A Holiday Gift List For Leaders, Presidents, Boards and Museum Staff
Posted: December 13, 2022 Filed under: active listening, Communication, gender equity, Leadership, museum salaries, pay equity, Workplace Bias Leave a comment
Dzaky Adinata – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=93698541
In many cultures worldwide, winter is a time for gift giving. In that spirit, here are a dozen things museum leadership can give their staffs apart from a holiday party.
- According the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only one in five U.S. workers has sick leave. Part-time workers are least likely to be offered sick leave, while union members are more likely. Do your staff–all of them–have the agency to take care of themselves or a loved one while also getting paid? Give the gift of personal time.
- When things go wrong at work, do you have colleagues–inside or outside your workplace– you can really talk to? Who do you download to, dirt and all? Find them, online or in real life, and your staff or team will thank you. We all need space to download. Give yourself the gift of your own personal posse.
- Is your staff happy? How do you know if you’re not listening? Have coffee with a different group of staff every month, and give the gift of listening.
- Has your organization done an equity pay audit? Unconscious bias doesn’t just plague people we don’t like. We all have it. Give your staff the gift of equitable pay.
- For leaders and for followers: give the gift of not rushing in. If you’re angry, especially if you’re really angry, press pause. Dial it back. Separate your personal anger and hurt over whatever happened, and approach your staff member or colleague when you’ve sorted things out.
- Give the gift of respect: Most humans try to do their best. Approach problems as if your staff meant well. Sorting out what went wrong will be easier.
- Do you and your staff have an HR policy? Is it easily accessed and clear to navigate? Give your staff a path to resolution for workplace problems.
- A frantically busy staff isn’t always a creative staff, and spitting out to-do lists isn’t the mark of good leadership. Time is precious. Acknowledge it, and give your staff time to think.
- Good leaders are empathizers. Give your staff, colleagues and board the gift of empathy. Hopefully, it will come right back at you.
- Transparency is inclusive. Give your staff the gift of shared information. You don’t need to have all the answers, but build trust by sharing what you know.
- Do you muddle kindness with inequity? You let staff member “A” leave early because their relative has weekly appointments, but say no to staff member “B” who can’t make their after-work class without leaving early. Give the gift of equitable policy making and abide by it.
- We are all flawed, fallible humans. Some days we get the bear, others the bear gets us. Don’t let past mistakes imprison staff or you. We all need the opportunity to try again and succeed. Take the proffered apology and move forward. Give yourself and others the gift of acceptance.
Above all, be kind. That doesn’t mean being mushy or losing your principles, it just means being kind. Remember to use “Yes, and..” and also “How can I help?” Who knows, maybe you and your colleagues will reframe leadership in 2023?
Be well, do good work, enjoy family and friends, and I’ll see you in January.
Joan Baldwin
Museum Leadership and DEI: A Process or an End Game?
Posted: November 9, 2021 Filed under: Diversity, gender equity, Leadership, Race, Workplace Bias Leave a comment
Last week’s post generated some buzz. It also prompted me to continue thinking about race and workplace equity, so here goes:
My grandmother was born at the end of the 19th-century. A generation later she might have been a professor or a politician, but as a young woman who finished college before WWI, her rebelliousness ended when she married. When I was little, she frequently spoke in quotes, most of which sailed past me. A frequent flyer was “Do as you would be done by, ” a sentence that seemed so riddled with verbs and prepositions that it was unintelligible. But decades later, it has more resonance.
Many of our organizations either have Diversity, Equity and Inclusion offices or aspire to have them. They are there to help us right centuries of wrong doing, to re-center our overwhelming White world views, and to provide staff safety and security in knowing everyone, not just the powerful and well compensated, is treated equitably. In retrospect, what strikes me about the Chicago Art Institute’s decision to dissolve its docent program in favor of paid, BIPOC, front-facing staff, is not the decision itself, but about the museum world’s reaction to it. Equity isn’t equity unless it applies to everyone, even the people whose political views, values, and personal choices you don’t share. In other words, to quote my grandmother, “Do as you would be done by.”
It strikes me that this is likely one of the most challenging parts of 21st-century leadership. As a leader, you need to be fair or equitable, always. Not just because it makes your organizational optics better, not just because you’re trying to appease a particular group or board member, and not just because in your heart you’re more allied with one point of view than another. To be truly equitable, your bag of biases must be kept off-stage otherwise you’re liable to privilege one individual or group over another. Why? Because they appear to share your values? Maybe outside of work they’re your friends? Maybe they remind you of a family member? Who knows? But when push comes to shove, they stir your sympathies, and cause you to lean in ways others do not, and unless you acknowledge that behavior and interrogate it, your decision making will be flawed, and you will likely make inequitable decisions.
One of the symptoms of post-Trump, post-COVID America is people seem free to speak their minds whether one-on-one, on social media or through protest. That can be healthy–like when staff collaborates for better salaries and benefits perhaps through union membership–or unhealthy–when a museum visitor berates a staff member. It also means when decisions are made, it’s likely there will be a reaction, which is all the more reason today’s museum leaders need to understand their own value systems, to align them with those of their organization, and to make sure the two mirror one another.
