Empowering Female Leaders: Why Companies Can’t Afford to Wait
This week, McKinsey released a report on Women in the Workplace that showed that for every 100 women promoted in an organization, 130 men are promoted. Not depressing enough yet? Allow me to continue: women who negotiate are 30% more likely to be seen as “bossy” and just 40% of women expressed interest in executive roles compared by 56% of men.
Last year, Bain & Company released a study with similarly depressing findings about how men and women evolve in their careers.
When women arrive at companies, their aspiration to reach top management averages 43%, and the confidence they can achieve that goal averages 27%. Yet after two years on the job, those numbers drop to 16% and 13% respectively.
For men, their aspiration levels as new employees versus experienced employees stays exactly the same, at 34%, while the confidence they can get to top management drops ever so slightly from 28% to 25%.
I’ll be completely honest — the saddest part about these statistics to me is that they don’t surprise me as much as they should. One of the best parts of my job is that I get to frequently meet with young women in business and tech. Their aspirations are frequently matched only by their confidence, something I find inspiring. But whether it’s sexist behavior in the workplace, imposter syndrome, social pressure, struggles with internal politics, or challenges with navigating failure, I see far too many women resorting to what my colleague Alison and I refer to as “best supporting actress syndrome,” meaning you started out aspiring for the lead role and eventually just start competing for supporting roles because the path seems less daunting and because it’s how you’re often encouraged to develop and grow.
I think we can do better. When it comes to female leadership, executives spend a lot of time identifying reasons the problem is “too hard,” ranging from the sociological (gender norms) to the behavioral (motherhood and marriage make it too challenging to balance work and career) to the pipeline (there just aren’t enough qualified women!), and not enough time actually solving it. One of the things I like most about this study is that it truly confirms to young female leaders something they have long known: it’s not them, it’s us. Companies and leaders need to do a whole lot more to inspire and engage female leaders from day one, and any excuse other than doing things better or differently falls short.
Before I dive in to where I think companies can do better, let me offer one important disclaimer: I work at HubSpot, and we, like many other entities in tech, are still in the process of improving gender equality at the very top echelons of our business. So let me first say that while we have made some key progress on this issue, we still have work to do — this piece is part of my combined aspiration and confidence that we can do it. Fortunately, the need for this disclaimer is matched in equal parts by my determination to fix this, a cadre of incredible female rising stars at HubSpot, and the commitment and support of our management team to see this change through.
Before I dive into solutions, let me first outline a few of the root causes associated with the Bain and McKinsey data sets:
Two years ago, I realized that when I met with young men in the technology industry and asked them what they wanted to do, they often referenced being founders, CEOs, board members, advisors, and thought leaders. Many women I met referenced incremental promotions, such as moving from manager to senior manager, or from individual contributor to manager.
This anecdotal evidence mirrors the Bain and McKinsey data, and I think the root cause is three-fold:
First, women are conditioned from an early age to seek approval and to avoid disrupting the apple cart too much, so in the abstract, the notion of aspiring to be the CEO of the company you work for seems achievable, but once you’re actually entrenched in your work and collaborating with people on your team, you don’t want to be perceived as taking someone else’s job or thinking you’re better than someone else within the organization.
As a result, declaring that you are just hoping to grow in your current role is the path of least resistance: it allows you to feel like you’re growing and moving forward, but not at the expense of others.
Second is the lack of female leaders at the highest tiers of business. When you look up the corporate ladder, the drop-off is staggering, as outlined in the McKinsey report graphic below. The gap at the entry level in terms of percentage is just seven percentage points, but at the Senior Vice President Level, just 20% of leaders are women.
It’s no surprise that aspiration falters alongside inspiration and mentorship: if you see predominantly older white gentleman leading the charge, you’re significantly less likely to envision how your leadership style could propel you to the very top.
Finally, imposter syndrome sets in. More specifically, a study by Ghent University cites “imposter cycle,” noting that feeling like an imposter doesn’t just impact a moment in time (like a Polaroid), but rather influences how women see the whole of their career narrative as flawed or imperfect. One of the women I’m lucky to work with every day aspired to be a manager early on in her career in tech, but ten days into her role as a new manager she began to question herself along with whether she could ever hope to be anything more than a manager given her uncertainty out of the gate. The resulting self-doubt is something I hear often from women in business, and while we often talk about it at key junctures of time, we rarely as an industry talk about its compounding impact over time.
But there are far too many articles on the existing landscape and the root causes, so without further dwelling on the problems, let’s talk more about solutions, specifically what leaders at any company, of any size, can do to fundamentally change this ambition and confidence gap over time.
