In one of our most controversial columns ever, we addressed the question of why more women don’t run companies. No, we said, there is not a cabal of Neanderthal men, working behind closed doors to keep the broads at bay. Instead, the relatively lower number of female executives is due to the exigencies of biology and the realities of personal choice.
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Reader Rants and Raves
► I read this article with interest because, at least in part, I agree with your findings. However, I would re-word your “biology” response as “time.” This difference is not that women have babies, but rather, that women give up their “spot on the fast track” when they have babies and choose to care for them because they lack the time. Time is the element critical to productivity and ongoing professional advancement for Executives; time to spend at the office, time to build relationships, time to spend with key clients – and for Executives that means loads of time - 60 hours per week or more. Traditional work flexibility programs don’t solve this problem; while employees get to spend less time in the office it most certainly sidelines any serious career they once had.
I also disagree completely with your final verdict, that “as long as mothers want to spend time with their children, women’s careers will always have a different, more circuitous path than those of men.” Frankly, I think this is a cop-out – one that assumes the only viable work structure is the one in which we dwell today.
— K.W.
► The bottom line is that, unless you are DaVinci, it is very difficult to excel in multiple areas - that being your career AND your family, so the majority must settle for somewhere in the middle. Biology aside, as it applies to either men or women, you cannot be the best CEO while being the best Husband/Father/Wife/Mother. Success comes with a price tag. The best will always rise to the top, man or woman, but that often comes with a price that women are simply not willing to pay. It has been paid by many men.
— Anonymous
► Your article reminded me of a news program I was listening to in Tokyo a number of years ago. The two executives were being interviewed about hiring college graduates. This was during the month when all potential college seniors send out their resumes to companies. The executives were asked why they didn't hire more females. There answer was interesting but honest. They didn't like to hire women because once we hire them they "get married, get pregnant, have babies" and then leave the company to raise a family.
— B.K.
► While I agree with what you said about women and the statistics concerning their "rise to the top", I believe you have only told the "tip of the iceberg" about what's holding women back. More than anything else, it is their mindset, as a class, that is "holding them back." When I was in college (I graduated in 1979), a professor cited an interesting statistic to us in psychology class. He stated that in the 1930s, more women had graduated college and began careers, than in the 1970s. "More women are in school now," he said then, "But they do not persevere to the same extent as women of the 1930s. Also, women of that time were not told 'you can have it all.' They were told, by and large, by their institutions, that a life of work was a serious and whole life, and that if they expected to have families they should realize that that too is a full time occupation, if done well. They were not taught what you're being taught today - which is, that your life should be one of a continuous string of options, opting in and out of this and that as you go along. All that leads to is a life of fragmentation, and the working world does not suffer dilettantes lightly." This caused an outcry from the "Libbers" in the class - I remember that day well. Too bad for them, and for me, that he was telling the truth.
Young women would be better served in our educational institutions, if we encouraged them to understand that biology plays a very large role in adult choices. We should be telling them this at a very early age, and never stop telling them. We should tell them that motherhood and family life is a serious undertaking, and so is a life of work. But to try to do both is tantamount to pretending that we are two persons. If spectacular results are wanted from either alternative, there should be a corresponding spectacular level of commitment to that alternative.
As far as I'm concerned, the most dangerous bit of political talk I ever heard was, "You're female. In our generation, you can have it all." The trouble is, the majority of women still believe that. What they fail to do as individuals is to decide where their own personal boundaries are. If the sexes are to be represented in comparable numbers at the top of the work pyramid, women need to dedicate the same hard headed determination to their careers, that men are genetically and culturally programmed to exhibit.
— J.S.
► You discuss male resistance against women having positions in upper management as being “subtle and surreptitious.” Quite right. But you then go on to say that since professional advancement is based on “availability, commitment and consistent performance,” it is very difficult for working mothers to advance to the highest levels of a company. Why does it have to be true? It is true in our society because men have defined this as the criteria for advancement, criteria that, not by coincidence, favors men. I do not pretend to know what criteria should replace these but I would be willing to bet that you can get some high level women executives to come up with something. The trick of course is getting male run companies to change their thinking.
— A.S.
► My wife and I have talked about this question at length. She and I are the owners of a 75 person manufacturing firm, and so are somewhat attuned to what it is to be a mom (or dad) and working as a CEO. There are two very significant factors that you can add to your list.
1. If the average age of a Fortune 500 CEO is 55 (or whatever it is, in fact), look back at the graduating classes of the MBA programs 20-30 years ago to see the male/female distribution. This baseline ratio heavily influences who is able to become CEO later on.
2. Nearly every woman who has the brains/education/social connections/drive to become a CEO someday, is very likely to be married to a man with higher than average income potential. That means that these women, when confronted with the choice between devoting their lives to a career/job or becoming full-time moms, have a disproportionate ability to choose the latter because their spouse has the income to allow it. The female working poor rarely has the choice. This means that there is a much larger "biological" drain on those women best able to become CEOs. As such, it seems unlikely that women will ever hold 50% of the top jobs, and not because of a glass ceiling or overt discrimination (although, as for other groups, it certainly does exist!)
— D.J.
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