This Is What Equality Looks Like
For women, power often comes
with a very heavy price
If you decide to follow conventional wisdom, there is a clear recipe for women’s equality on the job in male-dominated fields — and, by extension, in women’s lives. First, take one job, office-variety or otherwise, and add one cup of goals and a pinch of best intentions (optional). Then, work hard (the spoken-on-repeat rule) and eat shit (the quietly assumed one). Study more than everyone around you, put in longer hours, prove yourself over and over, and, if you want to keep advancing, figure out the fine balance of when to play nice and when to be firm. Know when to let the sexist joke roll off your shoulders, learn to laugh when you really want to say fuck you, somehow stop making the office cupcakes, do not crumble under the weight of your emotional labour, and always, always be excellent. If they see you crying or yelling, you’re dead. Then, at the end of it all, reach your hand down, wield your hard-won power, and help the next woman up to do the same. Repeat until an equal number of individuals of all genders exist at the top of said field, whether it’s politics, corporate North America, or STEM. Once that happens, we are done cooking. Voilà! You have made equality. Enjoy.
We stake a lot on workplace and economic equality, often making it the yardstick by which we measure women’s progress more generally. In North America, Europe, and elsewhere around the world, money plays a huge role in defining power. It’s no wonder that both capitalism, the all-powerful system by which we structure our societies, and the desire to break into everything that all-powerful system spawns heavily influence our ideas of equality. For women to be equal, we believe, they have to earn as much as men, own as much as men, be in the same decision-making rooms as men; the women’s rights movement has fought hard — is fighting hard — for these things. And so, when we take the measure of how far women have come, we know there is still a long way to go in Canada, because while women represented an average of almost 38 percent of MBA students in North America and Europe in 2018,119 they held just under 10 percent of executive positions at Canada’s largest 100 publicly traded companies that same year.120 We know this because while nearly half of practising lawyers in Canada are women,121 they make up less than 30 percent of equity partners at law firms and 25 percent of senior leaders,122 and only 39.6 percent of judges.123 And we know this because while 60 percent of university graduates are women (discounting STEM, sigh),124 only about 28 percent of them were tenured professors as of 2017.125 If we ever forget, we really know this because while women make up half the voting population, at the start of 2018 they accounted for only 26 percent of Canada’s MPs, 29 percent of MPPs, and 18 percent of mayors.126 Canada has had only eleven female premiers in its entire 150-plus-year history; the first was elected in 1991.
If that weren’t depressing enough, there’s also the problem of us getting the solution all wrong. There’s an assumption that, in making it to the top of any particular field, women are, well, at the top. Things are better there. They’ve achieved power, and with it, some taste of equality. They can effect change, enact a vision, control their own lives and the lives of people around them. They have resources and organizational influence, and positions that effectively halt the need to grin and bear it. They do not have to suffer men grabbing their asses, making crude sexual jokes, or masturbating into office plants — or whatever it is men do that day to show dominance and control, or just because they feel like it. At the top, those days are gone. Except, they’re not — that is, at least by every standard that we use to measure equality: equal pay, equal opportunity, a work life free from sexual violence and discrimination, and fair treatment and evaluation. As awful as things are for women at the bottom, they’re just as awful for women at the top. Actually, they’re worse.
For an example of how the fantasy stacks up against reality, let’s look at “glass ceiling pioneer” Ann Hopkins.127 By 1982, Hopkins was a rising star at Price Waterhouse (now PricewaterhouseCoopers). She had billed more hours than any of her colleagues, all of whom were men. And she had recently secured a $25-million contract with the Department of State, historically one of the firm’s biggest deals. Some of the partners sang her praises. And how could they not? She’d only been at the firm for five years, and look at what she’d already done. In their joint statement, evaluators called Hopkins “an outstanding professional” who had a “deft touch” and “strong character, independence and integrity.” One major client called her “extremely competent, intelligent,” as well as “strong and forthright, very productive, energetic and creative.” Her bosses put her up for partnership. (It’s worth mentioning at this point that there were then 622 other partners at the firm, only 7 of whom were women.)128 Other partners were less impressed. Not only was Hopkins too good, she wasn’t ladylike. One man called her “macho,” another remarked that she “overcompensated for being a woman,” and a third quipped that she needed “a course at charm school.”129 They denied her the partnership. Twice.
So she sued, and won, and went on to work as a partner at the firm for two decades.130
Generally, though, the story of the double standard for women at the top does not have such a happy ending. Consider what happened to former Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz, one of the few women to speak openly about her firing. (On the whole, executives and the companies they work for are unlikely to admit to firing, preferring to cloak the decision in euphemisms; one study found just 5 percent of CEOs are openly dismissed.)131 Bartz was hired in 2009 to help the ailing company right itself against the onslaught of Google, and also the lingering tidal waves of the 2008 recession. At the time of her hiring, the company’s chairperson, Roy Bostock, enthused that she was “the exact combination of seasoned technology executive and savvy leader that the board was looking for,” and that he was “thrilled to have attracted such a world-class talent to Yahoo.”132 Two years later, Bostock called Bartz on her cellphone, the day before she was set to appear at a huge conference in New York City, to fire her. He was only blocks away, but he did not give her the courtesy of a face-to-face.133 Speaking to reporters the next day, she put it bluntly: “These people fucked me over.”134
These people, it seems, are always fucking someone over. Consider also that the first high-profile person — not company — blamed for the financial crisis of 2008 was a woman.135 Or that, in the wake of JPMorgan’s 2013 “London Whale” trading scandal, which cost the company at least $6 billion and launched a Senate investigation, it was not the company’s CEO, a man, who stepped down, but its chief investment officer, a woman (she was replaced by two men).136 Or maybe just consider a December 2018 headline from an Inc. magazine column looking at the latest scandal for Tesla’s CEO: “If Elon Musk Were a Woman, He’d Have Been Fired Already.”137 Yes. In fact, when things go wrong and there is no woman to blame, sometimes men will even invent one. Or several, as happened with a particularly sticky rumour that circulated online after a pedestrian bridge collapsed at Florida International University in 2018, killing six people.138 A murky corner of the internet published a so-called article claiming an all-women engineering team built the bridge, cribbing photos from the company’s International Women’s Day posts on social media.139 That’s all it took. I heard the rumour again almost a year later when a friend met me after work one day and told me a “weird” story about a colleague — one who had totally bought it. Maybe that wasn’t so surprising; we’re primed to believe stories that scapegoat women.
