Within a few hours of me posting my previous piece, “Women Leaders Leaving,” Susan Wojcicki, announced that she was stepping down as chief executive officer of Youtube, a job she’s held for nine years.
Of itself this would not be especially worthy of comment. But given the announcement of her retirement was in the immediate wake of Nicola Sturgeon’s, and given women leaders are being depleted in Silicon Valley, it’s worth noting.
Even setting aside the special case of Elizabeth Holmes, the onetime CEO of the onetime Theranos, who crashed in a crash of her own making, in recent years, among others Sheryl Sandberg left her top role at Meta; Meg Whitman left hers at Hewlett-Packard; and Ginni Rometty hers at IBM. As the New York Times summarized it, in the recent past the tech industry “has lost a raft of women leaders who broke barriers, with few obvious female successors in sight.” Which again raises the question: given all the efforts made to change the equation, to fix the situation, why. Why are women leaders so stubbornly few in number?
Though we continue to refuse to acknowledge it, the answer seems to me to be clear. It’s not for lack of trying – trying to remedy the imbalance by doing everything from deliberately mentoring and sponsoring to deliberately socializing, modifying, and diversifying. Rather it’s because the higher women climb on the leadership ladder the more apparent become the physiological and psychological differences between them and men. Unless and until these differences are acknowledged and addressed, there will be progress, more women leaders than there were before. But progress will continue painfully, and puzzlingly, slow.