Encourage Women to Aspire to The Highest Possible Jobs Early and Often
Knowing that aspiration and confidence trail over time, what can companies do to change how aspiring female leaders see both themselves and their careers? I think progress here starts with actively creating programs to help women get to the top.
At HubSpot, we focus on helping women land board seats. Early on, someone suggested that because board seats are rare and highly coveted, we should relegate attendance to female directors and vice presidents.
We vehemently disagreed, and here’s why: if you don’t start early encouraging people to aspire to the very top, you passively participate in the very incremental thinking that disempowers so many women in business.
As a result, our Women on Board sessions are open to anyone, not just at HubSpot, but also at our INBOUND conference and within the greater Boston community. The sessions focus on women and men who occupy board seats and provide actionable tips on how female leaders can position themselves for board positions either near-term or long-term and how male leaders can proactively source and identify remarkable female leaders for their boards.
Jill Greenthal, a board member at Akamai, The Weather Channel, and Houghton Mifflin (to name a few) plus a Trustee at the Museum of Fine Arts and the James Beard Foundation. Accomplished in every possible way, one of my favorite takeaways from her most recent session with HubSpot’s VP of Operations Alison Elworthy was “it’s time for all of us to be more impatient” as it relates to gender equality at the board level. Her sentiment gave me goosebumps, but more importantly, it inspired several of our attendees to seek board seats at their respective colleges, universities, and favorite non-profits.
So next time you’re thinking about your company’s initiatives for women, ask yourself what it’s actually doing — is it impatient enough? Does it help women think about getting to the top, or just advancing to the next step level in their career progression? If it’s the latter, think bigger and higher — your willingness to do so will help the women in your organization follow suit.
Change Process Before People
MIT Sloan hosts a Breaking the Mold conference every year, and this year one of the young women on our team bought a ticket to go and asked me to join her. One of the first speakers was a woman named Iris Bohnet, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School, and she was talking about gender equality in the workplace, the subject of her book on the same topic. She shared a lot of remarkable takeaways, but the one that really stuck with me is that it’s much easier to take the bias out of a process than to remove the bias on how people think and the biases they bring to table based on their race, nationality, gender, socioeconomic status, and experience.
Laszlo Bock, Google’s former SVP of People Operations, noticed that male engineers nominated themselves for promotions at a far higher rate than their female peers. Google harnessed the power of what they call “the nudge” — they didn’t massively overhaul processes or people, they just asked their head of engineering to send out the observation that historically more men have nominated themselves for promotions and encourage women to think long and hard about raising their hand. That small nudge from the company’s engineering head went a long way in the number of women who raised their hand, and in turn paid dividends down the line that helped improve the ratio of female:male managers at Google.
At HubSpot, we started programming to help middle managers who are women advance to senior management, but recently we realized that because we develop so many of our managers internally, we need to actively encourage more young female leaders to actively consider bigger roles early on in their careers. We’ve already done a lot of individual meetings on this, but are currently in the process of developing active programming to help address this issue en masse — simply put, whether you’re talking recruiting, retention, growth, or promotions, creating processes that are fair and equitable is a whole lot easier and more effective than trying to identify and address the hidden biases people bring to work each day.
Don’t Leave Innovation to the C Suite
The truth of the matter is that diversity programs, parties, and initiatives have been around for years and haven’t yet meaningfully moved the needle, particularly in tech. I suspect that one of the many reasons this is the case is that C suite leaders have relied upon their own devices and ideas to meaningfully impact the problem, and revolutionary changes don’t happen with status quo ideas.
Case in point: HubSpot, like many tech companies, struggles with gender balance on our engineering team. When we took a hard look at our own data at HubSpot on the gender axis, the data shows that our top of the hiring funnel was more gender diverse than our offer funnel. We looked at a few levers (our technical test, the composition of our interview teams, etc) before one of our female engineers and one of our recruiters identified the heart of the issue: side projects.
At HubSpot, we ask a lot of questions about how people solve problems, and often the examples given are from projects conceived of or worked upon by interviewees at hackathons. Zoe Sobin, the engineer, noted that she was an athlete and member of a sorority in college — she a) didn’t have time to attend hackathons and b) found them to be (her words) “jam packed with sweaty guys who wanted to spend two days not showering and building stuff together.”
Zoe and Colleen Grant (an engineering recruiter here at HubSpot) realized something critical:
It wasn’t gender that was the primary issue, but rather that many young female engineers don’t have side projects or recent web apps to reference in the interview process.