It’s a depressing, enraging reality that women can be reminded of our unequal rights and poor representation anywhere: on the street, on our screens, in our homes, and at work. But it’s at work where we find some of the most measurable, glaring, and unexpected examples of the power gap. It’s also where we see most clearly how male conceptions of power often work against us — pushing to keep us in last place, even when it looks like we’re winning. This chapter is not about inviting us all to feel sorry for women whose shoes likely cost more than my rent. It is not about crying “poor little rich girl.” It is about asking: If the game doesn’t work for women and people of colour at the top, then what is it we are all striving for? And who really benefits from keeping us stuck in the game?
If the world generally expects women to be perfect, it expects women in leadership to be superhuman. More than once in my interviews, I heard a variation on the same half-truth, half-joke: We’ll know we’ve achieved something special once there are as many mediocre and flawed women in politics as there are men. Most days, that future seems very far off indeed. We can point out that the high expectations suffocating the success of women politicians has everything to do with sexism, until we, ourselves, are out of breath. But what comes next?
Part of the challenge right now, one long-time feminist, Amy Richards, told me, is that so many people are still stuck in that “pointing out what’s wrong” stage. Richards and Jennifer Baumgardner are co-authors of the seminal book Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future (published in 2000 and reissued in an anniversary edition in 2010) and co-founders of Soapbox, the world’s largest feminist speakers’ bureau. I spoke to them both shortly after several women put their bids in for the 2020 U.S. presidential race. People, they contended, are too busy looking at the individuals within power structures instead of changing the structures themselves. When women are in the disempowered zone, added Baumgardner, it’s too easy for them to believe they’re not part of the problem — after all, they’re not in power. “After we have exposed all of these corrupt systems and corrupt individuals and the depths of the injustices, we have to be willing to step into that power,” Richards said. “I don’t fully believe that women are there yet.”
When I asked Richards what, exactly, she meant by that, she replied, “We don’t make it easy on women.” She knows people who are sad, now, that Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election; at the time, though, they hated her. She was a bitch and a liar. “We have a hard time really supporting women in power,” said Richards, referring to all genders. “We need to get over that if that’s really what we’re claiming right now, that that’s what we want. We have to realize that women are flawed, but we have to support them anyway.” Baumgardner jumped in: “In the same way we do with men.” People in her world, she added, still blame Clinton for losing. She ran a terrible campaign. She wasn’t likeable. Now, there were four women candidates for the presidential nomination (by March 2019 two more would toss in their hats) that people “loved five minutes ago,” said Baumgardner, drawling out the “o” in “love,” turning the vowel into a virtual eye roll. But would any of them make it? “Will we do anything that we can to make sure that men are looked up [to] instead of women?” she asked. “Maybe.” Maybe.
Institutional and systemic factors have held women back from leadership, Baumgardner agreed. But there is something else, too. “There’s this deep-seated misogyny that we’ve all been soaking in for a long time,” she said. “And on the surface maybe we don’t feel it, but deep in there, there’s this sense of, ‘Well, when somebody is harmed, or when Hillary didn’t make it, or when that girl got raped, it’s her problem.’ There’s something about her.”
I spent a great deal of time talking with actual avowed anti-feminists for my first book, F-Bomb: Dispatches from the War on Feminism, and I don’t believe it’s inherently anti-feminist to question a woman’s behaviour or track record. We know women do heinous things, too. Still, Baumgardner and Richards are not wrong. We tend to blame women for their own hardships, just as we also fail to credit them for their accomplishments. As Deborah L. Rhode noted in her book Women and Leadership, women’s work is held to a higher standard than men’s — sometimes with no apparent value assigned to the work itself. Meaning, it doesn’t matter what the work is, or how well a woman performs it; so long as said work or experience is attributed to a woman, people will be less impressed. (If she even gets credit at all.) Rhode referenced one study in which participants evaluated the resumés of fictional job-seekers. One half of the group looked at the resumés of a female applicant with more education and a male applicant with more work experience. The other half of the group evaluated the reverse: a male applicant with more education and a female applicant with more work experience. Participants in both groups gave less weight to whatever advantage the female applicant had.140 “The last half century has witnessed a transformation in gender roles,” Rhode notes elsewhere in her book, “but expectations of equality outrun experience.” Many of those obstacles, she adds, involve gender bias. Clearly. That bias plays out in myriad ways. Women’s workplace mistakes are less tolerated and more often recalled than those of white men. See: Trump’s Teflon-like performance during the 2016 election race.
