CHAPTER 1
AIMING HIGH AND FALLING TO EARTH
Women in Early and Midcareer
To a woman graduating from college today, the lack of women in the senior ranks of business (as well as other fields) looks like an historical artifact. By the time she is the age of one of the few dozen female Fortune 500 CEOs, she reasons, company hierarchies should more or less reflect the proportion of women in her cohort. She has learned, likely throughout her entire educational career, about female leaders whose breakthroughs made it possible for later generations to rise. She may have read about someone such as former secretary of commerce Barbara Franklin, whose story appears after this chapter, who demonstrates that women can hold their own in the halls of power and help clear the way for women who come after them.
We conducted in-depth interviews with more than two dozen graduating seniors and found that women—and men too—reared on the rhetoric of “women’s empowerment” and accustomed to sharing the classroom and the playing field anticipated a future in which women leaders are commonplace. Given the well-known benefits of a college degree, young alumnae launching professional careers might reasonably assume that gender inequality will have little to no impact on their professional trajectories. While they are well aware of the lingering impacts of discriminatory practices and biased attitudes, by and large they believe that the underrepresentation of women in leadership, in the words of one graduate, “is changing” and that, perhaps more importantly, “it won’t matter because I’ll kick all their asses anyway.”
She is not alone in her optimistic, hard-charging outlook. A 2015 survey of millennial women found that about half of women in the workforce for three or fewer years (at an average age of twenty-five) believed they would be able to rise to the most senior level of their current organization.1 In the same survey, women cited “opportunities for career progression” as the most attractive employer trait. In an ongoing study of MBA graduates that we are involved with, millennial women ranked “opportunities for career growth” as their second-most important overall concern, after “quality of relationships,” exactly the same as millennial men ranked their concerns.2 Is it any wonder that young women entering the white-collar workforce view professional success as both desirable and attainable? Today’s college graduates grew up in an era when women comprised almost 50 percent of the US workforce and “girl power” was a bright thread woven into the pop cultural products that orbited them at every stage, from children’s books to T-shirt slogans to hit songs.3
This doesn’t mean young women are ignorant about lingering gender inequality. Having been witness to the debates about and painful disappointments associated with “having it all,” women entering the white-collar workforce are keenly aware of the prevailing sense that family demands interfere with women’s careers and see the friction between parenting and work as a general social problem. “I think work-life balance means maternity leave and childcare and universal preschool,” noted one young woman. A 2015 study of unmarried, childless men and women between the ages of eighteen and thirty-two found that women were cognizant of the effect these kinds of supports would have on their futures. They were more likely to express a preference for an egalitarian relationship, in which they and a future spouse equally shared the responsibilities of breadwinning and caregiving, if told they’d have access to paid family leave, subsidized childcare, and flexible work options.4 And it is not the case that young women—or men, for that matter—are uninformed about structural gender discrimination in the workplace. Indeed, it would be hard for them to be unaware: A search of the ABI/ProQuest database for newspaper and magazine articles on workplace gender gaps, bias, and discrimination published between 2000 and 2016 yields over five thousand results, even before the onslaught of media coverage sparked by the #MeToo movement.
For our research into women’s early professional experiences, we interviewed more than two dozen undergraduate students a few months before their graduation and then one year later. We also followed up with a subset of these graduates five years after that, when they had become more firmly established in their careers. When asked as graduating seniors about their expectations for how or whether gender might play a role in their paths, both men and women were quick to acknowledge the existence of inequities. Graduating men acknowledged their privileged position as they looked ahead to starting their postcollege jobs: “I know there’s a lot of sexism in the workplace, and I do anticipate in many contexts being treated like a more responsible person just because I’m a man, a white man,” one said. One of his female peers, who planned to attend law school, pointed out that “a field like law is still mostly male-dominated. I don’t know the statistics on this—I might be wrong. But I know that especially the older people in all these different firms are more likely to be men and there aren’t that many women at that level, from a couple of decades ago.” One of her peers, who had been hired to join a health care consulting firm postgraduation, had much the same assessment: “I know that at my firm there are definitely females, but there’s not too many females at the partner level. But that could have just been because of how things were back in the day.”
