Women in Leadership: The 20% Rule

Posted by: Cathy Arnst on October 08

Look around your workplace, and calculate the percentage of women. Now look at top management. How many of those corner offices are occupied by women? For the vast majority of U.S. workplaces, the answer is, 20% or less, even though women make up 48% of the total workforce. As Newsweek columnist Anna Quindlen writes in The Leadership Lid: “One of the greatest natural resources in America is going underused. And she may be sitting right at the next desk.”

Seems that the glass ceiling hasn’t budged in years, no matter how many women enter the workforce. An upcoming report from The White House Project, a non-partisan organization set up to promote women in politics, finds that women occupy around 20% of leadership positions in business, journalism, politics and law firms. The rate is much lower in Fortune 500 firms and higher in non-profits (where salaries are typically low). And it’s been that way for years.

This lack of female leaders persists despite the fact that almost half the U.S. population says they don’t care whether their surgeon, banker or lawyer is male or female, according to a Pew Research Center survey—an indication that gender-based stereotypes are breaking down for many once all-male professions. There’s a big lag between attitudes and action, however. White House Project president Marie Wilson points out that the U.S. ranks 71st in the world for women’s political representation (even Sudan and North Korea surpass us). Women actually lost ground last year in the nation’s largest corporations, says the non-profit Catalyst foundation:

In the Fortune 500, women held 15.4 percent of corporate officer positions in 2007, compared to 15.6 percent in 2006. Women in top-paying positions stayed the same at 6.7 percent. There was a 15.6 percent increase in the number of companies that had no women corporate officers, from 64 companies in 2006 to 74 companies in 2007, and the percentage of women in line positions which often lead to top leadership jobs fell by 1.8 percentage points, from 29.0 percent to 27.2 percent.

I always find it ironic when magazines put out an issue celebrating outstanding women—see Newsweek’s Women and Leadership , Forbes’ The World’s 100 Most Powerful Women, Fortune’s 50 Most Powerful Women In Business . If women leaders were all that commonplace or women in business all that powerful, it’s unlikely they would be singled out for celebration. After all, no woman has ever been editor of Fortune, Forbes or Newsweek. Or BusinessWeek.

So what’s to be done? At the excellent web site The Thin Pink Line (bookmark it now!), co-founder Carol Frohlinger warns women not to let themselves be lulled into a false sense of complacency by companies that pay lip-service to diversity and opportunity. Instead, she says, do a quick and dirty “gender audit”:

What percentage of women on your company’s board of directors are women? What percentage of women in executives roles are women? Do executive women hold positions in the line (the profit and loss areas of the business) or are they clustered in traditionally “female” staff jobs, for example, human resources? Do the people in your company include you (and other women) as appropriate in meetings where important decisions are being made? Do women get mentored by senior people to the degree that men do? Do women get assigned to high visibility projects at a rate commensurate to men? Do women get paid as well as men do? If your organization comes up far short, recognize that while your firm may have a theoretical commitment to gender neutrality, it’s not making enough of an effort. That means you’ll have to pick up the slack with your efforts.

Or, ambitious women could just become men. In a recent study of people who changed their gender through hormones and surgery, the researchers found that average earnings for female-to-male transgender workers increased slightly following their switch, while average earnings for male-to-female transgender workers fall by nearly one-third.

These findings…illustrate the often hidden and subtle processes that produce gender inequality in workplace outcomes.

If anyone out there has any ideas about how to increase the number of women leaders, or if you’ve already made it to the top, please share.

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