Visible Leadership
Given the benefits and drawbacks of women’s altered work lives during the pandemic, what can (and should) the future look like? Elena Siegel, ’10, is based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and works in social sustainability as a member of the UAE Global Council for Sustainable Development and a partner at leading global strategy consultancy Kearney.
Siegel works with companies and governments across industries to solve critical strategic issues. She notes that when you encourage companies to make public commitments around gender equality in a formal, government-driven way, they’re more likely to fully follow through. Encouraging this “has been a powerful tool the UAE has leveraged to advance gender equality and promote women into senior roles of influence,” Siegel says. “It’s one of the things they’re doing particularly well.”
Globally, there needs to be more effort put into getting women into senior, prominent roles, she argues. “You still have to create channels for women to move into positions of influence—board positions, speaker appointments, government roles. You have to find opportunities for women to rise without it simply being about quotas, because as we see in the research, quotas don’t work.” To actually advance women in the workplace, it will require more than just balancing the numbers.
“If you’ve never seen a woman CEO, you don’t understand women can be CEOs,” says Winfrey. “If you’ve never seen a woman of color in a leadership position, you don’t know it exists. When I joined Athena, one of the statistics that [founder and CEO] Coco Brown shared was, ‘There are 5,000 CEOs in San Francisco and only 250 women.’ It was like, ‘We have to change this.’”
First, Athena focused on helping women land board roles. “But,” Winfrey says, “we ran into, ‘There aren’t enough women who are board ready.’ Well, why is that? It’s because you need to have been in a C-suite. And then the boards would get into cultural fit, and cultural fit always seems to favor people just like you.”
It’s not all bad news, though, Winfrey says. “Women are still underrepresented, but we’re not zero.” Visibility is increasing—but there’s still a lot to do.