By Susan M. Heathfield, About.com
Tuesday January 13, 2009
I have mentored, for years in some cases, a number of women over the course of my career - all of whom are doing very well in the professions or lifestyles of their choice. So, when Kim Yorio of The Girl’s Guide … and YC Media fame contacted me for an interview about team work, I was happy to talk with her. In addition to the team work questions, she asked questions about why women appear to have lower scores in areas such as leadership, problem solving, inspirational behavior, and more when male and female employees are surveyed.
My position is that, while business has not always been, and is still not, in many cases, female-friendly, many of the reasons involve behaviors and attitudes that women can do something about. At this point, there are still too few women in executive positions, but I can also speculate several reasons why.
As an example, I am recently aware of research that says women lawyers make less money than their male counterparts and it has a lot to do with the fields and specialties chosen. Women apparently pick careers with more flexibility to balance family matters; the money comes with grueling hours, cross-country travel, and decidedly unfriendly family practices. (Source: Thomas Sowell in Economic Facts and Fallacies. Compare prices.)
Women are much more likely to interrupt their careers with time away from work for tasks such as raising children. This interferes with their ability to remain in the manager pipeline that is feeding into the executive positions. Second, women are not majoring in, studying, or obtaining degrees in several of the high need, high growth areas of employment such as technology, engineering, and science.
Women need to be cognizant of the language they use. As an example, a VP at a client company came to me to reject several female candidates for an executive role because they had not "accomplished anything" as far as he could tell. I asked how he had reached this conclusion when I believed they were highly qualified for the role. It was a language thing. The male candidates said things such as, "I expanded sales in the division by fifty percent." The women candidates said, "The team grew the business by fifty percent." and "We accomplished this."
Finally, according to Judith Lindenberger, women need to work in the line organization, in jobs in which they have profit and loss responsibility. Line success adds significant credibility to a woman’s career progression possibilities.
I have not done a lot of research in this area, but the interview with Kim certainly got my attention. So did this: Women who wear short skirts that display a lot of leg may be overlooked for promotion and pay increases. So says a study conducted by Tulane University. Overt sexual behavior at work, whether men and women are consciously aware of it, or not, can submarine your career.
