Disrupters, p.3
Disrupters, page 3
I said, “I guess you are,” and then started asking innocuous questions about projects she had spearheaded.
She told me about this amazing initiative she had thought of, found support for, procured resources for, and poured hours into. In just a few minutes, though, she had a scowl on her face as she relayed the rest of the story: Once the project showed some promise, her boss—a young white dude—took over the project and presented it to his boss . . . also a young white dude.
Just earlier that week, the executive vice president, a woman, had presented the project to the entire division. The young white guys got the applause. No mention of Ms. Chanel Suit. No credit. No recognition of her initiative, her work, or her contribution. The two guys didn’t invite her into the later meetings. Furthermore, they never gave her any support elsewhere and provided zero advocacy going forward.
As innocently as I could, I asked, “And does your boss do that to everybody?”
She thought for a moment and said, “No, he usually gives his support to the . . . oh. Oh.”
As soon as she realized that he always propped up the guys in his division—especially the young white dudes—and didn’t give much support, if any, to the handful of women, she suddenly realized she had experienced this systemic bias.
She was transformed. Ms. Chanel Suit turned into an angry goddess on a mission to take control of her professional destiny. If awareness is the first step in the journey to recognizing bias, anger is usually the second. She started ticking off all the times that something similar had happened to her and other women, and all the times it didn’t happen with her male co-workers.
Gender Equality vs. Gender Equity
“Equality” is the absence of negative action where all are treated the same; it assumes everyone has the same starting line, finish line, and journey.
“Equity” is the presence of positive action where each person is met where they are, not where you expect them to be.
Equality is not disallowing a person of color to enroll in a university; equity is recognizing that a first-generation college student has a steeper set of challenges than someone who comes from generations of doctors and thereby creating a minority scholarship to mitigate that disadvantage.
Equity is not explicitly barring a woman from becoming CEO, yet continuing to say, “I just can’t find any women candidates”; equity is recognizing that your candidate pool may be limited and thereby actively seeking out female candidates to balance it out.
“I’m going to call that EVP and tell her that it started with me,” she said. “What do you think about that!”
It was too late, I told her. The idea had already been announced. Those two guys were recognized as the owners. If she tried to get the admittedly deserved credit for it, she’d look like a bitter old lady. The best route would be to congratulate them, be happy the idea took off, and start talking about the next new thing. Then she had to make sure it never happened again.
She’s like so many of us, though. She had never stopped to question it. It was just something that happened. As a woman, you deal with it and move on. But once you start to look for it, you see it everywhere. This type of thing has been happening in the workplace every day, for at least a hundred years.
A Century of Assimilation
Yes, plenty of men’s ideas get stolen. Sometimes they’re even stolen by women. This isn’t men vs. women; us vs. them. It’s not that black and white.
Her boss may not even realize he has an unconscious bias against the few women he manages. He has been conditioned in a system that was meant for our grandfathers, not for today’s women.
The bias that women in leadership face isn’t part of just one company or even of one culture. It’s inherent, so deep-rooted that it’s invisible. It’s like asking a white person, “Hey, what’s it like having white privilege?” You can’t see it unless you’re on the outside. And you can’t see it, usually, unless you experience it firsthand and see it for what it is.
“Just because everything is different doesn’t mean anything has changed.”
—Irene Peter
It’s been there ever since modern companies came into being. More than a century ago, Henry Ford’s car factory in Highland Park, Michigan, started production. The Ford Motor Company hired so many employees who were newly immigrated to the U.S. that it created the Ford English School. It didn’t just teach language skills and civics lessons. At its core, it attempted to transform immigrants into model citizens.
As Ford himself said of the school, “These men of many nations must be taught American ways, the English language, and the right way to live.”
At the center of its graduation ceremony was a literal “melting pot.” Graduates would enter the huge cauldron on one side decked out in native costumes representing their ethnicity: Someone born in Poland, for example, would look unmistakably Polish. After passing through the melting pot, their national identity would be boiled away. They would step out on the other side dressed identically in typical American clothes: dark suit, white shirt, and nice tie, replete with a boater hat, while smiling and waving American flags.
The Ford Motor Company had no room nor any use for diversity. Their assembly lines ran on mechanization, systemization, and uniformity. Henry Ford needed a worker who was replaceable and interchangeable. Having a dozen different languages and cultural norms on the factory floor got in the way of productivity.
You and I can look back and see how awful that was. We’ve learned to celebrate diversity. Trying to strip someone of their ethnic and cultural heritage is morally offensive to us. We have entire seminars today on being culturally sensitive. I can’t imagine hearing someone saying, “You know, you’d really succeed in this company if you were just more American,” much less a company hosting assimilation classes. Yet corporate culture still acts this way with women.
