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The Invisible Glass Ceilings
Cheryl Contee has never been someone to mess with. Once, in first grade, Cheryl broke the nose of a bully on the playground with a roundhouse kick. Hers was a righteous fight. She was bullied all year and had racist insults hurled her way; the teachers looked the other way when Cheryl stood her ground. Those boys never messed with her again.
I know the adult Cheryl Contee as a warrior. She is also one of the kindest people I know. She’s the co-founder of Attentive.ly with Roz Lemieux, which is the first tech company with a Black female co-founder on board to be acquired by a company listed on NASDAQ.
Only about 10 percent of all women even get into a room where there might be a glass ceiling in the first place like Cheryl did. How do I know this? Only 10 percent of all women in the labor force earn $75,000 or more annually,1 so it’s the women in this top 10 percent of earners who are the ones that usually have a shot at making it rain glass. Just like women face a wage gap, women also face an opportunity gap. Wage and hiring discrimination go hand in hand with advancement discrimination. Not that many women have an opportunity to break through. But some do. Their stories shine a spotlight on the hurdles that we need to break down so more women can break through the many glass ceilings we all face. They also give insight into the intense ways in which women have to fight inequality in every space and workplace.
The barriers women face start when we are very young, including harassment, which forms a million different glass ceilings above our heads, not only at work but literally everywhere we go. Harassment starts at an early age and continues as we grow into women. You better bet the high levels of harassment women face play a role in strengthening the glass ceilings, making it harder for women to break through it.
I cheered when Cheryl broke through the glass ceiling as her tech company was acquired by a NASDAQ company—and I also smiled big when she shared that roundhouse kick story with me. I won’t lie. I admire a girl, a woman, with a good roundhouse kick when necessary. I shared with Cheryl that I, too, had an early history of fist-fighting boys, complete with fat lips and black eyes from standing my ground and literally fighting back as they tried to grab my ass, chased me on the playground, chased me home from school, chased me at the pool—basically everywhere, it seemed some days.
Cheryl said, “I’m so sorry you had to go through that.”
You know what? No one has ever said that to me in my life. It was a sobering moment. I replied, “Cheryl, I’m so sorry you had to go through what you did, too.” No woman should have to run a gauntlet of sexist and/or racist harassment in order to move forward through life. We can do better as a culture, as a nation, as a world.
The sheer level of harassment that all women face calls for a moment of pause, of talking to our male friends and our sons, of sharing that each moment of harassment is causing harm and strengthening that glass ceiling—and it’s got to stop: A full 65 percent of all women experience street harassment, and for 85 percent of these women, the first occurrence happened before they were seventeen years old. Even more disturbing, 67 percent of women report that their first experience of street harassment occurred before they were fourteen years old.2
Drilling down in the stats on street harassment is alarming: Of the 65 percent of women who experienced harassment, 77 percent of women under age forty reported being followed by a man or group of men in the past year in a way that made them feel unsafe; 57 percent under age forty felt distracted at school or work due to street harassment; half reported they have been groped or fondled during the past year.
How is this part of forming the glass ceilings above our heads? More than half of women experiencing harassment report having changed their clothing, refusing a social event, or choosing a different transportation option as a result; and more than a third said they were made late for school or work due to street harassment. It’s sadly important to note that contrary to what more than a few people of the male persuasion think, close to zero women reported finding street harassment flattering.3
Of course the harassment doesn’t end on the street, and there’s more than one kind of harassment that women face. For instance, one in four women report that they’ve experienced sexual harassment in the workplace.4
It’s no wonder that #MeToo, a hashtag and movement, first sparked by Tarana Burke many years ago to support survivors of sexual harassment and assault, went viral in 2017.5 A request went out that year, passed from person to person, for all the women who have ever been sexually harassed or assaulted to put #MeToo in their social media status in order to give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem. Eyes were opened. It turns out it’s not just #MeToo. It’s #MeUs. It’s nearly every woman I (and you) know. The additive negative impacts over time can’t be underestimated.
Harassment is often one of the many contributing factors—along with outdated workplace policies related to becoming a parent, a lack of economic security, structural racism and flat-out discrimination in hiring, pay, and advancement—that helps make the glass ceiling bulletproof. #MeToo is just the beginning of a larger conversation about the epidemic levels of sexual harassment and assault that negatively affect the lives and the careers of women. The partial reckoning for those who harass and assault women is a positive step forward. But, as a nation and as a world, we still have a tremendous amount of work to do.
