by Hanna Rosin
I had always heard that Silicon Valley was the ultimate flexible workplace, so in 2011 I went to visit some of the biggest companies and also some start-ups. Successful women executives there told me stories that would make anyone struggling to manage a high-powered job and a life jealous. As a mother of three, Katie Stanton had found her job at the White House a nightmare. One night at eight P.M., her boss called her at home to ask what she was doing out of the office. “Tucking my kids into bed,” she answered. “Why, is there an emergency?” Soon after, she quit and moved back to California, where she went to work for Twitter. As head of international strategy, Stanton asked her new boss if she could leave at five every day—she lives an hour away—and pick up on e-mail again after eight. No problem. “I consider myself incredibly lucky,” says Stanton. “Because I can do this job really well and have a family. It’s great. This is the place for me and the perfect role for me.”
Life for the women I talked to was not exactly perfect; in fact, it sounded exhausting. Stanton works every night—every single weeknight—and never gets to the gym or goes out with her husband. These women work flexibly, but they work all the time. As Emily White, a Facebook executive, put it to me, “Forget the balance, this is the merge,” meaning that work and play and kids and sleep are all jumbled up in the same twenty-four-hour period. (White came up with this term after she finally managed a night out alone with her husband, and they spent half the dinner staring at their iPhones.) But the work culture was still a revelation. Without a lot of official committees and HR red tape, Silicon Valley is figuring out the single most vexing problem for ambitious working women, a problem everyone thought was unsolvable: how to let them spend time with their children without ruining their careers.
The industry has by no means solved the ultimate problem, meaning that there are just as few female heads of companies as there are in any other elite sector. But it gives us a glimpse of the work culture of the future, where face time isn’t so relevant and people take it for granted that women—and men—can be really ambitious and manage a life, too. “Your reputation is based on what you’ve done,” said White. “It doesn’t really matter what’s in your pants.” In a chart comparing the “career cost of family” in various elite workplaces—meaning the price people pay for taking time off—the economist Claudia Goldin floats the tech companies high above the rest, in their own happy cloud. Women and men there can take time off and not take a big salary hit. Other industries, by contrast, suffer from “inertia” or “resistance to change,” argues Goldin. She compares them to her husband, who “to this day likes to go into the Whole Foods and go down the same aisle, every time, while I like to wander into new places. These more novel industries step in and they suddenly figure out how to do things differently.”
All the problems that companies elsewhere agonize over, the Silicon Valley women seem to workshop informally and on the fly. Worried that the Katy rule stigmatizes mothers? Mayer had it apply to everyone. Now one of her young male executives leaves early every Tuesday for his hallowed potluck dinner with his old college dorm-mates. Life problems are not all that different from technological ones: With enough creative thinking, anything can be solved.
As the first female engineer hired at Google and now one of its top executives, Mayer has become part of the Google legend. She got her master’s degree from Stanford in computer science with a specialty in artificial intelligence, and she is so intense in even casual conversation that I found myself tracking whether she ever blinks. She is also tall and blond, with Holly Golightly good looks and a great sense of style, and she regularly appears in local society blogs at fancy parties on the arm of her cute entrepreneur husband. She is well aware that she is an unusual package, and has embraced the extra task of being a role model for aspiring girl geeks everywhere: “I do think it’s important for girls especially to know that there is not one way to break through. You can be into fashion and be a geek and a good coder,” she says, and then hastens to add, “just like you can be a jock and a good coder. You don’t have to give up what you love.”
But try to draw Mayer into the morass of issues around discrimination and she will resist. “I’m not a girl at Google,” she likes to say. “I’m a geek at Google.” Why aren’t there more girl geek computer science majors like her? I asked. “I am much less worried about adjusting the percentage than about growing the overall pie,” she told me. “We are not producing enough men or women who know how to program.”
The women of Silicon Valley do not live in such a shiny detached bubble that they don’t recognize sexism. You would have to be blind to walk through the offices of Facebook or Google every day and not notice the sea of mostly male programmers, or the “frat house,” as Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, calls it. It’s more that they think of sexism in the same way people in London must think about bad weather: It’s an omnipresent and unpleasant fact of life, but it shouldn’t keep you from going about your business. The women don’t deny sexism, but rather will themselves to ignore it so they can get their work done. Their attitude is neither idealistic nor defiant but highly practical: Better to just workshop these situations one by one, like so many coding glitches, one de-gendered brain to another.
Dwelling on sexism is “complete waste of time,” Lori Goler, Facebook’s human resources director, said in a New Yorker profile of Sandberg. “If I spend one hour talking about how I’m excluded, that’s an hour I am not spending solving Facebook’s problems.” Even the stories of outright, obnoxious sexism don’t really rate. White told me about an old boss of hers at a different company who told her, “I can’t wait for you to quit so I can marry you.” But White waved the guy away as “pretty old,” a dinosaur no doubt six feet under by now. Her casual assumption was that he was the relic of the Mad Men era, exhibiting arcane behavior one might encounter in a retro TV show or a museum. She, conversely, was the future.
