The Importance Of Taking Notes

In my experience, 99 per cent of people in leadership roles don’t take notes. What’s more, males are less likely to take notes than their female counterparts.

I recently met with 30 chief executives for a dinner-table conversation about closing the gender gap. We discussed how men can counteract bias in the workplace by speaking up and championing their female colleagues. It was a wonderfully eye-opening discussion, full of valuable insights; yet I was the only person who took notes the entire time – and boy did I take notes, I ran out of white space and had to write over my notes, my hotel notepad, my report and even my name tag!

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer and the founder of LeanIn.Org, expressed her surprise over my note-taking in this excellent piece about women in the workplaceco-written with Adam Grant. Sheryl is putting together a series on the subject on LinkedIn too, I’m looking forward to getting involved.Back in our meeting, conversation came around to the subject of women being more likely to be note takers in meetings, because there is an unfair expectation on them to do support work. In other words as a society we expect the office housework to fall to a woman.