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Sparkle (1)
That question comes up every time I speak with women about their career aspirations.
A second question just as surely follows: if we can’t be authentically who we are, why would we want to “succeed” in male-dominated organizations or professions? Many women who leave the corporate world to stay home with children or enter entrepreneurial or nonprofit fields—or alternately, remain quietly in their jobs put only to find themselves doing the work but not getting the promotions—say they do so because they don’t want to become like men.
Yet all signs point to a potential breakthrough moment for women even as we debate the pros and cons of taking on male camouflage.
Study after study finds that companies with greater numbers of women in leadership roles make more money. Managers know they must retain high performing women to succeed. Today’s economic and social turbulence loosens traditional boundaries, thus opening opportunities for women prepared to take them; else Christine Lagarde would not be atop the IMF, and Crain’s New York would not be crediting women such as Jill Abramson, the first female managing editor of the New York Times, Tina Brown, and Arianna Huffington with coming to the rescue of the media industry.
True, this potential is far from fully realized. Though most doors have been opened in the legal sense and we’ve seen a woman first almost everything, the overall numbers remain numbingly immobile. Despite being 60 percent of college graduates and half of the workforce, women hold just 18 percent of upper management positions across all employment sectors. We sit in fewer than 15 percent of corporate board seats and hold a penurious 3 percent of Fortune 500 CEO positions.
Little wonder we earn 77 cents to a man’s dollar. Further, our nice-girl salary negotiating style costs us each a cool half million dollars on average over our working lifetime.
According to Catalyst, a non-profit organization dedicated to women’s advancement in the workplace, “Sexism is alive and well in the workplace and coupled with gender-based stereotypes, women continue to be placed at a disadvantage when it comes to advancing their careers.” Yet my own research found an equally pernicious barrier within. It’s women’s resistance to embracing the power we have in our hands to change the cultural soup that keeps us simmering on low when we are ready to transform it to boil.
It’s hard to change a culture while you’re living in it.
This conundrum evokes George Bernard Shaw’s observation that the reasonable person adapts to the world, whereas the unreasonable one expects the world to adapt to her. Of course he said “man” and “him.” I take poetic license since Shaw was born in 1856. But his conclusion is up to date: “Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable (wo)man.”
Clearly, it’s time to be unreasonable—to challenge the existing situation directly--if we’re going to make the next set of breakthroughs.
Since the days when mimicking men’s severe navy suits, learning to play golf, and talking tough were advised to make our woman-ness invisible, it’s become eminently clear that the strategy of co-opting women into acting like the guys doesn’t serve us any better than being stereotypically female or dropping out to escape dealing with sexism.
For women to be able to practice the authentic leadership that allows them to give their best, earn their worth, and advance to their highest abilities, it’s far more fruitful to define, align, and redesign.
1. Define: Both women and men are stuck with an outdated definition of power that implies power over others. No wonder many women reject the idea; after all, we’ve borne the brunt of its worst aspects, including abuse and discrimination. But once we define power as the power to accomplish things, to innovate, to make life better for ourselves and our families—I find that women’s faces relax and they are quick to say, “I want that!”
Julie Gilbert discovered something similar when she was an executive with the giant consumer electronic firm, Best Buy. The business had been created by men for men. She knew something had changed dramatically when she began to listen to female customers who are now the primary purchasers.
“When I engaged the woman’s voice, I started to realize how my voice transformed. I became more myself. I could breathe. I had ideas that frankly I used to think about all the time in executive meetings but had never ever said.”
2. Align: The world turns on human connections. Timing and preparation help.
