Mediocre

by Ijeoma Oluo

  In 2019, women made up just 5 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs. Five percent. And yet women make up a little more than half the overall population. We find more dudes named John at the heads of top companies than women.38

  So when Jill Abramson was promoted to executive editor of the New York Times, it was, sadly, a big deal. Many, myself included, took Abramson’s promotion as a sign of positive change in the publishing world. And when she was publicly and abruptly fired just two years later, many of us realized that maybe she—and the rest of us—had been set up.

  When you can’t keep women out anymore, and you can’t force them all to become secretaries or teachers because modern social politics demand that you at least pretend to support gender equality in the workplace, what can you do to keep women out of powerful positions in business? You can set them up to fail—or, to be more accurate, you set them up to fall.

  It’s called the glass cliff, and it’s a phrase that was first coined in 2005 by University of Exeter researchers Michelle K. Ryan and S. Alexander Haslam. Their research was inspired by an article in the Times (of London, not New York) that suggested women leaders have a negative impact on stock performance. Perhaps Ryan and Haslam smelled the whiff of bullshit coming from the page. They wondered if it was actually true that women brought doom and gloom to the businesses they led, or if there was some other reason why women were more likely to be found in leadership positions at troubled businesses. They found that women were indeed more likely than men to be in leadership positions at distressed companies, but they also found that the problems were not the women’s fault. In researching the one hundred companies listed on the London Stock Exchange that the Times had reviewed for its article, they found that although women were vastly underrepresented on the boards overall, they were most likely to be added to the boards of companies that were in serious trouble. These firms had shown months of decline and seemed at risk of failure prior to adding women to their boards.39

  When Alison Cook and Christy Glass at Utah State University followed up on this research by looking at US companies, they also discovered disturbing patterns impacting women and people of color in business: women and people of color were most likely to be placed at the head of a company when it was already at risk of failure; white men were less likely to accept leadership positions when companies were at risk of failure; and when women or people of color failed to quickly turn around the struggling company, they were most likely replaced with white men. Women and people of color are often only given the opportunity to steer ships that white men have already rammed into icebergs. Then, when the ship sinks, the media reports that women make bad captains.

  When Marissa Mayer was chosen to steer Yahoo, many argued that the ship had already sunk. After years of making bad business decisions and suffering increasing irrelevancy in the ever-changing digital world, the one-time internet giant appeared to be beyond saving. And yet many celebrated Mayer’s hiring as a step forward for women in the industry while acknowledging that her chances of success were slim at best. Ellen Pao’s appointment as interim CEO of Reddit surprised just about everyone—even her. But following the abrupt departure of their former CEO, the social media platform needed to change if it was going to expand beyond its reputation as a dark, smelly place for dudes to talk about video games and how mad they are that women won’t give them blow jobs.

  If you are seeing a pattern here, that’s because there is one. After everything else has been tried (“everything” being multiple mediocre white dudes) and time is running out, I imagine people start saying crazy things like “What if we tried a woman?” or “What if a brown person gave it a shot?” or, even crazier, “What if we put a brown woman in charge?” Women and people of color are often seen as Hail Marys for businesses in desperate need of change. They are tossed, eyes closed, fingers crossed, across the field with little direction other than a prayer that they will land the team somewhere better than it is now.

  Why do women and people of color take on these roles that seem doomed to failure? Are we not paying attention? Are we too prone to risk? Are we not smart enough to see the disaster in front of us? I think it’s pretty obvious: it’s because we don’t think we have a choice. We are never more likely to be given an opportunity to lead than when we will probably fail. We know that we will probably be denied that chance when the company is on sure footing. So we say a prayer and risk it all in the hopes that maybe it will pay off for us and for the company.

  But then, a funny thing happens when a woman or a person of color is promoted to the head of the company. White male managers stop collaborating with their coworkers—especially their women coworkers and coworkers of color. Why do white men decrease their level of performance when a woman or person of color becomes CEO? Because suddenly they feel less connected to the company.40 If this little fact has you thinking of the collective white male response to the presidency of Barack Obama and the rhetoric of the 2016 presidential election—yeah, I hear you.

  This is not all that happens when women reach the top. Often, they find themselves criticized for the “feminine” traits that were a symbol of the “change” that companies wanted when they decided that change was necessary. Many journalists and tech commentators criticized Marissa Mayer’s youth and fashionable wardrobe, even though Yahoo was desperate to appeal to a young, fashionable, internet-savvy audience. When she gave interviews requested by news outlets, she was critiqued by the press for seeking the limelight (similar critiques were aimed at Abramson). Even Mayer’s voice wasn’t beyond appraisal.