Last week some readers pointed out that we don’t really know how the Art Institute communicated with its docents, whether it chose to speak with them face-to-face or ended the volunteer program via email. Fair enough. But it’s easy to applaud the dissolution of one program without knowing anything about what will replace it. Would it help if we knew the Art Institute had also revamped its hiring practices so candidates are assessed with a minimum of bias? Would it help is we knew the Art Institute had prioritized BIPOC hiring, onboarding and mentoring?
Workplace equity is critical for everyone. And at the same time, we don’t leave our values, our beliefs, our friendships and our families behind when we enter the workplace each morning. That means museum leaders, whether at the top of the organizational food chain or department heads, need to be endlessly empathetic, and constantly engage in self-reflection, working to ensure individual success along with the collective whole. They need to make challenging the status quo the the beginning, not the end game. In short, systemic change means there are no quick solutions. And they need to understand White people’s antiracist work can leave Black colleagues exhausted. Why? Because somehow it becomes a White thing, necessitating congratulations, acknowledgement, and once again making White staff the focus of the narrative.
Change begins when an all-White volunteer program becomes BIPOC and paid, but it can’t end there. Is it enough that a predominantly White museum feels less bad because it changes the color of its front-facing staff without knowing whether they are safe, seen, and supported? Does a different staff who still bears the burden of a racist museum culture make for a different museum? In a perfect world, antiracist work is a process that hopefully deconstructs the ways White ideologies are prioritized in a museum, linking staff changes to larger internal organizational changes designed to create safe, equitable museum workplaces.
Be well and do good work.
Joan Baldwin
The Graduate School Conundrum
Posted: August 30, 2021 Filed under: AAM, Leadership, museum career, Workplace Bias Leave a comment
Last week there was an interesting and lengthy exchange on Museum-L, the museum discussion list, prompted when someone asked whether their hopes of getting a museum position with only a bachelor’s degree were unrealistic, and then followed up by asking how important a graduate degree is in breaking into the profession.
The responses were all over the map, from suggestions that museums aren’t higher education, and hands-on experience is more important than degrees, to the idea that most of what museum studies degree programs teach is a mystery taught by people with little or no experience. There were also voices saying that what matters is soft skills, which can’t be taught, as opposed to basic museum tasks which can be learned. Coincidentally, no one in this email string mentioned the word bias although these questions speak directly to the accretion of barriers in museum land over the last 50 years that have kept and continue to keep deserving people out of the field. Since last summer and George Floyd’s murder there’s been a lot of woe-is-me about the whiteness of the job sector, but this question of whether you need a master’s or doctorate speaks directly to the barriers in museumland.
But back to the question of whether graduate school is necessary or not: In full transparency, I have co-taught for the last several years, although not this semester, in the Johns Hopkins Museum Studies Program. Co-teaching one course in museum leadership doesn’t give me the right to comment on the program as a whole–although FYI to the Museum-L commenter JHU’s course descriptions are all available online so no mystery there–but I will say that by and large the students are impressive, smart, creative, and verbal. Almost all of them work full time with a portion of them working in museums across the country and around the world.
Coincidentally, my own program issued a job announcement this week, and went through a parallel discussion regarding graduate school requirements. Granted libraries are not the same as museums, although it is an allied field with many larger museums housing a library or an archives, while in my case, archives and special collections sit under the library umbrella. So, as you might imagine, there was some discussion about the question of whether our new job description would require an MLS. In the end, the answer was no. The position is front facing, and the overwhelming hope is that the person who fills it will be long on people skills. Everything else can be learned. Being kind, intuitive, empathetic and efficient on a campus of driven and often stressed adolescents, can’t be learned, and the damage done while an employee sorts out how to treat their co-workers and the audience can do a boatload of damage.
So, what’s the answer? In a perfect world I wish museums could get over themselves a bit and hire for the skills they really need, not for some artificial content-driven degree. Graduate school is huge investment. Johns Hopkins charges $4,554 per course, and 10 courses are necessary for the degree. And as an online program since way before COVID, JHU is cheaper than the more traditional in-person graduate programs requiring students to press pause on work while going to class each day. If you’re going to make such a huge investment of money and time wouldn’t it be great if you could spend time in the field first to see if it really moves you? Not to mention whether you can afford to stay in a field where according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics there is a median salary of roughly $48,500.
If your passion is curatorial, you’re going to need content–potentially a lot of content and research–to make your mark in an art, history or science museum. You may do that by combining an art history masters with real world experience or perhaps your PhD in entomology will land you a position in a natural history museum. But for many other positions, the field demands a knowledge of the museum ecosystem, an understanding of the positions within the job sector, and a passion for collaborating with your audience, combined with an understanding that it’s not what you look at that matters, but rather what you see.
COVID has left museumland in tough shape. There are fewer entry level jobs thanks to the decimation of the ranks that took place when organizations had to close. Yes, more organizations are unionizing, but salaries remain crappy and benefits not great. If your organization is hiring in the next six months….
- If you haven’t read AAM’s most recent blog post on equitable hiring, read it now.