Beyond that, all of us, regardless of gender, are too often predisposed to simply not see women as leaders. Take one study, in which researchers showed college students photographs of five people seated at a table, telling the students the people were working together on a project. The groups were varied: some all men, some all women, and some a mixture of both. In groups where either all men or all women sat around the table, students identified whoever was sitting at the head of the table as the leader. In mixed groups, if a man sat at the head of a table, he was still identified as the leader. Okay, fine. But if a woman sat at the head, she was no more likely to be identified as the leader than a man seated elsewhere at the table.141
On the rare occasion that a woman’s success is acknowledged, it’s also likely to be undercut by some implication that chance played a role. Researchers call this the “he’s skilled, she’s lucky” phenomenon.142 Women of colour are especially likely to have both their credentials and their competence questioned. One much-referenced study, “Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal?” (published in the American Economic Review) answered what was really perhaps a rhetorical question with a resounding “Yes.”143 The researchers answered 1,500 job ads in Boston and Chicago by sending out nearly 5,000 resumés, attributing identical qualifications to names like, for example, Emily and Lakisha. Anyone named something like Emily, Carrie, or Kristen received 50 percent more callbacks than someone named Lakisha, Aisha, or Tamika. A so-called white name, they determined, yields as many more callbacks as an additional eight years of experience on a resumé. What’s more, the researchers also sent out resumés showing varying levels of experience. If Emily and Lakisha both had a high-quality resumé, their callback gap did not shrink, as one might reasonably expect, but instead notably widened.
But racism and sexism are only partly to blame for the gap in “positions of greatest status and power,” argued Rhode. The other challenge is that women are self-selecting out — or, as Sheryl Sandberg has stated, they aren’t leaning in. There’s certainly some truth to this. When I was interviewing women for this book, I lost count of the number who told me that they simply didn’t try to get (fill in the blank with whatever opportunity you like) because they assumed they weren’t qualified and would not get it anyway.
One experience in particular stood out. In 2018, on the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, I called France Légaré, a professor in the department of family medicine and emergency medicine at Laval University and also a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair, to talk about the leaky pipeline for women in science and technology. That morning, she’d had a recruitment interview with a woman who’d received her Ph.D. in 2010. Légaré told her that, with her CV and her research profile, she could apply for a job more senior than she had. The woman responded with something like, “Oh, that’s true. Everybody tells me that I’m better than what I apply for.” And then she told Légaré that she knew it, too; her career had hit the next stage. But she was afraid she wasn’t good enough.
Because Légaré didn’t know the woman well, she did nothing more than reassure her. Yes, there will be a learning curve. Yes, you should still think about applying at a higher level. Take a week to think it over. However, for people whom Légaré does know well — those friends and colleagues who come to her for advice about their work or professional life — there is another, more direct answer. “I tell them, ‘Okay, stop talking like a woman. Stop talking like a woman who says, I’m not good enough. I don’t know enough. And, and, and . . .’” The list could go on forever. Stop internalizing that negative attitude, Légaré wanted women to know. Stop that dismissal of your skills and experience. Instead, tell yourself the truth. Reflect on your own accomplishments and see them objectively, as they are, not what you fear. “You don’t need to be so severe on yourself,” she added. “Because everybody else will be severe on you.”
She has a point. I don’t know many women who haven’t felt the chokehold of Imposter Syndrome at some point in their lives. That voice telling you that you don’t belong, or that you’re not good enough, can be both seductive and damaging. In 2017, the Harvard Business Review asked fifty-seven female CEOs for advice on how more women can make it to the top.144 Of them all, only five said they always wanted to be a CEO. Two-thirds said they never realized it was an option until another person suggested it to them. They described themselves as being focused on improving their results, rather than advancement and success. “It wasn’t until that conversation,” one woman told researchers, “that I even imagined anything past manager, forget CEO. I really just wanted a good job with a good company. That conversation was a bit of a wake-up call.”
It can be difficult to interrupt that story, too, and be your own wake-up call. One friend told me that she often faces anxiety when she feels she hasn’t answered a co-worker’s question in enough detail. That detail usually, she said, “goes far beyond what their original question was.” So, she went on, “If someone asks me ‘Who do I contact in XYZ scenario?’ I will feel like my response was inadequate if I only tell them the contact’s name and their email, instead of their name, plus their email, plus the reason why contacting them for this scenario is important.” She feels constantly worried that she isn’t doing enough, even though she is a valued, skilled member of her team.
Another friend told me about a vow she made with a colleague to stop saying “I’m bad at math” as a joke to male colleagues in workplace settings, because, really, when she thought about it, she wasn’t. I’ve had my own bad-at-math moment. Often feeling like a fraud at public events, blooming red with embarrassment as presenters read my bio, I started supplying a short, ten-word version instead. It took hearing several onerous, paragraphs-long introductions for male fellow panellists before I finally stopped underselling myself. Even so, I still shift uncomfortably in my seat.
If only a little bit of swagger was all it took.
It seems clear to me that women’s self-diminishment often creates a feedback loop, with society’s dismissal of our accomplishments feeding into our own derision, feeding back out into the perception that women aren’t ready for X, eating itself over and over again like a sort of ouroboros of negativity. And I also understand why it is alluring to tell women they most need to change their own perceptions (hard, but not impossibly so), versus rewriting the system (incredibly daunting, seemingly impossible), in order to achieve power. But there is a danger in proposing confidence and its sister-solution, empowerment, as the best answer to women’s equality and advancement. In 2018, the Harvard Business Review conducted another study, this time using text from Lean In, as well audio from Sheryl Sandberg’s TED Talks, to look at whether the DIY approach of “women can solve this” risked leading people to an unintended conclusion: “that women have caused their own under-representation.”145
The researchers chose Lean In because, as they rightly noted, the language of the book has come to dominate discussions on women and leadership since it was published in 2013. For the experiment, one group of participants read or listened to messaging that emphasized everything women could do to help themselves: be more ambitious, speak with confidence, demand a seat at the table, take more risks. The other group read or listened to messaging that highlighted structural and societal factors, including discrimination. Those who consumed the DIY narratives were more likely to believe women have the power to solve the problem, wrote researchers — which, they acknowledged, is probably good news, in isolation. More on the bad news side: those same participants were also more likely to believe that women were accountable for all aspects of workplace inequality.
