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Fostering Mutual Understanding: African-American Women and The C-Suite with Valerie Purdie-Vaughns, Associate Professor of Psychology, Columbia University
This exciting report came out a few months ago by the Center for Talent and Innovation. It was really focusing on women and what is their capacity to lead and what are some of the issues on the table that might undermine their ability to lead. One of the exciting things that came out of this report was the idea that black women when you look at the data in terms of their self-reports aspire to be leaders. And in fact aspire to be leaders even more so than white American women.
Strong Leadership Aspirations
What the report says is that African American women have historically taken leadership roles in their community whether it’s at church, whether it’s parenting and that this is actually familiar territory. So the idea that African American women need to say lean in as this is sort of a popular idea that women need to be more assertive in the workplace is something that African American women have been doing for a long time in many, many different communities. While many women have a struggle or back and forth between being a full-time stay at home mom and being a full-time employee or executive in the workplace for a wide range of reasons African American women don’t have that binary happening. And so they don’t see working long hours as inconsistent with being a parent or a mom at home. And so the report suggests that for these reasons African American women have much stronger leadership aspirations than actually many other groups.
Weak Relative Supports
When we think about women we have an image or prototype, our norm is that of white American women. We don’t think about the idea that different kinds of women have different kinds of needs. One of the things the report suggests is that women of color are more likely to feel stalled in the workplace. And while all women feel stalled women of color particularly contending for executive positions feel even more stalled. Another thing the report found is that women of color in particular are less likely to have sponsors. They may have mentors, someone who likes them, someone that takes them to lunch but they’re less likely to have sponsors. Someone who wants to push them through the company relative to white American women. The danger or the worry with a report like this is that we don’t want to say that white women are doing wonderfully and women of color are not. All women need more resources and more sponsorship in the workplace. But the key issue is that there’s a relative difference and so there’s this idea that even though women of color are actually more ready to lead in the sense that they aspire to be leaders, they’re less likely to have the sponsorship that they actually need to move through the workplace. And so their careers are stalled right below the place where they can reach the C-Suite. So they’re most frustrated because they’re having a much harder time breaking through that glass ceiling.
Feelings of Isolation
Another thing that the report really started to illuminate is the idea that we know that women and men are interconnected as families outside the workplace. But for women of color – say for instance you’re a manager or the CEO of the company perhaps the first interaction they might have with a woman of color is with you as a woman of color in the workplace. You may not be intermingling with them at home or in church or in other kinds of communities. So because of that all of the types of things – ski trips, happy hours, picnics, all of these events that are designed to bring people closer – what happens in these environments women of color are often left to feel that they’re isolated or left out. And so the kinds of interventions that companies do that are supposed to bring groups that are underrepresented closer together women of color might not benefit as much from those. So you have a group that’s feeling stalled but at the same time has really strong leadership aspirations that really are being tapped in the same way and it’s really – what it’s doing is that we’re losing talent in companies where we could have more.