The notion that “kicking their asses” will overcome any potential discrimination authorizes the sense of agency that young women are encouraged to feel in the face of lingering inequality. As another graduating student asserted, “The way I comport myself shows that I’m serious about what I’m doing, and as soon as you get to know me, the gender part doesn’t really matter anymore.” Having internalized years of confidence-boosting messages about their potential, early-career women may even speculate that prior generations were lacking not only opportunity but also drive: “When you look at these [consulting] firms, if you look at the top tiers—like partners—there are very, very few women. From my perspective, I feel like there is self-selection, to a certain extent,” mused one. From her vantage point, gender doesn’t loom large in a cohort equally balanced between men and women: “At least, going in with my class at [a firm], there’s going to be a lot of women. I don’t really foresee any sort of issue.”
But this progress narrative is belied not just by research on gender barriers to career advancement but also by what these same women experienced as their careers took shape. Take our interviewee Carla,5 a senior who was awarded a prestigious fellowship with an international marketing firm. She recounted “fl[ying] out to London for an interview, [and] they flew in executives from everywhere in the world to London, and everyone on the other side of the table was a man, and that was sort of weird.” But, she pondered as she looked ahead to the fellowship, “it was also interesting, because of everyone who was applying, there were only eight guys and twenty-two girls. So, it’s also thinking about the shift there, and how in twenty years, the other side of the table is going to look a little bit different.” Carla’s belief that the executive side of the table will seat more women implies, of course, her own opportunity to ascend to such a role over the next two decades. But one year later, her faith had been tested: “When I met one of the CEOs of the company with all the fellows in New York, where we finished the fellowship, he happened to remember all the guys’ names and none of the girls’ names.… The most senior person in the room was a woman, and the more senior fellow is a woman, and he didn’t remember her name, but he remembered the first-year guy in my class.”
The way that the women in Carla’s group of fellows seemed to be almost invisible to a senior leader of the firm is not an isolated anecdote. A large body of research confirms that women are perceived by superiors, peers, and subordinates in ways that diminish their status. Women get praised in performance evaluations, often for stereotypically feminine traits such as willingness to help out, yet receive lower numerical performance ratings and fewer career-developing “stretch” assignments than their male peers.6 Women’s contributions to their teams’ successes go undervalued and unrecognized; unless their achievements are explicitly called out to observers, women are seen as less competent and having inferior leadership capabilities compared to male peers.7 And women experience backlash when they are not helpful, even though the kinds of tasks they get criticized for avoiding, such as planning events and taking meeting notes, are neither highly valued by their employers nor associated with career advancement and rewards.8
The incongruity between Carla’s ambitions and the view of women’s suitability for leadership implied by the forgetful CEO sets up what will become an ever-widening gap between aspirations and attainment for young women embarking on white-collar careers. The emergence of this gap will recapitulate a pattern that has endured since women began entering professional jobs in large numbers. Our own research on baby boomer and Generation X Harvard Business School (HBS) alumni, who embarked on their post-MBA careers in the 1980s and 1990s, offers a case in point: Men and women had virtually the same values, rating “work that is meaningful and satisfying,” “professional accomplishments,” and “opportunities for career growth and development” as all highly important. That is, both men and women with the same elite pedigree aspired to fulfilling careers characterized by achievement and advancement—hardly a stunning insight. But these women saw their actual professional outcomes fall short: They were less likely than men of their same age to be in senior management or even in supervisory roles at all. And it isn’t at all clear that these women simply self-selected into less powerful positions: The women expressed lower satisfaction with multiple dimensions of their careers, compared to men in their cohorts.9
Lowered Horizons: Emerging into Careers
Six years after the aspiring lawyer quoted above graduated, now admitted to the bar and working at a large firm, her confidence had faltered:
It took a while for it to sink in, especially in my first year here, how often I was the most junior person in the room and the only woman.… There are plenty of women at this law firm, but it’s still frequently the case that you can be on a conference call with twelve people, standing in a room with ten people, and you look around and someone’s supposed to get water—and guess what, that’s you.… The fact that it kept happening, that it wasn’t just a one-time occurrence, it starts to get to you … especially the fortieth time a man speaks with a complete lack of respect for you or your time or efforts. It does add up, and it gets to a certain volume where you know it’s not coincidental. If I’m planning a lunch with five people and two people have to back out at the last minute—I started to notice that it is often the women of color who have last-minute [assignments] that come up, and these are often not substantive assignments … and it’s painful after a while to see this and to see how it happens.
