Our Turn by Kirstine; Stewart Page A

to change, when all around the media market, change was everywhere. Lacroix’s renewal signalled a status quo I couldn’t live with anymore. I decided to leave my job.
    Leading the CBC would no longer be about applying my strengths to meet the shifting demands of the new market. My mandate going forward would be more administrative, less aspirational. I couldn’t look ahead and lead a team where success was no promise of reward, where wins wouldn’t necessarily earn us reinvestment, and where people could be punished, not praised, for doing their best work. Spending my days trying to figure out how to keep a big ship afloat with half a paddle wasn’t for me. I found nothing honest or inspiring about it. I had been at the CBC for nearly seven years at that point, and while I’d never describe it as a comfort zone, it was no longer a zone I could inhabit comfortably. I could imagine a CBC, post-cuts, that would focus on its strengths, such as news and what mattered most to Canadians. But there were too many masters to serve and they weren’tready for the wholesale change that had to come. In that environment, I had nothing left to offer. It was time for me to go.
    But it wasn’t just about leaving the CBC. It was my exit from an entire industry whose time at the top was waning and whose leadership seemed to lack the courage to chart an effective way forward. I may have been doing one of the most important jobs in Canadian television, but what was television becoming? It was already clear that advertisers would soon be spending more on online digital ads than they would on print, radio and TV (a milestone surpassed in Canada in 2013, and a year later in the United States). So while other large traditional media organizations sent attractive offers my way, I was already sold on a new direction. The promise and potential of a new view of media hooked me. Technology was giving power to the very people I had made a career serving—those glorious masses. And I wanted to hear what they had to say.

[ IV ]
    You Need to Get Over Yourself
    AT TWITTER HEADQUARTERS IN San Francisco, the staff gathers every week for Tea Time. It’s a casual end-of-day event, beer and wine along with the tea, held in the wide-open space of the company lounge with added chairs and a stage up front. People make presentations about specific projects or new directions and employees chime in with comments and questions. But not all employees spoke up. Last year, the company’s SWAT team noticed that relatively few of the Tea Time questions were coming from women. Short for Super Women at Twitter, SWAT is the cheekily named internal team that works to advance women’s interests at the company. I became part of the team not long after I joined Twitter in the spring of 2013. I’ve always believed that advocating for women in the workplace requires a constant, concerted effort. Tea Time was a case in point. Here was a regular opportunity for employees to be heard, yet too many of the women who came out to the sessions stayed silent.

    Like many of the big tech and social networking companies, Twitter has more men than women among its three thousand or so employees. So proportionally, one would expect to hear from more men at any company forum. But I know too well that numbers don’t tell the whole story. Even when there are more women than men in a group, or at the table, there’s no guarantee you’ll hear from them. Stacks of evidence show women are far less likely than men to speak up in the workplace . And when women are outnumbered by men, they’re even more inclined to keep their thoughts to themselves. In 2012, researchers at Brigham Young University and Princeton examined how groups that included men and women collaborated to solve problems. They found that when women were in the minority they not only spoke less than the men, they spoke significantly less than their proportional representation