In the Lead takes another look at why women aren’t in senior-executive positions:
A recent study of women in corporate leadership by Catalyst, a New York research organization, found that women accounted for only 15.7% of corporate-officer positions and 5.2% of top earners at Fortune 500 companies in 2002. Even more telling, the vast majority of women in top jobs are in staff rather than line positions, which rarely lead to the very top. Women hold only 9.9% of line corporate-officer jobs — where they would be overseeing a business that earns money for their company — compared with 90.1% for men.Researchers and female executives cite a variety of reasons for this meager showing: male executives’ reluctance to mentor women, women’s exclusion from informal networks, a hesitancy to consider women for the toughest posts, and women’s own struggle to balance careers and families — sometimes leading them to settle for less-demanding roles at work.
But a big factor holding women back is their good-girl, or good-student, behavior. ‘Women will work themselves to death in the belief that if they do more and more, that will get them ahead, when it isn’t so,’ says Terri Dial, former vice chairman of Wells Fargo, and president and CEO of its Wells Fargo Bank. ‘They think, ‘If I do the work, my bosses will see it and reward me.’ ‘
An interesting anecdote:
Lisa Jacobson, CEO of Inspirica, a New York high-school and college tutoring company, agrees that women often don’t ask for what they deserve. In the 20 years since she founded her company, none of the female lawyers, graphic designers, public-relations experts, accountants or others she has interviewed to do work for Inspirica has ever quoted her as high a fee as their male counterparts. “The women almost always seem to say, ‘I’m $125 an hour, but for you I’d charge $75, when the guy just says flatly that he charges $350,” she adds.