Diversify. June Sarpong
had never even thought about whether or not boys, or indeed girls, grew up with any female business role models. I’ve always had a slew of male business icons I’ve looked up to and whose biographies I’ve devoured. As it stands, women have many professional male role models, but the reverse is seldom true.
I have no idea if Toby is right about Marissa Mayer growing up inspired by Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, but I do know that Mayer has a surprising female role model whose ‘against all odds’ story deeply resonates with her own – the 2002 Olympic Gold medallist Sarah Hughes. In a 2013 interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, Mayer likened her appointment as CEO of Yahoo to Hughes’s unlikely winning performance. ‘No one thought Sarah Hughes had a chance to win. Afterward, Hughes said that she didn’t quite know how she had done it and she wasn’t sure she would ever be able to repeat it. It was the routine of her life … I feel like Sarah Hughes. Actually, I still have her performance saved on my TiVo.’
At 37 and seven months pregnant, Mayer managed to pull off an incredibly impressive career move and leapfrog from vice president, location & local services at Google, to president and CEO of Yahoo. Many industry insiders were stunned, as there were numerous tech execs who were more senior and would have seemed more likely candidates for the job, but Mayer had something these didn’t: the power of the personal brand.
While at Google, Mayer carved out a stellar profile for herself as spokesperson for the company. She was also well known and respected outside of tech circles and able to explain complex technologies to the masses via the mainstream media. Undoubtedly her public profile would have played a role in helping the board of Yahoo in their decision. They would have been savvy enough to know that not only did Mayer have the ability to do the job, she also had the brand to sell the company to shareholders and potential advertisers. Even though Mayer’s tenure at Yahoo has been viewed as mixed, she undoubtedly brought something extra – something unquantifiable on a CV, but nonetheless impactful in real life.
Every female in a leadership position is a role model for a new generation of both men and women about what is possible. One such woman, who’s always been one of my favourite role models, is Clare Boothe Luce, a woman who carved out a phenomenal life for herself in mid-twentieth-century America, then very much a man’s world.
A Vanity Fair excerpt from the second volume of Sylvia Jukes Morris’s biography of Boothe Luce opens with: ‘What Clare Boothe Luce wanted, Clare Boothe Luce got: a man, a seat in Congress, an ambassadorship.’ All this was true, but Boothe Luce also managed to achieve so much more. She was able to soar to great heights in three distinctly different careers. Starting out as a journalist, she rose to become managing editor of Vanity Fair in 1930, aged 24, making her one of the youngest magazine editors in history. She then tried her hand at playwriting, penning the smash hit The Women in 1936, and later the screenplay for the movie Come to the Stable, which earned an Oscar nomination in 1949 for Best Story. After writing came a foray into politics, where she became one of the first women in Congress after running as a Republican and winning what was then a safe Democratic seat. She rounded out her political career as an ambassador to Italy for the Eisenhower administration.
Boothe Luce was very much aware of the double standards women of her day faced, and that her success or failure would affect not just her personally but the perception of female ability in general. ‘Because I am a woman, I must make unusual efforts to succeed. If I fail, no one will say, “She doesn’t have what it takes”; they will say, “Women don’t have what it takes.”’
Any woman who works knows that Boothe Luce’s words are as true today as they were when she uttered them over four decades ago. Even so, she never let the barriers she faced prevent her from succeeding. Instead, she used them as motivation to defy expectations for women of her day. Hers was a life well lived and a life that has inspired generations of women who have followed in her footsteps.
The American Dream seems to provide a better breeding ground for these kinds of entrepreneurial women. By default, American women benefit from this system more than their UK counterparts. British women are still so underutilized, especially once they become mothers, when we still have so much more to add to the British economy. In a 2012 speech about female economic empowerment, then Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg declared that the ‘absence of women from our economy is costing us dearly. If the United Kingdom had, for example, the same proportion of female entrepreneurs as the United States, we would see an extra £42 billion on GDP. In the words of the World Bank, gender equality is “smart economics”.’ He closed with, ‘Greater equality, a fairer society, a stronger economy too.’
Having lived in both the UK and US, I’ve seen for myself that this is an area US women excel in. And it’s not just about the job, it’s about what you stand for. Across the pond, being of service is very much expected – even in the case of Sheryl Sandberg herself. Becoming a fearless spokesperson for female professional empowerment has opened countless doors and brought all sorts of new opportunities to her and to others, and has also helped to establish Sandberg as one of the most admired women of our day. She and others like her have proved that when we leap over the barriers within as well as without ourselves, we can achieve incredible things. This new normal hasn’t yet filtered all the way up to influence the top job, as we know, but as Hillary Clinton said after her defeat in the 2016 presidential election: ‘The future is female.’
ACTION POINT: Take the Rejection Therapy Challenge for seven days.
DISCUSSION POINT: What if Steve Jobs had never tried again – and never gone back to Apple?
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