Michelle Angier and Beth Axelrod – “During the summer of 2013—about two and a half years after the start of a major effort to increase the number and proportion of senior-leadership roles held by women at eBay Inc. —we conducted a global gender-diversity survey on the attitudes and experiences of our top 1,700 leaders. The survey revealed some good news: for example, our leaders—women and men alike—consider gender diversity an important business goal. Moreover, we found no aspiration gap: women and men, in roughly the same proportion, want to move up. Many of the findings, however, were troubling, for they suggested that men and women experience the company in strikingly different ways. A majority of women, for instance, felt that their male colleagues didn’t understand them very well, though a majority of men felt well understood by the women. Likewise, women were significantly less likely than men to believe that their opinions were listened to and more likely to doubt that the most deserving people received promotions. Finally, we did not see any significant differences in the survey results across geographic regions. Our gender-diversity challenges (and therefore opportunities) were global ones. We were both frustrated and motivated by these survey results. But they didn’t necessarily surprise us. The company’s gender initiative really had significantly increased the representation of women in leadership roles. Between 2011 and 2013, in fact, their number rose by 30 percent annually, and we increased the proportion of leadership roles held by women every year. This early progress exceeded our expectations and showed that it is possible to make a difference. Nonetheless, we believed that our demographic results ran ahead of the cultural reality—the numbers were moving in a positive direction, but the experience of women at our company wasn’t yet notably different. At the root of the challenge, we believed, was the pervasive mix of unconscious mind-sets, behavior, and “blind spots” that color anyone’s perceptions of gender. Now, with some wind at our backs from the progress on demographics, and armed with the data from the gender survey, we committed ourselves to addressing our cultural challenges.”