She is not alone in finding what a difference a few years can make. After five years in the finance industry, another young woman found that the lack of female leadership at her firm was not an unfortunate relic of past norms: “I definitely felt isolated and different from my peers. And there’s definitely a lack of role models … there are fewer women overall, and then as you go up to higher and higher positions there are fewer and fewer women. I definitely felt like a minority and felt there were fewer role models for me.” According to the study of millennial women referenced above, by the time they are in their early thirties, the proportion who see themselves as likely to attain senior leadership has dropped ten points, to 39 percent.10 These diminished expectations are likely rooted in experience; an annual “Women in the Workplace” survey conducted by McKinsey and Lean In has found that women in entry-level jobs are 18 percent less likely to be promoted than their male peers.11 A raft of studies has come to similar conclusions. As leadership scholars Alice Eagly and Linda Carli observe in reviewing the literature, “Men generally have a promotion advantage even when characteristics such as job experience are controlled.”12 Very few women fully overcome this disadvantage. As is well known, just 5 percent of companies in the S&P 500 have a female CEO.13 More broadly, the World Economic Forum notes that women’s global presence in managerial and other senior positions in both the public and private sectors “is not trending toward equal representation.”14
One female MBA graduate (class of ’13) described, “Right out of undergrad, at least at my [consulting] firm, the [male-to-female] ratio was about 50/50. You generally just feel like a human being, as opposed to a female human being, and no one ever treated me differently. I got top ratings. I always felt like I was a strong performer.” But this equilibrium tends to be short-lived. Promoted to a management role after business school, this same consultant noticed that “increasingly, I’m the only female voice in the room.” A 2014 MBA, working at a different firm, described the same trajectory:
If you’re doing good work, and if you’re doing problem-solving effectively at the junior level … I do think that men and women are treated very, very equally. Of course, there is unconscious bias, but in general I do think at the junior level, I didn’t feel disadvantaged or different. I would say as a manager, it’s very different now.… I still have the attitude that if I keep my head down and work hard, I’ll get ahead, and I still believe that’s very true. I still believe [my firm] is a very meritocratic place. But I see my male colleagues doing really smart things to get recognition and to build relationships—and be seen to have a lot of the credit—that I would never see a woman do.… Most of the partners are men, and they engage in a certain way and look for certain things.
This consultant’s emerging sense that her male peers have better access to key internal networks and colleagues is borne out by research across a range of highly remunerative fields from venture capital15 to investment banking16 to law.17 In industries such as these, where the apprenticeship model reigns, such relationships are critical for advancement. As the consultant went on to explain, mentorship and sponsorship from senior colleagues are unevenly distributed at her firm:
A big consideration is, if I try to build a platform to partner, who’s going to help me build it? And that’s sort of where I’m struggling.… I was talking recently with a group of women at my level who all feel like, “I want to be partner, I like the work, but I don’t know who’s going to help me get there.” And we stepped back and asked, “Why is it that none of us feel like we really have someone, that we’ve built a community of people to help us build that platform, while a lot of our male colleagues have?”
It should be no surprise, then, that women’s representation begins to drop off higher up the ranks. While 48 percent of entry-level workers are women, that proportion shrinks to 30 percent at the vice president level and down to 25 percent at higher strata, according to a 2017 study.18 This underrepresentation fuels a vicious circle: As women move into managerial roles and notice that their cohort is not as gender-balanced as it once was, they may begin to wonder how long they will remain in the pipeline. Even if overt bias or explicit discrimination has not figured in their experiences, they see that men’s and women’s trajectories are starting to unfold differently. And women’s sense that they are not on a solid path to leadership is also reinforced when they find themselves steered away from or without access to development opportunities. For example, in multinational companies, global postings are a key stage on the path to senior ranks, yet 18 percent of millennial women do not believe they have equal opportunities to undertake international assignments, and they are less likely than their male peers to believe that their employer provides equal access to such assignments.19
Overall, women under age thirty are less certain than their male peers that they can reach the top level of their organizations.20 And they are right. Even among HBS alumni, a gender disparity in career outcomes persists: Among those in mid- to late career, women are less likely than men to have direct reports or profit-and-loss responsibilities or to be in the highest echelons of leadership, either as members of top management or as corporate board directors.21 As women move beyond the first few years of their working lives (when it may indeed appear that their gender won’t matter), the pool of women shrinks with each ascending level of organizational hierarchy.
