Lady Business: CEO firsts and farewells; Tech diversity and transparency
Hello, and welcome to Lady Business, a newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the 110th issue, published September 13, 2020.
CEO Corner
“I have to acknowledge that after 19 years, a lot of my identity is wrapped up in this company and in the [CEO] title. It helps a great deal that I’m not actually leaving…. But yeah, I’ll probably freak out at some point.”
In the last few weeks, I’ve written a lot about women taking and leaving CEO jobs at large companies. The biggest headline by far was this week’s news that Jane Fraser would become the next chief executive of Citigroup, the fourth-largest bank and 31st-largest company in the Fortune 500, in the process “shattering one of the most enduring glass ceilings in finance,” I wrote for Fortune. “Until now, no woman has ever run a major Wall Street bank—despite the ascendance of many qualified executives more than a decade ago.”
Fraser’s expected but still-unprecedented promotion was widely celebrated, with a relieved joy that I suspect anticipates the reaction if or when a woman finally does take over the Oval Office. (“It shouldn’t have taken so this long! There have been So! Many! Qualified! Candidates! But better late than never!”) And like whoever that future president will be, Fraser will carry the honor and the burden of being The First in addition to all the other expectations for running a huge entity trying to recover from multiple crises.
In the past month, I’ve spoken with two other women who have carried that burden for decades, as groundbreaking tech CEOs in another industry not known for its diversity, and who both recently decided to give it up: outgoing BlackLine CEO and founder Therese Tucker, who I profiled in 2017 as one of the only female founder-CEOs to take her tech company public, and former MetricStream CEO Shellye Archambeau, who’s written a new book about her experiences as one of the first Black women to run a tech company.
Both Tucker and Archambeau spent their careers being “unapologetically ambitious,” as the latter has titled her memoir, and neither is fully relinquishing power. Tucker will continue actively overseeing her company as executive chair, while Archambeau now serves on the boards of companies including Verizon, Nordstrom, and Okta.
They had very different reasons for leaving the CEO office, one of them tragic. (Archambeau’s description of her marriage, and her husband’s life-long support of her career, made me tear up.) And they had inevitably different experiences getting there in the first place: Tucker, who is white, faced some fierce sexism throughout her career and enduring assumptions about who gets to be a CEO, up to and including the time she got overlooked for her CFO in the Goldman Sachs elevator. Archambeau, who spent the first half of her career climbing the ranks at IBM but who gradually realized that she was hitting a ceiling there, also had to contend with corporate America’s entrenched if then-mostly-silent racism.
But they are both somewhat matter-of-fact about what has and hasn’t changed over the course of their CEO careers. Like the racial and gender diversity of the tech industry, where many of the biggest and most prominent Silicon Valley companies still employ single-digit percentages of Black and Latinx employees, and where women often account for less than a quarter of all technical roles. (Not that tech’s alone in these failings; big financial companies, including Citigroup, have also acknowledged some pretty big diversity gaps in pay, leadership, and employment.)
Here Tucker and Archambeau diverge. BlackLine still has yet to disclose its internal diversity statistics, something I first asked Tucker about in 2017, though the company says it has hired a third party consultant to work on benchmarks and recommendations. “I know I was not wildly as happy as I could have been on the gender” numbers, Tucker told me last month. “It’s tough. Right? Technology and sales—I mean, it’s just hard.”
Meanwhile Archambeau is in favor of these disclosures—and argues that companies should be praised for making them, no matter how bad the numbers initially look:
I think it's important to realize that we also need to be encouraging people. One of the things that frustrated me is that several years back, a number of companies in tech started publishing their diversity numbers, which I thought was a good step: “Hold us accountable, here are our numbers. This is our baseline.” And they got totally beat up for their numbers.
Now, they didn't publish the numbers saying, “We've been working for 10 years on this, here's our results.” What they said is, “This is now important. We're going to start working on this.” So if we keep beating people up for actually being vulnerable, and working to get better, we're encouraging people not to be transparent. We should definitely hold them accountable for progress now they've done it. But give them time. We also want to make sure that we are supporting the work that needs to be done to get to the outcomes.
Lady Bits
--"If we disagree about all of the other things, we should be able to agree that infants should have the opportunity for a fair start to life."
--"At that point Koppel looked down at his desk and half sputtered, half chuckled, kind of like a Victorian gentleman who’d just caught sight of a lady’s ankle.” There are many reasons to read this excellent, bittersweet profile of Vivian Stephens, the influential Black editor who founded the Romance Writers of America only to see herself, and most other writers and editors of color, slowly pushed out. But the most entertaining one might be the description of the time Ted Koppel tried to shame Stephens about creating a now-$1 billion industry and inadvertently wound up inviting her to question his sexual prowess on his national TV show.
--I enjoyed Kate Quinn’s The Alice Network, based on real-life secret agent Louise de Bettignies and the large spy network she ran in World War I German-occupied France, though it tested my pandemic-era tolerance for stressful fiction. (Yes, I chose to read a novel about espionage and being female during wartime occupation and the occasional Nazi; I’m not sure what else I was expecting!) But hey, look, yet another heroic real-life woman who fought and led other soldiers during those World Wars that were supposedly all fought by men.
--The New Yorker takes on the checkered history of Miss America, somehow avoids making even one passing Miss Congeniality reference.
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