- Diversity isn’t just about who’s in the staff photo. Is your organization ready to do the work necessary to challenge itself, changing its workplace DNA, to make hiring changes?
- A degree requirement is another way to favor a white-dominant culture. Is the position you need to fill one where a degree is necessary or are there complementary skills that might work just as well?
- All new hires need support and mentoring, particularly during their first year. Is your organization ready to press pause long enough to get its HR house in order?
One of the lines I like best in AAM’s blog post is “Stop seeking “perfection” and recognize that all candidates will have both strengths and areas for improvement.” You could write a whole blog post on perfection and museum HR. Accept that none of us is perfect, but everyone does their best. That mindset supports the idea that there isn’t one way a job can be filled, but many.
Be well, hire well, and be kind.
Joan Baldwin
Recognizing Stereotypes in the Museum Workplace: Necessary or Not?
Posted: January 11, 2021 Filed under: gender equity, Leadership and Gender, Self-Aware, Workplace Bias 1 Comment
There is a scene in an old Woody Allen movie where Mr. Allen and a tall, chic woman sit on a bench in Central Park, and comment on everyone who walks by. No, it’s not nice, but years before the words implicit bias were everywhere, it highlights the social stereotyping taking place when we look at our fellow humans. Every day we process, consider and judge. That’s what humans do. This week I posted an article titled How Gender Stereotypes Can Kill a Woman’s Self Confidence on the Leadership Matters Facebook page. The reaction to it, like Mr. Allen’s pigeon-holing scene, underscored the contradictions of women and work.
As the article’s title suggests, there are a host of workplace stereotypes that women navigate from pay—yes, nothing has changed about the gender pay gap—to parenting, to being liked, to how we dress, to being angry. The question Anne Ackerson and I encountered time and again when writing, and then subsequently talking about Women in the Museum is should these stereotypes matter? Variations of this question include: Why should I be blamed for the way other people think about women? Why should I have to dress, marry or have children to meet some unnamed standard? And most complex, why should I tailor my behavior to comply with absurdist, Stepford-like assumptions about women?
There are plenty of folks who believe all the restrictions and stereotyping placed on women in the workplace is bunk, and shouldn’t matter. In a perfect world, that’s true. In a perfect world museum workplaces would be human-centered, and equitably paid. But I have news: We’re not there yet, and there are plenty of folks, whether trustees who grew up in another era, big time donors who live in gilded bubbles, earnest volunteers, or our colleagues, whose places in the enlightenment circle may be different than our own, but we work with them. We make decisions, we share common goals in running museums. Their lack of enlightenment may bother us more than them, and occasionally they say hurtful things. Sometimes their expectations, often built on stereotypes, are the polar opposite of ours, and when we don’t live up to those imagined stereotypes, we’re trapped. And sometimes punished.
So…is it important for museum women to know where the mine fields are? My answer is yes. Eleanor Roosevelt, who probably knew a bit about being stereotyped, wrote, “If someone betrays you once, it’s their fault; if they betray you twice, it’s your fault.” So the first time an older trustee says that a pretty little thing like you ought to be married or when your male colleagues interrupt your thoughts during a meeting or leave you to do the scut work while they engage in deep conversations, forgive yourself. It’s the first time, and maybe you didn’t see it coming. But be self-aware enough that if it happens again, you’ve thought it through and know how to react.
If you’re a woman leader, you have two issues: First to be aware of social stereotyping for yourself, and second, to model a nimble, human-centered workplace for your staff.
If you’re a leader, consider…
- Creating a value-driven workplace. Make your museum’s value statement widely available to visitors, staff and board so everyone understands there is an expected code of behavior on your campus.
- Keeping your HR policies up to date, and reading them periodically so you are current on how your organization confronts problem behavior.
- Being conscious of how gender plays out in staff meetings: Do men talk more than women? Do women allow men to talk more? Why? Because they’re weary and it’s easier to let men blather and then cut to the chase afterwards? Or because there are power differences and being silent is self protection?
- Remembering everyone is intersectional and few problems define themselves solely around gender. They may be overlaid with race, age, class, and looks or some horrible Gordian knot of many issues at once, so try not to reduce a problem to something too simple.
- If you’re concerned about a staff member, ask. Help your team members find ways to navigate a professional identity separate from the ways they may be stereotyped.
- As we know all too well, words matter, and it’s a hot second from what one person deems a harmless remark or a joke to another’s breaking point. Don’t let gender stereotyping hurt your team.
If you’re a women in a leadership position:
- Remember that you, like other women in your museum or heritage organization, likely don’t get paid equitably. Can you use your power and position to lead a pay equity audit?
- If you’re a parent, remember that studies show parents, including men, are further penalized salary-wise and reputation. If that’s you, how can you change the culture in your organization?
- Consider that women who are perceived as competent are frequently not liked. Be aware of the likability penalty you face.
- Women are penalized for being angry at work because it violates a stereotype. Studies show women are rewarded for being sad, but anger doesn’t gain them anything, and in many cases it penalizes them. How will you model navigating skills so your staff sees you as authentic, someone with real emotions, but not reap the anger penalty?
