Bridging the Gender Gap

She serves as a consultant to Coca-Cola and the military. Connie Glaser is America’s guru of gender talk, the communication between men and woman in the world of business. Her new book comes out this month.

by Katja Ridderbusch
for Handelsblatt
Germany's leading business newspaper

The slender, elegant woman in a ruby jacket paces the stage with a microphone tucked to her cheek like a pop star during a concert in a giant arena. Her presence fills up the room, where 300 business executives, male and female, listen to her speak. “Smiling is a good thing, but woman smile way too much”, she says with a poignant bright voice. “Ladies, learn to put on a poker face!”

Then she turns to the men in the audience. She tells a story about a large hospital in Massachusetts where a freshly promoted female doctor was treated to a night out in a cigar bar by her all male colleagues. The male physicians were taken aback by the fact that her new colleague obviously felt uncomfortable. Glaser counters, “Guys, how would you feel if ten women invited you to a day at the spa?”

Connie Glaser is America’s guru of gender talk, the communication between men and woman in the business world. Her books have become best-sellers in the U.S., and have been successfully launched in Germany, Israel, Bulgaria, Korea, China, Japan and several other countries. This month, her latest book will hit U.S. bookstores: “Gender Talk Works. Seven Steps for Cracking the gender Code” (Windsor Hall Press, $19,95)

Connie Glaser delivers keynote speeches, workshops and seminars for high ranking officials and executives, many with Fortune-500-companies. Among her clients are AOL Time Warner, Johnson & Johnson, Hewlett-Packard, Coca-Cola, McDonalds and the U.S. Navy.

“The problem between men and woman in the workplace is not the fact that they play by a different set of rules”, Glaser points out. “The problem is that they don’t know these rules.” She considers herself a translator, a mediator between the male and the female culture. A supporter of women in the business world. But Connie Glaser is not a feminist, nor does she hate men, quite the opposite. With her husband Tom, who serves as the president to the American-Israel Chamber of Commerce in Atlanta, she has two sons, 22 and 24 years old. In a household of three men, she says, “you quickly learn to become very thick skinned.”

Glaser is convinced that men in the workplace at most times exclude woman unintentionally. She recalls a scene she just recently observed in the headquarters of a large corporation where she was invited to give a seminar on gender issues. A group of high-level women was standing in the hall as a man approached. The women opened the circle, inviting the man in to join the conversation. Men, however, would have never made that effort. “Including is just not part of the male culture. Men don’t ask to be invited. If they want in, they jump in.”

Born in the car-manufacturing town of Detroit, Michigan, Glaser studied English and Education at the University of Michigan in the early 70s, when political tensions were running high. She made her Master’s Degree and became a teacher. She worked at a high school in Boston, Massachusetts and at a college in Athens, Georgia. She says that teaching has taught her how to motivate audiences. “Teaching high school English grammar to a group of adolescents?” she recalls, giggling. “Hello, you better think of a ways to make this entertaining.”

When her sons were born she did not want to be in the classroom all day so she started her own business. She offered communication seminars and workshops to corporations. In 1990, she got invited by the University of Athens to speak about woman in the business world.

That, she claims, was a key experience. Shortly after that she wrote her first book: “More Power to you. How women can communicate their way to success.” Glaser became a pioneer of gender communication. She has written six books, and is a syndicated columnist with several leading U.S. business journals. The newspaper “USA Today” comments on the booming market of self-help literature in America and mocks the genre’s “excessive optimism”. Yet in Glaser’s books, the paper concedes, “the message is briskly written and worthy of being broadcast.” In her keynote speeches and seminars she draws people’s attention towards her like a stand-up comedian with style and grace. Glaser understands how “to relate to several very different audiences — ranging from senior partners and recruiters to college students and young professionals”, writes the consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, one of Glaser’s clients.

Glaser refuses to simply make women feel good about themselves. Edgy yet elegant criticism is part of her business as she lays her manicured fingers directly on her gender’s weak spots. There are, for examples, all the little tag questions and disqualifiers that woman often use in the work environment – and that minimize what they have to offer: “This might be a stupid question …” , “I’m not really versed about this …” or “You might already know this …” Or, the fact that woman tend to apologize much more frequently than men do. “Between woman, apology are more of a ritual than it is a literal kind of communication”, says Glaser. “Men look at an apology in terms of hierarchy. If you apologize, you subdue.”

Connie Glaser does not call for men or women to adapt to each other’s culture. In her book “Swim with the Dolphins” she claims that woman in the workplace should not copy the male behavior, but should rather focus on their own gender specific strengths and talents: intelligence, intuition, social graces. However, she says, “it doesn’t hurt a woman to read the sports section at the weekend” – in order to be able to join the guys’ talk in the office on Monday morning.

That is what she learned at home, in her household of three men. There, the Atlanta resident and tough gender diplomat says, she is still stunned when her sons come to visit and greet her Mom with a wave of robust male humor. “Well, I guess I am learning about gender communication the hard way”, says Connie Glaser, and bursts out into a loud and very down-to-earth laughter.