The Real Reason So Few
Women are in the Boardroom
by
Marty Nemko © 2004
On average, women are rated as
slightly better managers than men. Also, women better understand the
female consumer’s mindset. That’s important because women make most
purchases.
So why are only 11% of Fortune
500 senior executives women?
The standard answer is “glass
ceiling,” a term that evokes the image of a cabal of top male
executives scheming to preserve an old boy’s club.
While vestiges of old boy hiring
may remain, most top executives at Fortune 500 companies are too
worried about the bottom line to let any old-boy cravings affect who
they hire as senior executives.
The primary reason for the 11%
figure is that men, on average, are willing to devote more time to
their career than are women. And time it takes.
A study conducted by
The Business Roundtable, an association of CEOs, found that the
average CEO works 58 hours per week. Fortune 500 CEOs likely work
even more.
Unlike in typical media
portrayals, male senior executives don’t spend much time
hang-gliding. In the real world, here’s how it more often plays out,
as reported to me by my many clients who are male senior executives.
Their exercise is more likely to be on a treadmill while doing their
professional reading. If they’re married, when their wife insists, “You
need to take on more of the domestic chores and parenting!,” he is
likely to say something like, “I want to rise to the top, and you
want me to, too. I like my work, and you like our lifestyle and that
we can afford to pay for our kids to go to private school. That
requires lots of evenings and weekends. I spend as much time with
the family as I can.”
Most women make different
choices. Having been career coach to 2,000 professional clients, 2/3
female, more women than men prioritize work/life balance, wanting
more time for family, home, friends, and recreation. As a result,
fewer women than men are willing to work 58+ hours a week. Fewer
women than men want to take work home or do extensive after-work
professional development activities during evenings and weekends.
Part of the reason most women
want ample family time is their biological drive to have children
and be the primary family caregiver. Feminist activists argue this
is social conditioning by “the male hegemony.” But if that were
true, then why do women take on most family caregiving in almost
every society from Iceland to New Guinea, in every era from ancient
times to today, and in all political contexts from communist to
capitalist? Women’s desire to prioritize family caregiving is mainly
a biological predisposition, not cultural brainwashing.
Some women argue that it’s men’s
fault that women don’t spend more time at work. For example, Career
Journal senior correspondent Perri Capell wrote, “If more women had
men at home doing for them what women traditionally do for men, they
might be able to stay at the office longer.” Fact is, many women
don’t do it for men. They do it for themselves. On average, it is
women, more than men, who want to have children. So it is unfair of
them to insist that the men share heavily in the child rearing. It
is the woman, on average, who cares more about having lots of time
with children (And the data doesn't support the importance of
that--after controlling for socioeconomic status, quantity of time
matters little. Quality of time does). If quantity of family time
matters more to women, it is unfair for them to impose that value on
their husbands. And regarding domestic chores, most men aren't as
concerned about a tastefully decorated and sparkling clean home. On
average, women care more about this. It is unfair for women to force
men to spend time on what the woman wants. If a man were to insist
that a woman devote equal time to the things he cares
about--for example, financial and tax issues, that fix-it/build-it
project, or playing basketball, most people would think that unfair,
selfish. Yet when women do it, we think it's reasonable. I predict
that if women--before they got married--told their career-minded
future husbands that they would insist he fully shared domestic and
child-rearing responsibilities, and that they don’t expect to earn
much money, many men would decide it isn't worth getting married.
So, most women withhold those demands until afterwards.
In the privacy of my office,
many capable, highly educated women who, in public, mouth
politically correct mantras decrying the paucity of women in the
boardroom, admit that what they’d really like is to work part-time
if at all, so they can have ample time for home, family, friends,
etc. This is consistent with the September 2003 New York Times
Magazine story that found that a majority even of Ivy-educated
women did not work full time.
Dr. Warren Farrell, author of
the forthcoming book,
Why Men Earn More: The Startling Truth Behind the Pay Gap and
What Women Can Do About It, found
that a key reason men earn more than women is length-of-hours
worked. In addition to providing statistics, he interviewed a number
of successful senior executive women. Each one stated that crucial
to their success was their willingness to work longer than most
women are. For example:
When I interviewed
Lillian Vernon, (of Lillian Vernon Corporation), she said, “Many
people who dream about their own businesses and don’t have one,
are not prepared to work that hard—to think about their job
while they’re getting dressed, showering, waiting for somebody—
to think of every minute as an opportunity."
Theresa Metty, senior VP at Motorola agreed, “Successful people
don’t see after-hour ‘demands’ as demands, but as opportunities.
The opportunity to surprise, invent, create…”
A 2004 study by Catalyst, a
women’s advocacy organization, found that women aspire to senior
executive positions at the same rate as men. But a woman (or a man)
can’t have it both ways. If she wants a moderate workweek, for the
reasons I will outline below, she cannot fair-mindedly aspire to the
boardroom.