What stereotypes have you encountered? How have you dealt with them? And most importantly, what will help museum workplaces move from gendered to human-centered?
Stay safe,
Joan Baldwin
Diversity without Intersectionality is a Cart without a Horse
Posted: October 12, 2020 Filed under: Diversity, Gender, Race, Workplace Bias, workplace diversity Leave a comment
I admit it: It’s taken me a long time to wrap my head around intersectionality. When Anne Ackerson and I started writing Women in the Museum five years ago, I would have told you all women experience sexism in the workplace. It’s what unites us. Well, maybe, but in retrospect so is the fact that we all walk upright and most of us have two eyes and two ears.
Even though I was taken to task more than a few times by women of color during the writing of Women in the Museum, I don’t think I really understood intersectionality until this summer. In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder I heard a Black parent interviewed on NPR. They were talking about giving their children “the talk.” Anyone who has raised children knows parenting provides a wealth of things to worry about. All those worries escalate when children become teenagers, independent beings capable of making spectacularly bad choices. But listening to those parents, I realized my worries while raising two children were minor compared to theirs. So although we are united in parenthood, our experiences are vastly different. Of all the many things I worried about, car accidents, alcohol, bullying, drugs, you name it, I never worried about whether my children would be called out for simply being themselves. They are white, and therefore protected.
The term intersectionality belongs to Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, a lawyer and civil rights advocate. She introduced it in a 1989 paper presented in Chicago, although she acknowledged it came from generations of Black women writing that, “In every generation and in every intellectual sphere and in every political moment, there have been African American women who have articulated the need to think and talk about race through a lens that looks at gender, or think and talk about feminism through a lens that looks at race. So this is in continuity with that.”¹ Later, she used the metaphor of a traffic intersection, with cars coming from several directions, to describe intersectionality, opining that when an accident occurs, it’s difficult to pinpoint who or what caused it. Just as when a Black woman is talked over, demeaned or harassed at work is it because she’s a woman or because she’s black? Or is it because she’s not in power and someone who’s male is or someone who’s white and male?
There are a lot of museums and heritage organizations hiring Black leaders at the moment, and that’s a good thing, but questions remain: Do organizations do the kind of soul searching they need to do during the hiring process so BIPOC leaders aren’t tokenized or hired to check a box? Here’s what I mean. If a board hires a person of color because it thinks it should, but never addresses its own biases and issues, what happens? The first months may be fine, maybe even the first year, but what happens when implicit bias burbles to the surface? What happens when it’s clear the board’s perception of its first Black director is riddled with preconceptions. The Board may have trouble articulating those feelings because board meetings are not generally the place for feelings. Yet without unpacking what’s happened, both leader and Board begin an alliance based on misunderstanding.
And what if the leader is a woman of color? What if the Board also has issues with gender, issues it’s never copped to? What if, in their heart of hearts, they perceive women as less competent, prone to emotions, possibly more devoted to family than being a director, and maybe not leadership material? That’s a dire picture, but it’s the “and also” of intersectionality. Women sometimes face an uphill battle when it comes to leadership, but women of color must also combat the additional lens of race, that’s often masked in the urbane, left-leaning world of museums. And women’s workplace experiences vary drastically, so boards, HR departments and museum leadership need to do more than congratulate themselves for stepping outside the box and hiring a candidate of color.
One of our Johns Hopkins Museum Studies students remarked this week how important it is to be able to come to work as your whole self. Too true. Some museum staffers have always had that luxury. And that’s the inflection point between diversity and intersectionality. Knowing your staff reflects your community and the world as we know it is important. That’s the cart. But the horse is offering the respect and support for each of those individuals to bring their whole being to work, and to feel supported in what they do. That’s the horse.
As we work to right the wrongs of more than a century of overpowering patriarchal whiteness and classism in museums and heritage organizations, we need to be mindful of not only creating a diverse workplace, but an equitable and supportive one as well. Inviting someone to the table isn’t enough. Sometimes the rules are mysterious, opaque, and strange. We owe it to every creative, diverse soul who works with us to offer them the support and the path, the cart and the horse, to navigate the museum world.
Stay safe.
Joan Baldwin
¹New Statesman. Retrieved 10.11.20. https://www.newstatesman.com/lifestyle/2014/04/kimberl-crenshaw-intersectionality-i-wanted-come-everyday-metaphor-anyone-could
When Crises and Ethics Test Museum Leadership
Posted: March 16, 2020 Filed under: Leadership, Leadership and Gender, Museum, museum staff, Organizational Values, Workplace Bias, Workplace Values | Tags: decision making, Leadership, museums, nonprofit, transparency Leave a comment
What a week it has been. A pandemic, a stock market dive, a national state of emergency, and oh yes, a presidential primary. As we look ahead, many of us find our normal work world contracting. Conferences have been cancelled. Face-to-face meetings postponed. We’re trading office hours for work from home, conducting meetings via Zoom, and keeping our distance when out and about in the world.
