Glass ceiling opaque as ever
Recall this scene in the first season of the estimable television series Borgen. Birgitte Nyborg, her personal life cracking like egg shells, tries to stage-manage sex with her husband at the prime ministerial country residence of Marienborg. The encounter has all the appeal of a dampwool Danish afternoon (top notes of pong), as if the PM has scheduled “intimacy” within the thin threads of time between “renew battle for gender parity on corporate boards” and “resolve vexing business of fighter jets.”
In other words, a fair representation of life for a woman attempting to be head of state plus mother of two plus wife to a husband with ambitions of his own whose response to his wife’s manufactured enchantments is, understandably, flaccid.
The scene arrived in flashback in accompaniment to a sudden surfeit of news on women and power and that hoary catchphrase: having it all. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook COO and author of Lean In, announced the release of a women-in-the-workplace study, a survey of 118 U.S. companies and roughly 30,000 employees. “At the current pace of progress, we are more than 100 years away from gender equality in the C-Suite,” Sandberg wrote in the Wall Street Journal.
“If NASA launched a person into space today, she could soar past Mars, travel all the way to Pluto and return to Earth 10 times before women occupy half of C-suite offices,” Sandberg continued.
Anne-Marie Slaughter, who exited her job as the first female director of policy planning at the U.S. State Department and who wrote about that work-life decision on her groundbreaking essay Why Women Can’t Have it All, published Unfinished Business.
Slaughter’s extended argument points to corporate and governmental structures that work against the goal of the advancement of women and fail to accommodate the jigsaw puzzle of families and relationship.
This, of course, is an issue for men too.
“My book rejects the ‘having it all frame,’” Slaughter tweeted on Friday.
“This is about EQUALITY.”
And the Canadian Securities Administrators released an analysis of the representation of women on more than 700 TSX-listed companies.
It hardly warms the heart to read that 49 per cent of those companies have at least one woman on their board of directors.
How can it be that half the companies have none? Have we really regressed to, say, 1970?
Curious, I started poking through federal Crown corporations because surely that’s an obvious place to expect gender parity.
I looked at Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. (Nine board members. One woman.) The Canada Deposit Insurance Corp. (13 board members. Four women.) The Business Development Bank of Canada. (13 board members. Three of them women.) Export Development Canada. (Women have two of the 12 board slots).
NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair says he will mandate parity on all federal boards, agencies and Crown corpo- rations if he’s elected. So let’s get that on the record.
There are bound to be observers who insist that women don’t want power the way men do.
Writing about Unfinished Business in Fortune magazine, Patricia Sellers argues that women will exit the upper ranks even if “utopian work environments” are provided.
“Women tends (sic) to view power horizontally — it’s about impacting many things broadly — vs. climbing the ladder, which is generally more of a turn-on to men.” A turn-on? Well. Maybe we need to start at the top with fairness and then see what kinds of corporations evolve, benefitting both genders.
What would Birgitte Nyborg do? Blessedly, TVO airs Season 2 commencing Oct. 18, further answering the question posed by one of the Borgen scriptwriters: “Can you be in power and remain yourself?”