IMO, to be a successful CEO, women have to give up as much personal life as men do. if raising children is part of the equation, it just depends on how much either sex is willing to give that up for a career. i believe i've read that Elon's family is pretty hard-hit on the available-father standpoint stemming from his ambitions.
also, depending on the size of the company, i think women CEOs need to take on some atypically aggressive and assertive business characteristics that are unbecoming of either sex but are typically more acceptable in society for men to step into.
could a woman be the next Larry Ellison? certainly yes, but not without first taking on his asshole qualities. the aggressive characteristics that make him a great multi-$bn CEO also make him a pretty hated guy in many circles. there's a difference between business-respect and personal-respect, some people don't give a shit about the latter and will step on their partners' throats to get ahead.
> women have to give up as much personal life as men do
Women have to give up more than men. Guys can spend their 20s, 30s, and even 40s working nights and weekends to build the foundations of a successful company, with the goal of starting a family after they've 'made it'.
The window of opportunity for women is a lot narrower. If you're a woman entrepreneur in your 30's and want to eventually start a family, you'll have some much tougher choices to make than a guy in a similar situation.
I know people have done it before but I couldn't imagine going all out on the early days of building a startup while having to care for a baby, as a father or mother.
Don’t worry too much about being a bad father - as long as you are there at least some of the time and don’t beat them and their mother then they will almost certainly turn out OK.
My experience with my own children is the effect you can have on them is very limited - this is both liberating and depressing.
> Guys can spend their 20s, 30s, and even 40s working nights and weekends to build the foundations of a successful company, with the goal of starting a family after they've 'made it'.
That sounds as a sexist stereotype. Do you have statistics that this actually represent the norm for CEO's?
Yes, but not everyone want or decide to have children.
Simply claiming that because men can wait after they've 'made it', doesn't mean that every man on every continent will do it. That what I asked for, statistics that prove that men actually do it: wait until they've 'made it' to form families.
Or is "Biology" proof enough, and anyone who ask for evidence that stereotypes actually is the norm is simply being disruptive to the discussion?
If your point was to say that biological fertilization+pregnancy+motherhood is not the only opportunity for a woman to have a family, you made your point too obliquely for this audience.
I don't think the couple weeks most women might consider the minimum during maternity leave is significant.
It seems pretty even IMO. Waiting until your 40's, 50's or 60's for a man doesn't come without it's own trade-offs.
Most men who "someday want a family", entrepreneurs or not, are probably going to want to start a family before 40 I'd guess. I don't think gender probably plays a very big role in the "when" decision.
I'm not even sure what your point is. Other than trying to be offensive.
I have two young children. I cook the vast majority of breakfasts/dinners/meal-planning. Do almost all the dishes. Do 75% of the day-care pick-ups/drop-offs. Most of the late-at-the-office-hours are hers.
If you're going to get into a discussion about gender bias it'd probably help to leave your own at the door.
That a couple weeks of maternity leave isn't a career killer?
I'm guessing here because you haven't left me much to go on, other than you seem to think your Dad didn't do his fair share I guess?
Or my assertion that having kids while you're still young, having time to see them grow up and be an active part of their lives, seeing them go on to make their own families, that all that stuff is something men in general think about as well?
I hope people are taking more than a couple of weeks. I know this is America and all, but 2 weeks?!? If I was a (male) CEO I'd definitely take more time than that, at least to set an example that people shouldn't feel like they can't take time.
You'd hope. That's all I could take off (paid) for my daughter's birth though. I had a little more time for my son's (first born).
Leaving out details, but I'll say my wife's time/compensation package was _far_ better than mine. If anything her career has accelerated sharply since our first born. Which is positive of course. But it certainly seems counter to the "prevailing wisdom" on HN.
>>If anything her career has accelerated sharply since our first born. Which is positive of course. But it certainly seems counter to the "prevailing wisdom" on HN.
Earlier you said:
>>I cook the vast majority of breakfasts/dinners/meal-planning. Do almost all the dishes. Do 75% of the day-care pick-ups/drop-offs. Most of the late-at-the-office-hours are hers.
