Sandy Burgham is a principal at Play Contemporary Leadership CoLab, a consultancy practice specialising in leadership development and organisational culture. She joins listener.co.nz to write about modern corporate life. Here, Burgham considers what men are doing when women are attending leadership conferences and trying to bring about systemic change.
There comes a point in many a corporate woman’s career when you get asked to give a speech or at least “sit on a panel” at a Women in Leadership conference to expound pearls of wisdom about “how I got to the top”, so eager female conference delegates can take your top tips on negotiating the patriarchy.
The atmosphere is positive and feel-good and after photos are taken for your LinkedIn feed and a few fangirls have struck up the courage to say, “wow I loved what you said, that was amazing”, you leave feeling like you’ve done your bit. Of course, some women, millennials for instance, find this approach all too corporate and conservative, preferring to take the plunge and start their own business. These types want to “girl boss” their way up the ladder going to different sorts of events filled with entrepreneurs or the subset, mumpreneurs.
It doesn’t really matter which way you choose. The long-term result is the same: the patriarchy gives attendees a pat on the head for trying and remains largely unchanged.
I’ve done my fair share of these conferences in the past and have run large-scale women in leadership courses, but I rarely get asked to speak these days, perhaps because I risk putting a dampener on the proceedings with my strong views that it is all a waste of a woman’s precious time.
That’s to say, that over-committed women have simply added “systems change” to their already extensive to-do lists and get so busy doing their bit for Women in Leadership that they forget to ask, “hang on, how come I’m doing all the work here? What are the men doing?” I suspect the answer might be “playing golf” because in my observations, men are certainly not at a parallel men in leadership conference learning how to “dress for the job you want, not the job you’ve got”.
I once did a small study looking at the covers of books aimed at women in leadership. It was disturbing to find messaging that was patronising and contradictory – “Don’t Lean in, Dive in!” – as well as a concerning amount of black power suits and stiletto shoe imagery. One title still for sale is Skirt Strategies, with a cover featuring both items. Who has time to read these books? And why would they want to? And who wears shoes like that?
Women are so busy considering how they might “lean in” or “dress for success” and build their confidence that they rarely stop to consider why it is the individual female who needs to adapt to the system that was built to disadvantage them rather than vice versa.
Moreover, the white noise of women in leadership activity infers that she is not good enough yet to lead, so needs to go to a special women’s conference or course, when the reverse is true. Yes indeed, the irony or perhaps the bittersweet truth that would or should negate the need for all this market clutter, is that extensive research shows female leaders are not only as good as their male leaders, but are rated as more highly effective.
Zenger and Folkman’s 2019 study showed that female leaders scored higher than men in almost all leadership skills, from taking initiative and driving results to the more people-oriented skills of developing others, collaboration and teamwork. A more recent 2022 global study by The Leadership Circle showed female leaders are perceived to be more effective than male leaders at every management level, age level and across cultures.
The study also shows that female leaders underestimate their skills and influence to a greater extent than male leaders, leading to a female executive archetype that I see in my own leadership development practice: The Exhausted Hero.
It is well researched that women carry more of a load in the domestic sphere, a trend that is traditionally called The Double Shift. But now women are often running a Third Shift in the workplace, championing diversity and doing a disproportionate burden of emotional labour so employees feel supported.
A recent McKinsey study dubbed this the “office housework”. And now add a fourth shift outside the workplace - going to women in leadership events, like those networking evenings with titles such as “Women in accounting/architecture/engineering/ insert name of male dominated sector.”
It correlates to what used to be called the Tiara Syndrome, when women expect that if they work really, really hard, someone will put a tiara on their head. The tiara never arrives. But female leaders continue to be far more demanding of their own performance than male leaders, oftentimes engaging in overdrive and perfectionism to try to maintain their security in the system.
“It’s not fair,” they might cry. I know, it never was. Now would be a good time for the Exhausted Hero to stop assuming that the longer hours, being more educated than male colleagues (which they are), and generally being the perfect executive will get them awarded with the big leadership role. It won’t.
I say to female leaders all the time: you’re already more than enough. So, it’s time to deploy a new approach, go easy and suggest men do more work around the office and the system.
If it doesn’t get done, much like the dishes on the kitchen bench, then allow the system to reveal itself for what it is and allow companies to look embarrassingly out of step with the times. Above all else, do not volunteer to help. You are already doing far too much.
