I ran into a friend last weekend. Let’s call her Suzie. Suzie shared with me she was very recently passed over for a promotion that she felt she had clearly been the most well placed to get. When she found out that it had gone to a guy with far less experience than her and not half as strong a track record, she said she felt like she’d “been kicked in the stomach.” Suzie was clearly still very upset and assessing her options for the future. Leaving a large Fortune 500 company where she’d paved a relatively successful sales career for herself for the last 20+ years was a decision she had to weigh closely.
The only feedback Suzie been given was that she didn’t act “enough like a leader.” Nothing more. Which was both useless and frustrating for her. After all, she had consistenly delivered among the top sales results across her entire division for years. But when I asked her whether or not she’d asked for more clarity on what “not enough like a leader” meant, or even expressed her upset at being passed over, Suzie had said that she hadn’t. She hated to rock the boat. Which is part the problem – we women are sometimes our own worst enemy when it comes to being taken seriously as leaders. Sure, being collaborative is great. But sometimes we need to assert ourselves, we need to push back, speak up and yes, sometimes we need to rock the boat. Is
Women make great leaders. We bring strengths and perspectives that complement men and improve the outcomes of the decisions being made. We are naturally perceptive, empathetic and collaborative. But look at the number of women who’ve ascended to the top rung of the corporate ladder in the Fortune 500 corporations and you quickly see that women, despite all the progress of the last fifty years, are still the distinct minority in American boardrooms today.
This is neither good for women or for men. Research has shown that when you have more women sitting at the decision making table, it improves the bottom line results of the organizations who make them. So more women involved in the important decisions isn’t just good for women, it’s good for everyone.
There are myriad complex and intertwining reasons why women are still such a minority at the top (25% of Fortune 500 corporations don’t have any women on their boards!). One of the most obvious is that during the period of life (5-15 years post college) when men are hard at work earning their leadership stripes, women are having children. And while many women choose to combine child rearing with pursuing a career, many others elect to opt out of the demanding kids-clients-career juggling act. I don’t believe that any choice is better or worse. At least women now have a choice to make. But it does explain why, at least partially, despite the fact that women are graduating college at a rate of 3 to 2 over men, only 2% of our top companies are run by women.