On the last day of our leadership summit, I was at a happy hour that my company was throwing, and this woman from our European operations rushed up to me. She said, 'You know, we're the only women here in management roles? We have to stick together.'
My first reaction was to push her away. I hardly know this woman and she's got her arm around me, piling the Girl Power schtick on thick. I worked hard to get where I am in my career. I earned my spot here. My professional success doesn't have anything to do with my gender and to make some kind of alliance based on that now just seems regressive.
And then I looked around the room.
At a global company with more than 150 employees, they'd flown all the managers and senior leaders to New York for strategic meetings and just two of us are women.
Fuck. I never even noticed before this moment that I was the only one. She was right.
This isn't my story. A friend of a friend actually told this story over brunch a couple weeks ago, but it keeps playing in my head. She went on to describe how her company, a young, creative, ad agency, was made up of people from all kinds of backgrounds - from the US, from Sweden, Australia, Italy. But none happened to be non-white either.
She recounted what happened when she became pregnant with her first child a year ago. She was a nervous wreck for months worrying about how and when to break the news to her boss. The start up didn't have parental leave policies, so her CEO emailed her and asked her what she wanted to do. What she wanted most was the guarantee that her job would still be there for her when she got back from leave. Her boss gave her all that and more. It wasn't that he didn't want to do right by her - he did. It was just that he had no idea what to do at all because he'd never even considered it before.
What's most strange to me is that, in the modern workplace, we accept all this as normal. It was so normal to my friend's friend that she be the lone woman in a room of leaders, that it never even entered her mind as weird until the idea was quite literally thrust upon her. And even in that moment, her gut reaction was to repress the notion that we should even notice the lack of female representation among company leadership.
It's not normal. Globally women make up more than 40% of the labor force, yet less than 15% of us hold executive leadership positions [1]. And furthermore, 29% of black Americans and 21% Latino Americans age 25-64 hold college degrees [2]. However, at many top firms, it's the norm that they only represent a single digit percentage of the workforce. And I'm not even talking about leadership roles here, I mean at all levels.
I guess for now we have to stick together.
[1] https://hbr.org/2010/03/women-in-management-delusions-of-progress