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Power in Black and White

In 2000, as a newly anointed Henry Crown Fellow, Mellody Hobson attended a week-long seminar at the Aspen Institute in Colorado. It was a heady experience, she recalls, spending each day in the mountains discussing the works of Gandhi, Hobbes, and Locke with sixteen other extremely accomplished young leaders, particularly because the seminar was moderated by Skip Battle, the retired titan of Arthur Andersen Consulting and former CEO of online search engine Ask Jeeves. “Pearls of wisdom fell from his mouth,” she recalls. When the week came to a close, Battle turned to her. “Mellody, no doubt you will do good in our society,” he began. “But are you willing to put yourself in harm’s way?”

At thirty-one, Hobson had already done a lot of good. She was president of Ariel Investments, steering a firm with over $3.5 billion in assets under management. In her community, she served as director on the boards of the Chicago Public Library, the Library Foundation, and the Civic Federation of Chicago. She also sat on the boards of the Field Museum, the Chicago Public Education Fund, the 21st Century Charter School, the Women’s Business Development Council, Do Something, and St. Ignatius College Preparatory. And yet she knew exactly what Battle was getting at: was she daring to speak her truth, as a black woman—however uncomfortable it would make those around her? Was she capable of being that kind of leader?

In the ensuing years, Hobson seized every opportunity to speak out where she felt her truth might make a difference, using her board seats to advocate for membership to include more women and people of color, and using her platform as president of Ariel to help people grow their financial literacy. Wherever she went, whomever she was with, she elected to be “unapologetically black.”

Then, in May of 2014, presented with the opportunity to command the TED stage, Hobson delivered a fourteen-minute talk called “Color Blind or Color Brave?” She talked openly about her own challenges as a person of color, and then she urged listeners to talk openly about differences.

It was undeniably a risky truth to speak. Friends and colleagues alike had told her not to do it. “People will see you as militant,” they warned. “They’ll typecast you, make you ‘the race issue,’ see you as having your fist in the air—and that will hurt Ariel.” Moments before she took the TED stage in Vancouver, an exchange underscored the wisdom of their advice. A woman Hobson knew turned to her in the green room to ask what her speech was about. “Race,” Hobson told her. “Grace?” the woman responded, smiling. “What a great topic!” Hobson calmly repeated herself. The woman’s smile collapsed, and she looked away. “She didn’t know what to say,” says Hobson, recalling the tension in that room. “But I had something to say, and I was the perfect person to say it.”

Today, Hobson is known for many things in addition to her stewardship of Ariel Investments: her seat at the head of the table at DreamWorks Animation; her circle of friends, which includes Sheryl Sandberg; her marriage to filmmaker George Lucas; and her daughter, Everest. Vanity Fair profiled her in 2015; TIME magazine named her one of the World’s 100 Most Influential People.38 But what Hobson is most proud of, about herself as a leader, is choosing to speak out about, and model, being color brave. Because she delivered that inconvenient truth well before Michael Brown’s shooting in Ferguson, MO, and Freddie Gray’s death in Baltimore, MD, Hobson forced the nation to confront its own complicity in systemic discrimination and acts of unconscious bias.

“I didn’t know I was ‘early,’” she says, reflecting on her speech in Vancouver. “I said my truth about needing to seek out difference, challenge our own assumptions about others, because it’s worked really well for me. Some of the power I have today is related to living that truth.”

Putting oneself in harm’s way, she clarifies, doesn’t mean stepping in front of a metaphorical bus: when a client’s bias or bigotry makes her the person in the room unlikely to advance the interests of her team, she will step back to let someone else own the relationship. “There are times I know, I’m fully cognizant, that my presence may not work,” she says. But living her truth means acknowledging that she will make others uncomfortable and accepting that there may be negative consequences. “I’m okay with that,” she asserts. “It’s as Skip said: What are you willing to stand up for? What idea, what value, will you quit for? It starts with the individual. You have to make it happen. I’m supported by some amazing people here; my environment helps me stand up for what I believe. But I hold myself accountable.”

As editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan and an editorial director at Hearst, Joanna Coles is one of the most talked-about powerhouses in the media world. Her celebrity derives in part, certainly, from making herself highly visible on celebrity circuits. She’s taken lead roles on Project Runway, dispensing fashion advice in place of Tim Gunn. She’s joined Mika Brzezinski on Morning Joe to discuss executive presence as well as to kick off New York’s Fashion Week, where she was photographed alongside the runway, chatting up Miley Cyrus. In her platinum pixie cut, stiletto heels, and chic designer sheaths, Joanna Coles is as much a fashion doyenne as she is a media titan.

But Coles continues to make headlines because she has taken the most widely read women’s magazine in the world and used it as a platform to elevate women’s issues as they dominate politics, social policy, business, and the workplace. If under Helen Gurley Brown Cosmo’s mandate was to empower women in the bedroom, under Coles that mandate has expanded to empowering women in the boardroom, as well. She recruited Sheryl Sandberg to oversee and launch the magazine’s first-ever career guide, focusing on financial advice because Coles believes that nothing is more liberating for women than having the know-how to attain financial independence. She’s reallocated resources to do serious investigative reporting, offering readers insight on everything from how to press charges when raped to how to choose the most effective birth control.39 Painstakingly professional coverage of controversial topics has gotten Cosmo nominated, in turn, for prestigious industry awards; in 2014, Cosmo picked up its first-ever National Magazine Award, and in 2015, it made finalist for Magazine of the Year.40 Advertisers have taken notice: the September 2013 issue set a record in the magazine’s 128-year history. Readership at Cosmo, with one hundred million readers in more than one hundred countries worldwide, is also at an all-time high.

Coles’s business savvy and breathless schedule—this is a woman whose desk is positioned above a treadmill—have made her the subject of countless articles, from a New York Times glimpse of her home life (she’s married to screenwriter and human rights activist Peter Godwin, with whom she has two sons) to a Fast Company recounting of how she ascended to Hearst’s highest office. But what Coles wants to stress is how much she relishes the voice that her visibility and media platform afford her.

“I didn’t realize before I became editor-in-chief how much I was going to enjoy being in charge,” she says. “I’ve been so exhilarated creating direction for this magazine, seeing my ideas of what a magazine for women should be and watching it take shape over a number of issues—it’s thrilling. Of course it requires a lot of other people; I’m not doing this on my own. But I’m the person making the decisions. It’s my vision I’m putting out there. And it’s absolutely fabulous.”

To look at women like Hobson and Coles, one might conclude that, despite their different starting gates, black women and white have finally arrived.

These women are not simply lining corridors of corporate America, lending support to those in power. Rather, they occupy the C-suite’s corner office. They’re at the top of their respective professions, widely recognized for their achievement, amply rewarded for their acumen. Each has embraced leadership, shouldering its responsibilities both on the job and outside in the wider community. Each has enjoyed career success that has enriched, rather than impoverished, her personal life. And each has chosen to wield her power for good, driving change for an entire generation of women both black and white.

In many ways, they embody the feminist ideal. They exercise ably all of the choices that women before them fought hard for decades to bestow.

But our research reveals that they are also, lamentably, the exception among exceptional women. Ambitious, capable women today do not inhabit the C-suite in numbers anywhere near parity with ambitious, capable men: women constitute a mere 4.6 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs; only 14.6 percent hold executive officer positions.41 Black women in particular are absent from the upper echelons of the private sector, as noted in our Introduction. At this writing, only one of the twenty-two women at the helms of Fortune 500 companies is black, and only two black women—Mellody Hobson and Ursula Burns—serve as chief executives of publicly traded companies.42

Power eludes black women and white women today, we find, for reasons that owe much to their different histories and starting gates.

Black Women Want Power

Our data reveals black women to be nearly three times as likely as white (22 percent vs. 8 percent) to aspire to a powerful position with a prestigious title. Black women today draw strength and inspiration from a long line of matriarchs: women who prevailed as breadwinners, heads of household, and leaders in their churches, schools, and communities despite a relentless undertow of discrimination and economic hardship. “Our mothers had power, our grandmothers had power, we see what it can do,” says Ella Bell, founder and president of ASCENT: Leading Multicultural Women to the Top (a leadership development program), as well as an associate professor of Business Administration at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. “The reality is, the way we view gender, as it intersects with race and class—and you can’t look at it otherwise—gives us our understanding of who we are as women,” says Bell, whose book, Our Separate Ways, maps the personal and professional journeys of dozens of women in both communities. “As a result, what it means to be a woman, a feminist, in the black community is very different from what it means to be a woman in the white community. Rosa Parks is part of my lineage. Because black mothers raise their daughters to understand the shoulders we stand on, we have a different sense of who we are, what we can take on, and what we can survive.”

