I found out – years later – that when I left the interview for my first Director job, the panel Chair turned to the others and said: “That’s why we allow part time working.”
It’s a nice story and it may even be true. I like it, not just because it’s a lovely compliment, but because it supports something I believe is fundamentally important: that work should not require us to sacrifice the things we value. That may be our health, our family – or frankly anything else we want to spend our limited time on this planet doing that makes us feel whole. Working in ‘purpose-driven’ roles can make this line even harder to draw because if your job is your vocation, it can eclipse other things that are important to you, risking burn out.
I started working part time well before I had children, after a sudden illness made it impossible for me to carry on as I was. So, by the time my kids came along I was used to leading and operating in a different way. This isn’t the case for most parents, especially women. And this post is about women because the global data consistently show that men and women do not share the burden of domestic work and family responsibilities equally.
Flexible working of all sorts is on the rise, but I find that it’s still seen as a concession. It’s something we’re supposed to be grateful for in the context of a model that continues to demand the separation of work and family life, leaving women to manage the tension and carry the burden of trying to integrate these two sets of competing responsibilities.
When I was knee-deep in the literature about women’s leadership for our recently published research, I realised something that I had been living for some time but hadn’t known how to name: we broke the glass ceiling, but we forgot to rebuild the house. And so we find ourselves tiptoeing around, trying not to cut ourselves, still navigating a set of deeply rooted expectations, processes and systems that were designed for others.
But what does the latest research say? I want to highlight three things I learned from doing the research: the barriers women still face on the way to leadership; what can happen when they get there, and how our attitudes to all of this shift as we progress through our careers.
On the way up
The picture is complex – many different factors can affect women’s experiences of leadership and these interact and change over time. The challenges don’t fit neatly under headings, even if that’s how we must write them down on paper or deal with them in our flexible working policies. For example, how women engage in networking is affected both by structural imbalances in their caring responsibilities and how they navigate gender stereotypes. So even though I’m sharing a list, these things will show up in unique combinations for us all.
One of the most important things I learned about was “second-generation gender bias”. These are barriers that are less visible and more nuanced than the blatant exclusion of women from senior leadership positions that used to exist. Here’s a bit of a breakdown.
Limitations
📉Lack of role models and fewer development opportunities
📉Limited access to networks, social capital, mentors and sponsors, including being less likely to engage with, or seek, advancement through these routes
📉Constraints on access to the roles required to advance (e.g. studies showing that to get to CEO, women are more likely to have to move sector than their male counterparts, meaning they start those roles with less deep expertise)
And expectations
📈The “double bind” where expectations about what it means to lead well conflict with expectations about how women should be and how they should behave. (One finding that particularly depressed me: people assume a woman who has made to senior leadership is more likely to be unpleasant and unattractive.)
📈Male-dominated success stereotypes, including the well-documented ‘Think Leader, Think Male’ bias
📈Being subject to more scrutiny and held to higher performance standards
And let’s just bust a myth: I found little evidence that slow progress on equal representation in leadership is because women are ‘opting out’. The changing story of peoples’ commitment to work is the same regardless of gender.
Getting to the top, what then?
The concept of the ‘Glass Cliff’ first appeared in research in 2005, in response to a news article that claimed that senior women leaders had “wreaked havoc on companies performance”. The research highlighted that the causality asserted in the article was wrong – women were more likely than men to be brought into challenging and precarious leadership roles in times of crisis. Multiple studies since then have confirmed the existence of ‘observable phenomena’ for women and for minoritised racial and ethnic groups. What does ‘observable phenomena’ mean? That it isn’t always the case, but it happens often enough for it to be ‘a thing’. And why does it matter? Because it reinforces the stereotypes that plague women leaders, and when things go wrong, these non-prototypical leaders are punished more harshly for their failure, with severe damage to future careers.
This is worth digging into a bit. There are three main possible drivers of women finding themselves on these ‘glass cliffs’:
1️⃣ The desire to signal change in times of strife by selecting a leader who looks very different
2️⃣ Gender stereotypes in which it’s assumed that women bring certain skills and abilities to lead through crisis (as one woman in our study put it “being kind and soft to front the tough messages”)
3️⃣ A more sinister reading where women are ‘set up to fail’ to preserve a status quo of male leadership
Half of the women in our study spoke about taking on very challenging roles that felt toxic or too much for one person to handle. They reflected that gender often played a role, including in perceptions of them as “fixers” and their own motivation to take on the challenge to prove themselves. Few thought they had been deliberately set up to fail (which, by the way, is consistent with the wider evidence base where the women themselves rarely consider this a possibility). But once once they got there, it was absolutely clear that these women felt isolated, alone and unable to ask for help.
The last bit of evidence I want to highlight is from research by O’Neil and Bilimora on the phases we go through in our careers – it was something that really resonated for me personally as I look back on my experience and it’s helped me make sense of what I was feeling at different times. The three phases are:
🌞First, “idealised ambition” when women feel they will not face particular constraints because of their gender
☔Then later, “pragmatic endurance” when the realities of gender barriers hit hard
🌱And, last, “reinventive contribution” when some women find ways to build out new, more meaningful ways to manage their careers
So, there’s hope. And I’ll share more later on what helps.
In the meantime, I’d love to hear what resonates for you, what questions you might have and whether this little summary of the research helps you understand what you might be seeing and experiencing.
References and further reading
For the full Literature Review and references for this evidence, have a look at the research we have published here. My top reads and those most quoted above are Through the Labyrinth by Alice Eagly and Linda Carli, the glass cliff work of Michelle Ryan and Alex Haslam and second generation gender bias pieces like this HBR one by Herminia Ibarra, Robin Ely and Deborah Kolb.
