Museum Workplace Confidential: An Opportunity for Women at the Met and Come See Us in Austin

****** Last week Artnet News ran an article titled "Is It Time for a Woman to Run the Metropolitan?" Their answer was a resounding yes, and just in case the Metropolitan's interview list isn't gender balanced, Artnet provided them with names of 11 stellar female candidates. Leadership Matters would like to see the Metropolitan with a woman director too, but we're going to go out on a limb here: The Met's having a woman director is not the goal. The goal is equity in the hiring process. Frankly if the Met's destiny is female leadership, history tells us now might be the moment. The museum has reorganized its leadership structure so that whoever becomes director will report to Daniel Weiss, President and COO. This "almost" position is a traditional spot for women. It is a place they frequently occupy in government museums, playing the role of task-oriented collaborator while the political appointee (often a white male) in the corner office is the performance based communicator. In addition, if you scan leadership positions in American museums, you will find that women are often hired to lead troubled organizations. Once they are off the respirator, they're frequently handed back to a male leader. Even though we wrote the book on women in the museum workplace, there's something really depressing about parsing the leadership game by gender. In an equitable world we would assume that the Metropolitan's top-five list might include women, people of color, and openly gay or queer candidates because we would assume that good leadership is good leadership. We would assume that as the country's largest museum, the Metropolitan wants to lead by example. We would assume it incorporates blind screening into the hiring process, and that HR staff and board committees discussed how unintentional bias affects hiring. (They could learn a lot from AAM here.)  Last, we would assume that the Metropolitan wants a professional with a proven track record and a particular skill set. This is very important for candidates who are not white males. Why? Because statistics show us that men are promoted on promise and potential while women are promoted on performance. The bottom line? It would be awesome to see the Metropolitan join the Brooklyn Museum, giving us two organizations with budgets over $15,000, 000 with woman directors, but it's the process we care more about. Changing lives for women leaders means museum workplace culture must change too, and that means boards need to be open, transparent, intentional, and as bias-free as possible in the hiring process. When it comes to hiring, boards need to recognize that what is paramount is the museum, not their private discomfort or uneasiness in the face of difference. Joan Baldwin