This episode is a manual for CEOs, managers and male allies on how to support the advancement of women in the workplace.

Zoe Kinias is Associate Professor of Organisational Behavior at INSEAD, and is Academic Director of INSEAD’s Gender Initiative. She is based at the Singapore campus of the French business school.

For much of her career, Zoe’s research centered mainly around two themes: resilience and performance. Over the past few years she has increasingly focused on global women’s experiences of identity threat and how these can be mitigated by cost-effective and powerful interventions. Zoe uses experimental and quasi-experimental methods in the laboratory and field, as well as archival, survey, and qualitative methods to strengthen the validity of her results.

This episode is more of an interview than a chat, as I wanted to cover a lot of ground… Here are some of the topics we discussed in great detail: how to handle gender fatigue in your organisation, what social identity threat is and how to mitigate it, how companies can engage middle managers and manage the backlash against targets. We spent a significant chunk of the podcast talking about an extremely powerful exercise on “affirming the self”. This is one of those simple, elegant levers we can pull that helps both men and women, but disproportionately benefits women and helps them combat social identity threat. We also talked about how foster healthy sponsorship relationships and how to create an environment of psychological safety. Finally, Zoe put to bed the rhetoric on the abhorred “Queen Bee Syndrome”.

This is a meaty discussion – you’ll definitely want a pen and paper handy! My favorite quote was: “A lot of the organisational culture is grounded in our meetings”.

You can find Zoe on LinkedIn and at the INSEAD website.

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