This book has not been about black-and-white or binary choices, although it may have seemed so. In treating these subjects, though falling short, the author’s intent has been to paint in shades of gray.
Take the subject of the H-1B visa program (chapter 15). The tenor of the discussion is to raise questions. Has the information technology industry relied too extensively on the H-1B visa program? Has sole reliance, or overreliance, on the H-1B program resulted in a failure to think about and increase gender and other forms of diversity in senior management?
Emphasis on STEM education is similar. A healthy dose of it, especially for girls and young women, is long overdue. But remember H. L. Menken’s aphorism: “For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clean, simple, and wrong.” The emphasis on STEM is not wrong, but an overemphasis on STEM may be. An analysis of the career paths of women who actually have reached senior positions (CEOs and senior executives), though, does give one pause. That may be because the sample is small, but it may also may be because the headlong rush to reliance on STEM should be tempered by emphasis on other subjects as well, such as business subjects and certain of the liberal arts (government, economics), as chapter 14 suggests and the small sample available demonstrates.
For the most part, mentoring (chapter 12) is to the good, but it has become clear that the experts have placed too many eggs in that basket. Properly done, mentoring is valuable. Gone even slightly awry, mentoring may have several drawbacks, potential deficiencies the self-styled experts ignore. The emerging zeitgeist is that mentoring combined with sponsorship is much better, as a few observers have begun to recognize.1
Overall, early advocates for increased business opportunities for women were simplistic. They theorized that attacking the problems of women’s underrepresentation in business was similar to a game of golf: “you just had to whack it,” that is, get a mentor, network, and the like. Time has shown that there is not a single locus but many loci. Solving the multiple issues involved resembles “solving a multilevel Rubik’s Cube.”2 Resolving the work/life imbalance, for example, requires much more prolonged and diverse efforts than merely “whacking at it.”
There is a potential for backlash. “Among those who opposed the efforts of [early women’s rights advocates] were the leaders of the civil rights movement themselves. They thought that women’s-rights advocates were trying to piggyback on the movement for rights for African-Americans, and that the load will kill the piggy.”3 Civil rights activists often had emphatic reactions to the women’s movement.4 So, too, with staunch advocates of STEM and STEM programs. From those advocates, negative reactions will emerge in supposed or real revulsion over certain of the courses of action this book suggests, or samples of data that purport to support them. Proponents of the H-1B visa program and of its expansion will take strong exception as well.
Others, opposed to the advancement of women in business and to the devotion of resources to that cause overall, will have arrows in their quiver other than competition with the causes they espouse, for example, on behalf of African Americans or Native Americans, on the one hand, or profit maximization advocates, on the other. A significant number of individuals, including some leaders, within those groups claim that women lack competence, at least outside of areas such as marketing or fashion, or at least they make those claims sotto voce, inhibited from more vocal assessments by considerations of political correctness,
According to the Pew Research Center’s 2015 study, a large majority of the public sees men and women as equivalent on key leadership traits such as intelligence, honesty, ambition, and innovation.5 The main differences perceived between men and women “were compassion and organization, and on these traits women were rated as superior to men. Women are also more likely than men to engage in ‘transformational leadership.’”6
Another objection raised to expenditures on behalf of increasing female representation is that “women don’t want it,” or “don’t want it badly enough.” Sheryl Sandberg gives some credence to this view with her thesis that not enough women “lean in” (see chapter 8).7 Lisa Belkin wrote in her seminal New York Times piece that women’s underrepresentation is not only because “the workplace has failed women. It is also that women are rejecting the workplace.” “Why don’t women run the world?,” she asks. “Maybe because they don’t want to.”8
One hears this or similar refrains quite often. “Work at the top of the greasy pole takes time, saps energy, and is time-consuming. . . . Maybe the tradeoffs [that] high positions entail are ones that women do not want to make.”9 Women occupy 50 percent of the positions at U.S. businesses, similarly constituting 50 percent of the middle managers. In part, those statistics belie the claims that women “don’t want it.” Women’s desires, of course, are not monolithic. It’s impossible to group all women together and conclude that “they don’t want it.”
There are a number of reasons to encourage diligent efforts to include more females on promotion ladders and in senior positions. The preface to this books sets out a few of them. I have attempted to respond to the “Why women” question, as have other authors. There are at least fourteen or fifteen organizations whose stated goal is to increase the number of women in business and on boards of directors especially.10 A partial list would include the following:
There are a few specialized organizations such as Women in Technology (Washington, D.C.) and Women in Technology International (Los Angeles), although the latter seems suspect, organized as it is as a for-profit entity and selling T-shirts on its website.
Be that as it may, these organizations tiptoe around the barriers rather than confronting them. Moreover, for the most part they muddle on in the same old vein, urging women to do this or try that (again, lean in, find a mentor, network, be assertive, smile in job interviews, use “we” instead of “I”). What seems to be needed are organizations on the corporate side, either nationally or at least in Silicon Valley, spearheading efforts to increase opportunities for women in information technology.
In fact, elsewhere and overall, quests for women’s equality long predate the National Organization for Women (NOW) or Germaine Greer’s or Betty Friedan’s writings. The U.S. suffrage movement began in 1848 with the Seneca Falls (New York) convention. As long ago as 1895 Mark Twain wrote, “One of the signs of savagery is a civilization where equality between man and woman is furthest apart. . . . No civilization can be perfect until exact equality between man and woman is included.”11
Exact equality (parity) is not the goal, for this book at least. A significant self-examination, thought, analysis, and devotion of resources by the information technology industry are objectives for which the industry and companies within it must strive. Progress toward them is long overdue.