While the diminishing number of women in positions of increasing responsibility and power is clear, there is far less consensus about why and how the leaks spring and, in turn, what should be done to plug them. One widely held belief maintains that the real driver of gender gaps is that women’s aspirations trend downward over time, widening the distance between their goals and leadership roles. Implied is the notion that women’s underrepresentation in leadership is therefore inevitable or at least has less to do with organizational barriers than with individual decisions. Even among high-achieving women themselves, this conventional wisdom dominates: In our alumni study, 85 percent of HBS’s female graduates identified “prioritizing family over work” as the number one barrier to women’s career advancement, and women were no less likely than men to cite this explanation.22
The prevalence of this belief is perhaps unsurprising, given that work-family conflict dominated media reporting of gender and work between 2001 and 200923 and continues to figure prominently in discussions about women’s careers, including in the firestorm of coverage ignited by Anne-Marie Slaughter’s 2012 Atlantic article “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” (and her 2015 follow-up book, Unfinished Business: Women, Men, Work, Family). But the explanatory power of this narrative is limited. Our study of HBS alumni found that the gender gap in top management was not explained by women’s greater likelihood to have made career moves—such as taking time out, declining a promotion, or choosing a job with more flexibility—to accommodate their family responsibilities. Even when controlling for any combination of family accommodations as well as factors such as age, number of children, industry, and company size, the gender gap between men and women at senior levels persisted.24 And it isn’t at all clear that family demands are what drive women’s job exits: Just 2 percent of women planning to leave their current company were doing so to focus on family responsibilities, according to a survey of more than seventy thousand workers.25
When Organizations Depress Women’s Flight Paths
Despite shaky evidence, this narrative of women’s careers being stymied by their own lack of interest shapes how organizations interpret a dearth of women in their leadership ranks and, in turn, efforts to rectify the imbalance. As a result, companies can fail to address—or even see—what is really driving their gender disparities. One such cautionary tale comes from a large consulting firm that brought in a team of outside researchers to study the lack of women at the senior level and recommend changes that would enable more women to rise. What the team found wasn’t what the firm expected. While the firm had assumed that more women were quitting and doing so primarily because they couldn’t keep pace with job demands, in fact men and women were leaving at about the same rate. Moreover, the firm’s culture of round-the-clock hours—driven largely by a norm of overdelivering to clients as a way of one-upping coworkers—was experienced by both men and women as exhausting and dispiriting. Extensive interviews made clear that this culture was causing all employees, not just women, to feel that their jobs prevented them from being fully present in the rest of their lives, including as parents. Yet, despite commissioning the data, the firm’s leaders rejected and discarded it. Instead of tackling the overwork that was leaving employees, regardless of gender, unhappy and unwell, they doubled down on the belief that women were simply less suited to the challenges of high-level roles.
