Why Women Aren’t C.E.O.s, According to Women Who Almost Were
It’s not a pipeline problem.
It’s about loneliness, competition
and deeply rooted barriers.What their stories show is that in business, as in politics, women who aspire to power evoke far more resistance, both overt and subtle, than they expected would be the case by now.
.. Women are often seen as dependable, less often as visionary. Women tend to be less comfortable with self-promotion — and more likely to be criticized when they do grab the spotlight. Men remain threatened by assertive women. Most women are not socialized to be unapologetically competitive. Some women get discouraged and drop out along the way. And many are disproportionately penalized for stumbles.
.. “The men along the way, they were extremely jealous and competitive,” she said. “It didn’t really last that long because they saw my production, and when they did start to work for me, they realized, ‘She was not that bad.’ ”
.. Like many women who became senior executives, she said she rose fastest and most smoothly when she was measured by the straightforward metric of profits. “It’s really all about money,” she said. “I always had to do better than anybody else to be considered equal. I ran great restaurants, had great profits and had the most successful people working for me.”
.. she said she was unprepared for corporate politics at the very top. “Before heading to the C-suite, I didn’t feel I was handicapped at all,” she said, echoing conversations with many other women. But the next rungs of the ladder depend not only on results but also on prevailing in an environment where everyone is competing for a chance at the top job.
.. Her turning point came when she was outmaneuvered by male colleagues during a corporate reorganization.
.. “I rewrote the entire strategy for the company, doubled its share price,” she said. “We had a little bit of a dip. All of the guys had missed their numbers more. There’s a guy positioning himself as the successor. He hasn’t made his number in seven years. He’s tall and good looking and hangs around the right circles.”
.. “Women are prey,” she said. “They can smell it in the water, that women are not going to play the same game. Those men think, ‘If I kick her, she’s not going to kick back, but the men will. So I’ll go after her.’ It’s keeping women in their place. I truly believe that.”
.. “We are never taught to fight for ourselves,”
.. “I used to love the word ‘gravitas.’ I now think it’s male code for ‘not like us’ at the highest levels.”
.. if she wrote a book about women in business, the title would be “Dependable Back-Up.”
.. only 29 percent of black women think the best opportunities at their companies go to the most deserving employees, compared with 47 percent of white women.
.. Some men see the competition in zero-sum terms. One corporate recruiter described a conversation with a male client seeking an additional board post. “He said, ‘I know all the seats are going to women, and I don’t stand a chance,’ ” the recruiter recalled. “I said, ‘70 percent of the seats go to white men.’ ”
.. a story related by a colleague: A presenter asked a group of men and women whether anyone had expertise in breast-feeding. A man raised his hand. He had watched his wife for three months. The women in the crowd, mothers among them, didn’t come forward as experts.
.. She suggests withholding bonuses if leaders do not promote enough women or minorities and increasing bonuses if they do.