For some time now I’ve been interested in the question of why – for all our efforts over the last three decades or so – there are still so few women, relatively, at the highest rungs of the leadership ladder.
It’s not for lack of trying. Enormous amounts of ink of been spilled and enormous efforts have been made attempting to ameliorate the situation. Sponsors and mentors; explicit bias and implicit bias; parttime and flextime; remote work and hybrid work; diversity and inclusion – each refers to initiatives taken with the best of intentions trying to fix what’s broke. Or what’s ostensibly broke – too few women at the top.
Obviously, there are many more women near the top and even at the top than there used to be. But in comparison with men the numbers are still puny. There has not been a single woman president of the United States or France. There has never been a president or Communist Party chair or prime minister of Russia or China or Japan who was a woman. The percent of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies who are women finally climbed out of the single digits – for the first time ever, this year, it’s just over 10%. In top U.S. law firms, the percent of women equity partners remains under a quarter. And while more women serve in the U.S. Congress than ever before, the total figure is similar, just over 25 percent.
So… is progress toward gender equity being made? Yes. Is this progress after all this time sufficient? No – certainly not ideally.
What then is the problem? Well, it’s not really a “problem.” It’s a truism. Women and men are different. Women and men are physically, psychologically, and sociobiologically not one and the same. The differences between them necessarily have an impact on gender and leadership. Moreover, the differences between (among) them are greatest when pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, and childcare are involved.
For a book that was published in 2019 titled Women’s Leadership Journeys (edited by Sherylle Tan and Lisa DeFrank-Cole), I wrote a chapter titled “Leadership and Lactation.” My thesis was simple: “that the evolutionary origins of gender divisions explain to a considerable extent the meager numbers of women leaders.”
Remember… humans are primates. This explains why a section of my chapter discussed being a primate parent. I observed that among the commonalities of being a primate parent is a level of attachment between mother and child that nearly always far exceeds that between father and child. This impacts on women and leadership. Specifically, woman have a far harder time leaving their child behind while they go off to work – while they go off to lead – than do men. In Sweden, for example, men and women are both given the same amount of time off for parental leave. However, men return to full time work far faster than do women.
At the time I pointed out that scientists were only starting to get serious about studying the similarities between human and nonhuman primates. I further suggested the similarities would someday prove consequential – they would include “many psychological and social mechanisms underlying parenting.”
As it turned out, scientists did pursue this line of research. And they did find the impact of pregnancy and parenting on women – as on any other primate – was considerable. This was nicely summarized in a recent article in the Washington Post that read in part: “Neuroscience, which has long studied the effect of pregnancy on animal brains, has finally turned its attention to the effect on the human brain – and the results are challenging commonly held assumptions about women’s intellectual abilities during and after pregnancy.”*
The article makes clear the following:
- When a human mother is pregnant and then gives birth her brain changes. It undergoes “an extraordinary period of reorganization known as neuroplasticity.”
- These changes have some effects some of the time that are negative, such as “mental fogginess.”
- These changes have some effects some of the time that are positive, such as improved multitasking and stress endurance.
- Though the article does not explicitly say, its content makes clear that some of the time some of the changes are likely to have an impact on women and leadership. This includes the wish to, the will to, the determination to, the capacity to, lead. To, that is, prioritize leading over time with, and energy on family.
Of course, not all women are mothers. But about 86% of women in the U.S. between the ages of 40 and 44 have given birth to at least one child. Moreover, 25% of all American mothers are raising their children on their own. Finally, not only do women who are pregnant have to deal with changing bodies, once they deliver their babies they have to deal with changing expectations. According to the Pew Research Center (in a report published in 2019) “the public sees vastly different pressure points for women and men in today’s society.” Roughly 77 percent of responders say women face a lot of pressure to be an involved parent. A significantly smaller share, 49 percent, say the same about men.
Implicit in my theory about the importance of the differences between men and women as they pertain to becoming, or to being, a leader is that these differences will endure and that they will have an enduring impact on the numbers. This is not to say that equity between men and women in top leadership roles is not a goal we should continue to pursue. Rather it is to understand more clearly and fully what exactly we are dealing with – gender differences not entirely amenable to social engineering.
* https://www.washingtonpost.com/parenting/2023/02/23/mommy-brain-symptoms-benefits/