Exiled in Guyville
Last week, I did something I wouldn’t and don’t normally do: commented on a corporate brand’s Facebook post. TBH, I flip-flopped over the decision, scrolling down, then up again, talking myself out of and back into what I generally feel is just adding to the noise.
The post was an innocuous enough thing, although most of the time they are anyway. You just never know what’s going to set someone off, returning with their pitchfork in hand, followed by cluelessly angry villagers.
Anyway. The post was from a very well-known global design agency, publicly congratulating three men who’d been promoted from high-paying leadership roles to even higher-paying leadership roles as a result of a creative organizational restructuring.
Well bully for them! But seriously, you’re going to go through a whole restructuring process and you honestly can’t turn up an opportunity to promote someone other than a white dude–no, THREE white dudes? I guess to their merit, this agency happens to have one (white) lady on its exec team who gets flouted around every time they need to make a comment about diversity.
This makes me mad, sure, but mostly I am just so effing bored by the design leadership boys club. I’m bored of design bros, I’m bored of consultant bros, I’m bored of chef bros, I’m bored of politician bros. Just ugh. Enough already.
Look, I’m not trying to manufacture rage here and I’m certainly not pointing out something we don’t already know and probably (if you’re reading this) agree with. Choir, you have been sufficiently preached to; echo chamber, I am shouting into you, waving my fist.
So what set me off in this particular instance? Maybe it’s the coincidental fact that I’d actually interviewed and been offered a role with this agency some years back. If I hadn’t turned this job down, might I have landed one of those promotions? Might I have shifted some of the balance of design leadership? Might I have increased my odds of moving into a prominent design leadership position elsewhere? As a matter of perspective, the guy who I’d have been replacing went on to become the head of design for Instagram, so I guess that’s how the cookie crumbles.
If you want to know why I turned down this obviously illustrious opportunity, it’s because the agency is notorious for its old school churn-and-burn vibe. Yeah, their work is instantly recognizable and they’re an awards-factory, but at the end of the day, that stuff just wasn’t and isn’t in line with my values.
I don’t have any regrets here. I went on to amazing roles with a children’s book publisher and a paradigm-shifting bank. I did ok. But what I can’t get over is how few non-white-dude peers I’ve had along my career journey. Like, almost none.
For whatever reasons (although let’s accept the glaring reality that motherhood is one of the most punishing), women seem to fall off the ladder on their way up to the ceiling:
A good workplace is one in which you can look around and see versions of yourself five years from now, or ten. But for women, this exercise in mirroring gets harder and harder as they push toward 40, and 50, and beyond — for the simple reason that older women with ambition don’t stick around. They dial back, drop out, start their own thing. They want more control, flexibility; they find themselves trapped in one more meeting listening to one more self-serving anecdote by one more male superior who feels no urgency to head on home, and they reach their limit. For many of even the most ambitious women, the grind of a conventional, straight-up trajectory feels unworkable, especially once they’re caring for children, too.
via The Cut, Why We Need Older Women in the Workplace
Even though the number has tripled by their accounts over the past several years, according to The 3% Movement, only 11% of creative directors in the United States are women. I can’t imagine the picture is less bleak abroad. When you're talking about women in technology, more than twice as many women are likely to quit than men.
And how about this nifty little bit of data from The Upshot, who in an update to 2015’s Glass Ceiling Index report that there are holistically fewer women CEO’s of Fortune 500 companies than just the men named John who occupy the same role.
What’s the resolution here? Millions of talented women are currently on and continuously ramping up pathways for leadership roles. Is the objective to get them to stay the course, to lean in as it were, hoping to secure a spot at the top? Even in the best of circumstances, it’s still pretty hard to be optimistic about those prospects. The best I can come up with so far is to opt out of the system myself and focus on amplifying the voices of diverse female creative leaders across an increasing number of communities, offering mentorship to younger women shaping their careers, and partnering with female collaborators to launch and lead our own ventures.
It’s worth the sacrifice of being congratulated on your promotion if you’re already the boss.