Black women frustrated by slow progress
The number of women holding CEO positions among America’s largest corporations is, as everyone knows, very small. Just 23 women are CEOs of companies in the S&P 500. But the number of female African-American chief executives among those top businesses is downright minuscule: There is only one black woman, Xerox’s Ursula Burns, at this pinnacle of corporate power.
That’s certainly not for lack of ambition, according to a report released by the Center for Talent Innovation, a think-tank founded by economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett. In its research sample, 22 per cent of African-professional women said they aspire to a powerful position with a prestigious title, compared with just eight per cent of white professional women.
Black women in the sample also reported being more confident they can succeed in powerful positions than white women (43 per cent versus 30 per cent) and more likely to say high earnings were important to their careers (81 per cent versus 54 per cent).
The report also digs into findings from a 2014 study by CTI (Center for Talent Innovation), which looked more broadly at what professional women and men want out of their careers. At the time, that report found women were generally ambitious about wanting to excel in their careers, make money, and work in jobs that let them empower others and serve a broader mission — but were much less likely than men to gun for high-ranking jobs in their organization.
When Hewlett and her team went deeper into the demographics, though, they were surprised to see stark differences along certain ethnic lines. Those findings formed the basis for the latest report. AfricanAmerican women, it turned out, were an outlier, Hewlett said. “They really had a great deal of clarity. They were both ambitious and they loved power.”
Despite that ambition, the data show that black women are more frustrated than white women about their path to the top. CTI gathered responses from 356 black women and 788 white women working in professional jobs. And 44 per cent of the African-American women, compared to 30 per cent of the white women, reported feeling stalled in their careers. They were also more likely to feel that their talents weren’t being recognized by their managers (26 per cent versus 17 per cent).
Katherine Phillips, a professor at Columbia Business School who has served as a paid adviser to CTI but was not involved in the current report, explained that CTI’s study demonstrates the problem black women face when they’re trying to advance their careers. While they may raise their hand and want to climb the ladder, unconscious biases could mean they’re not always welcomed.
“We’re ‘leaning in’ so far we’re flat on our faces,” Phillips said. “Even if I keep leaning in, I need someone there to open the door.”
That struggle may in part be due to the unique set of biases that black women experience when it comes to leadership roles. On the one hand, past research about leadership styles has shown that stereotypes about black women — that they are more assertive, more direct, even brash — could actually help them advance in their careers, compared with white women.
Robert Livingston, a professor at the University of Sussex in England who has studied this phenomenon, said “black women can adopt a more assertive leadership style without being penalized compared to white women. It’s less of a violation of the prescriptive gender stereotypes.”
And yet when it comes to how African-American women are judged on their performance, research shows they face a bigger challenge than their white peers. “If a black woman makes a mistake and a white woman makes a mistake — or even a black man makes a mistake — the black woman is penalized most harshly,” Livingston said, “because she’s two degrees removed from the prototype of a ‘leader,’ which is a white male.”
CTI’s report cites another way such unconscious bias plays a role in the advancement of black women’s careers: Just 11 per cent of black women have a sponsor, according to prior research from CTI, compared with 13 per cent of white women. In this case, “sponsor” describes an advocate in the top leadership ranks who does more than mentor and provide advice, but instead actively promotes the more junior manager’s career.