(via Chicago Boyz) Over the weekend, I helped a few gal pals who put together a conference for Indian Women Leaders across the US.   The conference was a fun way to meet up with several old friends from all over the country and it was a guaranteed good time for me given the utterly imbalanced male / female ratio at play .  

One thing scares me about events like this -- they so easily fall into a "social justice activist" trap - stats like "Indian women are 60% more likely than their counterparts to hold graduate degrees but make up only .2% of Fortune 500 CEOs" can be casually bandied about and taken as prima facie evidence of discrimination by the Rich White Male power structure.  The "double minority" status (neither Male, nor White) of the Indian woman is proffered up as simple, obvious, proof of the "why".

By all means, I want to see more female execs and successful business women.   I love interacting with them and truly revel in their accomplishments.   And, I do think there's a need for a rich network & organization targetted towards this "historically under-represented" group, BUT I actively discourage the tired, simplistic "us" vs. "them" / "victim" vs. "powerful" dichotomy.   There are challenges, no doubt, but - PC be damned - they're just as likely to be "yours" as "theirs"  (and often both).

Thankfully, this group did a decent job of staying out of this territory although with a few minor lapses (I suppose that's understandable here in SF).  

The Economist - a pub I can almost always count on - chimes in with a good,  constructive, succinct article on some of the latest research on why Women aren't well represented in the upper echelon of Corporate America.

One classic reason often seen in Silicon Valley - "Staff" versus "Line" - women tend to start their careers in "staff" areas (like Legal, HR, PR, BizDev, finance, consulting, etc.) rather than Line roles (like core mgmt, ops, product development, etc.).  Staff roles don't automatically exclude you from the top ranks but the stats do work against you:

The Catalyst survey, published in the latest Harvard Business Review, finds that senior managers agree that the big problem is women's lack of line-management experience. In Fortune 500 companies, 90% of senior line managers are men.

The next point raised was differences in how men & women react to competition:

...physical tasks, showed similar results. When nine- and ten-year-old children ran a race alone, boys and girls clocked similar speeds. When children raced in pairs, girls' speed hardly altered. But boys ran faster when paired with a boy, and faster still when racing against a girl. Mr Gneezy points out that, if men try harder when competing, they will disproportionately win the top jobs, even when to do the job well does not require an ability to compete. Job selection is itself highly competitive.

It's actually a tad worse than this excerpt argues - Women running with women actually ran a tad slower than running on their own or against men.  Now this particular study focused on kids but similar outcomes have been seen in studies comparing college students, and adults.  Experimental rules that allow for a non-exclusively large number of "winners" show females competing favorably with men (which socio-economically parallels small biz leadership);  rules that exclusively allow for a single, large winner don't (e.g. the F500 CEO race).   There's clearly something deeper here than just the patriarchy keeping them down.

Finally - data on how women react to negotiations:

Ms Babcock, who recounts her studies in a forthcoming book, noticed that male graduates with a master's degree from her university earned starting salaries almost $4,000, or 7.6%, higher than female students. But when she asked who had simply accepted the initial pay offer and who had asked for more, only 7% of women, compared with 57% of men, turned out to have negotiated. On average, those who negotiated raised the initial offer by $4,053—almost exactly the difference between men's and women's starting pay.

These are all problems that can be overcome but - and I say this carefully - the onus is more generally on women to move past these issues rather than on the socio-economic system to accomodate them.   That's not to say that a bit of movement on both sides is probably required - in fact, there is a certain competitive advantage to be realized by firms that vigorously assist women in overcoming these issues.  They'll attract higher quality candidates, develop them further, and keep them longer.  

But, we should also be realistic.  Firms can't and shouldn't do it all by themselves.   Nor will the race to be a F500 CEO ever be anything but a frenzied rat race with tremendously competitive alpha-characters willing to make very deep lifestyle sacrifices to grab the brass ring.   Contrary to Femi-Activist conventional wisdom - not all of the the "game rules" are simple diktats by the white male overclass.  Most of these rules are borne out of economics, game theory, and management science.  Using aggregate statistics like the % of CEO's to try & change these rules in a clumsy top-down fashion will make society as a whole less productive.

Just watching out for my strong, proud sista's  ;-)

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