Many people love to make assumptions about women.
For a long time the assumption was that women don’t want to be leaders. She’s not ambitious. She wouldn’t have time. She’d rather work for a few years and then have a family. She’d rather stay home with the kids than pursue the travel involved in a big new promotion.
These have been convenient assumptions. They keep the same people in power and continue the safe and comfortable status quo.
We’ve made SOME progress in ending these assumptions, at least in certain segments of the workforce and in some of our more progressive organisations.
But what happens when such assumptions swing too far the other way? What happens when organisations in their efforts to achieve gender parity start assuming all talented women want to climb as high up the leadership chain as possible?
This conversation came up during a Q&A between Gillian Fox and Dr Simone Ryan we published earlier this week.
The Q&A is an edited extract from Fox’s excellent book Women of Influence, where she interviews 12 different women about leadership.
Dr Simone Ryan offered generous and informative responses to Fox’s questions, with the doctor, entrepreneur, mother and founder of One Life, Live it having experienced enough of her own ups and downs balancing life and career to be able to offer plenty of insights into what younger women can do.
When asked how men can do more for women, Dr Ryan said they need to first ask if women want to be involved. Not all women want to be in the boardroom, and leaders should ask about the ambitions and aspirations of their core team regarding where they want to be and their limits. Don’t just coach and groom women for leadership in an effort to reach gender parity.
Asked how much she thinks corporate society has swung in the opposite direction – where once women were actively being excluded, to assumptions being made that women are bursting with boardroom ambition – Ryan said this:
“I work with a couple of really large investment banks and they are actively recruiting women into big leadership roles. I said to one of them only last week, “You need to ask these women if that’s what they want to do and let them know what that’s going to mean for them.” It might change their family dynamic. They might need to bring in extra help. I often say you can have it all, you just need to be sure what ‘all’ is.
“Our next generation of female leaders – study, work, achieve and more than hold their own alongside males their whole lives – how do you think that changes when they become working mums?
“There are pressures as mums. As a working mum, I want to be home to read stories, tuck in and do all of those things that my mum did for me, but my mum wasn’t a working mum. My mum worked in a local pharmacy part-time. I loved her for that, because that was her sense of purpose when she was well.
As Amanda Lacaze told Gillian Fox in our piece published yesterday, every choice comes with trade-offs. She once bought into the concept of “having it all” but found there are times when you prioritise your career and time when you prioritise other parts of your life, like family. “My experience is that when women make these choices deliberately, they are more satisfied and happier than when they allow the choice to happen by accident, or worse, have it forced.”
Women need the opportunity to make such choices: To be able to actively choose if they want to pursue a leadership career or not — and, should their circumstances change, to be able to make completely different choices later on.
The key is to just ask. Don’t assume she doesn’t want it and don’t assume she does. Women have different and dynamic priorities and want to make their own choices. Just like men.
Women’s Agenda readers can download an exclusive preview of Woman of Influence ahead of the official launch of the book on May 17, 2016. To download your exclusive preview, simply visit here.
Check out more from this series:
Tracey Fellows on why leadership is like love.
Marina Go on going from magazine editor at 23 to CEO and board chair
Dr Simon Ryan on why the scramble to the top is making us sick.