I think your situation is not the norm. Not saying it's right or wrong, but it's not the norm. btw, I'm married with a 3yr.old daughter and a son on the way. In case this context is needed.
While "gender identity" probably doesn't play a large role in the "when" decision, unfortunately "gender expectations" do. Most societies expect different things of different genders, regardless of what the individual wants, leading to social pressures. Luckily that doesn't apply to America as much these days.
The problem is childcare which lasts much longer than 2 weeks. A woman who wants to focus on career and have children would be best served marrying a guy with less career aspirations than her which she would be less likely to run into in corporate circles.
I'm not sure this assertion holds any water for one. But I don't see how this could be framed a gender specific issue for another I suppose. Either way make sure your partner understands your ambitions when you get together?
There are probably selection factors at play too in that there are simply less men available who want to be househusbands than there are women who want to be housewives.
Successful men are probably also sexually more attractive to women than vice versa, an aspiring househusband with a low paid job would probably find it harder to get a date with a female CEO than the other way around.
> i think women CEOs need to take on some atypically aggressive and assertive business characteristics that are unbecoming of either sex but are typically more acceptable in society for men to step into.
I agree. I'm going to come out and say it, it's difficult for a woman to step into any kind of leadership position and do the tough things without being perceived as a "bitch".
One thing I've observed in women who might be perceived as successful in those roles is that they're able to find the right way of being in charge and overcoming those perceptions. I think it's a subtle attitude or behavior change, and it seems to be a fine line.
But I'll also say that for men, they risk being perceived as "an asshole" in much the same way. And demonstrating assertiveness and leadership, being tough when it's needed it also a similar skill. I just think that men have more societal support and a few thousand years more practice and training to figure it out.
Women have far fewer role models to pattern after.
That is a very fine line to walk, and if you just appropriate that characteristic out of context you are asking for trouble. Steve Jobs was extremely skilled at what he did and for the most part kept the "moral high ground" and was fighting for what he himself had largely built.
Don't judge a CEO on their personal characteristics, judge them for what they do and stand for. The new CEO of Coca Cola said he needed to figure out how to get more people to drink Coke. Fuck him. There are a lot of CEOs who are not just really bad for their companies but really bad for the world. For the most part, I think Steve Jobs was ok and the world is better because of him. It is ok to stomp on toes but not simply for the sake of stomping on them.
There will be some really good female CEOs. I predict all of them will have actually built their own company.
Fine, throw out the word 'asshole' and replace it with 'unlikeable'. The point is that men can be unlikable and still command respect. Women are much less likely to be met with that reaction.
To my (non native speaker) ears, "asshole" sounds less offensive because it's gender neutral. An asshole can be a man or a woman, but only a woman can be a bitch. So calling an aggressive or ruthless CEO "a bitch" sounds slightly more offensive and sexist to me. Maybe I'm wrong.
No one respects an asshole or a bitch if that is all they are. If you are one of these and great at what you do, people will often accept your character flaws. If you are an asshole and do not know anything, then you will soon end up with people who either have no other choice, or those actively trying to leave. Neither one of these will help you build a great company.
perhaps nature/evolution/biology has a lot to do with this, not just societal views.
people see an aggressive male and say "oh, that's just his nature" and the opposite for agressive women, "oh, what's wrong with her?". the converse is equally true: men who are overly submissive are considered to have "issues". testosterone makes males more aggressive as a gender, they are designed to fight and compete. i think blaming everything on cultural norms and sexism doesnt give enough credence to this.
i've always wondered why no one from "everyone is 100% equal" camp takes issue with male/female segregation in sports/olympics.
People at least pretend to respect aggressive men because they don't want to get beaten up. It's like at school where people are afraid to speak ill of the bullies. On some level I think we internalize this survival instinct.
Blaming it on biology is basically a creative way of giving up on the problem, though. A submissive man will always be a man with "issues" because of "biology" and "nature".
