If it hasn’t happened to you, chances are it has happened to someone you know: being underestimated, undervalued or underrated in your position at the company you’ve dedicated an overwhelming amount of time, passion and investment to. Regrettably, in this day and age, those words will ring clear to women more often than men. This likely won’t come as a surprise to anyone reading –– and that’s alarming. You know the headlines: “why aren’t there more women in leadership positions”, “women hold fewer than a third of top jobs” and, “what you can do to promote women in leadership roles”.
We tend to gravitate towards blaming stereotypes and long, metaphorically spiral staircases as the common denominators in a low female to male ratio when we look at who holds leadership positions. And sadly, it seems as though that blame hasn’t been misplaced. Of course, I can’t speak for everyone when I say this, but I am truly gracious about how far we’ve come in the endeavor for equality. Catalyst, a global NGO focusing on female empowerment in the workplace, announced earlier this year that in 2019, women held 29% of global senior management roles. But that number hasn’t changed since then. The journey to this (disappointingly low) 29% has been long, and, as a woman, I can say that while I wish that number would hit 50% in the next few years, there are so many statistics that ground me––even push me to the brink of pessimism. It’s this statistic, which sounds a universal alarm: “if first-level women managers were hired and promoted like men, there would be 1 million more women in management over the next five years”. Now, what stands out here is “hired and promoted”, reaffirming that the success of women is in the hands of the human resource department. As you shake your head thinking about how blatantly obvious that is, let’s dissect that a little more.
If the human resource department of a firm is meant to look for talent, ambition and suitability for the position, why does it seem as though they favor men in a pool of applicants that includes both men and women? What is the factor that gives men a steep, metaphorically short ‘stairway to heaven’ and sets women on a flat, spiral staircase that ends at a glass ceiling? There is global consensus that gender stereotyping is the common thread. Just last year, the NYT quoted an organizational psychologist who ever so simply explained the conflict faced by women striving for success in their career: “there’s a worry that if you draw too much attention to these biases, to your womanhood, that it reinforces people’s doubts about it.” Again, if that thought hasn’t crossed your mind, chances are it has for someone you know.
In April of 2019, Forbes published an article with a loaded title about female leadership, where the writer goes on to introduces an enlightening scenario, albeit it a simplified one. It’s an answer to our call for the factor, which catapults men to CEO positions and curbs women qualified to do the job: a real-life tug-of-war between confidence and competence. An exploratory HBR study found that where women are more likely to ‘take care’, men ‘take charge’ in an array of environments. Effectively, this means that “we commonly misinterpret displays of confidence as a sign of competence; we are fooled into believing that men are better leaders than women”.
So, how do we fix this? How can women break the barriers and rise to reach their potential? We can start by “fostering women’s ambition, passion and confidence”. By instilling a sense of safety, security, and trust, we can teach the women in our lives to to feel worthy and capable of responsibility, initiative and motivation.