Part of black women’s interest in private-sector power can be explained by the fact that their mothers and grandmothers simply did not have access to it. As Geri Thomas points out, “you knew black women could be in charge. They ran schools, they were head nurses—in black schools and black hospitals.” Thomas’s mother was one of them: she had a college degree, but no opportunities to exercise it outside of education or nursing. “My mother had to be a teacher,” Thomas says. “That was all you could be, then. So my sister and I, we were going to grab ambition by the horns.”

With increased access to higher education in the seventies, says Bell, black women attained degrees in fields where their authority was guaranteed: in medicine, law, education, and accounting. Legally, with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, black women had to be provided equal access to employment opportunities across all industry sectors.43 “But just because the law said so didn’t mean behavior followed,” explains Thomas. Consciously or unconsciously, black women favored employment where they could be assured of job security. “We talked about getting hired by the private sector,” recalls Charlene Drew Jarvis, “but we also knew you could be terminated at any time for any reason. I remember thinking, ‘I never want to be subjected to that kind of uncertainty or unfairness.’ I did not want to be at the mercy of some white guy who had no respect for my intellect, or my contribution; who saw me as somebody who counts pencils. I wanted more control than that.”

Perhaps that explains why black women’s representation in the ranks of corporate America is a relatively recent phenomenon. According to talent specialists and corporate educators, they come with clear goals and intense commitment to achieving them. “They know what they want to do, and how they want to do it,” says Bell, who runs leadership development programs for women at several multinational companies. “The level of confidence you see in these women is because, compared to a generation ago, they have a better understanding of expectations, assumptions, and opportunities. They’re not afraid to bring more of themselves to the table, to share who they are and make known their experiences and perspectives.”

Portraits in Power: Melissa James

As early as high school, Melissa James, managing director and global head of loan products at Morgan Stanley, knew she wanted a career in business. By her sophomore year of college, she knew she wanted to go into finance. “Earning well was part of it,” she says.

But not because she’d grown up poor: quite the contrary. James came from a privileged household. Her father, a physician, had attended medical school in Switzerland; her mother had graduated from Fisk, a historically black college, before earning a PhD in anatomy and physiology from the University of Chicago. Even her grandparents (on her father’s side) had college degrees. James was enrolled in a private elementary school; she leveraged a specialized high school experience at Stuyvesant High School, a magnet school, to get into Yale University, and obtained an MBA from Harvard University.

But because she lived in the inner-city community where her father served mostly black patients, ranging from the working poor to the middle class, James was keenly aware of the disparities which existed between different socioeconomic classes. “Because many blacks didn’t have the economic safety net of their white counterparts, I learned early how important it was to be master of your own destiny,” says James. “I saw the value of entrepreneurship: that to accumulate real wealth, you needed to own and control the means of production. That is what I was in pursuit of.”

James also liked telling other people what to do. “I was bossy as a kid, and business was a place to be bossy,” she observes, laughing. Yet what hooked her when she got to Wall Street was finding that she’d landed among her own: “smart people with backgrounds like mine, liberal arts majors who were similar to my undergrad peers at Yale.” She loved working alongside bright, highly motivated, performance-oriented people. “You can make the world a better place by being in finance, but that’s not the only thing that drew me,” she says. “I saw myself being empowered, and being in a position to empower others.”

Today, James is one of the 75 Most Powerful Blacks on Wall Street.44 She oversees $70 billion in loan commitments, a business she helped establish for Morgan Stanley. She’s overseen many of the firm’s lucrative endeavors, particularly in debt capital markets, where she helped raise billions in capital for corporate clients. She’s also had a hand in the firm’s most complex transactions with General Electric Capital Corporation, DuPont, and Agere.

