Need to know
For women, along with other marginalised groups, career success involves confronting serious dilemmas. Do you comply with what’s expected, or do you try to break the mould? Do you hide your ambition, or can you be honest about it? Should you be ‘yourself’, or is it better to adopt a more stereotypically ‘masculine’ style of leadership, at the cost of being disliked? Managing these tensions can leave us either frustrated in our careers, or socially penalised for our behaviour. Women in the workplace face what the feminist scholar Marilyn Frye has called ‘the double bind’, in which none of the limited options available seems to be desirable.
Much of the writing about gender in the workplace subtly – and sometimes not so subtly – blames women. It implies that women need to change in order to be successful in a (male) world. This is unjust and simplistic, and the truth is that many of us are agitating to overhaul this system. I run a consultancy that specialises in using insights from social psychology and other human sciences to assist organisations to be more inclusive, as well as to help leaders who are women achieve their potential. The practical reality is that we won’t be able to change the workplace if we don’t know how to navigate it.
The evidence suggests that, as a woman, motivation, energy and expertise will not be enough to get you where you want to go. It’s also important to be clear-eyed about your career goals, and to discern how your own socialisation as well as the widespread myths about female competence might be working against you. To be forewarned is to be forearmed, and tooling-up is sensible. What’s more, we know from the research that men who don’t conform to the stereotype of an authoritative leader will be judged negatively too – so, men, you might also find some helpful inspiration in what follows.
The first hurdle to overcome concerns your own relationship to ambition. Women, like men, experience reward and pleasure from working hard and achieving goals. We’re not working long hours and sacrificing time away from our families just to be ‘nice’. But are women ambitious? In her book Necessary Dreams (2004), the psychiatrist Anna Fels notes that the American women she interviewed largely disliked describing themselves as ambitious now. However, in talking about their ambitions for adulthood, they said they wanted to be known for mastery of a skill, and to be recognised for it. Fels argues that women are brought up to avoid recognition and visibility in favour of traditional feminine values; in her view, this contributes to why they often choose to nurture and defer to, rather than compete with, men.
Mastery demands motivation, support and appreciation over time. These are social experiences that rely on other people – they are what help us maintain focus and encourage us to overcome obstacles. So if women’s achievements are consistently undervalued by the people around them, we risk failing to find the stamina to push on and achieve our potential. It’s simply not possible for people to achieve their dreams as loners. An influential study led by the Harvard psychologist Jerome Kagan, for example, followed a group of 89 Americans from birth to childhood (although some dropped out over the course of the study). He concluded that recognition is a key component of mastery, and it might be impossible to master a skill without recognition.
A recent study found that men and women compete differently. Feminine norms mean that women are socialised to have more negative beliefs about competition. These norms socialise women to be modest, amenable and supportive. Numerous studies, including a recent one published by the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at King’s College London, find that women tend to experience significant organisational discrimination during their late 20s and early 30s – precisely when they’re starting to compete seriously with men and jumping into roles that have significant influence over others. It’s also the age when women most frequently decide to partner off and have children. For professional women in relationships with men, this life stage also entails a disproportionate burden of childcare and housework, the so-called ‘second shift’. This isn’t just a generational problem: a recent survey from Gallup found that among opposite-sex couples, those aged 18 to 34 were no more likely than older couples to divide most household chores equitably.
Faced with these pressures, women sometimes feel like they have to choose between holding on to their ambitions or downsizing them. Stereotypes present another obstacle, as they socialise women to act in line with cultural norms and are the basis upon which our behaviour is judged by others. One way of examining the impact of stereotyping is the Bem Sex-Role Inventory (BSRI), developed at Stanford University by the late psychologist Sandra Bem. The 20 characteristics associated with femininity – such as being loyal, compassionate, sensitive to the needs of others – are about support and relationships. By contrast, the BSRI characteristics linked to masculinity are largely self-focused, such as being individualistic, dominant, ambitious, analytical and willing to take risks.
It won’t have escaped your notice that masculine qualities are those typically associated with leadership in most western organisations. Women who display these traits are judged as unfeminine; cold, a ball-breaker, a bitch. This fact might be why many women don’t like to take personal credit for their success, and why we hear so many women attributing their success not to mastery and recognition, but to luck.
‘I’m not really ambitious – I just like to do a good job.’
‘I hate to promote myself. My work should stand for itself.’
‘It’s not about me; it’s about teamwork.’
These are examples of how women executives have described their ambitions to me. What’s significant is that these responses come from very successful women, who might be expected to have acquired sufficient power, self-confidence or allies, or a thick-enough skin, to own their ambition. However, their response could be a rational one: they understand that to exhibit male-type ambition invites hostility.
In scenes reminiscent of The Apprentice, a study by Doré Butler and Florence Geis showed that when men and women took turns assuming leader roles during a problem-solving task, the women consistently received more negative facial reactions than positive ones. A bit of eye-rolling doesn’t sound too serious. But when faced with it every day, it serves to depress women’s judgments of the value of their contributions and their prospects of doing well.
None of this means that women are less hungry for advancement. A survey by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) in 2017 of around 200,000 employees, including more than 141,000 women from 189 countries, found that women are just as ambitious as men at the outset of their careers. When companies foster a positive culture that actively works to promote gender diversity, women, including those with children, remain eager to progress. The findings suggest that their ambitions are constrained not by family status or motherhood, but by the culture and policies of their organisations. As the authors put it: ‘Ambition is not a fixed attribute but is nurtured – or damaged – by the daily interactions, conversations, and opportunities that women face over time.’
BCG also found that among employees aged under 30 there was little difference in ambition between men and women. The strength of ambition waned in both sexes over time, but women’s ambition eroded significantly faster than men’s at organisations with a poor record of gender diversity. However, at organisations rated as progressive, there was almost no ambition gap between women and men aged 30 to 40. Matt Krentz, a co-author of the report, argued this suggests ambition is not a fixed trait: ‘It is an attribute that can be nurtured or damaged over time through the daily interactions and opportunities employees experience at work.’