So rather than dismissing their observation, we asked Zoe and Colleen what we should do about it — we gave them the budget and tools to run the workshop, but they did literally everything, from recruiting a ton of female and male engineers to provide hands-on help to recruiting more than fifty local aspiring female engineers to join to food, follow-up, logistics, and programming. It was so successful they are running round two next month (if you know an aspiring female engineer, tell her to join us here)
The result? Fifty female engineers with web apps to shout loud and proud about when they interview. Hopefully many of them will interview at HubSpot, but regardless of what tech company is lucky enough to land them, Zoe and Colleen’s work made a fundamental impact both on the degree to which we proactively identified creative solutions to the issue and made both our male and female engineers more aware of this as a potential pothole or inflection point in the interview process. If you ask the same leaders for ideas, you’ll end up with the same results. If you engage your front line employees in solutions, you’ll likely end up with ideas that change the game, and that’s the only way we’ll fundamentally achieve gender equality in the workplace.
Have The Difficult Conversations
One of the big mistakes companies make is passing the buck on difficult conversations. How many people have heard “oh that’s just Bill from sales, it’s how he talks,” or “you can’t expect to work in (fill in the blank industry) if you can’t ignore that chatter.” It’s easy to dismiss these comments as one-offs or as unique to one department, person, or industry. It’s much harder to truly think about them for what they are: tiny messages about how women are truly perceived in the workplace that accumulate over time. Because they are accepted, ignored, and often shrugged off, women receive a powerful message early on in their tenure in business: your comfort level at work is less important than keeping X person happy or not stepping on Department Y’s toes, so just pretend it’s not there like we are doing and everything will be fine.
Everything’s not fine. Not speaking up about overtly sexist behavior sends a strong message to women and men alike that that behavior is not just accepted but considered part of the course of business at your place of work. The analogy I use for people is a balloon — the first comment deflates you a tiny bit, but it’s just a tiny hole, plenty of air left to keep flying. Over time, every single comment comprises a tiny hole in the balloon, and a less than subtle message about how high you’ll climb in an organization.
Don’t believe me? Studies show that casual sexism in the workplace has the same aggregate impact on women in the workplace over time as escalated incidents, such as sexual coercive behavior), so those comments accumulate negative value over time. Equally as important and often overlooked — it sends a message to everyone on the team (regardless of gender) that that behavior is permissible and even encouraged. So don’t avoid the hard discussions or turn a blind eye to ongoing gender behavior that seems “harmless” on the surface.
Make Inclusion a Team Sport
When we first started our women’s initiative at HubSpot, we didn’t make it explicitly clear that the programming was open to employees of any gender. Finally, after hearing from many folks who identify as male throughout the organization but who care deeply about the bosses, peers, mentors, friends, wives, daughters and moms they love, we opened up the umbrella and actively encouraged men to join in on the events meaningfully and to participate in the conversation. Recently, Barbara McCarthy, our Director of Engineering in Dublin, hosted and moderated an workshop of leading men focused on how men can meaningfully participate in moving the needle on gender equality in tech.
Some people expressed consternation that we would host a panel of all men talking about gender diversity, but the truth of the matter Barbara, like many leaders in the tech field, knows that if men hold the vast majority of senior executive leader jobs and represent both the visible and vocal majority in most technology organizations, you cannot afford to leave them out of meaningful conversations and programming around gender. As a result, our executive leaders attend Women on Board sessions, actively help us recruit senior women for advisory board, board, and senior leadership positions, and are visible and vocal in our events and programming.
The same principle aligns to employees of color and to LGBTQ employees, among other groups — engaging allies and meaningfully moving an inclusive dialogue forward ensures that diversity and inclusion are not seen as a zero sum game, but rather a critical investment to the future of your business and your brand.
We have a saying at HubSpot citing Louis Brandeis: “sunlight is the best disinfectant.” This is as true with gender interactions in the workplace as it is with our broader commitment to transparency in the business. The McKinsey report this week is a loud and clear reminder: the work we are doing is necessary but insufficient to meaningfully move the needle on empowering women in the workplace. Companies like ours need to do more, better, faster, and smarter to fundamentally change how we attract, engage, grow, and develop female leaders — it’s time to get impatient, and to get moving — thanks to this recent dose of sunlight, we can no longer hide from the reality facing our industry, our companies, and the next generation of women entering the workforce.
This is a team effort: If you have ideas, suggestions, data, or even just want to share your story — please write a response to this post.
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