Get in Touch Foundation, which provides free breast health education to girls, and serves as an advisor to the Innovadores Foundation, an organization working toward solving challenges in Cuba through innovation. In 2016, Eileen was invited by the Obama White House to participate in the United State of Women as one of five thousand global advocates for women and girls. In 2017, she was named one of Irish America Magazine's 2017 Business 100 Honorees. Eileen's book, In the Company of Men: How Women Can Succeed in a World Built Without Them, will be released later this year. (Find link below to pre-order and for information about events.)
Nancy Burger, senior editor, talked with Eileen about what she sees as the key factors necessary in improving the corporate environment for women.
In your experience working with companies, what are you seeing as some of the predominant issues women are facing?
We raise our girls to do absolutely everything right. We teach them to go into sports and excel, to go work in villages in Guatemala on their spring breaks, to take AP courses, to crank their GPAs, to get involved in student government - all those leadership targets - and they do that. One of the stats that I quote frequently in my work is: 70% of high school valedictorians are girls, and that number is trending upward. But, because most universities want to maintain a 60%/40% gender split, when those girls apply to their first choice college, many won't get a spot simply because of their gender. So, it's the opposite of the argument we've always been told, that we weren't smart enough, fast enough…these girls are proving that to be wrong, but they still aren't getting those spots.
What affect do you think that will have over time?
One of the pieces of research I'm working on right now is the lifetime impact of that. If you're one of those girls who doesn't get access to your top choice school, that has financial repercussions over your lifetime. The interesting piece of this for me is that my generation was told we weren't strong enough in math and science and weren't capable of doing those things, but we're telling our daughters that they can be anything and do anything, and they're proving those hypotheses wrong, yet they're still falling behind through no fault of their own.
How do we break that cycle?
By looking at the culture being created that is keeping certain people out of important conversations - people who should be in those conversations. People tell me, "I want to make my culture better. I know there are things that might be broken, and I want to examine them and fix them. But I really want to become an employer of choice, for the marketplace to see my brand as one that isn't just diverse but is inclusive." Those two words have very different meanings: diverse means that everyone is allowed at the table, while inclusive means that everyone belongs at the table and that everyone has valid input.
Where do you start the work in those companies?
I start by looking at what their current makeup is, what their promotion trends have been - who is being promoted into what jobs and why, and who are the people that are in the talent pipeline for promotion. A lot of companies, for example, will find that women will leave the company when they reach a certain level of management. That's the nut you have to crack. I want to help them understand what it is that tells those women that advancing in the company isn't going to work for them. Is there a work-life balance that gets skewed for them in that organization? How much of it can you fix and how valuable to the organization were those employees that left? A lot of companies haven't looked at that - at the working conditions under which employees are expected to perform.
In your experience working with companies, what are you seeing as some of the predominant issues women are facing?
We raise our girls to do absolutely everything right. We teach them to go into sports and excel, to go work in villages in Guatemala on their spring breaks, to take AP courses, to crank their GPAs, to get involved in student government - all those leadership targets - and they do that. One of the stats that I quote frequently in my work is: 70% of high school valedictorians are girls, and that number is trending upward. But, because most universities want to maintain a 60%/40% gender split, when those girls apply to their first choice college, many won't get a spot simply because of their gender. So, it's the opposite of the argument we've always been told, that we weren't smart enough, fast enough…these girls are proving that to be wrong, but they still aren't getting those spots.
What affect do you think that will have over time?
One of the pieces of research I'm working on right now is the lifetime impact of that. If you're one of those girls who doesn't get access to your top choice school, that has financial repercussions over your lifetime. The interesting piece of this for me is that my generation was told we weren't strong enough in math and science and weren't capable of doing those things, but we're telling our daughters that they can be anything and do anything, and they're proving those hypotheses wrong, yet they're still falling behind through no fault of their own.
How do we break that cycle?
By looking at the culture being created that is keeping certain people out of important conversations - people who should be in those conversations. People tell me, "I want to make my culture better. I know there are things that might be broken, and I want to examine them and fix them. But I really want to become an employer of choice, for the marketplace to see my brand as one that isn't just diverse but is inclusive." Those two words have very different meanings: diverse means that everyone is allowed at the table, while inclusive means that everyone belongs at the table and that everyone has valid input.
Where do you start the work in those companies?
I start by looking at what their current makeup is, what their promotion trends have been - who is being promoted into what jobs and why, and who are the people that are in the talent pipeline for promotion. A lot of companies, for example, will find that women will leave the company when they reach a certain level of management. That's the nut you have to crack. I want to help them understand what it is that tells those women that advancing in the company isn't going to work for them. Is there a work-life balance that gets skewed for them in that organization? How much of it can you fix and how valuable to the organization were those employees that left? A lot of companies haven't looked at that - at the working conditions under which employees are expected to perform.
Click the link below for more information
about Eileen's
soon-to-be-released book:
about Eileen's
soon-to-be-released book:
