Glass Half-Broken

Shattering the Barriers That Still Hold Women Back at Work

Colleen Ammerman, Boris Groysberg

• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781422173336
• eBook ISBN:
  9781633695948
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

Why the gender gap persists and how we can close it

Women have made up roughly half of the college-educated workforce for years, and before the onset of the economic crisis of 2020, the gap between the percentage of women and the percentage of men in the labor force was the lowest on record. But women remain underrepresented in positions of power and status. The gender pay gap, for example, shows little movement, largely because high-paying jobs are the most gender-imbalanced. Even in areas where there are roughly equal numbers of men and women, or where women actually make up the majority, leadership ranks remain male-dominated.

The endurance of these inequalities begs the question: Why haven't we made more progress? A 2020 analysis by a team of sociologists affirms that progress, as measured by rates of women's employment, earnings, and the types of fields and jobs they work in, has either stalled completely or slowed.

With fifty years of sweeping reforms in educational and corporate policy, it's tempting to think that any remaining gender imbalances reflect differences in individual merit or behavior, not organizational barriers. Much of the popular media supports this idea, with countless books and articles offering advice on what women should do to overcome challenges: lean in, speak up, do power poses, stop apologizing, and delegate more.

Ammerman and Groysberg focus instead on the pervasive organizational obstacles and managerial actions that create gender imbalance. Bringing to light the key findings from the latest research in psychology, sociology, and economics, Glass Half-Broken shows that along their entire career path—from entry- to mid- to senior-level positions—women get pushed out of the leadership pipeline and, at each point, for different reasons. Presenting institutional and managerial strategies designed to overcome and mitigate these barriers at each step in the career path, Glass Half-Broken is the authoritative resource that managers and leaders at all levels can use to finally shatter the glass ceiling.

PART ONE

OFFICE OBSTACLE COURSE

CHAPTER 1

AIMING HIGH AND FALLING TO EARTH

Women in Early and Midcareer

To a woman graduating from college today, the lack of women in the senior ranks of business (as well as other fields) looks like an historical artifact. By the time she is the age of one of the few dozen female Fortune 500 CEOs, she reasons, company hierarchies should more or less reflect the proportion of women in her cohort. She has learned, likely throughout her entire educational career, about female leaders whose breakthroughs made it possible for later generations to rise. She may have read about someone such as former secretary of commerce Barbara Franklin, whose story appears after this chapter, who demonstrates that women can hold their own in the halls of power and help clear the way for women who come after them.

We conducted in-depth interviews with more than two dozen graduating seniors and found that women—and men too—reared on the rhetoric of “women’s empowerment” and accustomed to sharing the classroom and the playing field anticipated a future in which women leaders are commonplace. Given the well-known benefits of a college degree, young alumnae launching professional careers might reasonably assume that gender inequality will have little to no impact on their professional trajectories. While they are well aware of the lingering impacts of discriminatory practices and biased attitudes, by and large they believe that the underrepresentation of women in leadership, in the words of one graduate, “is changing” and that, perhaps more importantly, “it won’t matter because I’ll kick all their asses anyway.”

She is not alone in her optimistic, hard-charging outlook. A 2015 survey of millennial women found that about half of women in the workforce for three or fewer years (at an average age of twenty-five) believed they would be able to rise to the most senior level of their current organization.¹ In the same survey, women cited “opportunities for career progression” as the most attractive employer trait. In an ongoing study of MBA graduates that we are involved with, millennial women ranked “opportunities for career growth” as their second-most important overall concern, after “quality of relationships,” exactly the same as millennial men ranked their concerns.² Is it any wonder that young women entering the white-collar workforce view professional success as both desirable and attainable? Today’s college graduates grew up in an era when women comprised almost 50 percent of the US workforce and “girl power” was a bright thread woven into the pop cultural products that orbited them at every stage, from children’s books to T-shirt slogans to hit songs.³

This doesn’t mean young women are ignorant about lingering gender inequality. Having been witness to the debates about and painful disappointments associated with “having it all,” women entering the white-collar workforce are keenly aware of the prevailing sense that family demands interfere with women’s careers and see the friction between parenting and work as a general social problem. “I think work-life balance means maternity leave and childcare and universal preschool,” noted one young woman. A 2015 study of unmarried, childless men and women between the ages of eighteen and thirty-two found that women were cognizant of the effect these kinds of supports would have on their futures. They were more likely to express a preference for an egalitarian relationship, in which they and a future spouse equally shared the responsibilities of breadwinning and caregiving, if told they’d have access to paid family leave, subsidized childcare, and flexible work options.⁴ And it is not the case that young women—or men, for that matter—are uninformed about structural gender discrimination in the workplace. Indeed, it would be hard for them to be unaware: A search of the ABI/ProQuest database for newspaper and magazine articles on workplace gender gaps, bias, and discrimination published between 2000 and 2016 yields over five thousand results, even before the onslaught of media coverage sparked by the #MeToo movement.