“These findings should worry anyone who believes we need structural and societal change to achieve gender equality in the workplace,” the researchers wrote. “They suggest that the more we talk about women leaning in, the more likely people are to hold women responsible, both for causing inequality, and for fixing it.”
This is how we get things like #GirlBoss — Sophia Amoruso’s autobiographical book was published the year after Lean In, and it was then adapted by Netflix as a TV series that premiered in 2017. The #GirlBoss brand is a glossier, more Instagram-ready version of Lean In that heavily relies on the same type of messaging: the only thing standing between you and success is you. Amoruso, who rose to fame after founding the fashion retailer Nasty Gal, also launched a conference in New York City in 2017 called Girlboss Rally. Half “experiential inspiration wonderland,” the conference has called itself “A Noah’s Ark of Ambitious Women,” and also an “empowering” space for “women taking their careers, side hustles, and small businesses seriously.”146 A pillar in what can be thought of as the new confidence industry, the idea of #GirlBoss — and all of its various, contemporary iterations, pushing us to slay, hustle, and kill it like a “boss bitch” — is girl power grown up. It tells us we only need to believe in ourselves (and also perhaps buy various items, usually pink) to help us achieve our #goals. “I have three pieces of advice that I want you to remember,” Amoruso wrote in the introduction to her book. “Don’t ever grow up. Don’t become a bore. Don’t ever let the Man get to you? Okay? Cool.” Then let’s do this, she hyped. “#GIRLBOSS for life.”147
It’s easy to see why this kind of messaging connected with millennial women, and it’s easy to see why it has persisted into Gen Z. Following it, women are largely excused from worrying over the larger structural and societal inequities that can hold them back. More than that: they are told that they are stronger than those inequities. The empowerment creed relies heavily on endorsing the belief that if women just go for it and never give up, they will triumph. It confirms their ambition, but bottles it within a contained, achievable space. Things like the pay gap, racial inequality, and sexual harassment are not ignored, exactly, but they are branded — usually into shirts that say things like “Cats Against Catcalls,” “My Favourite Position? CEO,” and “Pay Me” — along with the message that any individual can overcome them just by being excellent enough. The secondary, less-spoken message in all this is that while women deserve both power and equality, they will get it piecemeal, in dribs and drabs, as soon as they stop putting up their own roadblocks. Underneath it all, the dual mantras of “hustling” and “killing it” are not much more than a dressed-up version of something we all know already: that women have to work harder, better, and longer to reap even close to the same rewards as men. Only, this time, we’re doing it to ourselves and calling it power.
The patriarchy likes this type of power, too, because it can be sold to women. Take, for example, the much-lauded Nike commercial “Dream Crazier,”148 which debuted during the 2019 Oscars. Vox called it “moving,” adding that Nike was “pushing the envelope and making a statement.”149 CR Fashion Book, run by the former editor-in-chief of Vogue Paris, called the ad “inspiring.”150 Hello Giggles said it was “secretly the best part of the 2019 Oscars.”151 Admittedly, the first time I watched the commercial, which is narrated by Serena Williams, I felt a swell of recognition in my chest, a visceral response of yes, exactly. I wasn’t the only one. In its first month online, the YouTube video racked up more than 8.6 million views.
The video opens with a montage of women athletes showing the types of emotion we don’t usually see women show — at least not on mainstream commercials. It feels both rebellious and good. “If we show emotion, we’re called dramatic,” says Williams. “If we want to play against men, we’re ‘nuts.’ And if we dream of equal opportunity, ‘delusional.’ When we stand for something, we’re ‘unhinged.’” She continues, “And if we get angry, we’re ‘hysterical,’ ‘irrational,’ or just being ‘crazy.’” And then comes the empowerment twist. “But a woman running a marathon was crazy. A woman boxing was crazy. A woman dunking? Crazy.” And so she continues until the expected rallying cry at the end. “So if they want to call you crazy? Fine. Show them what crazy can do.” The implicit answer is: anything. But it’s also: buy some Nike shoes.
Divorced from corporate interests, it isn’t that this messaging isn’t, well, empowering. It absolutely can feel uplifting. It can remind us that we can achieve, even as it simultaneously reminds us that nobody thinks we can. Not that the victor–victim dichotomy matters much, so long as you go get it, girl. (Bring your Nike shoes!) In my research for this book, I found myself at one particularly energetic “no excuses” empowerment session in New York City, in January 2019. The facilitator, Natasha Nurse, had one jaw-droppingly impressive resumé and a true find-yourself story: she left a career in law to pursue her dream — fashion and writing — and she founded Dressing Room 8, a web-based resource that offers consultation and coaching services. Nurse herself radiated confidence and, while she acknowledged “we live in a very exclusionary world,” her answer to that was a message of ultimate self-empowerment: “If you’re not finding what you need, create your own.” She also had little patience for anybody in her workshop who bemoaned their circumstances or outside challenges. “The answer to everything,” she said, “is confidence.”
