What, if women don’t want (any more)
I once sat at a table together with six women during a networking dinner at a business event. Among them: a department head from the automotive industry with a PhD, a partner in a major law firm, an IT specialist in a management position. All these women were highly educated professionals with a lot of experience and wide-ranging expertise. Each of them represented in a different way what should be in great demand, not only in times of a shortage of skilled workers. They were supposed to be extremely sought-after resources. In theory, at least.
Patriarchal environments expel ambitious women
None of the women at my table was still in regular employment. They had all turned their backs on their employers and were now looking for (re)orientation. They had thrown in the towel, just wanted to get out. Out of the company, out of the system. Some of the women had already started their own business, some needed a longer break. And as different as the reasons for these women’s decisions may have been, a pattern emerges.
All of them showed the exhaustion and frustration that decades of asserting themselves in patriarchal and hyper capitalist environments still brings for women, despite all the statements made at Diversity Weeks and International Women’s Days. These women had tried to get along in the system, let alone succeed. They had fought, adapted, compromised, suffered. Until it just didn’t work anymore. Until they had to surrender.
This pattern replicates itself at the very highest levels of business and political leadership. YouTube’s CEO Susan Wojcicki, the Chief Business Officer of Meta, Marne Levine, Nicola Sturgeon in Scotland, or New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern are the latest prominent examples of women who have quit. Not as quietly as others, but for very similar reasons.
And as different as the individual decision-making may have been : These women left for reasons whose causes are to be found primarily in the system. A glance at German local politics reveals the same phenomenon: hardly any female mayors, instead “old boys’ networks” and framework conditions characterized by constant availability, deadline pressure and ultimate commitment.
Pinkwashing and false empowerment
And yet we still tell all the women to hang in there; to be courageous, to try harder, to take on responsibility and leadership, to adapt, to help change organizations from within or even to “man up”. And we still teach them how to dress, how to speak or how to stand so that they would be accepted in our normative business in-groups. Are we nuts?
Or, maybe, our appeals of perseverance are a kind of cynical self-protection. Are we behaving this way because we know precisely what the culture is like in many companies, political parties or scientific institutions? By suggesting that women can achieve everything, we reverse the responsibilities. Because whoever doesn’t “make it” maybe didn’t try hard enough?
One idea can’t be emphasized enough: “Stop fixing women, fix the system.” And: we should stop framing appeals to persevere or bite through as “empowerment”. Because today we mostly empower and encourage women by helping them to struggle through, to endure, to not take it so hard.
“Women often turn down leadership positions offered to them because they know full well the impact of the systemic conditions that are disadvantageous to them.”
Stereotypical narratives
For those at the top of the hierarchies, there’s not much of a challenge. They don’t have to change, they are being served both practical and one-dimensional narratives: that they themselves are open to more female representation in leadership, but if women reject such offers and positions, it is because of their lack of ambition. We still call these offers “opportunities” in all seriousness.
A closer look reveals how absurd this narrative is, for the exact opposite is true: women often turn down leadership positions primarily because they are fully aware of the effects of the systemic conditions that are disadvantageous to them. (The fact that they have a choice at all ironically even privileges these women, but that’s a different topic).
Two gaps that lead up to a “No”
When making decisions for or against a leadership position that is on offer, women are painfully aware of at least two contexts. The first is their mental load and its main cause. Mental load refers to the stress caused by a multitude of tasks (so-called “micro-tasks”) around care work; that is, what makes mothers in particular lie awake at night when the endless to-do list circles in their heads. Not because mothers should be doing care work, but because they are — as a matter of fact — doing most of it.
According to the second gender equality report of the German government, the average gender care gap in Germany is 52.4 percent. In households with children, the gap is 83.3 per cent: each mother in Germany thus performs on average two and a half hours more care work per day than the average man. And thus the likelihood that she will be able to sit down on Monday morning full of beans and in possession of 100 per cent of her energy to tackle her gainful employment-related weekly workload is very very low.
But that is not all. Even if a woman and mother really wants to take on a leadership job, there is still the next obstacle in the form of double standards: she usually has to perform better in her new area of responsibility than any of her male counterparts. She must constantly prove that she has earned her position and that she is up to the task. On top of that, she is perceived as a representative of the group of all women, “tokenism” is the technical term for such an attribution.
Are we surprised, then, that women react defensively more often when we offer them the same positions, which are still occupied as a matter of course by often white, heterosexual cis men? If we really want diversity to penetrate all areas, then we have to create — and want to create — the appropriate framework conditions. This includes a complete renegotiation of how we want to live and work together. More of the same is not a purposeful principle, especially not in the construction of roles and responsibilities.
For women, the bar seems to hang almost frighteningly low, at least when it comes to expectations of an organizational culture that suits them. For example, a female employee of an IT company said the following to me: “I’ve been here fro nine months now. And I have not been completely disillusioned yet. I haven’t experienced that in my career so far.” She meant it in a positive way, but at the same time it shows where we still stand.
This article has originally been published in German on my blog “Digitale Tanzformation”.
