Why are there so few women in top leadership roles? We’ve been working on this issue for a very long time and we’ve made some progress, but not at the top.
Women college graduates outnumber men in the United States. About a third of fulltime MBA students are women. Women hold nearly 40 percent of managerial positions. But when we look at the C-Suite, the situation is very different.
Women only hold about nine percent of top leadership positions. Only about four percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are women.
People come at this issue in several different ways. You may think of it as an issue of justice and fairness. Or you may imagine it in purely business terms and want to assure that your company has every quality brain it can get in the game.
So where do you start? Hundreds, maybe thousands, of writers have weighed in on this. We can divide their views into three groups.
Women need to change how they act.
We need to change our business policies and procedures.
We need to get rid of gender bias.
Women need to change how they act.
Sheryl Sandberg’s book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, doesn’t duck the reasons that women, as a group, may not be as successful as they would like in the business world. But she concentrates on what individual women can do to achieve leadership roles, if that’s what they want.
Most of the talk about Sandberg’s book centers on the advice to women to “lean in” at work, to accept challenges and tough assignments. “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” she asks. Other powerful advice is “don’t leave before you leave.” In other words, don’t start out by assuming you can’t have what you want, for example, a family and a career. Instead, give it your best shot and then compromise if you need to. Is that enough?
Princeton professor Ann-Marie Slaughter seemed to have it all. With her work ethic and discipline, she was able to maintain a heavy schedule and still fulfill her parenting role, with the help and support of her spouse. Then she took at job in government. Her experience there resulted in Slaughter’s Atlantic article, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.”
We need to change our business policies and procedures.
Dr. Slaughter brought the same things to her work in government as she had at Princeton. She was still highly intelligent and a hard worker. She still had a supportive spouse. What changed was scheduling flexibility. She discovered that she could not be successful in her government job and as a parent at the same time.
The takeaway is that, there are things that women who aspire to business leadership can do to increase their odds, but they’re still working in a system that makes it harder for them than for their male counterparts to reach the C-Suite. That means changing policies and procedures to make them more parent-friendly. Is that enough?
Many of those policies and procedures are rooted in history and individual and cultural biases. Change won’t happen unless we identify and neutralize them.
We need to get rid of gender bias.
When the Wall Street Journal surveyed a thousand adults in April of 2013, more than forty percent of women respondents said that they had experienced some form of gender discrimination. That’s the same proportion as a decade and a half ago.
The impact of bias is multiplied for C-Suite leadership because talent and motivation both matter. The SHL Talent Report for 2012 found that there were minimal differences in leadership potential between men and women. The talent was equal. But the report draws this stark conclusion.
“The C-suite culture has to change if it is going to attract aspiring female leaders.”
Individual and cultural biases are, by definition, unconscious. Their impact isn’t planned, but still very real.
Herminia Ibarra, Robin Ely, and Deborah Kolb describe a double bind for women leaders in a Harvard Business Review article titled “Women Rising: Unseen Barriers.” For example, when a woman acts “feminine” she’s often perceived as “not a leader.” But if that same woman acts the way a man might in a similar business situation, she’s often perceived as “unfeminine.”
There’s no quick fix for any of this. The individual and cultural bias parts of the problem will take time and a lot of work to change. C-Suite executives can do some of the work, but they need both help and a push from rising leaders and others who want things to change.
In the meantime, if you’re a woman aspiring to the C-Suite, take stock of yourself and your situation. Pick the advice that makes sense for you and act on it.
Recent Comments