The solution, in the eyes of the firm’s leaders, was to continue encouraging women (but not men, who were also struggling with excessive work) to take advantage of family-accommodation policies such as flex time and reduced schedules. But using those benefits pushed women off the leadership track and reinforced notions that they couldn’t handle the demands of higher-level roles, ultimately perpetuating the very problem that the firm had hoped to solve.26 When workplaces funnel women into lower-status, less rewarding jobs out of a well-meaning desire to “support” their careers, they further entrench the expectation that women’s primary role is outside the office. At the same time, gender inequality at home reinforces a cultural norm that associates men with paid work and women with caregiving. Women in dual-career heterosexual partnerships do the majority of housework and caregiving; even among affluent couples who outsource much of the labor, women take on the lion’s share of managing and coordinating such work.27
Among HBS alumnae—a highly educated, high-achieving segment of women workers—the proportion of millennial women expecting to interrupt their careers to care for children is more than twice as high (37 percent) as that of baby boomer women (17 percent) who expected the same when they first started out. Generation X alumnae were also less likely (28 percent) than millennial women to anticipate career interruptions for children. Younger women’s lowered expectations for egalitarian caregiving are a reminder that progress toward gender equality is stalled at home, not just at work, in ways that reinforce women’s disadvantage in both domains. Indeed, millennial women’s tempered outlook reflects the reality that earlier generations of women experienced; significantly larger proportions of Generation X and baby boomer alumnae reported being in traditional marriages where they did most of the childcare and their careers took a back seat than they had expected when they graduated.28 More recently, the coronavirus pandemic laid bare the extent to which mothers are still expected to choose between career and family. Amid the sudden closure of schools and day care centers as well as the risks associated with having a nanny, babysitter, or relative provide care, women with young children reduced their work hours four to five times more than did fathers.29 While the long-term effects of the pandemic on women’s employment remain to be seen, it seems likely that for many families, increased childcare demands will inspire the adoption of bifurcated gender roles that impede women’s careers.
Despite clear indications that external pressures spur women to ratchet back their ambitions, the belief that women don’t want to pursue leadership persists. Even as the recent college graduates in our study professed a strong interest in gender equality in their workplaces, they often attributed a lack of women in their companies or on their teams to women’s lower career ambition. In the words of one alumnus working in Europe for a major US-based consulting firm, “It is difficult to find women that are both qualified and willing to work the extremely long hours of consulting. It becomes a hard choice between career and family, given that the work gets in the way of meaningful time with family, and many women find it hard to make that choice.” The corollary is implicit: Men don’t find it as hard to make the same choice. And yet, as the consulting firm mentioned above found (but didn’t quite believe), men do suffer when expected to sacrifice time with their families. But in response they tend to deploy different coping strategies, such as quietly trimming their hours or limiting their availability without asking for formal accommodations, thereby flying under the radar and avoiding being branded as undercommitted.30 Meanwhile, women are bombarded with messages about the impossibility of managing career and family. A female executive can hardly get through an interview without being asked, sometimes with an undercurrent of incredulity, how she balances the two. And women who don’t follow a traditional path can sometimes experience more than just skepticism about their ability to juggle work and home: One series of studies found that men with wives who do not work viewed their female colleagues negatively and were more likely to deny promotion opportunities to women.31
These messages create some dissonance for young women in particular, coupled as they are with exhortations about women’s power and potential. (Girls can do anything except be both mothers and leaders.) One college senior claimed that she did not anticipate being treated differently from men in future work settings but also noted, in the same breath, that “in any field, the women and children thing is going to be an issue.” It isn’t clear if she thinks that the “women and children thing” is going to present difficulties for her, but she understands work-family conflict to be gendered and to be an “issue” for women’s experiences at work.
Family responsibilities are generally seen as problematic by young employees, according to a study of millennial workers: 44 percent of women and 49 percent of men believe that in their organizations, taking advantage of flexibility and work-life balance programs has negative consequences.32 These young professionals are not wrong, according to scholars who study the issue. The use of such programs and policies is associated with slowed wage growth and diminished promotion opportunities.33 Researchers have even coined a term for it: flexibility stigma. These are obstacles placed in women’s paths by their employers, not their children. As sociologist Pamela Stone found in a landmark study of highly educated women who leave the workforce, such workers are less likely to have “opted out” due to a diminished or vanished professional ambition than to have been pushed out by diminished opportunities, vanished mentors and sponsors, and organizational cultures that ascribe lowered status to mothers, even if they had previously been top performers.34 These shifts may take women by surprise, particularly if they have been on an upward trajectory. Is it any wonder that talented lawyers, bankers, tech workers, and consultants believe that they will be able to maintain their careers after becoming parents by dint of hard work and strategic planning, the qualities that have enabled them to succeed thus far? What they may fail to anticipate are the ways in which the context will morph into one that devalues their work and is riddled with unanticipated roadblocks to career growth.
