Women Aren’t Backsliding. Corporate America Is Just Finally Being Honest.
A McKinsey study claims women report less ambition, when maybe it’s the measure that’s wrong.
Axios ran a headline this morning: “Women in corporate America are backsliding”
The evidence? McKinsey’s annual Women in the Workplace Report which details women showing less ambition than men, and ultimately getting less support from employers.
I think that’s a bit of an oversimplification.
Corporate America might, as the report claims, be at risk of rolling back progress for women. But it (and the reporting on it) get something fundamental wrong: You can’t backslide from a place you’ve never fully occupied.
The Math That Doesn’t Add Up
I know something about the numbers that don’t work.
I was in the White House when I had my first child. Seven weeks later, I was in Afghanistan serving the President. I was traveling constantly until my son was three. “Mommy, I miss you,” he said. I missed him more. The asks of women are steep. The asks women make of themselves are steeper still. Stories like mine are not data points that will show up in an annual survey conducted by management consultants, but they give a much more complete picture than the data alone.
Let’s also be clear about what we’re measuring. Or maybe more specifically the system we’re measuring.
The early promise of the women’s movement was equal opportunity in a structure built entirely by and for men. Women couldn’t open bank accounts without male permission. Couldn’t start businesses. Couldn’t earn equally even when they outperformed. Progress meant fighting for access to a game with rules we didn’t write.
Some of the more retrograde things that used to hold women back are, thankfully, gone. Don’t mistake that for an equal paying field.
The Stories We Don’t Tell
I know a woman in Silicon Valley who, after losing her husband and children to a drunk driver, threw herself into work to survive the grief.
She brought in massive revenue, then brought the data proving she’d out-earned her male counterparts in revenue, even while being paid less. She was brushed aside. The quiet bonus check came later: Recognition without admission. (My guess is that it was still not equal work for equal pay).
Every high-achieving woman I know has a story like this.
This week, I’m in Florida visiting my grandmother. After helping build a Pizza Hut franchise with five young children, her husband died of a heart attack. She was left with impossible choices. She could lean into business she’d helped build but now had to singularly run. Or she could focus on children who were grieving and needed her more than ever.
I don’t know how she did it.
Then there’s my mother. When people say “my mom didn’t work,” I think of her. Raising children is exhausting, all-consuming work with demanding bosses who become your most important legacy. It’s a full-time job our society systematically undervalues. And when it’s done right, it is indeed the most important job in our society. Kids raised right go on to add significant value to our world.
What We’re Actually Measuring
Getting back to the McKinsey report. It suggests that flexible work arrangements are forcing women into difficult choices. Without ways to contribute that actually work for them, with employers admitting these contributions aren’t valued equally, the outlook is bleak.
But what if the premise is wrong?
After the White House, I was an executive at a publicly traded company, then CEO of a company I helped build, a network contributor flying weekly to be on air five days a month. Peak performance by every traditional measure.
But happiness?
My son hated when I was gone. He wanted both his parents around. I was frustrated that in this society we both birth and help build, we never get full credit for constructing, and we don’t have an equal hand in regulating.
Leaning Smart, Not Just In
Last year I stepped back.
Not because I lost ambition. Because I realized what it’s worth. You get one shot at parenting. Get that wrong, and what’s the point? I have done incredible things in my life, things I didn’t dream I could do as a kid. I helped elect the first Black president of the United States. I traveled in Marine helicopters to Buckingham Place. I stood in Nelson Mandela’s prison cell contemplating how one truly fights for equality. The most important thing I’ve done in my life is having my child.
Realizing that, and the importance of focusing on the next generation, is not losing ambition. It’s seeing clearly that you’re playing a game designed without your needs in mind.
There’s this exhausting debate that comes through in this Axios write up separating “trad wives” from “liberal moms” that I find deeply insincere. Women contribute in every way, and I appreciate very much women’ s perspectives of all backgrounds. I did read that Erika Kirk recently said single women were drawn to New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani to replace a husband, and I had to laugh: we can’t expect any man to singularly provide free community buses and universal childcare. But we do need men in the conversation about raising better humans. On that we will agree. I for one would welcome having a conversation with Erika Kirk or anyone else to bring about a better world for both women and children.
Sitting here with my grandmother, thinking about the choices she made that weren’t always hers to make (she had other people to think about), I think this report has it backwards. Women on the right and left are both asking for the same thing: systems change.
We can’t backslide from what we never had. The quiet promise isn’t in women changing. It’s in demanding the systems change. Call it what you will.
I call it leaning smart instead of leaning in. And right now, we’re measuring women’s progress by how well we conform to structures that were never built for us.
That’s not backsliding. That’s finally being honest about what needs to break.