For our research into women’s early professional experiences, we interviewed more than two dozen undergraduate students a few months before their graduation and then one year later. We also followed up with a subset of these graduates five years after that, when they had become more firmly established in their careers. When asked as graduating seniors about their expectations for how or whether gender might play a role in their paths, both men and women were quick to acknowledge the existence of inequities. Graduating men acknowledged their privileged position as they looked ahead to starting their postcollege jobs: “I know there’s a lot of sexism in the workplace, and I do anticipate in many contexts being treated like a more responsible person just because I’m a man, a white man,” one said. One of his female peers, who planned to attend law school, pointed out that “a field like law is still mostly male-dominated. I don’t know the statistics on this—I might be wrong. But I know that especially the older people in all these different firms are more likely to be men and there aren’t that many women at that level, from a couple of decades ago.” One of her peers, who had been hired to join a health care consulting firm postgraduation, had much the same assessment: “I know that at my firm there are definitely females, but there’s not too many females at the partner level. But that could have just been because of how things were back in the day.”

The notion that “kicking their asses” will overcome any potential discrimination authorizes the sense of agency that young women are encouraged to feel in the face of lingering inequality. As another graduating student asserted, “The way I comport myself shows that I’m serious about what I’m doing, and as soon as you get to know me, the gender part doesn’t really matter anymore.” Having internalized years of confidence-boosting messages about their potential, early-career women may even speculate that prior generations were lacking not only opportunity but also drive: “When you look at these [consulting] firms, if you look at the top tiers—like partners—there are very, very few women. From my perspective, I feel like there is self-selection, to a certain extent,” mused one. From her vantage point, gender doesn’t loom large in a cohort equally balanced between men and women: “At least, going in with my class at [a firm], there’s going to be a lot of women. I don’t really foresee any sort of issue.”

But this progress narrative is belied not just by research on gender barriers to career advancement but also by what these same women experienced as their careers took shape. Take our interviewee Carla,⁵ a senior who was awarded a prestigious fellowship with an international marketing firm. She recounted “fl[ying] out to London for an interview, [and] they flew in executives from everywhere in the world to London, and everyone on the other side of the table was a man, and that was sort of weird.” But, she pondered as she looked ahead to the fellowship, “it was also interesting, because of everyone who was applying, there were only eight guys and twenty-two girls. So, it’s also thinking about the shift there, and how in twenty years, the other side of the table is going to look a little bit different.” Carla’s belief that the executive side of the table will seat more women implies, of course, her own opportunity to ascend to such a role over the next two decades. But one year later, her faith had been tested: “When I met one of the CEOs of the company with all the fellows in New York, where we finished the fellowship, he happened to remember all the guys’ names and none of the girls’ names.… The most senior person in the room was a woman, and the more senior fellow is a woman, and he didn’t remember her name, but he remembered the first-year guy in my class.”

The way that the women in Carla’s group of fellows seemed to be almost invisible to a senior leader of the firm is not an isolated anecdote. A large body of research confirms that women are perceived by superiors, peers, and subordinates in ways that diminish their status. Women get praised in performance evaluations, often for stereotypically feminine traits such as willingness to help out, yet receive lower numerical performance ratings and fewer career-developing “stretch” assignments than their male peers.⁶ Women’s contributions to their teams’ successes go undervalued and unrecognized; unless their achievements are explicitly called out to observers, women are seen as less competent and having inferior leadership capabilities compared to male peers.⁷ And women experience backlash when they are not helpful, even though the kinds of tasks they get criticized for avoiding, such as planning events and taking meeting notes, are neither highly valued by their employers nor associated with career advancement and rewards.⁸

