Perhaps that explains why black women’s representation in the ranks of corporate America is a relatively recent phenomenon. According to talent specialists and corporate educators, they come with clear goals and intense commitment to achieving them. “They know what they want to do, and how they want to do it,” says Bell, who runs leadership development programs for women at several multinational companies. “The level of confidence you see in these women is because, compared to a generation ago, they have a better understanding of expectations, assumptions, and opportunities. They’re not afraid to bring more of themselves to the table, to share who they are and make known their experiences and perspectives.”
Portraits in Power: Melissa James
As early as high school, Melissa James, managing director and global head of loan products at Morgan Stanley, knew she wanted a career in business. By her sophomore year of college, she knew she wanted to go into finance. “Earning well was part of it,” she says.
But not because she’d grown up poor: quite the contrary. James came from a privileged household. Her father, a physician, had attended medical school in Switzerland; her mother had graduated from Fisk, a historically black college, before earning a PhD in anatomy and physiology from the University of Chicago. Even her grandparents (on her father’s side) had college degrees. James was enrolled in a private elementary school; she leveraged a specialized high school experience at Stuyvesant High School, a magnet school, to get into Yale University, and obtained an MBA from Harvard University.
But because she lived in the inner-city community where her father served mostly black patients, ranging from the working poor to the middle class, James was keenly aware of the disparities which existed between different socioeconomic classes. “Because many blacks didn’t have the economic safety net of their white counterparts, I learned early how important it was to be master of your own destiny,” says James. “I saw the value of entrepreneurship: that to accumulate real wealth, you needed to own and control the means of production. That is what I was in pursuit of.”
James also liked telling other people what to do. “I was bossy as a kid, and business was a place to be bossy,” she observes, laughing. Yet what hooked her when she got to Wall Street was finding that she’d landed among her own: “smart people with backgrounds like mine, liberal arts majors who were similar to my undergrad peers at Yale.” She loved working alongside bright, highly motivated, performance-oriented people. “You can make the world a better place by being in finance, but that’s not the only thing that drew me,” she says. “I saw myself being empowered, and being in a position to empower others.”
Today, James is one of the 75 Most Powerful Blacks on Wall Street.44 She oversees $70 billion in loan commitments, a business she helped establish for Morgan Stanley. She’s overseen many of the firm’s lucrative endeavors, particularly in debt capital markets, where she helped raise billions in capital for corporate clients. She’s also had a hand in the firm’s most complex transactions with General Electric Capital Corporation, DuPont, and Agere.
“I have to pinch myself sometimes,” says James, “because I’m living my dream. This is the vision I had for myself, and with the help from others along the way I’ve been able to live it and am very grateful.”
Our data echoes Bell’s observation about confidence: black women we surveyed are 25 percent more likely than white women to have both clear near-term (50 percent vs. 40 percent) and long-term (40 percent vs. 32 percent) career goals. They are also considerably more likely than white women (43 percent vs. 30 percent) to be confident that they can succeed in a position of power.
So it is all the more surprising, and dismaying, that despite their confidence, their ambition, and their credentials, many qualified black women fail to get traction on the steep road to the top—a situation alarmingly similar to the one that Geri Thomas described upon entering the white-collar professional workforce in 1970.
Ambitious, but Ambivalent
White women are more conflicted about pursuing and wielding power. They hunger for influence, we find, but believe they can have influence without the platform of formally recognized leadership. Leadership scares them. Asked whether they would accept an executive leadership position if it were offered tomorrow, 36 percent said no; 43 percent said they would accept it with reservations.
To be sure, both black and white women are aware that leadership will impose some heavy demands. Some 56 percent of white women and 52 percent of black women believe the burdens of leadership outweigh the rewards. Among the negatives that factor into their calculus is the fear that they will have no control over their schedule: 67 percent of white and 65 percent of black women say that needing to be available “anytime, anywhere” does not appeal to them when considering executive leadership positions.
The difference is, black women push ahead in their careers regardless of concerns about balancing all responsibilities. They’re clear-eyed about the burdens; they’re just not conflicted about wanting power. Whereas white women, having assessed the burdens, grow ambivalent—and rein in their ambition.
Such ambivalence toward power seems likewise rooted in history. White women today struggle to shed the burden of gender-role expectations attendant on their socioeconomic privilege—privilege that for centuries situated white women outside the paid labor force as homemakers and helpmates. The domestic roles that Friedan found so oppressive in 1968 continue to constrict them: acquiring new roles in the workforce hasn’t relieved them of the roles assigned at birth, but rather pitched them into an impossible bind where excelling at one means perforce failing at the other. The work-life conflict hasn’t abated for white women, despite declining birthrates and mounting wage-earning pressures. A stunning 35 percent of white women age forty and over in our sample do not have children. Fully 61 percent of white women in our sample that are married or living with a partner earn at least as much as their partners or spouses do. And yet white professional women, despite their fierce ambition (some 81 percent consider themselves ambitious), appear ambitious for something other than power. Despite the fact that we see young women starting out their careers intent on attaining positions of upper management, this intent is not matched by their older counterparts. White women between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-four are twice as likely as white women between the ages of thirty-five and fifty to say they aspire to a powerful position with a prestigious title.
And thus we see, half a century after women marched on Washington demanding equal rights, men and women with equal leadership potential arriving at starkly different destinations mid- to late-career. Men arrive in the executive suite, while qualified women continue to tour middle management. The numbers tell the story: women in the US hold less than 15 percent of Fortune 500 executive positions.45
This skewed outcome, as talent specialists well know, exacts an insupportable toll on both women and the companies that employ them. Women who have invested in their education and professional development—such as the 36 percent of US women and 32 percent of UK women on course to acquire an MBA or industry-relevant tertiary degree—fail to reap the dividends in terms of fulfilled potential or lucrative position.46 Employers that have invested considerable sums developing women for leadership roles are in danger of seeing their investment go out the door, possibly never to return, or failing to deliver anticipated returns in the form of a more diversified C-suite or boardroom. Companies whose leadership remains homogeneous, as the Center for Talent Innovation (CTI)’s 2013 innovation research shows, lose a critical competitive edge: they’re less likely to elicit