I began to fill up my notebook with Nurse-isms, all of which could have, quite honestly, become slogans on a (bestselling) confidence merchandise line. She doled them out as soon as a participant hit the “but” mode. As in, “But what about . . . ?” or “But I can’t because . . .” A short list: “Why won’t you move the Earth for you?” “Is it enough to stop you from doing what you want?” “Stop blocking your blessings. Why are you doing that? Stop. It’s 2019.” “What are you doing to achieve that? That’s the question of the day.” And, of course, the hustle: “Be ferocious about your goals. You have to be hungry. Hungry. Hungry. Hungry.” None of this is meant to single Nurse out; it’s refreshing to completely disregard the crushing influence of power structures and systemic inequalities. But the problem is that we’re also completely disregarding the crushing influence of power structures and systemic inequalities.
As the Harvard Business Review researchers noted, the (often) inadvertent consequence of all this is that it implies blame. I have no doubt that people like Nurse do care about righting wider systemic issues. Frankly speaking, though, neither confidence, individual empowerment, nor being a #GirlBoss will solve all of them — at least not on a wide scale, and not for more than a very successful few. Insisting that they can, and on a mass level, not only mirrors the blame back on women, it too often punctuates the conversation with easy answers, or ends it altogether.
Instead of looking at why women might lack confidence, those in power can deflect blame, saying that poor representation in corporations, academia, science, the law, and politics has nothing to do with them. We’ve all heard the routine excuses. Women and other equity-seeking groups haven’t pushed hard enough to be there. They don’t want to be there. Women are not CEOs or judges because they don’t ask to be. They would rather be doing something else (presumably being a mother, or some other typically feminine job). The problem is that even for those of us who care about equality, such messaging often deploys a same-coin, different-side effect. It can look like asking: How can women be more confident? How can we make them feel like they’re a #GirlBoss? How can we get women to speak up about their ambitions? Feminists have better intentions on their side, no doubt, and they may desire more equitable outcomes. But buying shares in the confidence industry still forces all of us to keep playing by the rules of someone else’s game. Beyond that, it also lets companies, quite literally, profit from our sustained inequality.
So yes, sure, there’s nothing wrong with wanting women to be more confident, but as a popular message and often-proposed panacea, it obscures some deeply urgent questions. For one, women do not start out less confident; something happens to steadily chip away at their self-assurance. Research shows this undermining of confidence begins in adolescence (a sad fact to which we’ll return later on) and continues right on into adulthood. In one 2014 study of 1,000 men and women in the United States,152 researchers found that early-stage career women were actually more ambitious than men, with 43 percent of them aspiring to top management, compared to 34 percent of men at the same stage. Both men and women were equally confident that they would reach their goal. Those numbers drop dramatically, however, as women advance (or don’t) in their careers. As men and women each gain more experience in the workplace, researchers found, the number of women who aspired to top management plunged to a dismal 16 percent, while the men’s percentage remained the same. Likewise, men’s confidence in reaching their goals sticks, whereas women’s drops by half. Evidently, not only does the journey suck, the destination looks much less attractive the closer it gets.
When it comes to positions of power, women are often set up to fail. If the glass ceiling has come to dominate conversations on women and leadership, the idea of the “glass cliff” has made a forceful play to replace it as a more pertinent metaphor. Researchers Michelle Ryan and Alexander Haslam coined the term in the mid-2000s after reading an article in the Times headlined “Women on Board: Help or Hindrance?” written by journalist Elizabeth Judge. In it, Judge bemoaned women’s advancement to leadership, arguing that the “triumphant” march of women into Britain’s boardrooms had actually sunk companies’ share prices.153 “So much for smashing the glass ceiling and using their unique skills to enhance the performance of Britain’s biggest companies,” Judge wrote. “Analysis . . . shows that companies that decline to embrace political correctness by installing women on the board perform better than those that actively promote sexual equality at the very top.”
Ryan and Haslam doubted that analysis told the whole story. What, they wondered, did the financial health of those companies look like before women stepped up? The short answer is: not good. “Women are more likely than men to find themselves on a ‘glass cliff,’ such that their positions of leadership are associated with greater risk of failure,” they wrote in one paper. “If and when that failure occurs, it is then women (rather than men) who must face the consequences and who are singled out for criticism and blame.”154 Examples of this ostensible hiring strategy include women like Carol Bartz, but also Marissa Meyer, another Yahoo! CEO; as well as Meg Whitman, brought in to help a struggling Hewlett-Packard; Ursula Burns, brought in to help a struggling Xerox; Indra Nooyi, brought in to help a struggling PepsiCo; and, most recently, Mary Barra, who took over a struggling General Motors in 2014 and was subsequently named “Crisis Manager of the Year.”155 And, if a woman does become the next American president, she will almost certainly be stepping into crisis.
Sometimes, as evidenced by the successful leadership of women like Nooyi, women CEOs do not plunge off the glass cliff (although their tenure can tend to be significantly shorter). When they do, however, they might find that the news of their replacement makes them want to punch something. (Okay, or, less violently, sigh really loudly.) A 2013 study published in Strategic Management Journal by researchers Alison Cook and Christy Glass reiterated the findings of previous “glass cliff” papers, affirming that women and people of colour were far likelier to be appointed CEO when a firm was already performing poorly.156 In particular, more than 40 percent of women CEOs were appointed during times of crisis, compared to just over 20 percent of men. What’s more, in a sort of power-lite move, only 13 percent of women were concurrently appointed as the company’s chairperson, as opposed to half of the men, who got that extra bump of influence.157 But Cook and Glass also wanted to know what happened after said promotion, when a woman inevitably left or was fired.