“I have to pinch myself sometimes,” says James, “because I’m living my dream. This is the vision I had for myself, and with the help from others along the way I’ve been able to live it and am very grateful.”

Our data echoes Bell’s observation about confidence: black women we surveyed are 25 percent more likely than white women to have both clear near-term (50 percent vs. 40 percent) and long-term (40 percent vs. 32 percent) career goals. They are also considerably more likely than white women (43 percent vs. 30 percent) to be confident that they can succeed in a position of power.

So it is all the more surprising, and dismaying, that despite their confidence, their ambition, and their credentials, many qualified black women fail to get traction on the steep road to the top—a situation alarmingly similar to the one that Geri Thomas described upon entering the white-collar professional workforce in 1970.

Ambitious, but Ambivalent

White women are more conflicted about pursuing and wielding power. They hunger for influence, we find, but believe they can have influence without the platform of formally recognized leadership. Leadership scares them. Asked whether they would accept an executive leadership position if it were offered tomorrow, 36 percent said no; 43 percent said they would accept it with reservations.

To be sure, both black and white women are aware that leadership will impose some heavy demands. Some 56 percent of white women and 52 percent of black women believe the burdens of leadership outweigh the rewards. Among the negatives that factor into their calculus is the fear that they will have no control over their schedule: 67 percent of white and 65 percent of black women say that needing to be available “anytime, anywhere” does not appeal to them when considering executive leadership positions.

The difference is, black women push ahead in their careers regardless of concerns about balancing all responsibilities. They’re clear-eyed about the burdens; they’re just not conflicted about wanting power. Whereas white women, having assessed the burdens, grow ambivalent—and rein in their ambition.

Such ambivalence toward power seems likewise rooted in history. White women today struggle to shed the burden of gender-role expectations attendant on their socioeconomic privilege—privilege that for centuries situated white women outside the paid labor force as homemakers and helpmates. The domestic roles that Friedan found so oppressive in 1968 continue to constrict them: acquiring new roles in the workforce hasn’t relieved them of the roles assigned at birth, but rather pitched them into an impossible bind where excelling at one means perforce failing at the other. The work-life conflict hasn’t abated for white women, despite declining birthrates and mounting wage-earning pressures. A stunning 35 percent of white women age forty and over in our sample do not have children. Fully 61 percent of white women in our sample that are married or living with a partner earn at least as much as their partners or spouses do. And yet white professional women, despite their fierce ambition (some 81 percent consider themselves ambitious), appear ambitious for something other than power. Despite the fact that we see young women starting out their careers intent on attaining positions of upper management, this intent is not matched by their older counterparts. White women between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-four are twice as likely as white women between the ages of thirty-five and fifty to say they aspire to a powerful position with a prestigious title.

And thus we see, half a century after women marched on Washington demanding equal rights, men and women with equal leadership potential arriving at starkly different destinations mid- to late-career. Men arrive in the executive suite, while qualified women continue to tour middle management. The numbers tell the story: women in the US hold less than 15 percent of Fortune 500 executive positions.45

This skewed outcome, as talent specialists well know, exacts an insupportable toll on both women and the companies that employ them. Women who have invested in their education and professional development—such as the 36 percent of US women and 32 percent of UK women on course to acquire an MBA or industry-relevant tertiary degree—fail to reap the dividends in terms of fulfilled potential or lucrative position.46 Employers that have invested considerable sums developing women for leadership roles are in danger of seeing their investment go out the door, possibly never to return, or failing to deliver anticipated returns in the form of a more diversified C-suite or boardroom. Companies whose leadership remains homogeneous, as the Center for Talent Innovation (CTI)’s 2013 innovation research shows, lose a critical competitive edge: they’re less likely to elicit market-worthy ideas, less likely to green-light them, and less likely to increase market share or grow their global footprint.47

Thus we find ourselves at an impasse unimaginable to our feminist forebears: exceptional women stand at the threshold to power either because they’re not invited to cross it or because they’re afraid to. What is to be done? How might white women come to embrace leadership as the means to liberation? How might black women shrug off the mantle of invisibility that keeps them from claiming the roles they’re prepared to fill?

In the next section, we’ll explore what exactly is holding women back and, having exposed those tripwires, map ways for women to leap over them.