I’m trying – and failing – not to get frustrated!
Repeatedly, experts on women and power are asked why their numbers remain so low. And, repeatedly, they give the same answers. Answers they’ve given for decades – which, however, have proved insufficient and, therefore, unsatisfactory.
This is not to suggest the answers they give are wrong. Or that their efforts to improve the situation – to increase the number of women in positions of authority – have been for naught. They have not: good intentions have made a difference; with measurably more women leaders now than a generation ago. Still, progress has been slow. Women are stuck in a rut and wonder why.
My return to this subject was prompted by a piece in Monday’s Financial Times, whose headline reads, “Number of US Women Executives Falls.” It’s not, however, the numbers that are disappointing. No surprise there. What’s exasperating is that experts on women and leadership are still giving the same old answers to the same old questions.
Jennifer McCollum, head of Catalyst, a non-profit that speaks for women in the workforce, is quoted in the article as saying that an “unconscious bias persists” against women. She adds that women and men with the same talents and skills are still thought of differently, which creates “invisible barriers that can have an enormous impact on women’s advancement.” Carolyn Childers, chief executive of Chief, a network of women executives, also provides a familiar explanation: the post-pandemic return to the workplace has disproportionally hurt women who “still have the majority of childcare.”
McCollum and Childers are not, of course, wrong. But their answers are shopworn. Even in a country such as Sweden, where business and government have done an excellent job developing policies that, for example, encourage equal responsibility for caregiving, the number of women leaders still lags.
Which is precisely why we need a radical relook at the gender gap. This relook focuses not on the similarities between women and men but on the differences. Women are different from men – their brains, their bodies, their minds, their psyches. These differences are relevant to why the number of women in power remains low, and they are important. Until they become part of the discussion, and until their implications are aggressively addressed, large numbers of women are destined if not doomed to be excluded from the C-Suite.
As I wrote in the post linked below: “We pretend the distinctions between the genders either do not exist or do not pertain. But they do.” They do exist and they do pertain – and they matter a lot.