As grim and scary as the news has been, in many ways, this situation is what leadership is all about. A crisis forces you to examine your organization from 37,000 feet. Like a chess player, you realize moving one way makes this happen, moving another initiates a different set of circumstances. And you make choices. With your team, you figure out how to proceed while being the best museum or heritage site you can. No one wants a national emergency, but if you ever needed to understand why leadership is a daily practice, not a goal, this is it. And if you’re prepared, your organization will echo your behavior.
One of the things that comes to the fore in a crisis, is how your team thinks. You’re probably aware who among your colleagues is a big-picture thinker and who quickly wallows in details. Use those skills. Everyone likes to succeed, and if you play to people’s strengths, you’ll get better, faster results.
Through it all, remember your staff. Your whole staff, not just the leadership team. As far as I know collections can’t catch COVID-19. People can. This is the moment to be the leader who acted humanely, the person who advocated for paid time off for hourly staff who may not have any, the person willing to adjust HR’s policy on telecommuting rather than assuming it just leads to colleagues watching Netflix in their bathrobes. This is the time to re-write the rules particularly if it protects the very staff who serve the organization. So protect your people by putting their health first.
*****
About a month ago, before the world turned upside down, Caroline Baumann, then director of the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum abruptly resigned. Baumann’s resignation was sudden, arriving with absolutely no information. A week later, there was more context. She was outed ostensibly by a whistleblower and charged with conflict of interest around the circumstances of her 2018 wedding. First, the Smithsonian suggested Baumann’s dress, from designer Samantha Sleeper, which retailed for $3,000 cost Baumann $750. Getting a special occasion dress at a bargain price isn’t an ethical breach, but the Smithsonian and the whistleblower accused Baumann of providing Sleeper with a free ticket to a Cooper Hewitt event. In addition, it was suggested that the location of Baumann’s wedding ceremony (not the reception) was also a quid pro quo as she received it for free from a Long Island non-profit and then subsequently offered them meeting space for their board meeting.
There are a few leadership lessons here. The first is if you’re a director it isn’t just conflict you need to be mindful of, but also the appearance of conflict. Second, as important as it is to have whistleblowers, they too can be flawed individuals, and looking for conflict is easier if you’re already angry at your museum. I’m not suggesting this particular whistleblower was disgruntled, but it’s one more thing leaders need to bear in mind, and if there is no appearance of conflict, there’s no way a whistleblower can misuse the process. Next is the lesson that no matter what role you play as museum director–whether it’s a city the size of Manhattan or a small town–there needs to be a firewall between your personal life and your work life. Baumann claims the Cooper Hewitt’s PR consultant encouraged her to “shed light on her personal life.” This resulted in the Cooper Hewitt highlighting Baumann’s wedding.
The last, and for me the most interesting, is the glaze of gender politics over Baumann’s resignation. The Cooper Hewitt lost six trustees who resigned in anger, a boatload of money from each of them, and a 19-year employee who had risen to be director, and who outwardly had done an exemplary job. The failed novelist in me has tried again and again to imagine this scenario happening to a man. It’s not impossible, but it is unlikely.
Is it possible that while the Smithsonian followed its necessary protocols, its investigation wasn’t without bias? Was there implicit bias on the part of the investigators and the inspector general leading to a less than nuanced outcome? It’s likely we’ll never know. What we do know is women leaders walk a different path than their male counterparts. As Kaywin Feldman concluded in her 2016 AAM keynote: “Our society will not benefit from the leadership of female museum directors, across all types of museums, of all sizes, until museum boards are more cognizant of their internal biases, and tendency to dismiss female leadership styles.”
Stay safe.
Joan Baldwin
Image: Anchorage Daily News
Of #MuseumMeToo, Whiteness, and Doing the Right Thing
Posted: January 13, 2020 Filed under: Communication, Courage, Diversity, Leading Across Organizations, Museum, Organizational Values, Sexual Harassment, Workplace Bias | Tags: advocacy, Leadership, nonprofit, transparency 4 Comments
Twelve days into the new decade, and so much has happened. Last Monday the museum world reacted to President’s Trump’s threatened bombing of Iranian cultural sites with responses from AAM, AASLH, AAMD, and even social media from the circumspect Metropolitan Museum of Art. That was the week’s beginning. By week’s end, The Times had published an article on Joshua Helmer, once employed by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and now director of the Erie Art Museum. In a #MuseumMeToo moment, Helmer is accused by both current and past colleagues of sexual harassment.
I had planned to write about white people trying to do the right thing, but before we go there, I need to say something. The Joshua Helmer scandal not only generated a social media storm, but a Change.org petition demanding Helmer’s firing. Meanwhile, Friday, the Erie Art Museum released the following statement,”The Erie Art Museum Board of Directors takes seriously all allegations of misconduct. Prior to offering Mr. Helmer the position at the Erie Art Museum, the Board, with the help of an employment consultant, conducted due diligence including background checks. No issues were identified during our due diligence.”
The subtext here is a board who says it did its research. If the complaints about Helmer are true, then it sounds as though the board is shifting blame to its recruitment firm or the Philadelphia Museum of Art for failing to divulge what they knew. But here’s what’s really bothering me: In 48 hours the Helmer firing petition garnered over 2,000 signatures. GEMM–Gender Equity in Museums Movement–has its own page on Change.org, a pledge to stop sexual harassment in museum workplaces. In six weeks it has yet to amass 500 signatures.
