Where Are the Women? addresses the dearth of women in senior positions depite the plethora of women, for instance, graduating with MBAs:
It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. By 2004, after three decades of the women’s movement, when business schools annually graduate thousands of qualified young women, when the managerial pipeline is stuffed with capable, talented female candidates for senior positions, why are there still so few women at the top?In part, the answer probably still lies in lingering bias in the system. Most women interviewed for this story say that overt discrimination is rare; still, the executive suites of most major corporations remain largely boys’ clubs. Catalyst, the women’s business group, blames the gap on the fact that women often choose staff jobs, such as marketing and human resources, while senior executives are disproportionately plucked from the ranks of those with line jobs, where a manager can have critical profit-and-loss responsibility. Others fault the workplace itself, saying corporations don’t do enough to accommodate women’s often more-significant family responsibilities.
All those things are true. But there may be a simpler — and in many ways more disturbing — reason that women remain so underrepresented in the corner office: For the most part, men just compete harder than women. They put in more hours. They’re more willing to relocate. They’re more comfortable putting work ahead of personal commitments. And they just want the top job more.
Let’s be clear: Many, many individual women work at least as hard as men. Many even harder. But in the aggregate, statistics show, they work less, and as long as that remains true, it means women’s chances of reaching parity in the corner office will remain remote. Those top jobs have become all-consuming: In today’s markets, being CEO is a global, 24-hour-a-day job. You have to, as Barnes says, give it your life. Since women tend to experience work-life conflicts more viscerally than their male peers, they’re less likely to be willing to do that. And at the upper reaches of corporate hierarchy, where the pyramid narrows sharply and the game becomes winner-take-all, a moment’s hesitation — one important stint in the Beijing office that a woman doesn’t take because of a sick child or an unhappy husband — means the odds get a little worse for her and a little better for the guy down the hall.
I think O’Reilly’s tournament analogy is dead on:
Charles A. O’Reilly III, professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business, has been particularly interested in women’s career attainment and the problem of why, despite notable gains in education and experience, women are still so woefully underrepresented in the top ranks of American corporations. In 1986, he began following a group of University of California, Berkeley MBAs to see if he could isolate those qualities that led to a corner office. His conclusion is starkly simple: Success in a corporation is less a function of gender discrimination than of how hard a person chooses to compete. And the folks who tend to compete the hardest are generally the stereotypical manly men.Think of careers as a tournament, he says. In the final rounds, players are usually matched pretty equally for ability. At that point, what differentiates winners from losers is effort — how many backhands a tennis player hits in practice, how many calls a sales rep is willing to make. “From an organization’s perspective,” he says, “those most likely to be promoted are those who both have the skills and are willing to put in the effort. Individuals who are more loyal, work longer hours, and are willing to sacrifice for the organization are the ones who will be rewarded.”
Today’s women, he says, are equal to their male counterparts in education, experience, and skill. But when it’s a painful choice between the client crisis and the birthday party, the long road trip and the middle schooler who needs attention, the employee most likely to put company over family is the traditional, work-oriented male.
Now I have to rent The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit:
There’s a scene near the end of the 1956 movie The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit in which Fredric March, who plays a work-obsessed network president, turns on Gregory Peck, who plays his conflicted speechwriter. “Big, successful companies just aren’t built by men like you, nine-to-five and home and family,” March says. “They’re built by men like me, who give everything they’ve got to it, who live it body and soul.” March, of course, has sacrificed his own happiness to the company, a choice that Peck is unwilling to make.
Americans work more hours than any other nation, and American men work more hours than American women:
As a nation, we now clock more time on the job than any other worker on earth, some 500 hours a year more than the Germans, and 250 hours per year more than the British. But the true heavy lifters in the productivity parade are American men. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, men work longer hours in every industry, including those traditionally identified with women. In financial fields, for example, men worked an average of 43.8 hours per week compared with women’s 38.7; in management, it was men 47.2, women 39.4; in educational services, men 39.2, women 36.0; in health services, men 43.1, women 36.4.The same pattern holds true in professions whose elaborate hazing rituals are designed to separate potential chiefs from the rest of the tribe. Young associates at prestigious law firms, for example, often put in 60- to 70-hour weeks for long periods of time. “It’s almost an intentional hurdle placed by the firms to weed out those who simply don’t have the drive and ambition to do it,” says Stanford University economist Edward Lazear. “It may be excessive, but you select out a very elite few, and those are the ones who make it to partner and make very high salaries.”
Some people take this all as evidence that women have less power than men. Others point out that women are under less pressure to kill themselves for that CEO position:
“When a woman gets near the top, she starts asking herself the most intelligent questions,” says Warren Farrell, the San Diego-based author of The Myth of Male Power (Simon & Schuster, 1993). The fact that few women make it to the very top is a measure of women’s power, not powerlessness, he maintains. “Women haven’t learned to get their love by being president of a company,” he says. “They’ve learned they can get respect and love in a variety of different ways — from being a good parent, from being a top executive, or a combination of both.” Free of the ego needs driving male colleagues, they’re likelier to weigh the trade-offs and opt for saner lives.