Recently I read a short publication by McKinsey and Co. that looked into fortune 500 companies and “successful” women. Of the companies analyzed, only 12 met 3 out 4 of the criteria in their metric system (read it here). This is not unusual. We have all seen these types of statistics before — women in the C suite are a rarity today, but are they going to go extinct?
A bit of a dodo myself, I started out reaching for the top — dreaming of being a CEO, but then life began to change. I learned that I am interested in all sorts of things, not just working 24/7 to climb the corporate ladder so that I can spend 100% of my time working with men and pretending to like things like golf or what happened in the most recent sporting event. As it turns out, I am not alone. It seems that many gen-y women feel similar to myself (read it here).
So what is it that has changed? For me, it has been about integrating in a more relaxed culture and being exposed to the average worker. It is really nice to sleep in and wake up in a house full of people, chatting with them, making food, eating food, and doing nothing but building greater emotional connections with the people around me. If all I did was work, I would be isolated and would lack a strong emotional connection to the people and environment of which I am attempting to serve.
I look forward to working with women in my generation as well as current leaders to change the mentality of our culture so that women can make all sorts of different choices, but can still be heard. I also look forward to working with men in helping them to become better fathers who will be granted the opportunity to be at home with their children for at least some part of their careers.
What would you do? Do you think that this is a legitimate issues? How can we as a society change it?
