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Stop Blaming Women for Holding Themselves Back at Work New York Magazine

The Harvard Business School surveyed three generations of 25,000 MBA graduates of Harvard Business School, in a serious effort to understand why there aren’t more women in the corner office. Their exhaustive study concludes that the problem isn’t that ambitious women are insufficiently tough, savvy or competitive at work. At least among the Harvard grads, the problem isn’t that the women are diverted during their 30s and 40s by wanting to breast-feed when they should be test prepping. The women are not ‘opting out’ or failing to ‘lean in’, deciding instead to ‘ratchet back’.

The authors found no correlation at all between career success and decisions an individual makes to accommodate family, by limiting travel, choosing more flexible hours, or moving laterally within a company.

It is true that women were more likely than men to have made such decisions. But men at the top often made demands that accommodated their family lives.

Very few commentators in all the recent bloviating about female success have come out and said what the HBR authors have: that the problem lies with the culture in the workplace itself. Most women work full-time through their child-rearing years, and yet they achieve less than men at work  (measured by numbers of direct reports, bottom-line responsibility, and senior-management status) because, well, they’re women. There are wide gaps between the way women envision their futures (professionally, as well as domestically) and the way those futures evolve over time not because of the choices they make, necessarily, but because the systems within which they live are entrenched and fundamentally sexist.

The Harvard Business School concludes that women should stop blaming themselves or saying they must try harder.

 … as the HBS study reminds us, when there’s a whole lot of trying without commensurate succeeding, then you have to start to consider that the game is rigged.

Amazon Employs 18 Women Among 120 Senior Managers The Guardian

Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos has made a ton of money selling books to women on how to succeed in business. Within his own Amazon business model, it seems the few women are able to work their way up the Amazon ladder. Bezos employs only 18 women among his 120 most serior managers, and has no direct female reports.

An all-male group of 12 men — known internally as the S Team — runs Amazon. Of the 18 women in senior management, 13 are executive assistants. 

Amazon may consider itself to be a great innovator, but when the topic is promoting and developing the careers of women in the company, it reads like ‘Mad Men’ to me.

Secrets of Silicon Valley (That Only Women Know) Glamour

Women comprise only 26 percent of the computing workforce. It gets worse, today only 18 percent of undergraduate computer science degress go to women — a number that has dropped in half from a high of 37 percent in 1985.