Why Women Matter
An excerpt from:
“Closing the Leadership Gap: Add Women, Change
Everything”
Marie C. Wilson
Why Women Matter
Do women lead differently? Yes, we do, whether from learned responses or lack of testosterone, and it is a hot underground topic for women at the top. “This is the great unspoken truth, the new orthodoxy that every woman I have ever encountered acknowledges – although usually only in private or with a group of other women,” says author and businesswoman Margaret Heffernan in a 2002 Fast Company article. “Their caution betrays a fear that…acknowledgement of difference will come to mean an acceptance of inequality. A fear that ‘different from’ will morph into ‘less than’.”
And so we find ourselves wedged into stereotypes, often acting against female values, trying to fit the male definition of leadership. It has come at a cost, but it has allowed us to slowly infiltrate the locker rooms of business and politics an inch at a time.
We are finally in the Senate on our own (without succeeding a deceased husband), and we govern states and cities. A woman has been nominated for vice president, and some have served in presidential cabinets. Madeleine K. Albright and Condoleeza Rice have served as secretaries of state. We run Fortune 500 companies and large universities.
We are among the fastest growth groups for entrepreneurship, with a woman starting a business every sixty seconds. As of 2006, the United States had about 7.7 million privately held firms majority owned (meaning 51 percent or more) by women; these companies accounted for 30.4 percent of all privately held firms in America, generating almost $1.1 trillion in sales and employing more than 7 million workers. Between 1997 and 2006, these firms grew in number at nearly two times the rate of all U.S. privately held firms; employment and revenue also grew faster.
Offices now experiment with alternative work arrangements. In the 1990s, the number of families with stay-at-home fathers and working mothers rose by 70 percent, resulting in nearly 2 million couples in reversals of traditional roles. Working Mother magazine goes beyond naming the 100 Best Companies for Women, now also naming the Best Companies for Women of Color.
You’ve come a long way, baby. Or have you?
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