Career TOOLBOX #21: Why Are These Executives Making Everyone So Nervous?

The Influence of Marissa Mayer and Sheryl Sandberg

The Dow Jones is rallying at over 14,000 and yet the only thing the business media can talk about is two corporate leaders: Marissa Mayer and Sheryl Sandberg.

Both Americans have a lot in common: Gen Xers, highly educated (Mayer – Stanford, B.S. and M.S.; Sandberg – Harvard, A.B. and M.B.A), and earned their .com chops (~a decade each) at Google. And both now hold leadership positions at highly-visible firms: Mayer is CEO of Yahoo and Sandberg is COO of Facebook. Both are on the boards of very prominent firms. Both are married. Both are young moms. Both are very attractive. And, oh, both are women.

Mayer made headlines most recently when she ordered a new policy stating that employees now have to work from the office (vs. from home, a coffee shop, the beach, etc.). Sandberg’s making waves because in her new book, Lean In: Women, Work and the Will To Succeed, she encourages women to pursue professional success and strive to have the best careers possible.

Their recent decisions and publication have set off a global media firestorm. Feminists are mad because they think both women are out of touch with real working women. Employees are mad because they want the flexibility to work from anywhere, especially in our tech-networked society. And anyone with a social media account is chiming in as though they’ve had the rare experience of either of these two women. Mayer is the youngest CEO of a Fortune 500 firm. Pre-Google, Sandberg served as Chief of Staff on the United States Treasury.

Speaking of Fortune 500, here are some recent stats in America:

– As of 2012, we had a record breaking number of women as Fortune 500 CEOS: 18, up from 12, from 2011. That’s a whopping 3.6%.

– According to the 2013 Bureau of Labor Statistics, for the exact same job, “White women earned 79.6 percent as much as their male counterparts, compared with Black (87.4 percent), Hispanic (86.6 percent), and Asian women (71.6 percent).”

– Catalyst.org recently compared maternity leaves in various industrialized countries. In China, women have a 14-week maternity leave. In Russia, 20 weeks (ten before and ten after birth). Italy: 5 months, at 80% of the woman’s salary. Canada, mothers can take 17 – 52 weeks maternity leave, with up to 13 weeks paid. Here in the U.S.: 12 weeks, unpaid.

– Men who have a wife at home, over the course of their careers, make more money than men whose wives work outside the home.

All this professional gender discrepancy in 2013. How can this be?

I spent two full decades working for domestic and international corporations, in various states in this country. I’ve seen some things. And here’s what I know for sure regarding the entity known as Corporate America:

– Women who want to advance need to wear heels. Men need to learn golf.

– Women, if they have a male boss, get noticed more by looking good, wearing skirts that cut just above the knees and, when necessary, flirt it up with their senior male manager. Men who want to get noticed get a beer with their boss.

– Women who go into their boss’s office and ask for a raise are looked at as weak, because they didn’t attract the right man who would be a good provider. Men who go in and ask for a raise, because they have to take care of their family, are considered as doing the responsible thing.

– Women will take much less credit for the same work as men and are perceived as weaker and more difficult. Men can say things and seem more credible and easier to get along with.

– Women who come into a meeting and lay down the hard facts, the cold truth and the direct approach, expecting swift results, are then referred to as bitches or “on the rag.” Men who do the same are considered assertive and loyal.

These are not gentle statements. They are neither stereotypes nor are they meant to strike up a war of the sexes. They are my observations.

Nearly three years ago, Hanna Rosin published a front page article in The Atlantic called “The End of Men.” It drew so much fury and momentum that it has since grown into a book. The article is a fascinating take on the state of things and Rosin did her homework, comparing who is graduating from college more (women) and graduate school (women) and how the white collar corporation of today demands more social and interactive/emotional skills that women are supposed to be better at. According to Rosin, the women are winning.

But are women winning at the price of men? If once there was a time when women couldn’t vote or couldn’t get a mortgage or a checking account in their own name, today it’s a fascinating conundrum where, simultaneously, while women seem to be running a faster race, men are still the ones holding the finish line.

The scales are way off-balance, on both sides, and I’m not really sure who — if anyone — is really winning. If, say, twenty years ago, while I was in college and a man would compliment me on my hair I’d smile and say, “Thank you,” today I could easily sue that man for sexual harassment. And win. Is a compliment harassment? I don’t think it is. And, today, more and more women, with their corporate status, corporate credit cards and corporate business travel, are the ones initiating and having the affairs.

The rules are changing. Worse, no one knows the rules. All of this is making everyone very nervous. Just like Mayer and Sandberg are making everyone very nervous.

If our mothers’ generation, the Baby Boomers, brought the women’s movement forward, it was at a great price: divorces, latchkey kids and ultimately for both generations, corporate layoffs. Now, who do we believe in? Who do we trust? What is our path?

In 2012, Augusta National finally invited its first two women to join the exclusive club: former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and financier as well as President of Rainwater, Inc., Darla Moore. And, yet, Secretary of State is still the highest political position a woman has held in this country. All the while England had Margaret Thatcher, and that was in the ’80s. Indira Ghandi and Golda Meir began serving as India’s and Israel’s Prime Ministers back in the 1960s.

At a time of still tremendous fiscal uncertainly, and a still thick and wide glass ceiling, Mayer and Sandberg aren’t just leading two global giant corporations, they’re also making millions of dollars doing it. No one gave them their positions or their salaries. No one put them in charge. They climbed into their current roles. Of course, they had parents, teachers and mentors, of both genders, who believed in them. Somebody along the way recognized Mayer and Sandberg for their intelligence, dedication and potential. And the two women continued to prove their worth, with new opportunities that they took on, with or without the approval of others.

For feminists to cry foul and accuse Mayer and Sandberg of not being real, I ask not real to whom?

I’ve been extremely fortunate to have had incredible women bosses during most of my career — women who, like these headliners, earned their bachelors and often masters from prestigious universities, women who (usually while on my watch) realized they were pregnant and had to learn the incredibly difficult balance of work and family, and women who knew how hard success was and took great care in leading — and leaning — me to my next level, without ever feeling like I was their threat. Instead, they trained me, demanded a lot out of me and then, eventually, brought me into their sorority. These women, my former bosses, are great leaders. And great leaders know that there’s plenty of room at the top and mold others to harness our own power. To all of them, I say, “Thank you!”

At a time when the country is so politically divisive — with one side thinking that as Americans it’s our individual responsibility and our legacy to succeed and to make something exceptional out of ourselves, while the other side, equally passionately, feels that the government and society should take care of each other — here are two people who are very clear and quite unapologetic on where they stand.

And that is what makes the media and corporate leaders, men and women, Boomers, Xers and Ys, so nervous about Sandberg and Mayer: they know exactly who they are, they know precisely what they want, they’ve earned their stripes, they’re making their own rules and they’re building opportunity, all the while answering to insatiable shareholders and driving the Dow.

Now that’s something to rally about.

First published in March, 2013.

 [Images: Google.com]

Reprinted with permission and gratitude from CoolCleveland.com.