Allison McNeely
Google image search for "female executive" produces pages of photos of conventionally attractive white women, and a few of these lame comics.
I just watched this incredibly inspiring TED talk from Sheryl Sandberg, COO at Facebook on women in the workforce. (Watch it!)
Her talk was about how women are not getting the corner offices and becoming executives. In the non-profit world, which we traditionally associate as having more female leadership, only 20% of executives are women. Of 190 heads of state, only 9 are women. In parliaments around the world, the average for female representatives is 13% of all members. Executives/board members in business are about 15-16% female.
These numbers are declining, not growing. There are not more women becoming executives, there are less.
I don’t know exactly why these numbers are declining, it is a bit of mystery, because it doesn’t seem that men are actively holding women back (unless you’re trying to get nominated in the Conservative Party of Canada.) Sandberg suggests that women have to balance their personal and professional lives more than men, and that they often lack the confidence of men. I’ll explore these ideas shortly.
Sheryl Sandberg talked about how she pitched a big New York company and when they all took a quick break, the partner leading the meeting didn’t know where the women’s bathroom was. In the past year that this company had occupied their office space, Sandberg was quite possibly the only woman to have ever pitched a deal, or maybe she was “the only one had to go to the bathroom.”
Sandberg has three pieces of advice for women:
- Sit at the table
- Make your partner a real partner
- Don’t leave before you leave
“Make your partner a real partner” refers to the fact that when a couple both work, it is still the woman who takes on the majority of household responsibilities and childcare…meaning that she has 2-3 jobs, when he only has one. If someone has to drop out of the workforce because more help is needed at home, who is more likely to do that?
“Don’t leave before you leave” refers to the tendency of women to worry about their careers and having children before it’s time or necessary to do so. Sandberg, who has two young children herself, acknowledges how hard it is to leave your children and go back to work. Still, she told a story in her talk about a young woman, who didn’t even have a boyfriend, who came to talk to her about her worries regarding her career and children. She was “mommy tracking” herself before she was even pregnant! Balancing work and children is incredibly difficult, but women shouldn’t be taking themselves out of the game before it’s time.
“Sit at the table” was the one that grabbed me the most. It stems from the fact that women consistently undervalue/underestimate their achievements and their abilities. For example, women do not negotiate for themselves in the workforce — a recent study found that 57% of men negotiated their first salary out of university, only 7% of women did. If you ask women why they are so successful, they will say “someone helped them, they got lucky, they worked really hard.”
That hit me like a bulldozer, because since I got my job, that is exactly what I’ve been telling people, almost word for word. I tell people that I got my job at Wine Access because someone helped me, I got lucky and I was in the right place at the right time. I also tell people that the candidate pool was weak, because that’s what I heard through the grapevine.
But do those things even matter anymore, if they are true? I’ve been in the position for 8 months and I am good at what I do. But yet, I struggle with confidence and it took having a flawless review in December to really cement in my brain that I am succeeding.
Sheryl Sandberg believes that women need to sit at the table, they need to celebrate their successes and to not be afraid to push for more — the promotions, the raises, the responsibilities. But women are often nervous to do these things, because success and likability are positively correlated for men and negatively correlated for women. Successful women are seen as being political and out for themselves, men are seen as great guys to work for, because who doesn’t want to work for someone who is good at what they do?
I believe that women are responsible for the lack of female executives, but because they have balance personal and professional lives more than men and because they are not traditionally encourage to celebrate their successes. It’s not as simple as “Oh, maybe they don’t want to be executives.” Just as I said in my last post on women in tech, women have to take responsibility for putting themselves in the big chair, if that’s where they want to be, but it isn’t as easy for women as it is for men. And it’s important to remember that.
Photo: cartoonstock.com
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