In order to reach parity in business and government by 2025, women must get comfortable with claiming and exercising power.
Gloria Feldt, Cofounder and president of Take the Lead
What is your relationship to power? On a scale of one to ten, with one being, “I don’t like the idea of power so I don’t seek it,” ten being, “I love having power,” and the middle range being, “I’m not so comfortable with power, but I know I need to deal with it,” where do you place yourself?
I recently keynoted a conference of two hundred of the most powerful women lawyers and judges in the country. Not one of them raised her hand when I asked who rated herself a perfect “ten.” A few hands went up at the other end of the scale, ones or twos. Most hands raised in the five-to-seven range. After a few minutes discussing the question, one table of women burst out in laughter. “We agreed we could own up to being nines,” they told the group, “but ten just seemed too pushy.”
I wasn’t surprised. I see this bell curve in almost every predominantly female group. Men are far more likely to claim to be tens without hesitation. In one mixed group, a man, trying to be encouraging, chided a young woman who pegged herself as a two, whereupon she curled up into a fetal position in her beanbag chair and I had to coax her back into the conversation.
In another example, a colleague conducted a focus group of executive women to learn their preferences for a leadership course she was developing. These women were leaders in their respective professions or companies. When my colleague threw out ideas for names of the leadership program, those containing the word power drew the most controversy. One participant said she did not like the word because “it speaks to dominance.” Another said the program should not use “power” because “it is highly offensive to some people.”
I started studying women’s relationship with power in 2008, when it appeared we might have our first female president. I wrote an article for Elle magazine about women in politics, assuming it would be an optimistic look at how women are ascending to elective office. How surprised I was to learn, however, that at the rate we were progressing, it would take another seventy years for women to achieve parity in Congress.
Whether we are talking work, politics, or personal life,
the dynamics of power are the same.
Women currently represent 51 percent of the population, 57 percent of college graduates, half the workplace, and 54 percent of voters, but only hold 18 percent of the top leadership positions across all sectors. Despite the potential power of sheer numbers in all these areas, we have barely moved the dial toward meaningful leadership parity in the last two decades.
The business case for women in leadership is clear: more women equal greater profits. Yet the 2013 Catalyst Census reports found women flatlined again compared to the previous years 14.6 percent of executive officer positions in Fortune 500 companies and 16.9 percent overall of board seats—the eighth year in a row of no appreciable increase.
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This post is excerpted with permission from “From Oppression to Leadership: Women Redefine Power,” by Gloria Feldt, in Leading Women: 20 Influential Women Share Their Secrets to Leadership, Business, and Life (Adams Media, 2015, ISBN: 978-1-440-58417-6, $16.99, available at bookstores nationwide and from online booksellers.
About Gloria Feldt:
Gloria Feldt is the cofounder and president of Take The Lead, an initiative to prepare, develop, inspire, and propel women to take their fair and equal share of leadership positions across all sectors by 2025. Take The Lead provides training, mentoring, role model programs, and thought leadership to companies, women’s groups, and individuals.
The bestselling author of No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think about Power, and three other books, she began her journey as a teen mom and high school dropout from rural Texas, then used her experience to become president and CEO of the world’s largest reproductive health and advocacy organization, Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Her passion is to remove the last remaining obstacle to leadership parity: women’s learned resistance to embracing their own power. This resistance is why women are stuck at 18 percent of top leadership positions and why the loss of high-performing female employees keeps organizations from optimal success.
Chosen by Vanity Fair as one of America’s top 200 women leaders, legends, and trailblazers, Glamour Woman of the Year, and one of Women’s eNews 21 Leaders for the 21st Century, Gloria teaches “Women, Power, and Leadership” at Arizona State University and inspires both men and women with her keynotes and Power Tool workshops. On her website she writes a popular blog, Heartfeldt.
She has appeared on most national network and cable shows and as a commentator has been published in major media including the New York Times, the Daily Beast, Salon, forbeswoman.com, and Huffington Post, and says she hangs out on social media far too much.
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