Re-examine how we see women in charge

I was doing some research for a recent interview with Tina Brown when I came across this assessment:

‘‘There are – if I may be permitted to oversimplify wildly for a moment – two kinds of women in the working world who achieve great power. The first is those who are good at what they do and enjoy working with other smart or talented or thoughtful women. And there’s another kind that isn’t really good at much of anything at all but self-promotion, self-aggrandisement, and manipulating other people.’’

Mimi Kramer was writing in Vox about the systems in place that allow powerful men to get away with sexual harassment for as long as they do. That second kind of woman, Kramer maintains, props up those systems. ‘‘The women enablers may have some unconscious need to diminish and devalue something they lack,’’ she writes.

Kramer calls Brown, who edited Vanity Fair and the New Yorker before launching Talk magazine with Harvey Weinstein in 1999, ‘‘the enabler-in-chief’’.

‘‘It’s absurd,’’ Kramer writes, ‘‘for her to carry on as though she didn’t know of Weinstein’s depredations and wasn’t complicit.’’

In multiple interviews – including the one I conducted with her at a University Club luncheon – Brown has maintained she knew nothing about Weinstein’s alleged habit of harassing and assaulting women. She described him as an extremely paranoid bully with a terrible temper, but says she was unaware of the harassment allegations.

I choose to take Brown at her word, but I also don’t think what she knew and when she knew it is the most relevant question right now. It reminds me of the burden we placed on Hillary Clinton to atone for her husband’s sins.

What I hope we can examine, instead, is the way we regard women in charge.

A popular proposal to curb the sexual misconduct allegations rocking so many industries is to make sure more women are in leadership roles.

I’m all for more women leaders. But I don’t think we’ll get there – or, more to the point, have much luck changing cultures once we get there – as long as we’re stuck in our current way of thinking about powerful women.

Women leaders are expected to be nurturing and gentle and accommodating to their employees’ work-life balance needs. Sometimes they are all of those things.

But when they’re not, they earn labels and scorn that are rarely attached to male leaders who are similarly disinclined to nurturing. We make room for a whole range of male leadership styles. We make room for one female leadership style and we want it to look a lot like mothering.

Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant beautifully deconstructed our mistrust of women in charge in a 2016 New York Times piece titled ‘‘Sheryl Sandberg on the Myth of the Catty Woman’’.

‘‘In business and in government, research supports the notion that women create opportunities for women,’’ Sandberg and Grant write. ‘‘On corporate boards, despite having stronger qualifications than men, women are less likely to be mentored – unless there’s already a woman on the board. And when women join the board, there’s a better chance that other women will rise to top executive positions. We see a similar pattern in politics’’.

‘‘As more women advance in the workplace, queen bees will go the way of the fax machine,’’ they write.

The question is whether we’ll dislodge our long-held beliefs long enough to absorb the research that disputes them. ‘‘We stereotype men as aggressive and women as kind,’’ Grant and Sandberg write. ‘‘When women violate those stereotypes, we judge them harshly.’’

We’re likely to be talking for many weeks and months to come about how women are treated in the workplace – at the top, at the bottom and at every level in between.

I hope we can use this moment to broaden our definition of how women can and should operate at work, where their success greatly benefits all of us.

Chicago Tribune