Using a data set of CEO transitions in Fortune 500 companies over a fifteen-year period, they discovered that if a company continued to perform poorly, which it often did, since companies are big and difficult to turn around, women and people of colour were almost always replaced by white men — a pattern they dubbed the “saviour effect,” a really depressing echo of the larger relational narratives-slash-fantasies we build around women, people of colour, and white men. “These findings suggest that occupational minorities face greater challenges when appointed CEO,” wrote the researchers, “and are provided few degrees of freedom with which to establish their leadership capabilities.” In other words, they never even get a chance to succeed; the game is often rigged from the start. Even knowing this, women and people of colour tend to take the job anyway, largely because, as other research has repeatedly shown, they (sadly, correctly) believe it might be the only opportunity they’ll ever get to advance.158
The way we talk about women in leadership does little to counteract these narratives. One 2016 survey, commissioned by the Rockefeller Foundation, examined media coverage of America’s top CEOs.159 As its authors, perhaps naively, stated, “The skills and performance of a CEO should matter most in a crisis.” Meaning: media coverage of a company that was doing badly would, a person might reasonably assume, focus on the performance and strategy of its CEO. Except that’s not exactly what happened. Framing of such stories instead relied heavily on the gender of the CEO, whether the journalist was conscious of it or not.
In cases where the company’s CEO was a woman, 80 percent of the stories blamed her as the source of the crisis. But when a man was the CEO, only 31 percent of the articles named him as the source of the calamity. To add to the “you don’t belong” line, articles focusing on women CEOs were also more likely to mention their personal lives, and when they did, the vast majority of them discussed family. None of the articles cited mentioned a man’s children or his family. If any article did delve into a man’s personal life, it was to focus on his retirement plans, his post-career life, or his social relationships. All of which is to say that discrimination can choke especially tightly at the top of the hierarchy.
This is undeniably discouraging, but here’s the real gut punch: if women are more likely to be hired when a company is tanking, they’re also significantly more likely than men to get fired when their company is doing well. One 2018 paper published in the Journal of Management, cheekily titled “You’re Fired! Gender Disparities in CEO Dismissal,” found that women are about 45 percent more likely to be dismissed than male CEOs.160 When the company was performing poorly, rates of dismissal were about the same, which is moderately encouraging. However, women were found to be significantly more likely to be dismissed when the firm had high performance. “Higher levels of firm performance protects male, but not female, CEOs from dismissal,” wrote the researchers, adding that their results challenged an age-old nugget of conventional wisdom: that how well a person does a job corresponds to their job retention. That gender plays a role in firing is inescapable. And all of it feeds into the idea that women just aren’t cut out for leadership.
Speaking of: women CEOs are also more likely to face pressure from activist shareholders (so dubbed because they try to get firms to change strategic direction).161 Using an eighteen-year data set, one team of researchers found that activist investors were more likely to tell women how to manage the firm, even if, statistically, their company was performing as well as a man’s. (Sound familiar?) Such findings, they added, show that power is not enough to overcome bias. That isn’t exactly encouraging for those without power, either. “If prejudice based on gender role incongruity occurs for such visible roles,” they added, “it suggests there may be even more prejudice against women in less visible high-level positions.” Meaning: if men are annoyingly confident enough to publicly correct the CEO of a high-profile company, can you imagine what they say in private? You probably can.
So, the paradox of female power, thus far, in a nutshell: women are held to a higher standard than men, but it ultimately doesn’t matter how good they are because neither their purported power nor their stellar performance shields them from the effects of sexism. Yet it’s even more complicated than that. Women who play the game too well can often pay a steep price. For as much as we force power-seeking women to be exceptional, that very extraordinariness is usually what men perceive to be most threatening. That’s the kind of fun world we live in! This fact becomes particularly devastating when considered in tandem with girls’ and women’s rising advancement and achievement in educational systems, particularly in North America and Europe, a statistic that’s often meant to soothe worries about the advance of equality. And maybe it would if we weren’t living in a backlash against women’s perceived power grab. Or, as Natasha Quadlin asks in a 2018 study published in the American Sociological Review: “Women earn better grades than men across levels of education — but to what end?”162
Quadlin sent out more than 2,000 job applications, varying her fictional candidates’ GPA, gender, and major. She discovered that women benefited from moderate achievement, but not high achievement. Indeed, high-achieving men were called back at a rate of almost two to one compared to high-achieving women. And when those high-achieving fictional applicants specialized in traditionally male-dominated fields, such as math, the callback gap leapt to three to one. This is partly because employers greatly value likeability in women, a characteristic that they assign to mediocre women but not high-achieving women, whose personalities, as Quadlin wrote, “are viewed with more skepticism.” They are simply not “supposed” to do well in those fields; if they do, they’re assumed to be uptight. High-achieving women, it should be noted, also lost out in relation to moderate-achieving women. Quadlin called it an inverted-U shape for achievement, in which the women with the best grades were disproportionately penalized, most starkly in STEM. That disadvantage is likely to be even worse for women of colour, Quadlin theorized, as they are often held to an even stricter standard when it comes to demonstrating warmth.