Imagine you are, say, a midlevel manager at a large professional services firm. You started at the firm after college and returned after getting your MBA four years go. You are aiming to make partner. You have received stellar performance evaluations, you are cultivating relationships with a few key executives, and you make it known to your boss that you are eager for stretch assignments that will help you develop and demonstrate your potential. You and your spouse decide to start a family, and upon your child’s birth you take advantage of your firm’s industry-standard parental leave. When you return to work, you schedule a meeting with your boss. You want to propose that you’ll focus on local clients for the next year and have the flexibility to leave the office around four o’clock to pick up your son from day care, when the norm in your department is to work in the office or at the client site until at least seven o’clock. You explain that you’ll be back online after the nighttime routine and won’t be working less, just working more hours from home. You remember that when you first came to the firm these kinds of arrangements were touted, along with the maternity leave you just took, as key components of the company’s benefits scheme. You even recall one of the partners who spoke at a women employees’ forum pointing them out as central to the firm’s commitment to retaining and promoting women. Just to be sure you have the right information, you skim through the human resources intranet to confirm that your proposed plans are explicitly presented as options.
In the meeting, you also remind your boss about several upcoming milestones that the two of you have discussed as crucial to your career track. And you point out that you are exceptionally well qualified to lead a major project with a prominent client who happens to be located in your home city. Even though you’ve been with the firm for almost eight years and know that your supervisor has been impressed by your work, the conversation doesn’t go as you’d expected. Your manager agrees to your requests but cuts the meeting short. In the coming months, you find that your boss doesn’t seem as happy with your work, which is puzzling given that your output on the local projects meets or exceeds your past performance. You are disappointed when your manager tasks a younger male colleague with a high-profile assignment that is right in your wheelhouse, but when you ask to be put on the project your boss says simply that your coworker is a “better fit,” even though he is less familiar with the industry. As time passes, you realize that you continue to be passed over for exactly the kinds of projects that would propel you to partnership. You also find that the senior colleagues who once sought you out for expertise or special requests have stopped doing so.
Unbeknownst to you, your request to modify your working arrangement triggered the flexibility stigma present in your workplace. Researchers describe the effects of this stigma as “both reputational and concrete”:
When caregiving constraints become salient at work, the quality of work assignments suffers. This alone can doom a career, given that career development is highly dependent on on-the-job highly specialized training. Yet negative career consequences are overdetermined: other penalties include the difficulty of finding mentors and sponsors, which again is vital for career progress in elite jobs.35
Experiencing both reputational and concrete effects, you feel increasingly disconnected from your job, once a source of deep meaning and satisfaction. In frustration, you decide to apply for a similar role at a competing firm, knowing that they have more women partners than your current employer. You are encouraged when the hiring manager calls you for an interview. Despite feeling that you aced the interview, you never hear back. Though you tell yourself they must have just wanted someone with different experience, you can’t help but wonder if the fact that you are a parent of a young child played a role. Although the hiring manager didn’t ask you about your family, you know that several former colleagues and friends work closely with her. When you hear that an old college friend was hired—a young father of two with a stay-at-home spouse—you can’t help but wonder if he was viewed as a safer bet than you. Your nagging feeling that the hiring field wasn’t quite level has a name, again grounded in social science: the motherhood penalty. Women with children are less likely to be hired than men—with or without children—or women without children. And we know why: Mothers are viewed as less committed and less competent than any of those other groups.36 The penalty is gender-specific. The “daddy bonus,” by contrast, means that men with children, especially professionals who are white, college-educated, and in households with a traditionally gendered division of labor, are paid more than childless men even when controlling for number of hours worked.37
At this point, faced with stymied career growth, you may very well decide to opt out of the workforce if financially feasible, but in context this decision looks less like a desire to leave than a reflection of how unrewarding it is to stay. Is it any wonder that it is ambitious women, those with elite pedigrees and impressive track records, who pause or abandon their careers? The deep sense of satisfaction they derive from work fades when opportunities to learn, grow, and lead are foreclosed. The high-flying MBA who drops out of the paid workforce is simply an extreme example of women’s continued frustration at workplaces that prevent them from realizing their full potential.