Our 30 Percent
In very few sectors of our economic, political, scientific, and business arenas have women broken through the glass ceilings. Even though women make up a little more than 50 percent of the American population, and more than half of the advanced degrees are awarded to women, women have yet to break through being more than 30 percent of leadership across sectors. You read that right. We occupy fewer positions of power despite holding more college and graduate degrees than men.6
Want to see what the glass ceiling looks like? Currently:
Women are only 6 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs.7
Women are only 19 percent of all members of Congress.8
Women are less than 30 percent of funded research scientists.9
Women are less than 14 percent of the experts interviewed on Sunday TV talk shows and a tiny subset of radio hosts, and male-authored front-page newspaper bylines outnumber those bylined by women by a 3 to 1 margin.10
According to the most recent data available, just 9 percent of the directors of top U.S. grossing films are women, and female characters are only 12 percent of protagonists, 29 percent of major characters, and 30 percent of all speaking characters in the U.S. top 100 grossing films in 2014.11
Obituaries of men even outnumber those of women, despite the fact that women are slightly more than half our population, as if the life of a man is more newsworthy than that of a woman.12 It isn’t. The list goes on. Somehow, most of our nation has subconsciously decided that 30 percent is equality. It’s not. Women are 50 percent of the population, so we’re 20 percent short.
Why are we 20 percent short? Well, to start, disdain for women, including harassment and misogyny, is a consistent aspect of our culture. The best example of this is President Donald Trump, who always seems to have something demeaning to say about women, including leaders on the international stage. Trump even once told the First Lady of France, Brigitte Macron, “You’re in such good shape,”13 as if it were appropriate to comment on a woman’s body. But Trump’s behavior, and the fact that he was elected president in spite of his reputation for openly demeaning women, is a symptom of a far bigger problem in our nation than just that one person, even if that one person sits in the Oval Office. The persistent idea that women are less than men will exist forever if we don’t stand up, break through, keep marching, and speak out. Women and girls need to be treated with respect, listened to with open ears, paid and advanced equally to all other genders. Full stop. But we have a long way to go to get there.
Our culture has become relatively numb to harassment and sexism directed at women. Too often it’s normalized background static. That normalization is part of why it starts to feel like a victory when women reach 30 percent of the leadership in any field, even though we’re still 20 percent short of parity and women have higher levels of education than men on average. It’s part of why it’s hard to break through the glass ceilings in the first place. And it’s part of what we need to address in order to make it rain glass.
As my close friend Kirstin Larson says, “We have been conditioned to believe that we deserve less parity and told that because we have made gains (from 0 to 30 percent), we should be happy that we have made some gains at all. This is akin to telling women that they should be flattered when being catcalled.” We have work to do, women and men alike, to open the doors to success, because, as you’ll see on the pages that follow, we all lose out when women are locked out. The data is clear in every field from business, to science, to politics, to the media: When women succeed, America succeeds. Women have a tremendous amount to offer, but too many are trapped under a solid ceiling of glass, unable to break through.
But some women do break through—building a road for others to follow. The rest of this chapter is about breaking through, persisting against the odds, and what we can learn from the experiences of women who do break through to use in our own lives.
Breaking Through
Cheryl broke through that 30 percent barrier in business and has become a powerful and highly respected voice in our nation. But before she made a mark on her own, Cheryl had to leave the international public relations firm FleishmanHillard, where she’d been working. The firm refused to promote her, even though her original job offer letter stated that she would become a senior vice president. “I was working eighteen to nineteen hours a day, bringing in hundreds of thousands of dollars,” she told me, “but they didn’t give the promotion to me.”
Doing her own calculations, Cheryl realized she could more than support herself if she could bring in just a percentage of the business she’d been managing and bringing in for the PR firm. So she set out and paired up with her business partner, Roz Lemieux. But, like many women and particularly women of color, Cheryl and Roz had to do double, triple, quadruple the work of their male colleagues in the same industry. It turns out that Cheryl had taken for granted basics like people taking her phone calls or meeting with her. People ignored her and were curt and condescending.
In fact, Cheryl says, “It was hard and completely humiliating.” As someone who had launched a successful media platform (Jack and Jill Politics), was well known in her field, and had been a high-level executive, Cheryl was used to people at least treating her with some level of respect. Cheryl had come face-to-face with the glass ceiling.
One of the big tasks that business owners, particularly those in technology companies, need to do is raise capital to bring an idea to full fruition and scale. Cheryl and Roz had to do that, too. Once, Cheryl gave a demo for a well-known fund that specializes in minority tech entrepreneurs. A person who was younger than her, white, and male said, “This is a really a great product. I just don’t know if you can pull this forward.”
Cheryl was infuriated. “At that point I had a successful multimillion-dollar business. I was like, are you serious?” she said. Unfortunately, Cheryl’s experience is not unique. Because she is a woman of color, Cheryl faces barriers that others would not.14 Eventually, Cheryl and her business partner, Roz, broke through not just the barriers related to their race and gender, but another barrier that the majority of women face: being moms. Cheryl and Roz both were pregnant during the lifecycle of their company. Studies show that motherhood triggers a tremendous amount of bias, but Cheryl and Roz didn’t let that stop them, either. Instead, they addressed it belly forward.
“We were starting to raise capital for our startup and had a big pitch in Atlanta in front of six hundred people,” Cheryl told me, adding that most in the audience were men. “Roz was maybe eight months pregnant at the time. She was going to make a self-deprecating joke about her pregnancy. But I said, ‘Roz, you should not make fun of yourself in front of these people. Most of that audience would never be brave enough to do what you’ve done, let alone stand on that stage and talk about it. Let’s make a joke that builds you up as the hero you are.’”
