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Don’t Lean In. Opt Out
Manifestoes
for working women, much like working women themselves, are often held to an impossibly
high standard. Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In
was a best-seller, but critics – male and female – tore it apart because it
asked women alone to fix their broken work environment. The criticism is valid;
Sandberg has since admitted that it would be hard for a single mother to follow
her advice. And yet male-authored advice books hardly get torn apart for
failing to address intersectionality, privilege, and structural racism and
sexism along with tips on how to climb the corporate ladder.
Sallie
Krawcheck wants us to know, even before we open Own It: The Power of Women at Work, that she excels in the face of
such impossible standards – in heels, no less. The cover features Krawcheck,
the co-founder and chief executive officer of Ellevest, an online investment
service for women, perched atop a stepladder in black stilettos. Krawcheck gets
how difficult it is for women to break into the executive class. She worked her
way up in the banking industry, only to be let go from C-suite jobs at
Citigroup and Merrill Lynch.
Reflecting on her tenure at Citigroup, which ended
about nine years ago, she says she believes gender played a major role in the
tensions she experienced. The final straw, Krawcheck writes, came when she made
an unpopular suggestion that she believed was in the company’s best interest:
reimbursing some Citigroup customers for losses they’d suffered in the early
days of the 2008 financial crisis.
Given how
she frames her experiences, you wouldn’t expect Krawcheck to write that “being
a woman in the business world is not a liability: it’s power.” The liability,
she says, manifests primarily when women try to affect a masculine demeanor
around the office: when women speak up, as she did, they’re judged more
negatively than men. Women who negotiate the way men do are considered too
pushy. So throughout the book, Krawcheck scatters tips on how to successfully
leverage feminine traits. In a chapter titled “The Obligatory Ask-for-the-Raise
and How-to-Negotiate Chapter (With a Twist),” she suggests that women pretend
during salary negotiations that they’re at a PTA meeting. Research shows that
women perform better when they’re fighting on behalf of someone else, such as
their kids.
Her
approach makes sense, but does it work? Here, Krawcheck runs into some trouble.
She argues that companies resistant to women-friendly policies and practices
will fail – but they haven’t, even as inhospitality remains the norm. The pay
gap persists. The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission got almost 13,000
complaints of sexual harassment in 2015, a number that’s held steady since
2011. Women enter corporate America at near-parity with men but occupy only 19%
of C-suite positions, according to a recent survey by McKinsey and LeanIn.org.
Sandberg’s nonprofit. In another recent survey, by MWW Public Relations and
Wakefield Research, three-quarters of respondents said they believe women are
worse at delivering financial returns for companies. The opposite is true:
Numerous studies say that organisations with female managers perform better on
average than those led by men. Whatever Krawcheck’s hopes, women tend to get
penalised no matter how they act on their way to the top. Those who get there
are often set up for failure, tapped to lead only in moments of crisis, when
the odds of succeeding are slim to none, a phenomenon known as the glass cliff.
Ultimately,
Krawcheck argues, there may be no way for women to work within the system and
win, no matter how often they transform perceived liabilities into assets. Her
most useful – and radical – advice comes in chapters that urge women to opt
out. In “Literally Own It: Start Your Own Thing,” she encourages women to start
businesses. When that happens, “there’s no playing by the boys’ club rules,”
she writes. “No asking permission.” Since the system isn’t working for us, it’s
time for us to build our own.
Source:
Bloomberg.com