Amazing, given all we've achieved to move beyond the biology and nature we had for tens of thousands of years, that we're still incapable of seeing an aggressive woman as 'normal'.
men and women are not the same. they certainly deserve the same treatment, but no amount of legislation or arguing will change the fact that they are biologically and chemically different, their brains are wired differently through hormones, chemistry. yes, culture can change this wiring to some degree, but it will never make the sexes equivalent and interchangeable. no one is "blaming" biology. it is not an "creative" way to treat people differently. the differences are there and have been there for tens of thousands of years and will continue to be there for thousands of years. disregarding biology is no less harmful than "blaming" it.
That's a straw man opener, for sure. No-one is arguing that men and women are the same. What I am saying is that women and men are equally capable at being great business leaders. They are equally capable of assholes while doing so. But men are far more likely to be given a free pass on behaviour like that than women are.
There's nothing evolutionary about that. Someone's perception of you is not coded into your genetic pattern. It's cultural. A hundred years ago you could have easily claimed that women shouldn't have the vote because of tens of thousands of years of biological differences. What makes that argument any different to this one?
> Someone's perception of you is not coded into your genetic pattern
I agree. Though perception is not the same thing as caring about your perception. Being perceived as assholes (and enablers of child labor, pollution, etc) doesnt stop men from striving to be CEOs of huge international conglomerates. I do believe that there is a societal issue with appointing women as CEOs of existing enterprises (rather that women being CEOs/founders). This fear may be founded in "can this woman rise to the sufficient level of asshole necessary to always make shareholder-value-enhancing decisions?". maybe it is the higher morality of women (a good quality by anyone's standards) that acts as a glass ceiling in business.
> A hundred years ago you could have easily claimed that women shouldn't have the vote because of tens of thousands of years of biological differences. What makes that argument any different to this one?
no one is preventing women from giving up raising a family to dedicate themselves to business. i doubt that the disparity between male and female CEOs can solely be accounted for by oppression or the perception that "trying isnt worth it because i'm a woman"
> Blaming it on biology is basically a creative way of giving up on the problem, though
I think you're missing the point. If we acknowledge that there are differences then we can come to terms with the fact statistically men will always be more likely to be CEOs - that doesn't mean we should stop fighting sexism or whatever other issues we have culturally producing prejudice - but it does mean that we may not need to strive for some kind of ... statistical parity.
In another comment you say:
> What I am saying is that women and men are equally capable at being great business leaders
You have no way of knowing that. That's a pure guess on your part. We know that women and men have different brains on the biological and chemical level so, all things being equal, surely it would lead to a least SOME difference statistically on which gender ends up being CEO. The question after that is of degree and does our current gender ratio predominantly represent a biological or cultural phenomena.
Since we historically have a lot of different cultures, and all seem to produce significantly more male leaders than females on, I'd say the biological argument has a lot of weight. I could be wrong!
It's almost as though you have no idea that emergent effects and networks effects exist in complex systems, and interpersonal relations have no bearing on sociology.
I suppose you also believe that viability for US presidency is largely a genetic biological trait, since so many Bushes and other White Anglo-Saxons Protestants have gravitated toward it.
It's important to be a successful CEO. If you're Steve Jobs at Apple's height, you could sacrifice children during the weekly round-up and people would nod sagely and talk about how doing that is part of what makes such a great CEO.
Not sure. It is probably about delivering results. If you get these by being a dictator this reflects of cause on your personality even more than when you are just deflecting it on "the team".
I suspect this is an industry-specific thing -- I don't see a lot of public hate for Fortune 100 CEOs Marillyn Hewson or Phebe Novakovic, both leaders of companies much more significant than Yahoo.
You learn to just embrace the bitch label. It's the only way to get through it -- you're going to get called one whether you are or not, so you might as well own it and make it work for you. I'm actually a very nice person and treat my employees wonderfully but I've been told scare the shit out of certain people who don't know me very well. My reports have actually told me they love my reputation; they promote it so that 1) they get what need from other departments easier and 2) they don't have people fighting to get their jobs (I have by far the best department/division/employees).
despite you getting downvoted, there is some truth in this. but mostly at the very top of the food chain, where your sole accountability is to your shareholders which is expressed in terms of $$, nothing else.
Several psychological studies indicate that adjectives like "ambitious" are often perceived as positive when describing men but negative when describing women. That does make the female leader's role more challenging.
> it's difficult for a woman to step into any kind of leadership position and do the tough things without being perceived as a "bitch".
