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On Resignations And Gender Diversity

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Do they make the news because such news rarely happens or because they resign from positions of power? This start of 2023 has witnessed the resignations of three women in leading positions in three different areas: the Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern; the leader of the Scottish Independence Party, Nicola Sturgeon; and Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube and, above all, a founder member of Google.

The two political leaders motivated their decisions by saying they felt they were no longer able to give their best to their countries. Wojcicki said that she wants to dedicate herself to her family, her health and personal projects which inspire her passion. Though we still do not know who will take Sturgeon’s place, the other two will be replaced by men. This, in the case of Wojcicki, will further reduce the number of women leaders of technological companies and that age-old question will once again surface as to whether women leaders know how to advance other women, or not.

According to Laura Kray, Director of the Center for Equity, Gender and Diversity at the University of Berkeley, there has been a changing of the guard which has failed to favor female continuity: Sheryl Sandberg at Meta, Meg Whitman of Hewlett Packard, Ginni Rometty at IBM, Marissa Mayer at Yahoo are examples of top managers who have not been replaced by women and this has demonstrated that women tend to have a shorter-lived career in the world of technology. What is more, research undertaken by Silicon Valley Bank in 2020 demonstrated that over half of American start ups have no women in positions of leadership.

Those who maintain that it is the resignations that made the news have, instead, noted that, for once, there are simultaneously three women at the head of a prestigious newspaper like the Financial Times and journals like the Wall Street Journal and The Economist, and that this good news was not so widely acclaimed in the press.

Each person can then decide, according to their inclination and culture, as to whether their glass is half empty (there are still too few women) or half full (in spite of everything, some women still make it to the top). But the incontrovertible objective fact is that there are really very few women in decisional roles: in Europe only 35% of members of boards of directors are women and only 7% of companies have a female CEO. In Italy, this statistic is even lower at 3%. Is this the fault of women who don’t know how to advance other women and who, consciously or unconsciously, sabotage their careers? Or are men to blame because they don’t want to cede power and they compact in opposition. As in all complex questions, there can be no single answer.

But the results of research undertaken, once again, at Berkeley, by Laura Kray and Jennifer Chatman, are emblematic of the kind of bias and obstacles that women are still up against, and are worthy of reflection. Chatman, a highly regarded academic and winner of the Haas Top Award for Teaching Excellence, at Berkeley, observed a strange phenomenon: her students’ evaluation of her ability to teach began to decline after she reached the age of 40 and sank to its lowest level when she was 47. A statistic that apparently contrasts with the fact that experience should have, on the contrary, improved her ability to teach. The study of the trend in evaluation, on the part of a substantial panel of academics, has demonstrated that Chatman’s observation was no exception: both for men and women there is the perception that experience increases ability or efficacy, in other words what is sociologically defined as agency, and it is one of the elements that determines how we immediately judge someone. The other element is warmth, the capacity for empathy. For women, however, as they get older, ageing is more or less consciously associated with a lack of empathy and this also determines a negative judgement on their efficacy. “They are stereotypes which obviously go back to a time when women were principally entrusted with the job of caring for others, but which re-emerge when they propose to take on a role of agency,” Jennifer Chatman explained in an interview. The result is, in any case, a prejudice which emerges at the very moment in which women have to play their best card at advancing their careers and when, yet again, they are not judged for their professional abilities but rather for their adhesion to a pre-established model.

Certainly, not even this stereotype is singly responsible for the difficulties that women encounter in breaking through the glass ceiling. But it IS emblematic of the thousands of hurdles, some almost imperceptible, that they will have to cross along their career paths.

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