MENTION THE LACK of women at the top of corporate America in certain circles and you will likely get a healthy dose of feminist rage. “I’m sick of hearing how far we’ve come. I’m sick of hearing how much better situated we are now than before . . . . The fact is that so far as leadership is concerned, women in nearly every realm are nearly nowhere,” writes Barbara Kellerman, a professor of leadership at Harvard’s Kennedy School, and she cites the familiar statistics: 3 to 6 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs, 17 percent of congressional seats, twenty out of 180 heads of state.
There are, of course, other data points than the ones at the tippy top of the pinnacle. In the levels just below CEO—the top executive officers, or the highest paid—women have been lately inching up about a percentage point a year. The number of women with six-figure incomes is rising at a much faster pace than it is for men. Nationwide, about one in eighteen women working full-time earned $100,000 or more in 2009, according to recent census figures, a jump of 14 percent over two years. Women are now lead TV anchors, Ivy League college heads, bank presidents, corporate CEOs, movie directors, scatologically savvy comedians, presidential candidates—all unthinkable even twenty years ago. The job of secretary of state has been virtually reserved for a woman. The number of female heads of state, although still small, has suddenly doubled in the last several years. And as we learned from Barack Obama, it takes only one person to make the whole picture look different.
But more important than all the data points is the outlook. You can see the current setup as evidence that the top will forever remain in a male iron grip, or you can see it for what it truly is: the last gasp of a vanishing age. Even the way we now frame the issue makes it clear that men’s hold on the pinnacles of power is loosening. In business circles, the lack of women at the top is described as a “brain drain” and a crisis of “talent retention.” At least half a dozen comprehensive studies have confirmed that losing top women executives is bad for profits. And while female CEOs may be rare in America’s largest companies, they are highly prized: In 2009, they outearned their male counterparts by 43
percent, on average, and received bigger raises.
“Women are knocking on the door of leadership at the very moment when their talents are especially well matched with the requirements of the day,” writes David Gergen in the foreword to Enlightened Power: How Women Are Transforming the Practice of Leadership. The old model of command and control, with one leader holding all the decision-making power, is considered a relic of the midcentury military age. The new model is sometimes called “post-heroic” or “transformational,” in the words of the historian and leadership expert James MacGregor Burns. The aim is to behave like a good coach, and channel your charisma to motivate others to be hardworking and creative. The model is not explicitly defined as feminine, but it echoes literature about male-female differences. A program at Columbia Business School, for example, teaches sensitive leadership and social intelligence, including better reading of facial expressions and body language. “We never explicitly say, ‘Develop your feminine side,’ but it’s clear that’s what we’re advocating,” says Jamie Ladge, a business professor at Northeastern University.
Julie Gerberding, an infectious disease specialist who was the head of the Centers for Disease Control and is now the president of Merck Vaccines, calls the new style “meta-leadership” or “horizontal leadership”:
Horizontal leadership takes different skills than vertical leadership. And it requires people to know how to negotiate, to be able to be true and effective partners and collaborators, to find that third path, to be able to walk in someone else’s shoes with emotional intelligence and empathy. And while men and women possess those skills, I think some of them are attributes that women are naturally inclined or more socialized to excel in. And in this very complicated world in which we live, that horizontal leadership probably is one of the key success factors for any organization.
A 2008 study attempted to quantify the effect of this more feminine management style. Researchers at Columbia Business School and the University of Maryland analyzed data on the top fifteen hundred US companies from 1992 to 2006 to determine the relationship between companies’ performances and female participation in senior management. Firms that had women in top positions performed better, and this was especially true if the organization pursued what the researchers called an “innovation-intensive strategy,” in which “creativity and collaboration may be especially important”—an apt description of the future economy.
It could be that women boost corporate performance, or it could be that better-performing firms have the luxury of recruiting and keeping high-potential women. But the association is clear: Innovative, successful firms are the ones that promote women. The same Columbia-Maryland study ranked America’s industries by the proportion of firms that employed female executives, and the bottom of the list reads like a roster of the ghosts of the economy past: shipbuilding, real estate, coal, steelworks, machinery.
Lately, the problem of too few female executives has taken on new urgency. In 2001, as the Internet boom was deflating, MIT’s Quarterly Journal of Economics published a paper called “Boys Will Be Boys: Gender, Overconfidence, and Common Stock Investment.” Two University of California, Davis, researchers compared the trades of men and women over a six-year period. Men, especially single men, traded vastly more frequently than women, and they did so out of a false confidence in themselves and their own judgments, the researchers concluded. (Single men traded 67 percent more times than single women.) The result of this overconfidence, all economic models predict, is many more bad decisions and far lower net returns.
