Sheryl Sandberg, co-author of the bestseller Lean In, co-wrote an article for the New York Times called “Speaking While Female”. She says that women get interrupted more at meetings than do men and proposes to add Band-Aids to the process such as hiring quotas for women in management, “no-interruption” policies, or “Obama-style meetings” in which no men were permitted to speak. This reminds me of General Motors taking feeble little steps toward solving their ignition key problems rather than putting keyless ignition systems in all of their cars.
Contrast to Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon. As noted in my review of The Everything Store, Bezos reengineered meetings at Amazon so that, for the most critical part, neither men nor women would be speaking. People were required to bring their ideas to meetings in written prose form and people would spend the first 15 minutes reading. (Perhaps after that there would be a chance for the interruptions of which Sandberg complains to occur, but by that point ideas were all out there on the table and tied to an author.)
If there are corporate processes where women aren’t being treated equally maybe the first question to ask is “Should we even be engaging in this process?”
If you are going to have people bring written proposals into a meeting and read them, why not instead circulate written proposals via email? You may want to make sure everyone reads them, but really only the person making / implementing the decision has to read them, and others who are really interested that receive the proposals are free to read and comment if they think that is a good use of their time.
This does point to one big problem with meetings as they tend to be conducted in most American office settings, too many people attend them or are asked to attend them. They really should be limited to the people who have to make or implement the decisions. There might have to be some mass meeting where an important person give a speech explaining the decision, but this should be short (it can also often be done via mass email). The decision makers might want advice or opinion from experts, but that can be done one on one, with scope for interested parties to submit written opinions unsolicited.
On feminism, there is a “light” side of feminist theory that raises good questions on organizational behavior, that could have benefited men and women if this was the part that organizations implemented.
In parliamentary procedure, there’s a rule that when a question is being discussed, no-one can speak twice before everyone (who wants to speak) has spoken once, which also largely works around the problem:
http://www.bartleby.com/176/7.html