• male peers spend less time in grade
• male peers are promoted on potential, women are promoted on proven track record
• the tone of meetings is combative not collaborative
• the language of men is perceived as strong, women's language weak
• men's directive management style preferred, women's collaborative style wimpy

There are thousands of ways that men and women do work differently. Not right or wrong or good or bad, just different. But if you are a woman and a male senior executive is judging you there is a good chance he will judge you by his standards and you will be found wanting. How long do you fight if you have other options?

The percent of women in management in the US in 1995 was 48% in 2009 it was 51% -- parity and holding. The number of officer positions for women in US Fortune 500 Corporations in 1995 was 8.7% in 2009 it was 15.7%. But nothing has changed since 2002 when it was 15.7%. The same is true with board seats with 9.6% in 1995 and 15.2% in 2009 with 14.7% in 2005. http://www.catalyst.org/publication/206/women-in-us-management

This pipeline strategy is not working at the senior levels.

Let’s switch now and focus on pipeline leaks…..

While delivering many sessions this year to Executive teams, we’ve heard an interesting comment over and over again. As we begin our work with them, we typically ask for the gender representation of a group. More often than not, at these very senior levels, we find the women are represented in smaller numbers.

What’s been interesting is that when we ask for this information, the woman who is providing us with the gender ratio will often say something like “but she doesn’t count, she acts just like a man”. We’ve thought about this a lot and we think there are several possibilities that could be playing out here:

• Both men and women judge women by women’s rules. So, if a woman is leading in a way that men typically do, both men and women will notice that and it often will not seem right to them.
• Women operate under the Power Dead-Even Rule [where power is shared and no one is above or below in regard to power]. That is, women tend to disapprove when a woman exhibits more power and will often respond negatively toward a woman in a senior level position.
• Both men and women have a natural core of strengths. We know from the research that men and women tend to fall in the middle of the bell curve on certain tendencies and behaviors. Because there are two tails to every bell curve, not every man and every woman are represented in the middle of the bell curve. If this woman’s natural tendencies do not fall in the middle of the bell curve, she may behave in a way that is completely natural for her and that may not be appreciated by women who tend to fall more toward the middle of the bell curve.
• It is possible, however, that women in these senior positions, have learned to behave more like men in order to be successful inside the organizational culture [which defines what a leader looks/sounds like]. This means that the woman has had to exert an abundance of physiological energy into Flexing Her Style [the 2nd level of options we discuss in GenderSpeak]. This can be extremely difficult to do, let alone sustain over long periods of time.