From the article, Getting More Black Women into the C-Suite from HBR.org
By Melinda Marshall and Tai Wingfield
In late 2014, poised to publish a report on women’s ambition, we stumbled on a startling fact: black women are nearly three times more likely than white to aspire to a position of power with a prestigious title.
And yet white women are about twice as likely as black women to attain one.
Roughly twenty women helm a Fortune 500 company. After the departure of Ursula Burns at Xerox, none of those women will be black. (Editor’s note: this rings true in the public sector as well).
The problem may lie in the constraints endemic to identity politics. Since the beginning, the Women’s Movement has treated all women, black and white, as having similar goals and suffering similar inequities; the Civil Rights Movement has likewise treated black Americans as a monolithic group. Enlisted by both movements, black women fought on both fronts. But fifty years later, they appear to have benefited from neither, relative to women and black men, in terms of their empowerment and advancement.
As we explore in our book, Ambition in Black and White: The Feminist Narrative Revised, neither movement recognizes their particular challenges in the workplace, nor their singularly fraught path toward equality. At the intersections of race and gender, both then and now, black women have labored unseen, even to those lobbying for their advancement.
We talked to black women who were among the first out of the gate when barriers fell to white-collar occupations. One of these was Charlene Drew Jarvis, longtime District of Columbia Councilwoman, who started out in 1965 as a neuroscientist at the National Institute of Health. Another was Geri Thomas, former Chief Diversity Officer at Bank of America, who started at the bank when she was a sophomore at Georgia State (and the bank was still Citizens and Southern National).
Both women came from educated parents (Drew Jarvis’s father was a physician and researcher who pioneered blood banks). But neither came from families that could help them fulfill their ambition in a predominantly white workplace—and be seen as leaders.
Thomas describes working literally in the back offices of the bank for white supervisors, encountering not one person of color until she reached the sidewalk on her lunch break, because management didn’t want black people interacting with customers and didn’t trust women with anything but admin or support roles. Drew Jarvis, with a Ph.D in neuropsychology from the University of Maryland, wanted to be recognized for her performance and work ethic, not her gender or color—so tried “never to present as a threat.” In a white bookstore, she took pains to impress the salesclerk with her diction and erudition, lest her color make him think she was ignorant.
Both women, that is, suffered from invisibility even as they stood out like unicorns, either because others insisted they not be seen or because, eager to be seen as equal, they elected to downplay what made them different.
Fifty years later, invisibility continues to cloak ambitious black women—as our interviews make clear — for much the same reasons. Capable and credentialed, a black lawyer at a DC firm explained how she took on an extra-heavy caseload and kept her head down, lest she be seen as “an affirmative-action choice.” A leader at a global investment bank explained how her role came “with training wheels,” with a limited remit and extensive oversight, because senior management wasn’t confident she could be trusted with strategic decisions and couldn’t allow her in such a visible role to fail (thereby exaggerating the likelihood that she would).
Click this link to READ MORE of Melinda and Tai’s article.
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Melinda Marshall is executive vice president and director of publications at CTI, where she drives the Center’s research on innovation, sponsorship, and leadership. She is coauthor of the CTI book Ambition in Black + White: The Feminist Narrative Revised and CTI reports including “Innovation, Diversity and Market Growth” as well as “Sponsor Effect 2.0.”
Tai Winfield is senior vice president of communications for CTI and managing director at Hewlett Consulting Partners (HCP). She is coauthor of the CTI book Ambition in Black + White: The Feminist Narrative Revised and CTI report “Black Women: Ready to Lead.”