The incongruity between Carla’s ambitions and the view of women’s suitability for leadership implied by the forgetful CEO sets up what will become an ever-widening gap between aspirations and attainment for young women embarking on white-collar careers. The emergence of this gap will recapitulate a pattern that has endured since women began entering professional jobs in large numbers. Our own research on baby boomer and Generation X Harvard Business School (HBS) alumni, who embarked on their post-MBA careers in the 1980s and 1990s, offers a case in point: Men and women had virtually the same values, rating “work that is meaningful and satisfying,” “professional accomplishments,” and “opportunities for career growth and development” as all highly important. That is, both men and women with the same elite pedigree aspired to fulfilling careers characterized by achievement and advancement—hardly a stunning insight. But these women saw their actual professional outcomes fall short: They were less likely than men of their same age to be in senior management or even in supervisory roles at all. And it isn’t at all clear that these women simply self-selected into less powerful positions: The women expressed lower satisfaction with multiple dimensions of their careers, compared to men in their cohorts.⁹

Lowered Horizons: Emerging into Careers

Six years after the aspiring lawyer quoted above graduated, now admitted to the bar and working at a large firm, her confidence had faltered:

It took a while for it to sink in, especially in my first year here, how often I was the most junior person in the room and the only woman.… There are plenty of women at this law firm, but it’s still frequently the case that you can be on a conference call with twelve people, standing in a room with ten people, and you look around and someone’s supposed to get water—and guess what, that’s you.… The fact that it kept happening, that it wasn’t just a one-time occurrence, it starts to get to you … especially the fortieth time a man speaks with a complete lack of respect for you or your time or efforts. It does add up, and it gets to a certain volume where you know it’s not coincidental. If I’m planning a lunch with five people and two people have to back out at the last minute—I started to notice that it is often the women of color who have last-minute [assignments] that come up, and these are often not substantive assignments … and it’s painful after a while to see this and to see how it happens.

She is not alone in finding what a difference a few years can make. After five years in the finance industry, another young woman found that the lack of female leadership at her firm was not an unfortunate relic of past norms: “I definitely felt isolated and different from my peers. And there’s definitely a lack of role models … there are fewer women overall, and then as you go up to higher and higher positions there are fewer and fewer women. I definitely felt like a minority and felt there were fewer role models for me.” According to the study of millennial women referenced above, by the time they are in their early thirties, the proportion who see themselves as likely to attain senior leadership has dropped ten points, to 39 percent.¹⁰ These diminished expectations are likely rooted in experience; an annual “Women in the Workplace” survey conducted by McKinsey and Lean In has found that women in entry-level jobs are 18 percent less likely to be promoted than their male peers.¹¹ A raft of studies has come to similar conclusions. As leadership scholars Alice Eagly and Linda Carli observe in reviewing the literature, “Men generally have a promotion advantage even when characteristics such as job experience are controlled.”¹² Very few women fully overcome this disadvantage. As is well known, just 5 percent of companies in the S&P 500 have a female CEO.¹³ More broadly, the World Economic Forum notes that women’s global presence in managerial and other senior positions in both the public and private sectors “is not trending toward equal representation.”¹⁴

One female MBA graduate (class of ’13) described, “Right out of undergrad, at least at my [consulting] firm, the [male-to-female] ratio was about 50/50. You generally just feel like a human being, as opposed to a female human being, and no one ever treated me differently. I got top ratings. I always felt like I was a strong performer.” But this equilibrium tends to be short-lived. Promoted to a management role after business school, this same consultant noticed that “increasingly, I’m the only female voice in the room.” A 2014 MBA, working at a different firm, described the same trajectory:

If you’re doing good work, and if you’re doing problem-solving effectively at the junior level … I do think that men and women are treated very, very equally. Of course, there is unconscious bias, but in general I do think at the junior level, I didn’t feel disadvantaged or different. I would say as a manager, it’s very different now.… I still have the attitude that if I keep my head down and work hard, I’ll get ahead, and I still believe that’s very true. I still believe [my firm] is a very meritocratic place. But I see my male colleagues doing really smart things to get recognition and to build relationships—and be seen to have a lot of the credit—that I would never see a woman do.… Most of the partners are men, and they engage in a certain way and look for certain things.

This consultant’s emerging sense that her male peers have better access to key internal networks and colleagues is borne out by research across a range of highly remunerative fields from venture capital¹⁵ to investment banking¹⁶ to law.¹⁷ In industries such as these, where the apprenticeship model reigns, such relationships are critical for advancement. As the consultant went on to explain, mentorship and sponsorship from senior colleagues are unevenly distributed at her firm:

A big consideration is, if I try to build a platform to partner, who’s going to help me build it? And that’s sort of where I’m struggling.… I was talking recently with a group o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: The Stalled Workplace Revolution
• Part One: Office Obstacle Course
• Part Two: Clearing the Path to Gender Equality at Work
• Conclusion: A Breakthrough Moment
• Epilogue: Gender Balance Sheet: A Harvard Business School Case Study
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors