Are Women Set Up to Fail?
I’m sure many of us read with interest the announcement of Carol Bartz as the new CEO of Yahoo! Carol lead a very successful growth and change effort at Autodesk and has now been brought into Yahoo! at a time when there is much needed strategic and leadership re-direction. Her track record certainly points to Carol being the right person for the job on both counts.
On the same day this news came out, there was a great article forwarded to me by Board of Advisor member Karen Appleton, VP of Bus Dev at box.net. The article, The Glass Cliff: Are Women Leaders Often Set Up to Fail? by Sylvia Ann Hewlett of Off-Ramps and On-Ramps
Related to women on boards, she references a recent work that disputes that when women are added to boards the financial performance of the company declines. Rather it appears that women are added to the boards when the share price is tumbling as a means of showing that something is being done. The women being last in are first to be blamed.
In the article, she references several studies including The Athena Factor
I’ve spoken with several women members of FWE&E who have specifically said they have seen this phenomenon of women not taking senior roles in organizations where they have seen the women before them fail. The general consensus was that for some reason the bar was higher for the women put in these positions and there was little mentorship and no room for error.
This is not to say, especially in these precarious economic times, that men don’t face the same hurdles. It just seems that when women are placed in these positions and fail, the cultural stereotypes come out about how women aren’t as effective leaders as men.
Have you had or seen similar situations? How do you feel about Carol’s chances of success at Yahoo?
