Successful women are made, not born

Barbara Black

There’s still mystery around why women aren’t successful in greater numbers. Despite the fact that they outnumber men as university students, the salary gap between men and women with higher education shows no sign of closing. There may be more women in mid-level management, but a woman CEO or prime minister is still newsworthy.

In 1998, management professor Terri Lituchy attended a conference workshop called From Polar Winds to Tropical Breezes that pondered why some women succeed in spite of the odds.

Eight of the academics felt so energized by the discussion that they continued working together after the conference. They conducted surveys and interviews in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Jamaica, Barbados, Mexico, the U.S.A. and Canada. The results are presented in a book called Successful Professional Women of the Americas (Edward Elgar publishers).

The researchers expected more cultural differences than they got. True, the Caribbean women shared the credit for their success with God, and the U.S. women were often stumped when asked to name a leader they admired (one named herself!).

However, the researchers were struck by how many of these women, regardless of their origin, cited their participatory style of management as key to their success. They didn’t see it as an abdication of responsibility, the way a male manager might.

“Women tend to credit the group,” Lituchy explained in an interview. The corollary is that they take personal responsibility for failure, perhaps too much so. “Men never blame themselves.”

Lituchy, whose field is cross-cultural management, has observed business people and academics at social gatherings. “The women try to get to know people. The men go after deals.”

The successful women in the study, regardless of their country, defined their success in broader terms than a man might. They included their family, if they had one.

The researchers expected that mentoring would be more significant than it turned out to be. Few of the successful women had true mentors or sponsors in the workplace. Many of them cited their families as a strong source of support, particularly their husbands and fathers. Education was a factor in their success, and in several cases, a privileged background.

Most of the women who were interviewed downplayed the role of their gender in their success in a negative or a positive way, but they often mentioned difficulties they encountered because they were women, so the researchers were aware that this was a subject on which the women themselves were ambiguous.

Lituchy pre-tested her survey on Concordia undergraduates and students in the MBA program, all of them women. The students’ results were markedly different from the results she got from mature women who fit the study’s definition of success.

The survey tested for certain qualities: self-efficacy (belief in one’s ability to perform), locus of control (the extent to which success and failure are contingent on one’s own ability), and need for achievement (a preference for challenging but achievable tasks, and a willingness to work harder than required). The younger women seemed to lack these qualities relative to the successful women.

That suggests to Lituchy that the qualities leading to success aren’t predetermined; they can be acquired by ambitious young women, and taught and encouraged by managers and business educators.

She hasn’t given up on mentoring, either. When she presented her findings to a group at McGill recently, discussion turned to how to improve mentoring for women faculty members at McGill and Concordia. She said teams of four (two mentors, two protégés) would seem to offer both individual attention and a hedge against sexual impropriety or harassment.