Lady Business: The CEO numbers game; Japan’s med-school gaslighting
Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a weekly 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 thirty-eighth issue, published August 9, 2018.
Single-Digit Percentages
One in, one out. It’s hard not to do the math, when the math is so easy to do. It’s hard not to walk into a room and immediately notice the few other people who look like you. And, when one of those only people leaves--it’s hard not to count.
Indra Nooyi this week announced she is stepping down after 12 years running PepsiCo. Nooyi has generally been praised as an effective leader and a straight shooter despite some missteps (eg, “Lady Doritos”). She led Pepsi’s pivot towards healthier beverage and snack products, and her numbers are pretty impressive: Pepsi had $35 billion in revenue when she took over as CEO, and $63.5 billion in revenue last year.
So why is she leaving behind such a small cohort? Nooyi’s departure is the latest blow to the very narrow ranks of female CEOs, and the now-virtually non-existent ranks of minority women CEOs.
Women hold just 5 percent of CEO jobs at S&P 500 companies--as in, literally, just 25 seats out of 500. Even though women make up 45 percent of entry-level employees at these same companies, by the time it gets to the executive/senior level, we hold less than 27 percent of the jobs, according to Catalyst. And then so few of us make to the top job that Nooyi’s resignation sparked several thinkpieces about What It Means For Lady CEOs.
And then there’s this:
Nooyi’s exit thins the ranks of major U.S. companies led not only by women, but by minority women. After former chief executive Ursula Burns’s recent departure from Xerox, there are no African American women leading an S&P 500 company, and women from other racial or ethnic backgrounds are also extremely scarce in the corner office. In 2017, Geisha Williams became the first Latina chief executive of a Fortune 500 company, PG&E Corp.; Advanced Micro Devices is led by Lisa Su, who was born in Taiwan.
I know it’s somewhat reductive to discuss longtime, accomplished leaders like Nooyi for their rare status as vaginas in power (VIPs!), or vaginas of color in power ("VOCIPs"...? I'm gonna try to make it a thing!) but ... it's hard not to get caught up in the numbers game.
I'm not necessarily arguing that women make better leaders than men. (Though there's some evidence of that!) Or that every woman should be replaced by a woman. (Though wouldn’t it be nice if there were enough of us promoted to C-suite roles that we could even entertain that possibility?)
Nor am I arguing that these specific women are always paragons of leadership. This week Nooyi, who reportedly led efforts to disband a White House CEO council after the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville a year ago, celebrated her resignation announcement by … having dinner with the president and other former members of that council. Which is a decision that I just fail to understand as either a strategy move (You’re leaving! Let the new guy take the meeting if keeping the president happy seems like the right move for your company!) or on a basic “human who said she was 'heartbroken' by Charlottesville” level.
Kathy Warden, who’s on track to fill Nooyi’s seat as the 25th female CEO among the S&P 500, will do so by taking over defense contractor Northrup Grumman, which is no stranger to controversy and criticism. Or there’s new Land O'Lakes CEO Beth Ford, the first openly gay woman to lead a Fortune 500 company. It’s a milestone worth celebrating -- though, as my colleague Will Yakowicz points out, it’s would be easier to celebrate a win for diversity at a company that doesn’t use caricatures of a Native American “Indian maiden” to sell butter.
But then again, we’re not discussing the merits of all of the other CEOs among the S&P 500 -- those 475 men whose records rarely get put under the gender microscope, and whose careers and leadership decisions vary widely.
We’re just looking at the numbers. And the numbers, these days, still suck.
Paranoia, MD
“Gaslighting” is a great, useful word that’s become prevalent in some corners of the media, thanks in part to Lauren Duca’s Teen Vogue essay about Donald Trump’s lies to America. “To gaslight” means, essentially, to manipulate a sane person into thinking she’s crazy. (Charles Boyer, in the 1944 movie Gaslight, wants to institutionalize his wife, Ingrid Bergman. So he dims the lights on her--and tells her no one else can see the lamps flickering.)
Anyway, it’s a word that deserves wider usage in straight news stories. Like, say, when a top medical school tries to keep out women by telling them that they just aren’t smart enough:
Tokyo Medical University, a private institution consistently ranked among the country's best for clinical medicine, has been automatically lowering the entrance exam results of female applicants for the past decade, an attempt to keep the ratio of women in each class of students below 30 percent, the Yomiuri Shimbun [newspaper] reported.
… According to an unnamed source who spoke to the Yomiuri Shimbun, the school thought female students would eventually leave the medical profession to give birth and raise their children. “There was a silent understanding [to accept more male students] as one way to resolve the doctor shortage,” the source said, adding that the policy was a “necessary evil.”
Yes, not admitting or hiring any women is certainly one … innovative … way to avoid figuring out any sort of practical maternity leave policies. Why try to address widespread business realities when you could just rig the game and avoid dealing with them altogether?
Lady Bits:
--Interesting read from Eater about the cookie-cutter landscape that Manhattan’s Koreatown has increasingly become, due largely to the enormous rents (up to $3 million!! for a restaurant!!) charged by the “chaebol” Korean conglomerates who own most of the land there. (I also learned that “chaebol” literally means “rich class,” which has a nicely vulgar bluntness.)
--“I think to white people he looks Asian, but to Asian people he looks half-white.” I’m looking forward to the movie adaptation of Crazy Rich Asians, despite some of its bro!novelist tics. And I admit I was a little dismissive, initially, of the controversy over the casting of the male lead, a Singapore-Chinese character who’s being played by a half-Malaysian, half-white actor. But this interview with Jamie Chung and this thoughtful New York Times feature about the casting process helped me understand more of the nuances of the controversy, especially from Chung’s perspective. (The filmmakers had told Chung that she, as a Korean-American, wasn’t eligible to play a Chinese-American role in the movie -- and when a half-white guy got cast, she understandably saw a bit of a double standard.)
--My friend Joe reminds me of Zelda Fitzgerald, another woman gaslit by Ernest Hemingway and of course, by her famous husband, who tried to suppress the publication of the novel their life together inspired. In the parallel universe where I’m a literature professor, please sign up for my senior seminar: Great 20th Century Women, and the Literary Assholes They Loved.
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