How to Succeed in Business (and Why It’s Still Harder for Women)
Upon gaining admission to top law, medical, and business schools in the mid-twentieth century, growing numbers of women sought professional degrees to mitigate their structural disadvantage in the pursuit of jobs and promotions. One woman’s 1980s-era memoir about earning her MBA described her decision to apply to business school: “So often, it seemed, women lacked the necessary authority to take control of a situation and be listened to. When I thought about my business and the work I would do helping people market and finance their ideas, I imagined myself sitting in front of a banker and trying to convince him or her to lend money to my client. When that image came to mind, so did an MBA. It was there like a silent partner, helping to shore up my credibility.”38 An MBA or other professional degree still remains a signal to employers, not only of the quality of a prospective employee’s training but also his or her ambition and career orientation. An ever-increasing number of women have followed these early graduates’ paths. Today 45 percent of applicants to graduate business schools are women.39
An MBA, particularly one from a top school, should—in theory—help to mitigate the effects of unequally distributed opportunities and counter gender stereotypes that render women less credible in certain settings. Business educators are undoubtedly aware that part of the value proposition they offer to women is an increased likelihood of ascending to ranks where there are few who share their gender. The Forté Foundation, a nonprofit promoting business education for and to women, states on its website (in a section titled “The Value of an MBA for Women”) that “women with MBAs are more confident and content in their careers and earn more than their MBA-less counterparts.” It goes on, “An MBA is an integral stop on the Path to the Boardroom.” The website also notes three high-profile female leaders—former CEO Indra Nooyi of PepsiCo, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, and Ellen Kullman, former CEO of DuPont—who hold MBAs.40 Business education, this pitch suggests, will give ambitious women the footing to succeed in what remains a man’s world.
Yet stepping into an MBA classroom can make women keenly aware that they remain underrepresented. A minority of faculty are women, and the protagonists of case studies—widely used as teaching materials around the world—are most commonly men (specifically, white and heterosexual men). In the words of a 2015 MBA graduate, the lack of women in cases “seemed like a shame, given that 40 percent of my classmates are women.… I don’t think my gender had any sort of negative [impact] on my experience, but I feel like the academic experience was certainly more male-biased.” Research has demonstrated that the representation of women in educational spaces does affect how women students perform and how they see their future options.41 When we analyzed HBS’s own curriculum, we found that three-quarters of cases taught in the first year (when all students take the same set of courses) featured male leaders. Given these numbers, it is unsurprising that women MBA students sometimes feel out of place. When asked about the extent to which gender as well as other social identities such as race were addressed in the curriculum, a 2013 graduate said, “Not at all, that I noticed. It didn’t come up at all, and I think it was very poorly integrated.” And it is not only women students who notice the absence of discussion around issues of gender diversity. A 2015 male graduate observed, “I don’t really remember it taking up more than five minutes of conversation. You’d like it to be woven throughout, not just ‘Today we’re doing gender, tomorrow you can forget about it.’ ”
Course materials aren’t the only signals that female business students receive. Another 2015 graduate noted how gender dynamics in the classroom can undermine women’s sense of belonging: “I think it’s harder for women to speak up in the classroom setting, and I think it’s subconscious, because of how women are judged more harshly compared to their peers.… I think that’s very true in the classroom setting. I think it impacts female students.” Outside the classroom, women MBA students navigate other dynamics that make their gender salient. As one recalled, “It’s funny, my guy friends who set up golf pools or sports brackets didn’t even invite females, or think it would make sense to [invite women]. That always just made me laugh, because I like golf! I would golf with my guy friends—yet to them it would be male-oriented.” Another noted, “Socially there were still things where it didn’t really feel equal. There was definitely a finance crew that you could never really become friends with because you were a female, even if you had previous finance experience or future ambitions. There were those sorts of stereotypes that were frustrating, but I kind of chose to not even go to battle with them.”