Often, when we say we want women to be confident, what we really mean is that we want them to be feminine and confident. Warm and confident. Charming, full of acquiescence, and confident. Consider what one retail manager of a major chain told me about how both staff and customers respond to her leadership style. “People do not like hearing ‘No,’ but they really don’t like hearing it from a tiny woman, with conviction,” she said. Unless she feels she should be apologizing, she added, she refuses to inflect her voice with “sorry.” People don’t like it when she factually, calmly explains rules; they really don’t like it when she enforces those rules. Men especially don’t like it, she told me. Her staff also don’t like that she can say no to them with confidence. They call her authoritarian “because I consistently ask them to adhere to company rules, without empathetic inflections in my voice.” But when she tried being empathetic they didn’t respond at all. “When I have to constantly remind them to do their job I’m a ‘nag,’” she said. “But worst of all, they call me ‘moody.’ If a man emotionlessly told them to do something — not a problem.”
In fact, women reap few of the rewards we’ve come to expect from power, achievement, and success. As we first examined in the introduction, the pay gap becomes chasm-like once women make it to the top executive positions. In January 2019, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives released a report that examined the compensation of all the top executives — including the CEO and the chief financial officer (CFO) positions, as well as the three next highest-paid ones — on the S&P/TSX Composite index, which accounts for roughly 250 companies.163 Among full-time workers, women make eighty-three cents for every dollar men make, a gap that widens for women of colour, Indigenous women, and women with disabilities.
Yet while the gap narrows slightly among senior managers, it stretches to what the report called “an abysmal” sixty-eight cents among top executives. For women supposedly at the top of the hierarchy, that amounts to nearly $1 million less a year. There are three main factors that account for the disparity: position type, company size, and sector. That is, considering that there were more CEOs in Canada named “Paul” or “Brian” in 2018 than there were women CEOs, women who are top executives are more likely to be in HR positions, not CEO ones. They’re also more likely to work at smaller companies, which pay less; and be less represented at larger ones, which just pay them less. Plus, company sectors that do hire many women are likely to have bigger pay gaps.
Bonus salary, as opposed to base salary, drives much of the compensation gap, according to the CCPA report. At the top level, a person’s base salary accounts for only 27 percent of their compensation, with bonus pay accounting for the rest. Personal performance often has little to do with it. Bonus pay is mainly (theoretically) based on a company’s share price and is usually awarded through stock options to everyone who occupies the C-suite. Nevertheless, women at the C-suite level get substantially less bonus pay even at the same company, based on the same stock performance. It’s also worth mentioning that, when looking at base salary alone, the pay gap is the same as it is elsewhere. It’s the system of rewards that, in the end, rewards men. “The lack of female executives and their substantial pay gap is an issue of fairness in its own right,” wrote the report’s author, CCPA senior economist David Macdonald, “but it also lays bare the cumulative impact of corporate culture on women’s working lives.”
Of course, corporate culture is only the surface-level problem at work. Misogyny has helped to define that culture, filtering it through a history of treating women as office lackeys, workplace subordinates, and colleagues who need to be “put in their place.” It’s presumably the same attitude that led one of my first bosses, a man who owned several stores in a Toronto mall, to one day tell me I was hired to “pretty up” the place. Whether he meant by virtue of my face or my presumed workplace decorating skills I’ll never know; I was too enraged and embarrassed to ever speak to him again. I had no workplace power then, but even if I had, it might not have saved me from such a comment. Just as women might expect workplace power and authority to result in better pay — respect, even! — they might also reasonably expect that no subordinate would ever make inappropriate comments about how pretty they are, grab their ass, or make a “joke” that involves an eggplant emoji. Not so. In fact, a woman’s power and authority at work seem to attract bad behaviour, like flies to honey. While those who are most vulnerable in the workplace — including women in junior positions, people of colour, and LGBTQ+ workers — certainly face sexual harassment, and often feel powerless to stop it, there is a growing body of research showing that women in positions of authority are just as, if not more, frequently targeted. Researchers call this the “power-threat” model, referring to men’s discomfort with women’s authority over them as the driving motivation for harassment.
It makes a sick kind of sense. Sexual violence is, at its core, about asserting control and domination. And what is more threatening to a man’s control and domination than a woman who has achieved more power than him? This is why sexual harassment has been shown to increase at the promotion stage for women, and it’s also why studies have found that men (and particularly men who identify as strongly masculine) are more likely to harass women who identify as feminists than they are women who adhere to traditional values.164 What’s worse is that researchers have also discovered that men believe this works: those who engaged in harassment essentially felt a boost to their perceived manliness following the action. Which also makes a sick kind of sense: there’s a reason the larger manosphere and the anti-feminists within it target women with violence and derision.
“When women’s power is viewed as illegitimate or easily undermined, co-workers, clients, and supervisors appear to employ harassment as an ‘equalizer’ against women supervisors,” concluded a team of researchers who completed the first longitudinal study that clearly revealed the power-threat pattern. That study, published in 2012 in the American Sociological Review, found that women experience a power paradox, in which their authority counterintuitively seems to invite more bad behaviour instead of protecting them from it. This can be exacerbated when a woman or person of colour is the only person in a room with high-powered people, as she so often is.
The researchers shared the experience of a woman they called Holly, the first woman in upper management at her manufacturing firm. Her subordinates would joke, “If we had somebody with balls in this position, we’d be getting things done.” Then, one evening, a client — the vice-president of an influential firm — sexually harassed her at a company dinner, trying to put his arm around her, groping her leg, repeatedly remarking, “Oh, I love her. She’s beautiful.” She was the only woman there. After co-workers finally saw what was happening, one suggested she leave. She did. They then stayed behind for drinks at the bar with the client.