I disagree that leadership is about being a bitch or an asshole.
Yes, it's widely said that Steve Jobs was an asshole. But people "got" where he was coming from. He was a perfectionist. I'm pretty sure he didn't alienate all his friends.
In leadership you have to be able to take tough decisions; but it's not about being tough with other people all the time. You might have to be tough with someone occasionally, it's a tool you might need to use.
Take Martha Stewart for example. Tough bitch ? Successful CEO ?
>>Of course there are some drawbacks of being a female CEO. When you’re a woman in charge, you do have to work a bit more to get credibility and have people listen to you...
The way my company's CEO, who is also female, put it: "when you're a woman, people in business don't take you seriously until you are successful."
I'm a guy, but I see this phenomenon everyday when observing the way my female coworkers are treated by (male) managers. The good-looking ones have it worst, in my opinion: while their looks may give them an advantage in certain situations, they often have to work extra hard to get noticed, and when they do become successful, their success is attributed to their looks instead of their intelligence and hard work.
You think Gabe Newell got a lot of credit for being a studly dude? He still gets tons of crap for being overweight. This happens at far lower levels than Gabe.
I think it is interesting that GabeN build a company that caters to a demographic similar to himself, with a product that minimizes face to face human interaction. It leans away from all the negative biases he would face in business.
Also, Gabe is a founder. Most CEO types are MBA raiders who float from job to job pillaging companies.
Those are issues stemming from being a founder, and possibly your parents knowing your fall back plan either doesn't exist, or is to move back in with them.
Those are not issues stemming from your identity as a person. Other groups of people, in this case women, have issues where people are utterly dismissive simply because of their membership in that group.
The challenge this adds on top of normal founder challenges is orders of magnitude greater than any challenge added to founder challenges by being yet another white male founder.
That is just an empty claim, though. Is there any indication at all that it is the case?
Maybe some women CEOs feel they are not being taken serious because they are women. But if CEOs in general are not being taken serious until they are successful, how do those women determine that being a woman is the extra reason they are not being taken serious? And how did they get to be CEO in the first place? Somebody has to have believed in them?
People still often directly vocalize their sexism as such. Stating things like 'Its a good idea for a woman'. They probably don't often do it to the person who they are offending face but I have heard it about others and forwarded onto them in the past.
When people you trust inform you that the someone dismissed you for being a woman, then you can know pretty safely. You can keep defending your stance, although at this point I am dismissing you as a probable troll.
I'm sure people who dismiss women exist. But are they significant? People are being dismissed for all sorts of things. Wrong age, wrong taste, wrong education, wrong school, wrong accent, wrong religion and so on and so on. The question is always, are the jerks a significant enough fraction to have an impact. Women are the majority of the population, so they should have a sufficient supply of business partners. Even if all men would say they don't want to work with women, there would still be several billion women to do business with.
I'm a man, and I don't automatically get every job I apply for. I wonder why that is?
Both questions don't indicate a belief that somebody can't hack, just that it is less likely for that person to be a hacker. That doesn't imply anything about skill.
And CEOs are not usually hackers anyway.
Likewise, sexual interest doesn't indicate a low opinion of somebody's skills. Otherwise only stupid people would have sex.
If female CEOs are only taken serious once they are successful, how did they become CEO in the first place?
I'm not sure what anyone's parents have to do with anything related to anyone's startup, but if they do, that's a pretty freaking huge red flag right there. :)
>We need to start emphasizing the success of women CEOs
Why? I don't want to emphasize anything. Can these people leave us alone and stop telling everyone what they should be doing. Who do they think they are, I am so sick of this.
If you crop the quote like that, you miss the point, which is that if you're going to have a female-positive stance rather than an egalitarian one(I have the latter), you should at least emphasize the success rather than the womanliness.
This is so that you are talking about the potential for success regardless of being a woman, rather than the womanliness despite being successful, the latter construing it as though being a woman is incompatible with success.
So her title says "it doesn't change a thing" and then in the body she admits that there are some differences:
Of course there are some drawbacks of being a female CEO. When you’re a woman in charge, you do have to work a bit more to get credibility and have people listen to you; it might be harder to recruit developers and make them trust you; and you will end up going to a few sales meetings where the other person is more interested in you than in your product.