To succeed in a company, corporate culture expects women to shed what makes them unique—to be less like a woman and more like a man. If there are too few women in the higher echelons, the company blames the women: There are not enough qualified candidates, women don’t want to move up, women lag behind their male counterparts because they choose to have children, or whatever other excuse they can find.
Group Affinity
A 2015 report found that about twice as many men got help from senior-level men than did their female peers. It’s an unconscious bias, not an explicit one. This is an “I” group affinity—i.e., a simple preference to be around “people like us.”12
In so many words, they’re saying, “There’s no room here for leaders who don’t want to look and act like us. If only you acted more like a man, you could succeed.”
No one says this, of course. I doubt many directors or CEOs even explicitly think it. It’s an unconscious bias, which makes it even more difficult to combat. It’s a cultural norm so embedded in corporate practice that it’s a blind spot.
There are two main problems with this: One, we don’t live in the Industrial Age anymore, and two, even women who assimilate still aren’t guaranteed success.
We live in an economy where the chief competitive advantage doesn’t come from mass-producing something more cheaply than your competitors. Margins and commodities are important, of course, but that’s not a sustainable competitive advantage. The global economy is largely driven by innovation. And that doesn’t come from group-think or uniformity, but from a mash-up of ideas and cross-collaboration. Assimilating everyone into the collective hive is the opposite of fostering innovation.
But look at some of the women you know who have assimilated. They may dress like men, negotiate like men, communicate like men, and mimic men in so many other little ways. Even so, ask yourself: Have they advanced as quickly as the male co-workers they started with? Have younger, less-qualified guys been promoted over them? In any given scenario, would the same thing have happened to them if they had been men? If they were men . . . would they be where they are in their career right now?
The Economic Cost of Gender Bias
To quote startup investor Adam Quinton of Lucas Point Ventures, speaking at the 2013 We Own It Summit, “It goes beyond fairness. This is a people’s issue, not just a women’s issue. As someone once said, ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’”
Another investor at that same summit, Richard Nunneley, put it this way: “Why waste 50 percent of global intellect?”
To round this out with a third sentiment, intellectual property lawyer Annette Kahler wrote in a 2011 paper examining the gender gap in patents, “Opportunities are being missed because the ideas, inventions, perspectives, and proposed solutions of women are missed.”13
McKinsey Global Institute undertook a study in 201514 that examined gender inequality in 95 countries. Essentially, the authors posed the question, “What would it look like if women were as much a part of the economy as men?” If that were to happen, their research suggests, women would add $28 trillion to the global economy by 2025. To put that in perspective, they point out that this is roughly the size of the U.S. and Chinese economies combined. Can you imagine?
“Gender equality is smart economics.”
—Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank, 2007–2012
Of course, total gender parity is unlikely by 2025. To set more realistic expectations, they measured what the global economy would look like if each country just matched the progress of gender equality of its fastest-improving regional neighbor (out of ten groupings of regional countries)—in other words, if every country kept up with whoever was setting the pace toward economic parity in the region.
In that scenario, it was still an astounding $12 trillion.
U.S. Businesses Majority-Owned by Women
Total number: +11 million
Percentage of all U.S. businesses: 38 percent
Gross revenue: +$1.6 trillion
Employing: 9 million people
Businesses with +$1 million in revenue owned by a woman: 1 in 5
#1 state by total number: California
#1 state by percentage: Louisiana
#1 state for fastest growth of number: Florida
Number by a woman of color: 5 million
Sources: National Women’s Business Council Analysis of 2012 Survey of Business Owners; National Association of Women Business Owners Institute for Entrepreneurial Development; American Express OPEN 2016 State of Women-Owned Businesses Report15
That’s how much women currently in the work force would add to the global economy today if they were paid equally to their male counterparts. That’s an entire extra China churning out products and services . . . sitting right here in our collective backyards.
How do they suggest accomplishing this? Nothing earth-shattering. Their recommendations are along the lines of top-down approaches you see elsewhere: address unpaid labor and care, reduce violence toward women, ensure they have legal rights and protections, provide better education and access to health care, and so on.
Women everywhere need those things. Every woman should have the same rights and access as men. What’s frustrating is that the conversation on gender still revolves around justifying why a woman should be in the room.
Why? Why do we have to prove that we can contribute just like our male counterparts? Why is the focus on “Yes, you have the right to be here” instead of “What do we need to make our board and company the most successful they can be?”
That should be the discussion. We shouldn’t still need to do research on what the world would look like if women were accorded the same respect as men. Women and minorities shouldn’t need to prove that we’re capable. We should already have moved past those arguments. Indeed, we’ve made tremendous strides from the days when women couldn’t even own property or vote. But our competence is not assumed. Our worth isn’t recognized. Our rights aren’t universal.