When the economy collapsed several years later, this finding provided one of the few clear guidelines for the future: More women around means fewer pointless risks. What used to be considered a marker of leadership—the ability to act quickly, to remain in a state of pumped-up confidence—was recast as a liability. At the same time, what was long viewed as a feminine weakness—hesitating, waiting for outside feedback and confirmation—now looked like a critical life-saving skill. Researchers have even started looking into the relationship between testosterone and excessive risk-taking, trying to discern whether groups of men, in some basic hormonal way, spur one another to make reckless decisions. We don’t yet know with certainty whether testosterone strongly influences business decision-making. But the picture emerging is a mirror image of the traditional gender map: men and markets on the side of the irrational and overemotional, and women on the side of the cool and levelheaded.
“One of the distinctive traits about Iceland’s disaster, and Wall Street’s, is how little women had to do with it. Women worked in the banks, but not in the risk-taking jobs,” writes Michael Lewis in his book Boomerang. Halla Tomasdottir was an executive in corporate America before she moved back to her native Iceland and founded a financial services firm. This was in 2007, when Iceland was newly intoxicated by the kinds of complicated investment structures that would soon destroy its economy. Tomasdottir had a “strong feeling in [her] stomach that this wasn’t sustainable,” so she decided to found a firm with explicitly “feminine values.” (This is Iceland, where feminism is not an embarrassing word.) For her this meant giving primacy to some basic concepts, among them risk awareness and emotional capital. Being risk aware means not investing in things you don’t understand. And thinking in terms of emotional capital means remembering that it’s people who make and lose money, not Excel spreadsheets. Tomasdottir’s was one of the handful of firms to come out of the crisis with no losses, and it is now thriving.
In May 2012, when Wall Street was scratching its head about how JPMorgan could have made the disastrous bet that led to a $6 billion loss, The New York Times came up with a novel and very relatable explanation. The bank’s chief investment officer, Ina Drew, had been overseeing the team responsible for the bet. Drew was a quiet, hardworking mother of two, “as far from a ruthless diva as you can be,” according to her friends. Drew had been credited with keeping the bank steady in 2008. Using coachlike post-heroic” leadership skills, she kept the traders’ huge egos in check. In morning meetings she would “huddle” with them and get them to outline the risks they would be incurring in trades that day. “When Ina was there, things ran smoothly,” a colleague told the Times. But Drew developed Lyme disease in 2010 and missed huge chunks of time at work. The morning meetings turned into “shouting matches” in her absence, her colleagues reported. One of her deputies in New York was at war with another one in London, who came up with the strategy that led to the losing bet. Egos raged add “everything spiraled,” leading to a nearly $3 billion loss that almost wrecked the bank.
In Chasing Stars, Boris Groysberg, a professor at Harvard Business School, follows a thousand star analysts at Wall Street investment banks. Groysberg had wondered what happens to stars in elite professions when they change jobs, as is common in this era of freelance talent, where no employee is loyal and companies feel free to poach from one another. He found that for the most part, the practice of poaching is disastrous. Stars who change firms “suffer an immediate and lasting decline in their performance,” which he judged partly by following their numerical rankings in Institutional Investor. But Groysberg discovered a surprising exception: women. The 189 women he followed didn’t necessarily trust their firms to support and promote them in the usual ways, so they spent a lot of time securing outside relationships with clients—relationships they could transfer to their new jobs. And the women didn’t jump at offers merely because they meant more money or bigger titles; they cautiously evaluated future employers before taking a job. As a result, the women achieved a higher average rank by the end of the study, and more women were ranked first than any other rank. Groysberg guesses the women thrived because in that maledominated environment, they had to be more intelligent, flexible, single-minded, and ambitious. As one woman analyst told him, “being an average performer was not an option for women.” But largely they thrived because they used the traditional “feminine values” of care and caution to their advantage.
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nbsp; If this is the way the world is inevitably moving, why hasn’t it arrived yet? What’s holding women back from overtaking men at the top? After all, for a woman in her thirties navigating her way through some frustrating corporate hierarchy, thinking about the long sweep of history will probably not cheer her up. But the world does not flip upside down overnight. Men have been in charge for about forty thousand years, and women have started edging them out for about forty. So of course there are still obstacles at the top.
Right now, an ambitious career woman working outside the idyll of Silicon Valley has what we might call a brand identity problem. Women are like the Kia cars of the workforce: They are growing fast, faster than their big brother company, Hyundai. They are known for being nimble, trendy, and much more attuned to customer needs. Once the scrappy underdogs of car manufacturers, they are now ready to play in the major leagues. But they still need to convince everyone else that they belong there.
The top still looks male, so women who make it that far still seem like an anomaly. In fact, they are seen as violating some essential quality of femininity—warmth, maternal instinct, communal feeling. Deep down we—men and women both—are not gender blind. We still expect women to act one way and men to act another. More than that, men and women both resist thinking any differently because it causes too much confusion and cognitive dissonance. We can glimpse the massive paradigm shift just on the horizon but we are not quite ready for it—a resistance that will fade as more and more women reach visible positions of power.