There are also some pretty good advantages. It’s sometimes easier to get press coverage, and sales can happen faster. People will usually be keener on lending a hand. And I’m not even talking about all the help I got from fellow female entrepreneurs, especially when I was trying to get things off the ground.
I agree with her general sentiment that being a CEO is hard, regardless of gender. I also agree with her agenda that women need more role models of what it looks like to be a successful woman. But I don't think this kind of dismissal of the issues women have is very helpful. Being a woman does change some things. Understanding that "it has its good points and bad points" is a much, much better message than saying "it isn't any different at all" which is what the title says.
Her point here was that its not necessarily harder being a girl ceo/ some things are different but it's a draw.
Her point was that these are minor details and that it doesn't change what makes being a ceo so difficult.
She wants to make it clear that being a woman ceo isn't some kind of amazing feat (though being a ceo in general is) and that she wants more woman to try it.
I think her point is that the differences are irrelevant in comparison of the (common) challenges leadership positions generate, so it's not helpful to overemphasize them.
She didn't emphasise it very strongly, in fact it was a very weak emphasis but she was saying that everyone has a different set of strengths and weaknesses. She might find it easier to get press attention as a woman but a guy could easily have a strength that makes up for this.
> But I don't think this kind of dismissal of the issues women have is very helpful
I think she knows better than you, unless you are a female CEO.
She made the point that sometimes when a woman is doing sales the customer can be more interested in her than the product. But historically, a lot of women in sales have tried to use sexuality to get the sale.
No, I am not a female CEO. I am female and have struggled a lot with the ways in which being female throws up barriers to some of my goals.
The fact that it wasn't perceived by her as a big deal does not prove she knows better than I do. Statistical outliers are not inherently more wise than others about the problems that your "average" person has.
> The fact that it wasn't perceived by her as a big deal does not prove she knows better than I do.
You've already said you don't agree with her on this point and yet again you don't say why.
> Statistical outliers are not inherently more wise than others about the problems that your "average" person has.
I'm sure that formerly, she was not a CEO, she was an "average" person. So she knows more about getting to CEO as a woman than you do. I'm not arguing that she has had the same experiences as you but I think it's a given that she is not implying that it is the same for all women.
You weren't previously asking me why I disagree with her.
If you are actually interested in a few of my thoughts on the subject, there are relevant posts on my personal blog that can be read. You could look for the tag "The Gray Zone" to get you started.
Sort of cleverly, she just used her gender as a means to tout her app in a national newspaper, while mentioning that being female makes it easier to get press.
Chance is far more interesting when the discussion is about things like "how to increase your luck surface area." Otherwise, it is kind of hand-wavy dismissal of success as "welp, they got lucky."
Yes I agree - we need to discuss those things that allow you to influence your probability of success. We don’t seem to discuss this as frequently as we discuss gender.
Well, I think for some folks, gender is one of the things influencing probability of success. When I write about it, I try to write about how one might get around the problems it creates. There is a low-ish level of interest in that around here.
We have the questions in the debate concerning demographic bias in business or power completely wrong. These articles should disturb us because they aren't about examining what demographic bias means but a rather they produce fluff pieces meant to distract from the issue by saying "see look, a woman can run a country/company and it's no different." The debate is framed in the context of the glass ceiling, if it exists and if there are barriers to entry. What the debate should be about is the glass floor and the group think that is the result of in homogenic environments.
We have way too many articles by women describe how the ceiling works or is broken and way too few from men that look at the problem of the glass floor along the lines of "i'm a man working in a mostly male power structure and here's how this structure creates adverse results." We are so used to accepting the latter we can hardly imagine its effect. Until the entire power structure of a institution mirrors that of the social demographic makeup there is really no reason to take these articles seriously.
This statement may come off polarizing, but the same applies to minorities.
As a black man, and a Jamaican, other black people and other Jamaicans don't need "black CEOs" to look up to. They just need other CEOs who happen to be black, and other successful entrepreneurs that also happen to be Jamaican.