  Women who lead with a more “male” style do not fare any better. Women are often punished for the same personality traits that men are praised for. Less than a year into Abramson’s role as the head of the New York Times, Dylan Byers published a scathing exposé in Politico on her leadership style, titled “Turbulence at the Times.” The piece alleged that Abramson was widely disliked at the paper for her “brusque” and “difficult” manner. The article started by detailing an alleged confrontation between Abramson and her second in command, Dean Baquet, that ended with Baquet storming out of her office and punching a wall. This altercation was used as the first example of Abramson’s apparent provocation, with anonymous employees telling Byers, “If Baquet had burst out of the office in a huff… it was likely because Abramson had been unreasonable.”41 Yet she wasn’t the one who punched a wall. “Unreasonable” behavior by women apparently justifies violent behavior by men.

  Marissa Mayer faced similar critiques. She was too brusque and not collaborative enough. She was a perfectionist and a micromanager. The traits that Abramson and Mayer were criticized for are traits that make men into legends in their industries. Imagine complaining that a male editor in chief at a bustling newspaper is “too brusque.” That has literally been the stereotype of newspaper editors from the moment newspapers were invented. Who would Steve Jobs have been without his singularity, his perfectionism, his uncompromising management style, and his personal attention to detail?

  When women try to create the change they are hired for, they are often met with open revolt. This was the case for Ellen Pao at Reddit. “Everything was a push uphill. We didn’t have mobile. I was like, ‘Who doesn’t believe in mobile?’ But the whole team didn’t believe in mobile,” Pao explained to me.42 We were discussing how she had worked to increase Reddit’s mainstream appeal and ease of use through important changes like making the site accessible to people who want to use their cell phones for social media.

  As Reddit struggled to diversify its employee and user demographics, Pao started making practical changes in recruitment, hiring more women and people of color and changing long-held practices like only recruiting from the Reddit site. She also eliminated salary negotiations, instead offering prospective employees a choice of compensation packages since research has shown that women are often at disadvantages in salary negotiations, which can contribute to gender pay gaps. As the demographics in the office began to shift, some emp
loyees saw the changes as a threat to Reddit’s culture: “There was a strain of, like, ‘We only want longtime Redditors to work at Reddit,’” Pao told me. “And those longtime Redditors were mostly white men, mostly introverted, mostly had this point of view of, ‘We can say whatever we want, we can do whatever we want, and we don’t have to be inclusive, and we only like people who are like us.’” Reddit was the white man’s domain.

  It can be argued that the biggest factors preventing diversification of Reddit’s user base were the rampant racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism found in the platform’s threads. Conversations on Reddit are grouped by subject matter called “subreddits,” and when Pao decided to shut down the openly abusive subreddits charmingly named “r/FatPeopleHate,” “r/HamPlanetHatred,” “r/ShitNiggersSay,” and “r/Transfags,” many of the white men who visited the platform just to be able to bathe in their hatred of others were outraged. They considered themselves victimized, unfairly silenced. The closed subreddits were quickly replaced by ones with names like “r/EllenPaoIsACunt.”

  The response to Pao’s attempts to change office culture, while extreme, is probably unsurprising to any women who have tried to increase equity or inclusion in their offices—especially women of color. The truth is, even though many women believe that they must work to increase inclusion in their workplaces, for their own survival and for the survival of their women peers, they are almost always punished for it. Women and people of color who advocate for diversity and equity are often punished for their efforts in peer, team, and management evaluations. Ironically, the people who are not penalized in their evaluations for their diversity and equity efforts are—say it with me—white men.43

  The career trajectory of women who make it to the top is marked with battle scars. They often have to battle high school teachers and college instructors who steer them away from STEM fields or business and toward the arts (I’m not knocking the arts here—my liberal-arts degree has served me quite well), and they have to fight for attention that is given more generously to the young men in the room. Then they have to battle sexist work environments where they may be vastly outnumbered by men and isolated on their teams. They have to overcome reduced access to the internships, mentorships, and office friendships that many men use to secure opportunities. They have to fight upper managers and subordinates who don’t see them as “management material.” And they do this for less pay than their male counterparts.

  After all that struggle, women have to jump at fraught and risk-filled leadership positions at failing companies because they know those are likely the only chances they’ll get. Once at the top, they have to battle a team of white male managers who suddenly don’t feel like working as hard as they used to. They have to find a way to be a “strong leader” while also not seeming like a “bitch.” They have to battle to push forward every change they were brought in to make, no matter how incremental. And through it all the news articles documenting their efforts will focus on their appearance, their voice, their age.

  When we look at the treatment of women in business and in business leadership, how Abramson, Pao, and Mayer fared in their jobs will probably not come as a surprise. When Abramson was very publicly fired with little respect for her years at the Times (even though past executive editors at the Times who had been involved in serious misconduct and scandal had been eased out of their roles with much more grace), women in the journalism world clearly saw hands pushing Abramson off the glass cliff. She had, by many measures, done a superb job. Prior to Abramson taking the helm, the paper had, like many older newspapers, struggled to engage readers online as the popularity and profitability of print publishing continued to decline industry-wide. Under Abramson’s leadership, experiments with interactive, multimedia stories helped establish the Times as a leader in the digital news sphere, and the paper took home an astonishing four Pulitzer Prizes, for Investigative Reporting, Explanatory Reporting, International Reporting, and Feature Writing.44 In the end, New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. stated that Abramson was fired for a “series of issues” including “arbitrary decision-making,” “inadequate communication,” and “public mistreatment of colleagues.” Abramson was replaced by Dean Baquet, the man who had punched an office wall during a disagreement with her.