So they did. Roz got up in front of the crowd and said, “In full truth, I have two startups: One is in my belly and has an eighteen-year runway and the other is Attentive.ly.” The room roared. Cheryl adds, “That was a big moment for our company and for Roz as an entrepreneur. She did great.”
But is it really possible to break through when so few have done it? Cheryl tells people that it’s not impossible to be a successful female CEO; it’s just that you’re going to have to be more persistent, give it more time, knock on more doors, and provide more proof. It’s so much more time, in fact, that women in fields like tech often have to add that time into their business models. “For example, if the funding raised for a company run by men will last six months, then women may have to make it last twelve months, because it’s so much harder for women to raise money,” Cheryl told me.
And then she said something that has stuck with me. “I see racism and sexism as market distortion. It introduces irrational factors that create noise in the system, which means good ideas and women, and particularly women of color entrepreneurs who have them, either need extra time or don’t get funding at all even if they have an incredible product or amazing app that could change the world as we know it. Sometimes it will take too long to raise the capital or they won’t be able to raise any at all. This is a market distortion factor that our economy must confront in order to succeed in the twenty-first century.”
A mountain of data echoes Cheryl’s assessment.15 A Harvard Business Review article reported that venture capitalists talk very differently about women and women of color entrepreneurs, which adds up to significantly less funding, concluding, “This isn’t only damaging for women entrepreneurs; it’s potentially damaging for society as a whole.”16 One of the many reasons the funding gap is damaging for society as a whole is that women often build more prosperous businesses. For example:
Harvard Business Review reported a study finding: “If a group includes more women, its collective intelligence rises.”17
A study by Pepperdine University found a direct correlation between higher levels of women in leadership and higher profits—and that promoting women meant outperforming the competition—for all Fortune 500 companies.18
A study by the accounting firm Rothstein Kass found that female hedge fund managers outperformed men, earning an 8.95 percent return in 2012, compared to a 2.69 percent index return, when the market took a dive.19
A Credit Suisse study found that companies with at least one woman on their board had a higher return on investment than companies with no women on their board. And a Catalyst report on S&P 500 companies found a correlation between women’s representation on boards and a significantly higher return on equity, a higher return on sales, and a higher return on invested capital.20
Research on private firms found that managerial diversity is related to positive performance outcomes.21
These are just a few studies from a huge stack of research demonstrating the positive impact of women, and women of color, as entrepreneurs, hedge fund leaders, managers, and more. I could fill the rest of this book with just that list of studies and their findings. One of the most compelling studies I came across is that businesses with female CEOs during the Great Recession were less likely than their male peers to lay off staff (14 vs. 6 percent), which led to better community outcomes.22 Women have long been outstanding colleagues in the workplace and continue to be outstanding today.
Despite all of this data, the glass ceilings remain completely solid. As noted above, only 6 percent of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are women. And there are zero Black women heading Fortune 500 companies after the departure of Ursula Burns as CEO of Xerox in 201723. Black, Asian, and Hispanic women make up less than 3 percent of board directors at Fortune 500 companies.24 And then of course there’s the wage and hiring discrimination that most women, particularly moms and women of color, face each and every day in our nation in every job sector.
Cheryl’s story shows a glimpse of what happens when women aren’t advanced in corporations. I’m not talking about her story of success here, but what came just before that—the moment she was denied a promotion, despite having that promotion be part of her initial job offer. It turns out that not only had Cheryl met the criteria for a promotion and been overlooked, but she had actually executed additional work and still was ignored. “I created a plan to bring in $1 million in revenue (with appropriate staffing). My bosses thought it was hilarious. So I left. Then in our first year launching Fission immediately after that, Roz and I brought in over $1 million in an even more challenging social enterprise–focused business. At the company I had worked for, it was clear that their thinking was too narrow to imagine success for female entrepreneurs.” It’s time to broaden perspectives for the good of women, business, and our economy. It bears repeating: We all lose out when women are left out.
Parity Is a Win for Everyone
It’s time for parity. Parity is a win-win. To be clear, I’m not suggesting that women become 100 percent of CEOs, 100 percent of leaders, 100 percent of anything. That’s not what this is about. I’m simply suggesting that women have parity in all sectors—and parity is when our representation in these fields matches our representation in the population as a whole. We are at least 20 percent short of parity right now. And one of the first steps to getting to parity is realizing that having women make up only 10, 20, 30, or even 40 percent of any sector of leadership is leaving the contributions and talents of too many women on the table, locked out, stuck below a glass ceiling.
That being said, the work positions covered in this chapter are all relatively high-paying positions that only women in the top 10 percent of earners usually hold. But the majority of women are in low-wage positions—which means that far too few women even get a shot at getting into a room with a glass ceiling in the first place. Let’s change that.