It is for this reason that I don't support things like quotas. Make sure that X% of your executive ranks are female, or black or asian or any other "under-represented" minority. Quotas are bad policy.
The more people of minority origins that become successful is the more they will inspire others to do the same.
There is a reason so many young black men want to become basketball stars, and why so many Jamaicans are "running" (no pun intended) into athletics. It is because they have realized that they can excel in those fields because of the examples before them. Not that they are anyhow more advantaged in those fields. It is just that the glass ceiling is no longer there.
So Kudos to Ms. Collin for writing this article. Well said!
We need more female entrepreneurs with attitudes like this. Although awareness for equality issues is undoubtedly important, Collin hits the nail on the head by re-focusing on the undeniable truth: running a company is just plain hard. Sure, being female, minority, short, nontechnical, etc can all be drawbacks, but I'd argue that they all pale in comparison to the difficulty that is successfully running a sustainable company. Full disclosure: I am relatively young (20) male hacker of minority descent, and I used to use some of these factors as excuses but now I treat them as irrelevant. Those things simply don't matter to me (in context of running a company or building a product) because it's not really in my power (and not really my overarching mission) to change the culture of the valley and the rest of the tech world. Just my $0.02.
I know this doesn't really touch on the meat of her column, but I was kind of surprised that Mathilde uses "woman CEO" and "female CEO" interchangeably. Usually people have a strong preference for one or the other. (Personally, I prefer using adjectives as adjectives and nouns as nouns, and don't think there's much of a need to turn "woman" into an adjective.)
Technically and linguistically speaking, "female" is an adjective, and "woman" is a noun. You'd talk about a woman who is a CEO, or a female CEO. Some professions and niches, often in the sciences, use female and male as nouns: i.e., "the female of the species," or "the subject is a Caucasian male, 47." This latter usage is becoming increasingly common, to the point where the exclusively adjectival nature of "male" and "female" is being erased. Meanings and usage are pretty fluid over time.
Of course, words like woman, man, female, and male also have connotations above and beyond their technical parts of speech, such as the connotations Mathilde talks about.
Traditionally, as in decades ago, it was actually considered somewhat vulgar to use terms like "male" and "female" to refer to human beings. The term "woman CEO" would have been preferred for that reason. Somehow I like the aesthetic of "woman CEO" over "female CEO" for the same reason. It seems more dignified and humanistic.
Hence why I tend to use "female" and "male." Mankind is not separate from the animal kingdom. Although I suppose male human and female human are the least ambiguous.
Even these days, many people have a problem with "female". Some people with particularly unsavoury views of women have a particular tendency to use it.
In a weird way, I've always admired the German method of just smashing words together when they become commonly associated in compound phrases. It creates some long, ungainly mouthfuls. But at least you never have trouble parsing them in a sentence. :)
"linguistically speaking" words mean whatever native speakers use them to mean... the field of linguistics would be pretty boring if it were about writing down mostly-arbitrary rules for people to follow.
""linguistically speaking" words mean whatever native speakers use them to mean... the field of linguistics would be pretty boring if it were about writing down mostly-arbitrary rules for people to follow."
I'm not advocating "mostly-arbitrary rules for people to follow." Just pointing out the technical meanings of both terms. I also pointed out that these meanings are fluid and are changing. Obviously usage is subject to change, and if I came across as opposing that, I didn't mean to. I was just addressing the question implied in the parent comment.
Eh, adjectives can function as nouns sometimes (females, whites, although doing this sometimes creates an issue such as where it's preferred to say 'x people' instead of 'xes') and nouns tend to easily function as adjectives (laptop mouse, house key). Very malleable language. In French you'd have to say "mouse of the laptop" for example.
also, depending on the size of the company, i think women CEOs need to take on some atypically aggressive and assertive business characteristics that are unbecoming of either sex but are typically more acceptable in society for men to step into.
could a woman be the next Larry Ellison? certainly yes, but not without first taking on his asshole qualities. the aggressive characteristics that make him a great multi-$bn CEO also make him a pretty hated guy in many circles. there's a difference between business-respect and personal-respect, some people don't give a shit about the latter and will step on their partners' throats to get ahead.