What are the core competencies that women offer in the workplace?  How can women use this information to better market their skills during promotions and finding a job?  Bonita Banducci, a Gender Expert who teaches at Santa Clara University, helps companies find ways to retain women and bring more innovation and competitive advantage to their companies.   SHOW SUMMARY Link to Segment 1: Most companies lean toward evaluating their workforce based on male-oriented competencies.  What are female-oriented competencies that companies should consider if they want to tap the full potential of their women employees?  Find out about a whole category of thinking and skills that women bring that can be used to generate innovation and better solutions to problems. Link to Segment 2: There are core competencies that have a female and male expression.  For example, a women will demonstrate being a team player in a different way than a man.  Often a women’s way is misinterpreted.  What are other competencies that women and men express differently?  How can women narrow the divide? How can men shift their perspective on these competencies? Blog Post by our Guest Rise!-as you Lean In! There is a confidence and freedom as well as joy that my women graduate engineering students discover in my Gender and Engineering class at Santa Clara University. The men, too, discover a new way of seeing the world and how to work effectively with differences with Gender Competence, as one student put it, “I feel like I have a strategic advantage.” There is one lesson about an everyday practice that drives women’s ideas and eventually drives women themselves out of organizations and out of engineering, that when understood and managed applying RISE, not only retains women, building confidence and freedom to contribute, but also increases innovation. RISE is a model and formula for having different “competencies” of women and men working together. Relational & Individualistic = Synergy (the whole greater than the sum of the parts) and mutual Empowerment. Many women see the world through a Relational lens of relationship and demonstrate competencies of “connecting the dots” systems thinking, multi-tasking, and sharing information to create new information. Many men see the world through an Individualistic lens of status and independence, that give us traditional competencies of prioritized, linear thinking, focus on one thing at a time, and sharing information only as needed. The everyday practice of playing Devil’s Advocate is the ability to poke holes and find faults using deductive reasoning to bullet proof an idea. As one Individualistic Executive of a local space agency said to me, “We do science here, Devil’s Advocate is science.” Relational people often respond to Devil’s Advocate as an indicator that their idea is not good—and often drop it, sometimes taking it personally that they are not competent. Then they show up to others as not confident and not competent. Point out that you bring another competency, Collaboration or Angel’s Advocate, to build on an idea with “what could make it work” and “what else is possible with the idea,” using inductive reasoning. You frame a competency that is otherwise invisible, unarticulated and unrewarded. You bring a new competency into the organizational culture. You can teach your Devil’s Advocates by insisting, “Before we play Devil’s Advocate, I want to play Angel’s Advocate and bring your best thinking to this.” It will be a new muscle for them. You may have to prime the pump for them, demonstrate what you mean. You can also engage them in teaching you how to stand up to Devil’s Advocate, when that time comes. You will never back down again. The first time I did an exercise to practice both Devil’s Advocate and Ange