Are Successful Women Intimidating?
Or…Why Do Successful Women Intimidate You?
According to Cornell University’s Susan Fleming, senior lecturer at the school of Hotel Administration, women make up just 4.6 percent of the S&P 500’s CEOs. Yet, in the US. Today, women make up just under 50 percent of the US workforce.
Why might this be? Well, again, according to Fleming, a female leader is imagined as “strong and authoritative,” she knows her stuff, holds her ground and speaks her mind And yet while she does that, she must also be perceived as gentle, supportive and kind, communal, even sweet. All of those things are the expectations of what an appropriate female leader should be.
I’m a woman who has worked in the business and technology spheres for nearly two decades now, and I can assure you, those traits are nearly impossible to embody simultaneously, while the failure to do so triggers negative reactions for many women leaders. These inconsistencies amount to prejudice across the workforce, primarily against women.
In the Victorian age, men and women had specific roles to play. It was a patriarchal society and women were certainly not supposed to be educated outside of the home. It was a man’s world, after all. Women were expected to align with feminine values like cooking and cleaning, childrearing and sewing. In fact, many of our…