It does frustrate me. It does, at times, anger me. There is a systemic bias against women in corporate culture. You’re not fighting any one person or even a group of people; you’re fighting against a cultural mindset. But getting mad will only make it worse. You and I could drink Prosecco all night, ranting and railing against the Man, and solve nothing. And truly, that’s not productive for the soul, either.
But what about the women who have made it to the top? What about the women who didn’t assimilate? For my doctoral dissertation, I studied women who had not just broken the glass ceiling but shattered it. I could have done my research on successful female vice presidents and CEOs, but I wanted to go to the tip-top: women sitting on the boards of public companies in the highly competitive fields of technology and health care.
I wanted to understand their common traits and characteristics. What worked for them? What didn’t? Did they attribute their success to luck or skill or knowing the right people? What did these women do differently than their peers that let them reach the pinnacle of corporate success? More important, could other women model it?
The Way of the Disrupter
After concluding my research, I took my findings out into the real world. I compared notes with other accomplished female leaders at all levels, I coached female executives to success, I sat on the boards of organizations providing support and angel investment for women-led companies, and I implemented my findings in my own life and career.
With the odds stacked against them . . . when playing a rigged game . . . when working in a culture where unconscious bias against them is normal . . . how do women disrupters still achieve success? I’ve organized the rest of the book around what you need to know to break the mold and find your success.
Know the Game
Here in Chapter 1, we’ve focused on the fact that, first and foremost, disrupters realize that business is a game, albeit one like Calvinball in “Calvin and Hobbes”: You don’t necessarily know what the rules are and often lose without even knowing why. But also like Calvinball, each player gets to make up her own rules.
So they do.
Later, you’re going to read about Jo-Ann’s portfolio approach to ever-changing business situations and how Nicole shook up an entire industry by redefining how high-growth startups are supposed to work.
Define Your Own Success
Disrupters don’t look to external sources to tell them what success looks like for them. They know that every individual has her own finish line. Some women want to embody Mother Earth, while others want to be the next Margaret Thatcher. Disrupters have a deep sense of their life’s purpose, and nearly everything they do aligns with that vision.
Look for that theme while you read the profile of the venture capital investor who was shunned by her entire professional network as she pursued what she thought was best for the world.
Choose Career and Family
They don’t buy into the myth that you can be successful at home or successful at the office—but not both. These women find a way to achieve not work-life balance (there’s no such thing) but work-life integration. They don’t allow others to set their priorities or tell them how their life is supposed to look. They eschew what they’re “supposed to do” and instead create their own goals and definitions of success. They find ways to weave the different strands of their lives together into a harmonious whole.
In Chapter 3, I’m going to share what that looks like for my husband and me, for other women, and even for a VC-funded entrepreneur whose husband is also a VC-funded entrepreneur. That blend of career and family looks different for all of us, but our approaches work for us.
Get Out of Your Head
The first person to stop us is, unfortunately, ourselves. Before we can talk about how we can work around an external unconscious bias, we need to look at our own internal biases holding us back. The disrupters I present throughout this book have learned how to overcome their own self-doubt and fears. They still experience them, of course, but they know how to quiet and even ignore that voice inside their head.
Women’s leadership styles often evoke resistance, exasperation, and even ridicule from their male co-workers, superiors, and subordinates. Women “don’t make decisions fast enough” or “worry too much about people’s feelings.” Disrupters, however, have an enduring belief that they have the skills and capabilities to meet the challenges ahead. Or, if they don’t, that they have the capacity to master the required skills. In other words, these women believe they have what it takes to lead—and so they do. Following this chapter, you’re going to read about Lisa Morales-Hellebo’s journey in “A Fully Formed Woman—Finally!” I see the journey of every disrupter mirrored in some aspect of her story.
Use What You’ve Got (Everyone Else Does)
Disrupters know the game is rigged and use every advantage they have to combat those odds. At the same time, they know that being a woman in business carries some unique risks, from being accused of landing a job “just because” they’re a woman to the “glass cliff” phenomenon.
Take the Damn Job!
Women are more likely than men to feel unprepared for a new position or set of responsibilities. We often rely on our demonstrated competence to judge whether we are prepared. Men, however, more often rely on confidence in their abilities. That is, we want to figure it out first and then take the job, while men want to take the job and then figure it out as they go.
This chapter consists of a short list of strategies disrupters use to advance their careers, followed by the profile of an unorthodox career path, which began in a drug rehab facility and wound up presenting in a United Nations compound.
Mentoring Works! (Except When It Doesn’t)
Many companies, some of them well-meaning, have created mentoring programs wherein they assign junior female employees to be coached by their more senior counterparts. These work well early in a woman’s career, as young professionals come onboard and learn about the organization and how business works. But they don’t affect how many women are later promoted to higher positions: women face the same glass ceiling regardless of whether they go through mentoring.
