3 obstacles to female leadership — what's standing in our way
Leadership isn’t easy for anyone. To be great, you need a wide range of abilities and behaviors — high intelligence, analytic skills, strategic thinking, emotional maturity and awareness, interpersonal finesse, the ability to inspire and influence, clarity about priorities, the discipline to get the job done — the list goes on and on.
And yet … women always seem to need a few more skills. The hurdles are higher, and consequently, harder to clear. I was on a panel about women in international leadership recently for the International Executives Resource Group. An audience member asked whether leadership posed specific challenges for women. As I reflected on her question, it seemed to me that women must be especially agile in three areas of leadership men don’t often worry about.
Demonstrating authority as a female leader
For a leader to be effective, she must be seen as a powerful, knowledgeable, forceful figure who inspires confidence and trust in her followers. This is a tougher challenge for women than for men, for many reasons. Most images of powerful people are male, and we simply don’t look like them. We are smaller, our voices are higher, and we’re prettier. If we try to look and act like men, we often seem artificial. If we look and act like women, we are often dismissed.
This is the tricky situation Andie Kramer and Al Harris called the “Goldilocks Syndrome” in their book, Breaking Through Bias. While there are ways for women to demonstrate authority effectively — referent power comes to mind — there are fewer options, and substantially more scrutiny.
Navigating the perilous issue of sexuality in the workplace
The recent tsunami of reports of sexual harassment in the workplace has made it painfully clear how difficult it is for women to navigate the sexual landscape of leadership. The majority of people in power are straight men, and many of them will find women sexually attractive, or simply see sex as another means of wielding power.As more men in power lose their jobs over sexual assault and harassment, perhaps men will feel the need to regulate their behavior more thoroughly. In truth though, it’s often women who bear the brunt of the consequences, and therefore women who must spend more time policing their appearance and behavior, and fielding sexual overtures and outright harassment from colleagues and superiors.And then there’s the lack of access. The men who do try to avoid making women feel uncomfortable sometimes do so in a very counterproductive way: avoiding socializing with and mentoring women. All that serves to do is create further barriers for women’s leadership development and advancement.
Work-life balance — or for women in leadership, more often imbalance
Despite the praise for egalitarian relationships, the challenge of managing family responsibilities falls more squarely on female shoulders. Whether that’s invisible labor — the emotional chores and planning tasks that keep households running — or the very visible work of mothering children, women are still on the hook for more than men around the house.I am gratified to see many younger men taking their household and family responsibilities more seriously than their fathers and grandfathers did, but it is still rare to find a household that is truly fifty-fifty. This makes it harder to women to raise their hands for the difficult, time-consuming assignments that are stepping stones to promotion. It makes it harder for us to engage in those all-important networking activities that take place outside of work hours. And, it can make leaders pass women over for promotion, from a conscious or unconscious belief that they won’t be up for the job.
Removing the obstacles to female leadership
When you look at just these three ways that women have to outwit and outwork men, it’s no surprise that we’re so underrepresented in senior leadership roles.
Acknowledgement and understanding are the first steps to making progress. It’s up to both men and women to take the rest. Men need to explore and accept how they create and benefit from these obstacles, and then work to erase them. And women need to find better ways to manage these skills while we wait for the world to change. I don’t pretend to have easy answers.
But if you want to talk about how to make a difference for women in the areas of authority, sexuality, and balance, please get in touch.