Reading this, I thought of the comments and behaviour I was subjected to back when I helmed one of Canada’s oldest, most progressive political magazines: “Oh, you must be the intern” (countless times); “What a cute little blog you run” (not a blog, and you know it); “Are you on Tinder? Will you show me how to use it?” (just no); “You’re so beautiful” (silence, silence, nothing else); “I think he has a crush on you” (not an appropriate response to a meeting wrap-up with an outside consultant); a note telling me that “a bit of slap and tickle can be a good contrast to the serious side of sexism” (really?); an unsolicited, lingering backrub and a literal “Good job” from a professor after I gave a presentation to his class on being a successful woman in journalism (patronizing and gross!); an older industry professional who rested a hand on my forearm throughout an entire conversation he was having with another person, then suddenly turned to me and suggested coffee (thank u, next). Yes, I could see how the power-threat paradox could play out, over and over into monotony, grinding down someone’s will, sort of like a Friends rerun marathon.
I called the lead researcher on the paper, Heather McLaughlin, an assistant professor in Oklahoma State University’s sociology department, to see how the power-threat model might clash against the increased push to see women advance in the workplace. One of the biggest mistakes people make, she told me, is conflating a woman’s supervisory authority at work with an automatic increase in workplace power, and not accounting for the social hierarchies that exist outside the workplace. She referenced Holly’s case. Too often, a woman who occupies any top executive or supervisory role is the only woman at that level — a token nod to diversity or progress that doesn’t necessarily mesh with the wider company culture (or world culture). “To what level are they able to effect change?” McLaughlin asked, imagining the solitary woman at the top. “And what is their role there? Are you hiring this person because you value their voice and you want to make changes? Or are you hiring this person simply to assuage concerns that you’re sexist?” And if those questions are answered honestly, how much voice and agency does a person really have?
No wonder women at the top aren’t helping other women rise, or at least not in the numbers we expected. They’re too busy fending off everything, and everyone, around them.
Several years ago, a photo of me popped up on an older colleague’s Facebook page. Taken the night of our national industry awards, it showed me in a neon floral dress, standing next to the colleague and beaming. I was holding up an envelope that contained the certificate marking my gold-medal win from that night. Underneath the photo were a couple of comments from his friends, older women in the industry, women to whom I’d looked up. One was to the effect of, “Is she even old enough to drink?” And the other said something like, “I didn’t realize they let children into the event now.” I blinked red. Then I blinked tears. Not only was I old enough to drink — thirty! — it was only a few weeks after my then husband had unceremoniously announced he wanted out of our marriage. I’d revelled in the win that night. I’d needed it. To face the kind of behaviour I usually expected from men coming from women jarred me. And it wasn’t the first (or last) time a woman with more experience cut me down or behaved coldly toward me.
Researchers coined the (super-sexist) term “Queen Bee” in the 1970s to describe this kind of behaviour in workplace settings: women who’ve achieved high positions, particularly in male-dominated organizations, by distancing themselves from other women, and also by essentially emulating the behaviours of the types of men whose positions they wanted. Think of it as the power-achieving equivalent of the “cool girl” who “prefers to hang out with the guys.” In organizational settings, the Queen Bee may act in a derogatory manner toward other women — de-emphasizing their career commitment, achievements, and goals, as well as generally underscoring other qualities, like their family life, their looks, their personality, in a way we have come to expect more generally from macho men.165 Perhaps predictably, plenty of media articles have used the idea of the Queen Bee to feed into stereotypes of catty women and bad female bosses; others have insisted there’s more to it.166
And, of course, there is. Research has shown that, rather than a simple Mean Girl-ing trait among successful women, the Queen Bee phenomenon is also a consequence of gender discrimination in the workplace. Put another way, stressing how much they differ from other women has been the main method by which women traditionally get ahead, acutely so when everyone else in power is a dude.167 They have no inherent predisposition to battle other women; it’s more that they, rightly, view mirroring masculine traits, and denouncing feminine ones, as a way to advance. It’s much easier, however, to fall back on the trope that women are bitches. This lazy thinking is only aggravated by the gendered expectations placed upon women. Women are expected to help lift each other up in the workplace — consider the famous quote by former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other” — while men are not only allowed, but expected, to compete among each other for the best jobs. Women who do try to compete up the hierarchy in organizations are then seen as unnatural, cold, and even shameful. They are not nice girls.
This isn’t to say the Queen Bee phenomenon doesn’t harm women; it does. One ground-breaking study published in 2018 discovered that the Queen Bee effect can be just as damaging to women workers as sexism; although, unlike sexism, other women are unlikely to attribute it to ill intent — a factor that can make it harder to name and address.168 Study participants who were exposed to Queen Bee behaviour were more sad, angry, and anxious than those who weren’t.
None of this means that women are toxic banshees who should be banned from power. Nor does it mean that women make terrible mentors. Rather, it recalls McLaughlin’s point about what it means to be the solitary woman at the top. She contended that hiring a single woman CEO was unlikely to hugely shift a company’s larger culture, but employing more women who can more collectively make changes — without experiencing backlash — could. The authors of the above study concluded much the same thing. “Only placing a few more minorities and women in the higher echelons of the organizations is not sufficient without also targeting the organizational diversity climate,” they wrote, “or at least not if this increase in women and/or minorities does not lead to a critical mass.”
So, no. One woman alone cannot entirely change the deeply disadvantageous power structures that have been built over centuries. However much power she has, so long as she’s still playing the game, the game has more power. Faced with this messy reality, many trans and cis women, as well as people living beyond the traditional gender binary, have given the middle finger to traditional power structures—and the rules that govern them. Think of it as the ultimate “boy, bye” move: reimagining a world without men in it at all.
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