At a time when women outnumber men at college and university campuses, and when the numbers of men and women in the work force have reached parity, why are women still earning less than their male counterparts and under-represented in management positions?
In her new book, No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power, U.S. author Gloria Feldt says no one is holding women back in the workplace but themselves. Ms. Feldt, former chief executive officer and president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, tells The Globe and Mail the time is ripe for women to reach full gender equality, if only they would seize it.
How are women holding themselves back?
I’m not sure that we know that it’s our moment as much as the rest of the world knows it’s our moment. You can see the signs of it every day. You see it in studies that show companies that have a critical mass of women on their boards of directors or their management teams have better returns on investment. And you see it in marketers, who know that women buy 85 per cent of their goods, and so they go all out to attract women to what they’re selling. But women don’t know the power that they hold in their hands. We need to see it.
How do women hinder themselves on an individual level, like when it comes to asking for a pay raise?
There are behaviours that we have learned that we have not yet given up. I refer to them as ‘the baby elephant behaviours,’ from the fact that when baby elephants are trained, they learn when they’re tethered to a post, they can’t get away from it. And once they’re fully grown animals, they have plenty of strength to uproot the post, but they don’t. I think women, to some extent, have learned the behaviour that we’re tethered to the post of cultural barriers ... .
Women don’t negotiate as aggressively for their first salary … When you add it up, the surveys show that costs women, on average, a half a million dollars in their lifetime.
How can women make demands or be assertive without being perceived as pushy?
Just as it’s hard to build a bicycle while you’re riding on it, it’s hard to change a culture while you’re living in it. Women are still judged more harshly than men on several counts. If we are assertive, we’re called aggressive. If we’re aggressive, we’re called words that aren’t very nice. On the other hand, we all know that to speak up for yourself, you sometimes have to be aggressive. Part of the answer is just not to be afraid of being viewed negatively.
You mention that women need to redefine their sense of power. What’s the difference between how men and women define power?
When people think about power, they tend to think about having the power over other people ...
Women, generally, when you talk to them about power, their first instinct is to resist the notion because they’re thinking about the old paradigm of ‘power over,’ and it is certainly true that women have borne the brunt of the negative aspects of power for millennia. But once I start talking to women about defining power as the ‘power to’ – the power to accomplish something good in this world, the power to have a better life for yourself and your family – I see their faces relax and they can accept that kind of power.
