When Women Don’t Support Women
October 10, 2021
It happens, but is it as big of a problem—or as cut and dry—as some would have us believe? This story might help:
When Jenn Hyman, Founder and CEO of Rent the Runway, was 22 years old and in her first corporate job, she had a life-changing experience. After sharing her ideas in a meeting, her 35-year-old female boss pulled her aside to give her some advice: “You really need to shut up,” the boss said. “You’re a girl, and it would be much more becoming if you acted sweet in conversations, because you know, you’re too confident, you’re too bold, and it’s coming across the wrong way.”
Was her boss trying to help Jenn, or hinder her? My guess is that it was a little of both. (As for the “life-changing” part, Jenn shared her boss’s comments with a more senior male executive, who said, “Jenn, you keep doing what you’re doing, because that woman’s going to be working for you someday.” And she did. And the rest is history.)
Why was Jenn’s boss giving her self-inhibiting advice? Probably because the boss was following that advice herself and believed that this was the way to survive in a male-dominated environment. (She was wrong, of course. As the male executive implied in his comments to Jenn, women who try to be non-threatening are actually making themselves impotent in male-dominated environments. These women might be useful, because they work hard and are eager to please, but they’re not going to be invited into the rooms where real decisions are made.) To see a younger woman speaking up must have been a shock to Jenn’s boss—because the boss had trained herself to keep her own head down, and also because this young kid was successfully claiming the space in meetings that the boss had voluntarily relinquished years before.
I’m a believer that if the old “queen bee” stereotype (of senior women purposely not supporting other women) was ever true, it was due to a system in which only one token woman was ever allowed at the top. Self-preservation dictates that the token woman would not publicly advocate for the advancement of other women. Why would she? She knows that the senior men are using her to check off the “woman” box and not signaling a larger commitment to equality.
Research supports this view. Columbia Business School and the University of Maryland's business school studied America’s 1,500 biggest companies and found that when a woman was the CEO, more women were likely to be found in senior positions than when the CEO was male. The study noted an “implicit quota” in the male-led companies as the cause.
That study was done in 2015. In 2021, things are clearly changing, as the need for corporate diversity of all kinds is now a mainstream conversation. And more women are actively and publicly supporting other women. (One of my favorites: MaryAnne Gilmartin, CEO of L&L MAG and a towering presence in New York City real estate development, talks often of developing a “she-building” where each part of the process is done by a female-led company.)
You know, men have always supported women, too. Remember that the person who gave Jenn Hyman the encouragement to keep speaking up was a man (a gesture she credits for her highly successful career).
Women succeed when women support them, and also when men support them. In the case of MaryAnne Gilmartin, it was men who gave her her start, but a woman—another female pioneer—who gave her her biggest break (and a lifetime of mentorship).
Mostly, women succeed when they’re prepared to support themselves. In talking about her meteoric rise in the male-dominated world of New York City real estate, Gilmartin says, “You know, I never got the memo about feeling intimidated. I always had the feeling that if I knew what I was doing, and I had a job to do, I had a place at the table… I was by age and by gender a minority for many many years, but I was never intimidated.”
It’s that kind of self-determination that will help us succeed no matter which gender is or isn’t supporting us along the way.