“A fund manager, a CEO and a PA walk into a bar. One of them is a woman.”
That is the joke Knight Frank associate partner Georgie Roberts kicked off her EG Future Leaders talk with. Except the punchline wasn’t funny. Because we all thought it. We all assumed the woman was the PA. Admit it. We did.
The joke also wasn’t funny because it was something that Roberts had lived. She had been on the end of a barbed comment that had assumed that a woman was less. Less smart, less able – just less.
“What do all these behaviours have in common? They are assuming you are less competent. They are assuming that when you walk into a room, you need to prove why you are there and that is absolutely draining”
The experience, which you can hear when you watch Roberts’ EG Future Leaders talk, is one that she said, thankfully, had not been repeated much, but was enough to drive Roberts to highlight the need for real estate to check its unconscious bias.
“We often talk in real estate about how once the dinosaurs that get such a bad name are out of the industry it’s going to be so diverse,” Roberts told the audience. “But bias is learnt, behaviours are learnt and we mimic what we see from our managers and our leaders. This isn’t going to die out with the dinosaurs. This needs to be addressed.”
And addressing the situation lies with all of us, said Roberts. It is up to us to stand up to microaggressions that we might see or hear. It is up us to validate people’s experiences of being made to feel less. It is up to us to stand up and use our voices, for ourselves and others.
And it is up to us to change the narrative around jokes about a fund manager, a CEO
and a PA walking into a bar – because they are all women.
Watch Georgie Roberts’ full speech on unconscious bias:
A key element of what makes EG Future Leaders so special is the ripple effect it has. Our Future Leaders inspire action in our audience.
This year was all about the power of turning small ideas into mighty actions and unleashing the creativity we know exists in real estate.
Head to my.walls.io/EGFutureLeaders to see some of the takeaways our audience members shared.
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