FC NOW: The Fast Company Weblog
January 27, 2004
Where Are the Women?
In honor of Senior Writer Linda Tischler's appearance today on NPR's Talk of the Nation, we've published her February feature online early.
Linda's story seeks to answer the question why more women aren't running companies these days -- since they've been successfully climbing the corporate ladder across professions for 20 years. With quantitative research and a bucket of anecdotes from real women and men, Linda comes up with an answer that is both provocative and intuitively satisfying. Women aren't running corporations because they don't want to.
In addition to her cover story, we've also developed two Web Exclusive interview transcripts, one with Professor Charles A. O'Reilly at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and another with Catherine Hakim, a sociology professor at the London School of Economics.
Posted by Heath Row at January 27, 2004 4:19 PM | Category: women in business |
8 Comments
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The article on the same topic in this last issue of FastCompany really steamed me right off.
It's not this simple. The answers to why women aren't in the corner office are simply not that black-and-white.
And the more we push this back at women, more or less saying it's all their own fault, the longer the corner offices will be occupied not by the best candidate out of the entire field.
The answer lies in that very act of pushing back. It's not the women. It's the measures. We measure success in business by traditional standards based on male-oriented hierarchies and structures. Were society to allow business to become that which is female-oriented, this article would have been entirely unnecessary.
I recommend revisiting the The Second Shift -- when women are not harassed by society for being imperfect mothers, when fathers bear exactly the same burdens, when new support networks and resources replace those women have lost with societal changes, then perhaps women will be in the corner offices.
Think about it: a woman has to choose between putting in the extra hours a corporation demands as a ticket to success or taking care of her children. Why does she have to make this choice at all??
I like this comment because it states that we have a male dominated society.
But - that is a fact. The question is not "Why does she have to make this joice at all". As long as we have the kind of economy that we have. She has to. If you are in a tropical forest you can not claim to get killed by an animal by saying there should not be animials.
The question is - is there a chance to change this type of economy that forces people to work such long working ours.
And one very interesting point the article stated:
As long as we have a competitive driven economy we will have a winner, and the winner is always the more productive.
So as long as it is possible to gain more by working more, the one who work more will win.
Only if we are able to change this rule, that productiveness is combined with long working hours, and bind it together with another factor - intelligence, creativity, I do not know, than we will have different correlations. Correlations that will have a different impact on our social life.
It scares the male dominated societies silly that after centuries of dominating cultural division, the balance of power might erode one day favour the intelligent rather than the dualistic. The information age hasn't arrived in its full force but as we circulate on the outer edges of this new galaxy, one can understand already that 50% of societies collective intelligence and customer decision makers are currently defined by their genitals and motherhood.
In the information age, we have information and slowly and surely we will open our eyes to it. We are stuck in the division of labour and centuries of dogma - that's the beauty of information, it does make things transparent, once you've dug yourself out of it. There will always be parts of the world and that will promote continuation of religious and financial lockbox dogma that warns societies of the dangers of transparency and flexibiity - ones that preach against the damnation and woe that their own leaders will try to create! Life after 2020 will be pretty pathetic for such leaders, if they continue to exploit ideology based on centuries of control.
The 21st Century isn't about equality or glass ceilings, its about advantageous application and optimization of information, and at the main core of information led society is the notion that we need to apply 100% of available intelligence in this world and we don't get to that optimization if we cannot get past our antiquated ideas about what women can or cannot do. World War II destroyed the myth of the industrial age, the information age will override our present ones. As for current percentages there is not much you can do about it other than comment on it, info-parental rather than "father time" will do its change thing via emergent rather than incremental change.
M.
zorromark@consultant.com
(Mark Twain wasn't Mark Twain, Mark Zorro isn't Mark Zorro)
http://www.markzorro.blogspot.com
Actually, Mark, there is something that can be done, and women are doing it in droves. It's another problem with all the articles which push back at women, claiming they're "dropping out" or "opting out". (As if choosing between one's flesh-and-blood and corporate bullying is much of an option...) These articles simply don't take note of the sea change under way.
Women are starting their own businesses, building something completely different to achieve the same ends. Note this from SOHO in reference to the U.S. Census Bureau's Economic Census Survey of Women-Owned Business Enterprises: "Over the last two decades, the survey has revealed not only the dramatic growth of women-owned businesses, but also their economic power. From 1982 to 1999, the number of women-owned businesses increased by 250 percent - from 2.6 million to an estimated 9.1 million."
Note, too, the rate of growth, documented by the Center for Women's Business Research: "The growth of women’s entrepreneurship, driven by access to capital, markets, and networks has outpaced the growth of all businesses by 1.5 to 2 times"
Women aren't getting to the corner office not just because the glass ceiling expects them to make choices their male counterparts aren't required to make; they're making their own corner offices outside of the Fortune 1000.
The real FastCompanies may be newer, smaller, agile and owned-operated by women.
Did the article mention much about the entrepreneurship trend? I can't get FC much where I am but it must have been a bit simplistic not to. Primarily I want to run my own business for reasons of ambition, but the distinct possibility that I could have kids and get to enjoy them as well is attractive.
I don't have any answers for those on the corporate track though. Women need wives too is all I can think of! Some fathers rights leader was in the newspaper the other day crowing that fathers now do 1/3 of the house- and kidwork in dual earners families. Excuse me for not being profoundly grateful...
Rayne, I picked up your comments today. Interesting stats that you present. Present day attitudes about women have been shaped through religous and political mechanisms centuries ago and as a society we have not really addressed the origins of the bias and beliefs. I believe that this time based attitude about woman is finally beginning to erode and that by 2020, we are going to see people seeking opportunity because of their intelligence that is not restricted by cultural norms of birth sex. The stats may be moving in a direction that confirms this transformation but its still a slow walk to an intelligent future.
M.