Corporations, governments, and
non-profits need plenty of good 20 to 40 hour-a-week workers, but
not in the top spots. Here’s why.
Imagine you were the CEO of a
company and were considering two employees for a senior position.
Candidate A had—over her or his 20-year career--worked 50 to 60
hours a week, and in spare time, made great efforts to keep
upgrading skills, while Candidate B worked 40 hours a week, and in
spare time focused on family, home, friends, and recreation. You’d
almost certainly hire Candidate A. Fact is, more men than women are
like Candidate A. That, and not a sexist glass ceiling, is the main
reason why women represent only 11% of senior executives in Fortune
500 companies.
But let’s say that you, the CEO,
did what feminist activists advocate: install a family-friendly
workplace that prioritizes work-life balance. You might hire lots of
people like Candidate B. If so, your company would likely go out of
business.
Here’s why. Your competitors
would hire lots of Candidate A’s. That would result not only in
those senior executives--the company’s more important people--being
more productive, but their supervisees too. Dedicated, passionate
leadership is infectious.
A company with such committed
employees is an exciting, passion-filled place. The argument that
working more than 40 hours a week is ineffective and leads to
burnout is not true. What leads to burnout is meaningless or too
difficult work in a passionless workplace, not additional hours of
meaningful, doable work in a passionate environment. Some of the
most alive people I know work long hours. The argument that working
more than 40 hours a week leads to burnout is rhetoric unsupported
by research. I believe the rhetoric is simply designed to sell
work-life balance to employers. We all know how being around
dedicated people makes us more energized, not less.
A workplace with long,
hard-working passionate people results in the company’s products
being better or more cost-effective, which makes thousands of
people--the customers--happier. Aren’t you grateful when your home,
TV, car, etc., is wonderful, reliable, and didn’t cost too much?
Creating excellent products, in turn, causes a company’s profits to
grow, which allows the company to invest in more innovation,
provides money to the thousands of shareholders who entrusted their
savings to the company, and increases the sense of pride and passion
among the company’s employees.
Meanwhile, your employees,
mostly Candidate Bs, zealots for work-life balance, in the
short-run, will appreciate being able to leave work earlier than
workers at your competitors’ companies. When, in the middle of a
brainstorming meeting, someone says, “Sorry, I have a parent-teacher
conference. I have to leave,” and you say, “Fine,” everyone will
smile at how family-friendly their workplace is. But inside, those
with passion about their work will feel that passion just slightly
deflated. Each such event—for example, every time an employee takes
advantage of the Family Leave Act-- dissipates your workplace’s
passion just a little more. In the intermediate term, your employees
will be working for a company in decline because their competitors,
filled with more passionate, dedicated employees, are producing a
better product. And in the long-term, such companies are far more
likely to go out of business, leaving your boardroom with 0 percent
women and 0 percent men.
The media’s headline message is,
“Hire more women and make the workplaces more family-friendly. Stop
demanding that executives work 50 to 60 hours a week. Be more like
France that mandates a 35-hour average workweek.” The media is far
less eager to trumpet the fact that despite France having a better
educated population and 35-hour work week, its unemployment rate is
more than twice the US rate. Advocating “family-friendly, work-life
balance” workplaces will likely create different headlines a few
years later: “More jobs out-sourced to India." “More companies open
new facilities in China.” “Unemployment soars.”
For the reasons stated at the
outset, if I were a CEO, I would certainly want to hire women in
senior positions, but only those with a proven track record of
having put in long hours at work and in professional development,
and who could be counted on to continue doing so. Those are the
same criteria I would use to evaluate male candidates.
There would be plenty of room in
my company for women and men who want to work a moderate workweek,
but not at the top. I don’t care whether my executives have a y
chromosome, but I want their priority not to be work-life balance,
but rather, helping my company to ethically develop the best
products in the world.
Dr. Marty Nemko
© 2004
Dr. Marty Nemko is a career
and personal coach in Oakland, CA. 400+ of his published writings
are free on
www.martynemko.com.
His column appears on Page 1 of
the Sunday San Francisco Chronicle's employment section. It ran for
three years on the front page of the classified section of the
Sunday Los Angeles Times.
Many of his writings have been
published online on monster.com, careerbuilder.com, aol.com, and
msn.com.
He is a frequent guest on CNN,
ABC, and PBS. He is the regular career and education expert on CNN
Local Edition.
He is in his 17th year as the
regular career and education expert on the Ronn Owens Show,
the #1 rated talk show in Northern California. He has been the
primary source for dozens of articles, including in the New York
Times and Washington Post.
He is in his 16th year as host of
Work with Marty Nemko, a popular talk show on an NPR
affiliate in San Francisco.
He holds a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley
and subsequently taught there.
Copyright 2004 Marty
Nemko, all rights reserved