The educational climate at business school affects more than women’s experiences in the classroom; it also influences how they articulate their ambitions. A 2017 study of students at a top-tier institution found that when unmarried women believed their responses to questions about their career aspirations and goals would be seen by their fellow students, they reported a desired salary $18,000 lower than when their responses would not be seen by classmates. They also said they were willing to travel seven fewer days per month and work four fewer hours and reported being less professionally ambitious and having lower leadership tendencies.42 As these findings make clear, women are contending with contradictory expectations. Even in a setting where, by definition, everyone wants to advance their career and increase their earning power, women are well aware that these very characteristics may make them appear “too” ambitious and make it harder for them to find life partners.
This vexing choice intensifies as these same women move through their careers, manifesting not only in the conflicts women themselves wrestle with but also in how they are perceived in the workplace. Because characteristics stereotypically associated with leadership are in tension with those associated with femininity, women in positions of power tend to be viewed as competent but cold or nice but ineffective.43 Discomfort with women in leadership roles is rooted in a contradiction between the “good woman” and the “good leader.”44 The existence of this double bind is not a secret. Indeed, women students may learn about it in organizational behavior or leadership courses. There is no shortage of books, workshops, curricula, or support groups that aim to help women navigate it, and any executive-level woman can recall the delicate balancing act.
At the start of their careers, young women may believe they can cultivate an image as both a “good woman” and “good leader,” allowing them to earn professional rewards while avoiding pejorative labels such as “sharp-elbowed” and “domineering.” In short, they strive to be seen as competent and likable—a respected leader who has warm, genuine relationships. Indeed, when we asked college students in their final semester to name women they viewed as epitomizing success, both women and men described the women they identified—ranging from celebrities to professors to industry leaders to students’ own family members—as admirable not only for their professional achievements and influence (“Someone like Samantha Powers, very well respected in the field academically but also brings to bear her experience in policy”) but also for coupling career with the roles of wife and mother (“and also managed to get married to that law school professor”). Even when students did not highlight these family roles in describing what they found admirable about the women they identified, when prompted to share what they might ask these women, the students frequently said they would ask them about how they managed their work-life balance. One graduating senior, who had accepted a consulting job to begin after graduation and planned to get an MBA, summed up the dual imperative for women:
One of my parents’ friends is actually a woman who has two children, and she is a partner at a consulting firm. For someone like that to be able to have the best of both worlds—that’s something that I’ve been talking about a lot: women who are able to have a family, and not just have it, but be able to actually spend time with them and be a good mother but at the same time still develop her career. That’s something that I really respect.
This student’s praise for the female partner “still develop[ing] her career” while not just having children but “be[ing] a good mother” mirrors the dominant narrative about motherhood as the primary impediment to women’s career advancement. The female partner stands in as the exception that proves the rule: someone who inhabits the role of good leader (evidenced by her promotion to partner) as well as good woman (demonstrated in her maternal devotion). But the female partner is, in fact, simply an exception—fewer than 20 percent of managing directors and partners in major professional service firms are women.
What happens to women who do reach leadership? Their stories make clear that assumptions about caregiving are far from the only factor that contributes to women’s underrepresentation in the C-suite and other executive ranks. Gender becomes more salient as women ascend to more senior positions, and this marginal status becomes more pronounced as female peers leak from the pipeline. Because manifestations of bias evolve from one career stage to the next, women are tasked with identifying and navigating new forms of subtle discrimination just as they are taking on increasingly challenging roles and new responsibilities. What may have long been a successful strategy of keeping one’s head down and paying little attention to gender differences often falters when women rise in the ranks, even as their high-level jobs afford the kind of autonomy and flexibility that allows them to manage their family responsibilities more easily.
Striking the perfect balance between expectations for women and those for leaders is by definition impossible, yet women in leadership roles spend significant time and mental resources attempting to achieve it—time over and above the demands of their actual jobs. As one vice president of sales we spoke to noted, “It’s not about work. The problem is never about work. Because on work, I deliver.” As women navigate the increasing complexities that come with the expanded scope and responsibility of more senior roles, they must simultaneously manage the challenges of being outliers—another kind of second shift. The higher a woman ascends, the more noticeable her difference from the masculine norm, a realization that often dawns on women as they climb higher and find themselves the only woman in the room. We spoke to dozens of women in executive roles, many of whom were aiming for promotion to the C-suite at the time of our interviews. The next chapter explores their experiences and the tactics they deployed to navigate the evolving obstacle course.