Why is it so easy to sign the Helmer petition, but not the GEMM pledge? Does encouraging Helmer’s firing make you feel like you’re doing something? Does it take the onus off you, and put it where it seems to belong? For centuries powerful people have used authority to coerce sexual favors and harm the less powerful. Yet sexual harassment remains an ongoing problem in the museum workplace. Imagine, for a minute, if the GEMM pledge had been around when Helmer left the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Could employees who signed it remain silent as a purported harasser left for a new position? It’s each of us who makes change. Not “them,” whoever “they” are. And we make change by changing our behavior. Sign the GEMM pledge. Don’t wait. Do it today.
**********
So what I really meant to write about is this: In my ongoing journey recognizing the limitations and boundaries of my own whiteness, sometimes I hear stories that speak to the way we as white humans think we’re doing the “right” thing, but it backfires majestically. Let’s imagine there’s a white development officer and a curator who’s a woman of color. The curator knows of an eminently successful young, black businessman who’s just sold his company for $30 million. She follows him on social media, knows he’s a collector, and has met him at a social event. She discusses this with the white advancement officer who’s aware of the businessman’s success. She asks the museum to approach him because her upcoming show will include several artists he collects. She’s hoping for additional underwriting for her exhibit and maybe an acquisition fund for artists of color. Instead, the development officer asks her to reach out first. In his world, it’s better if the businessman is approached by a) someone he sort-of knows, and b) by someone of color. He may also be scared–scared he’s not culturally astute enough–and he’ll say something wrong, and he doesn’t want to be wrong. The curator of color is angry because to her the optics look terrible. The collector isn’t a small business owner. He’s a gazillionaire who’s just sold to a multi-national corporation. Why shouldn’t he be treated like any other 1-percent entrepreneur?
What’s wrong here? Well, a lot, but definitely a failure to communicate. The white advancement officer is unable or unwilling to confess he feels ignorant, something he’d do in a heartbeat if the prospect were an international, and there were a language barrier. In addition, he’s comfortable letting the curator of color carry the burden of race. She, on the other hand, reads the situation from the black entrepreneur’s point of view and suspects he’ll be insulted if he isn’t treated like every other big giver the museum approaches.
So where does leadership come into all of this? Good leaders understand their own limitations and vulnerabilities. Humbling themselves in front of colleagues, admitting what they don’t know, and asking for help come naturally. When we’re all being our best selves–admittedly a daily struggle–we need to model great leader behavior: stop worrying about judgement, stop worrying about control, stop writing the script for others, and instead communicate and collaborate. What if the advancement officer admitted a gift from this young entrepreneur would be a first from a non-white donor, and he was scared of messing it up? What if he asked for the curator’s help and collaboration instead of turning the ask back to her? What if she felt she could say, I am not the spokesperson for my entire race? And further, what if, as a woman of color, she also didn’t need to worry about being characterized as brash and pushy?
There are a number of ways this story could have gone. I offer it only to point out how our narratives hem us in. Understanding our own parameters enough to know what we don’t know, and having the courage to be vulnerable are leadership practices we all need to develop.
Joan Baldwin
Museum Leadership: Your Observation is Your Obligation
Posted: September 3, 2019 Filed under: AASLH, gender equity, History Museums, Leadership and Gender, museum staff, Organizational Values, Professional Development, Workplace Bias | Tags: empathy, Leadership, museums, women Leave a comment
If leaders were cartoon characters, they’d have heads topped with arrows instead of hair. Why? Because whether they mean to or not, leaders exude direction. They are points on the organizational compass. And when direction isn’t clear there are plenty of folks in the hallway, around the coffeemaker or after meetings to interpret what has or hasn’t been said. That’s a preface to what follows, meaning I may not be correct. After all, I’m only an observer.
If you couldn’t attend last week’s meeting of the American Association of State and Local History in Philadelphia, it was a good one. Anchored by the indomitable Eastern State Penitentiary, and the city’s other national historic sites, not to mention its many museums, the conference drew a large crowd. The theme was “What Are We Waiting For?” but the subtext was certainly history’s importance in understanding the present. It was there in the keynote, moderated by Sean Kelly, Director of Interpretation at Eastern State Penitentiary, and featuring Susan Burton, a Los Angeles-based writer and prison reform activist whose memoir details a 20-year cycle of addiction, pain, sadness and prison, and Dr. Talitha LeFlouria, a University of Virginia associate professor, and author of Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South, where the arrow pointed directly from centuries of enslavement to decades of mass incarceration. And it was also there in Dr. Erica Armstrong Dunbar’s myth-toppling speech about George Washington’s obsessive search for his runaway slave Ona Judge. And, I’m sure it was there in the many panels, tours, and countless conversations as conference attendees struggled, argued, and supported one another in connecting past and present. If you want to interpret those directional signals, what you might say is the complacent, white, male narrative of the past is disappearing, replaced by a host of other black and brown voices, from individuals who’ve been here months, and those whose past stretches back to enslavement or others whose land was stolen, and they lived out their days on reservations.