  Mayer’s downfall seemed predestined before she even took on the role at Yahoo, but it was accelerated by activist investors. Just days after Mayer gave birth to twins, Eric Jackson of Asset Management threw a metaphorical brick through her window in the form of a ninety-nine-page presentation sent to Yahoo shareholders lambasting the company and Mayer’s leadership. Jackson hoped to convince other shareholders to join him in demanding that Mayer be fired. Mayer survived Jackson’s attempts to oust her, only to be brought down by another activist investor simultaneously working toward her demise. Jeffrey Smith of Starboard Value decided that Mayer couldn’t save Yahoo—nobody could—and he used his influence to pressure Yahoo to break itself apart and sell off its profitable holdings.

  To have two separate activist investors targeting you at once might seem extreme—unless you are a woman running a company. A study by the University of Missouri found that, even though women make up only 5 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs, activist investors are more likely to target companies helmed by women with the intent of directing their management decisions, even when controlling for company performance. This means that activist investors are seeking out companies that are led by women with the goal of taking that leadership from them—because they are women.45 Mayer was ultimately forced to oversee the scrapping of Yahoo and the end of her job.

  Ellen Pao was brought down in a storm of fit-throwing Redditors. The moderators of the most popular subreddits took their pages private in protest of Pao’s leadership decisions, effectively shutting down the site for a majority of users. In the midst of the crisis, Reddit’s board surprised Pao with new and unrealistic goals for the company, demanding that it grow from 135 million monthly users to 350–500 million monthly users by the end of the year. To Pao, the writing was on the wall. Reddit wanted her out.

  When Pao resigned she was replaced by Reddit cofounder Steve Huffman. He didn’t roll back the changes that Pao had implemented—the ones that apparently had caused so much outrage with Redditors—and yet, for some mysterious reason, the outrage ended. The protests stopped; the popular subreddits were taken out of their private settings. There wasn’t an influx of new subreddits titled “r/SteveHuffmanIsACunt.” Soon Facebook and Twitter would also take steps to remove abusive accounts from their platforms, and yet the widespread uprising against their male CEOs that Pao had faced never materialized. And even though the ambitious user goals Reddit had set were apparently so important that failure to meet them would have forced Pao to resign, it took Reddit over three years after she left to reach the half-billion monthly-user goal they set for her in 2015.

  I’m not trying to paint a picture of perfect women being taken down by awful men. Abramson, Mayer, and Pao were far from perfect. Abramson herself admits that she wasn’t the best editor. She made that admission in an autobiography that showed serious lapses of judgment and even breaches of ethics on her part when it became clear that she likely plagiarized parts of the book. But Abramson wasn’t fired for lapses of judgment or plagiarism—she was fired for being… difficult. And despite a record that was widely praised within and outside Yahoo, Mayer also made a lot of decisions that many people thought were unwise, especially with regard to the rapid acquisitions that she oversaw of more than fifty companies by Yahoo in just four years. I’m not saying that if all CEOs were women, every company would be improved. But it’s not as if white dudes have been doing all that great. So why aren’t women given an honest chance?

  The hard truth is, the characteristics that most companies, including boards, shareholders, managers, and employees, correlate with people who are viewed as “leadership material”—traits most often associated with white male leaders—are actually
bad for business. The aggression and overconfidence that are seen as “strength and leadership” can cause leaders to take their companies down treacherous paths, and the attendant encounters with disaster could be avoided by exercising caution or by accepting input from others. These same qualities also mask shortfalls in skills, knowledge, or experience and may keep leaders from acknowledging mistakes and changing course when needed. They prevent healthy business partnerships and collaborative work environments. These traits can and do spell disaster for many businesses.

  And yet many of the white men who embody these characteristics are held up as masters of business, even when they fail in front of our eyes. Yes, Trump’s multiple bankruptcies and business fiascos are good examples, but so are the public failures of Martin Shkreli, who is still running companies from prison and is thought of by many young businessmen as a bit of a rock star, even after his scams ruined lives; of Elon Musk, who seems to be too busy tweeting insults at people and giving away submarines to effectively run Tesla; and of John Schnatter, who finally left Papa John’s Pizza after blaming poor performance on the NFL and using racial slurs in company conference calls.

  What is lost is not just the potential for new and different leadership, but the general practice of valuing women leaders—or at least seeing them as equally likely to lead a business to success or failure as white men—and what being valued would mean to the millions of women in American workplaces. Many people never want those women to be CEOs, but women are not devalued only as CEOs; they are devalued in every part of the American workplace. Women are demeaned, dismissed, abused, and underpaid in nearly every industry. These insults hurt individual women, their families, and the businesses they work for.