Via my colleague, Kate Bartlett, I came across this short article by Amanda Gerut, Still Working to Cure ‘Invisible–Woman Syndrome,’ in Agenda. The article opens:
Women on boards aren’t considered token members anymore. But they still must work doubly hard to claim leadership positions and sometimes to prove their value to male board colleagues.
The piece probably caught my attention because of some similarities to the narratives of tokenism that Lissa Broome, John Conley, and I discuss in Does Critical Mass Matter? Views From the Boardroom. Several of our female respondents reported that they worked harder and prepared more for board meetings than their male colleagues.
For many, this felt need to work harder did not just emerge in the boardroom, but reflected a lifetime pattern of behavior derived from being the first and only female or minority at many important career stages. For example, in response to a question about whether she felt she was being held to a higher standard as a woman and therefore had to work harder, one respondent—a pioneering white female director as well as a member of her company’s management team—recounted her up-bringing and her education:
A: I think that I have a tendency to create that higher standard for myself, because having grown up in the timing that I did, I was al- ways the only woman doing whatever it was, and so, as a result, I always felt I had to work harder—example, being in an accounting class where I was the only woman, and back there that was—back then it was very common, and the professor saying that he had never given a woman an A. And, I mean, he announced that to the class. And you couldn’t do that today. So there was always that tendency that you had to work harder.
My father was the type who didn’t feel that a woman should go to college, that a two-year school was all that a woman needed. And I had to—I proved him wrong. I paid for myself to go to college, whereas he totally paid for my brother and gave him a car. So I had to prove that I was going to do better than my brother. So I think you get that ingrained into you.
In a similar vein, an African American female director said that she “absolutely” prepared more for board meetings than other directors. Her explanation centered on being black, female, and middle class:
I was always told, and remember I grew up in the 60s when I was a teenager and went to college, that I have to go that extra mile, I have to extend myself beyond the benefit of the doubt ‘cause I’m not going to be extended the benefit of the doubt, so, if I’m asked to X, I have to do X plus Y.
A white female academic and former board member remarked that when she was the only woman on one board, “it did feel like I was continually representing something, or being a token. And that didn’t feel nearly as good as being part of a group of two or three” as she was on another board she later served on. She also mused:
I was just trying to figure out whether there are ways in which women are more or less likely to want to serve on boards as men; or whether minority people are more or less likely? Whether they feel that they will have too heavy a burden because they’ll be expected to be responsible for womanhood or minorityhood? I don’t think that’s true of most boards in fact. But whether, before you’ve ever served on one you might think you were going to have to? I don’t know if that’s a concern for some potential board members . . . if so, I would hope people would be able to lay those worries to rest.
Several women also reported that they understood in some sense that whether they did well as the first female board member might influence whether or when another woman would be invited to join the board. One white female board member told us that she was the first woman on a particular corporate board, joining an African American male who was already on that board. She acknowledged that by the time she left the board, there were four female board members, then quipped, “I guess I didn’t mess up too badly.” She also commented, however, on the pressure that this placed on her:
I never really had a bad experience as a token. In fact, they seemed to be particularly curious in what I did think. And that put some pressure on—if you were speaking, you didn’t want to just blurt out stupid things. But I never really felt intimidated about asking questions, either.
And this leads to an important caveat to our respondent’s narratives about their potential token status: although we heard stories of the stresses associated with being the first and only female or minority board member, this narrative is in tension with our respondents’ professed comfort with their first and only status and the benefits that they perceive accompany these stresses. Many of our respondents tend to view themselves as pathbreakers—often the first and only female or minority at many important career stages. They exhibit a certain pride in the notion that they are highly qualified corporate directors, accustomed to their “outsider” status, and need no additional reassurance or support from the presence of other members of their demographic group. All report an ability to function as effective directors, even when the sole female or minority in the boardroom.
One respondent, an African American female director, gave a vivid version of this account, made especially powerful by its framing as a retelling of a conversation that she had just had with her son:
A: Well I’ll answer that question [how it felt to be the only racial minority on a particular board] this way because I just had that conversation with my son last night, yesterday, who’s going to take a new job. He’s a recent graduate. I told him that the first thing you have to do is recognize that you have the job because you have the skills to do it, and throughout my life I have never gone into any situation thinking that I was a minority. I know I’m a minority, but I don’t go into any situation with that as a conscious part of it. Any situation that I’m in is because I’m there as a person, and I’m there because I have something to contribute, I have some skill, I have some expertise, and so that is the mindset that I took to the [name of company] board. I’m here because I have something that they wanted and it’s regulatory expertise and that’s what I’m here to provide, and so I never let being a woman or a minority come to the forefront and I think when you do that, it can put you at a disadvantage because that’s what you focus on and so when you say how was it, I never dwelled on that. I was there because they asked me to be there for a particular reason and that was the value that I brought to the board so it was not an issue for me, and I don’t think that they viewed that as an issue either. One of the things that I know happens when boards actively seek other members who don’t look like them, they’re not white and they’re not male; they’re at a point in their life that they recognize that they have to do things differently from a business standpoint.
The paper contains numerous additional quotes highlighting this tension between our respondents’ recognition of the stresses associated with being the first and only female or minority in the boardroom and their apparent embrace of their “first and only” pathbreaker status.
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