For me though there was another signal: The four panels and one workshop that addressed women in the history museum workplace. Anne Ackerson and I have written and spoken about this topic for almost seven years, and in that time there were more than a few moments when getting one panel on women’s issues for AASLH or AAM seemed like an achievement. So maybe I’m reading too much into this, but finding AASLH President John Dichtl in a panel titled “#MeToo: AASLH, NCPH and the Field” was a sea change. Perhaps it’s AASLH’s size and more cohesive membership, but its leadership is clearly listening to women’s issues in the field. When asked to post salary ranges in their job announcements, AASLH did. And their willingness to open the annual meeting to discussions about women’s leadership, sexual harassment in the field, and pay equity tells me they’re acknowledging that while the heritage organization/history museum workplace might not be Nirvana, they want to make it better.
So, here’s a thank you: Thank you for a great conference. Thank you to AASLH’s leaders and planners for changing the narrative; thank you for publicly acknowledging the consequences of workplace harassment, and gender pay inequity. Thank you to the male leaders who showed up to represent at four of the five sessions. Kudos to all the women who spoke, especially those brave enough to reveal personal stories.
One final plea though: Do something with what you learned. Commit to personal change. Be kind. Support one another. Don’t do it because someone’s different than you. Do it because you are colleagues. If you are a leader, and haven’t addressed the gender pay gap in your organization, do an equity audit. See how bad things are. If you don’t have a values statement or a statement about the kind of behavior you expect in your museum or heritage site, write one. Don’t wait ’til next year to hear it another time and realize 12 months went by and you didn’t move the needle at all.
Make change now. Do it as individuals, do it as organizations. To quote Enimini Ekong, Superintendent of Nicodemus National Historic Site and Chief of Education and Interpretation at Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site, “Your observation is your obligation.” So for goodness sakes look and then act.
Joan Baldwin
The Gender Implications When Hiring & Interviewing
Posted: April 29, 2019 Filed under: gender equity, Leadership and Gender, Museum, Museum Boards, museum career, Nonprofit Boards, Nonprofit Leadership, Workplace Bias | Tags: career, Leadership, museums, nonprofit 1 Comment
Applying for a new job is stressful, a time sponge, and from an organizational point of view, costly. For an individual, even if it is done as much to exercise a muscle as out of need, it requires diligence, self-awareness, and confidence. If you interview as female, it’s even more challenging. Why? Because you have to walk a thin line between what you know, what you believe, and public perception.
I’ve spoken to a number of women in the museum and library fields about job interviews. These women aren’t novices. They all lead organizations or departments, and they are well read, not in the book group sense. Rather they read widely about leadership, and they’ve had opportunities to put what they read into practice. Before I go further, here are some givens about men and women in the job race. They are all supported by research, and I’ve included links so you’ll know I’m not just ranting.
- Men think they’re smarter than 66-percent of their peers. For women it’s less so, 54-percent.
- Women don’t think of themselves as ready for promotion and they consistently underestimate their talents. See #1 above.
- A lot of what’s happened in the American workplace has focused on “fixing” women, making them more like successful men, rather than simply leveling the playing field.
- Women are more frequently hired to take over organizations, departments or programs that are troubled than men are.
So what happened to the women I spoke with? These issues came to a head when they were faced with the proverbial interview question about change. It goes something like: “Based on what you’ve seen today, what is your vision for our organization, department, program?” Anybody who’s read anything about leadership knows that rapid change, particularly from a new hire, goes nowhere. These women knew that. Each gave an answer that was a variation of: change takes time, buy-in is important, describing how they like to observe, watch, listen and learn before experimenting, analyzing, testing again, and implementing. None of them got the job. The positions went to men.
Is it possible the men offered less measured and reasoned responses? Is it possible they replied with a laundry list of changes, delivered with a confidence and panache that was just what the interview committee wanted to hear even though few organizations–except the most desperate–can sustain wholesale hierarchical change?
I can imagine you eye-rolling here. How do you know, you ask? And you’re right. There are a million reasons for offering a job to one person over another. But is it possible that boards or hiring committees confuse confidence with competence? That a confident answer even if it flies in the face of every good leadership best practice is more acceptable than a more measured response? And might that be a gendered thing since we know men tend to sound more confident? In fact, if I were asked, going forward, I’d tell each of these women to answer that question differently. I’d tell them to practice sounding confident, responding with a vision statement and a list of areas that need experimentation.
Some final caveats: This isn’t about getting women to act more like men even though it seems that way. Successful women are confident, but the consequences of acting confident are different for men and women. Women are judged differently than men, and therefore answers to the most basic questions are heard differently. Women need to be twice as good to be seen as half as competent. All of this is 10 times harder and more complex for women of color, women who are overweight, women with disabilities, LGBTQ and transgender women because the opportunity for bias multiplies.
And lastly, if you are hiring:
- Remember, an interview is like a wedding. If that’s the happiest day of your life, you’re in trouble. Hire for the long haul, not the razzle dazzle. There are many who ace the interview, but there’s no there there when it comes to real leadership.
- Because the museum field is tipping so precipitously toward becoming a pink collar profession, hiring committees may think they’re doing the field a service by hiring a man. That may be. Just make sure the process is equitable. Tokenism is tokenism no matter who’s in the mix.
- Talk openly about issues of bias–where and how they appear–with your search committee before the process begins. You may want to use a bias exercise to help your committee understand where they are.
- Build a diverse interview committee that includes POC, the young, the experienced. Let the committee discuss its governance rules ahead of time. Make it a safe space where all thoughts are welcome.
- Discuss the difference between diversity and difference. Is your program, department or museum ready for a challenge? See suggestion #2.
- Be open. Remember it’s not just about you. It’s about your organization. Look for the person who will help your museum grow.
Joan Baldwin
Museum Leadership, Bias, and Pay
Posted: April 8, 2019 Filed under: Leadership, Museum, museum salaries, pay equity, Workplace Bias, Workplace Values | Tags: Leadership, museums, nonprofit Leave a comment
Nobody wants to be called biased, particularly in the workplace. These days bias conjures more than just partiality or favoritism, and points directly at “prejudice in favor of or against one thing, person, or group compared with another.” It would be close to impossible to be a responsible museum leader and be biased. Prejudice and partiality aren’t in anybody’s top five leadership competencies. So if displaying bias isn’t a behavior anybody claims, why talk about it? Because we all own some. It is not reserved for our political or ideological enemies or people we don’t like.
There are two types of bias: implicit and explicit. Explicit bias bubbles through our consciousness when we feel threatened. It helps us explain the universe by pigeon-holing and stereotyping people and their behavior. We can name it because it’s there, part of who we are, how we’re imprinted as children, and the values we hold. Implicit bias, on the other hand, affects our unconscious self in ways we’re not aware of, making it sometimes much more lethal then its noisier, brash cousin. A biased statement is out there for the world to hear or read. A decision driven by implicit bias is hidden and often unexplained.
This week, Leadership Matters goes to Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania to deliver the keynote at the Federation of Pennsylvania Museums’ annual meeting. Our topic: Gender and Leadership. Before you eye-roll and think “Good Lord, haven’t we covered that?” just stop. Because there’s one place in every museum or heritage organization that is the nexus of gender, implicit bias, and leadership. What’s that, you ask? Your payroll. Unless and until you’ve completed an equity audit, and then adjusted wages for places where there are inequities, that’s the place where–to mix metaphors entirely–your chickens come home to roost. That’s the place where all the bad decision making, suspicion, anger, and dislike lives. It’s also where admiration, pity, gratitude, and hope reside, brought to you by implicit bias.
Imagine you do an equity audit at your museum: you may discover that two under-forty, full-time employees, one male and one female, have wildly divergent wages. For the sake of argument, let’s say she is a curator and a woman of color, and he is an education curator and a white man. In your organizational chart both are on the same level, both hired within months of each other, both with comparable experience. Both report to you and are part of the leadership team.
And let’s say you weren’t director when they were hired in 2011. Someone else did that. In addition, both have used your newly-revised personnel policy to take maternity/paternity leaves recently. What might you find? First, the man’s salary is $62,500; the woman’s $45,500. That’s better than the average African American woman who makes 61-percent of a white man’s salary, but it’s nothing to be proud of. Second, when you look at their salary history, he received a small bump within a year of his paternity leave. She took maternity leave at almost the same time–yes, that was a rough year– and when she returned, following annual personnel reviews, no bump. This too fits with a Harvard study where women pay a financial penalty for being parents, but men do not. In fact, men with children are considered more hirable than men without children. Women with children, on the other hand, are less likely to get hired, and less likely to be promoted. The same Harvard study shows women with children were considered less committed to their jobs then women without children.
Granted, this is an imaginary scenario, but it’s there to help you understand how unconscious bias takes root. One prejudicial decision regarding race, gender, parenthood, weight, LGBTQ, or disability lives forever in payroll, and unless there’s an equity adjustment, it will still be there decades later when the employee retires. Your job as a leader is to work with your board to examine and correct these problems. Otherwise what’s the point of your mission statement and all the other spin that comes off mission? What’s the point of “serving diverse audiences” if your own workforce is discriminated against?
What should you do?
- Read and understand the pay gap and its history.
- Don’t tell yourself you’re not racist and then allow the gender/race gap to persist in your workplace.
- Educate staff and board about why the pay gap is a problem and what needs to change at your institution.
- Do an equity audit. Evaluate your payroll. Look for the gaps. Make a plan for adjustment. Act on it.
- Look at your parental leave policy. (If you don’t have one, make one.) FMLA or the Family Medical Leave Act is not pay. It’s a place holder. Make sure staff isn’t penalized for parenting.
- Pat yourself on the back and celebrate with your board if you discover your pay scale is equitable.
It’s a rare individual who’s self-aware enough, who’s done enough soul searching, who realizes the ways in which she’s privileged, and the ways others are not, and who can shed enough load to come to workplace situations unbiased. But we can all try. Payroll is a place where we can change the museum workplace. Just do it.
Joan Baldwin
Leadership Matters 