By Caroline Turner, author of Difference Works: Improving Retention, Productivity and Profitability through Inclusion

This is not news to anyone who frequents this site: women are still not proportionally represented at the upper levels of business. Women represent about half of entry-level employees and lower level management positions. But at each level up the corporate hierarchy, the percentage of women is lower.

According to Catalyst, in 2011 in the Fortune 500 women represented only 14.1% of executive officers, 7.5% of top earners and 3.2% of CEO’s. In law firms in 2010, Catalyst reports, women made up 45% of associates but only 19% of partners. These declining percentages form a pyramid: the “pyramid problem.”

As I climbed the corporate hierarchy to the C-level, I read a stack of books (many very good) designed to help women navigate the “male dominated” business world. From those books I learned, for example, that women don’t (and must in order to succeed) speak up, ask for what they want, toot their own horn, take risks, speak more confidently and take things less personally. In other words, they need to conform to masculine norms. A recent research report by Catalyst, sadly, concludes that, even when women do all these things, they still lag behind men.

I also learned (from those books and my personal experience) that women face the double bind: If women act too feminine, they aren’t seen as leaders; if they act too masculine, they aren’t likeable (and may be called the “B” word). To succeed, women must get it just right.

All this leads one to think of the pyramid problem as a woman’s problem that is theirs to fix.

That hasn’t worked.

This is more than a problem for women. It is a problem for business. The pyramid problem results in substantial, unnecessary costs for business and it prevents business from realizing the documented upsides of gender diversity. It’s time to shift the focus from how women need to change in order to succeed to how corporate culture can change in order to achieve gender diversity in leadership. That takes framing and talking about the issue differently.

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Contributed by Kate Buller, Executive Coach, The Executive Coaching Consultancy (London)

Resilience, or the ability to flex and bounce back from setbacks, is a central characteristic of business leadership and living full and challenging lives.  So what are some of the key psychological and physiological processes behind understanding and improving resilience?

Resilience in the face of significant challenge is an adaptive capacity. It is a process rather than a trait.  As human beings we’ve evolved to heal ourselves. It’s not only about self-confidence, as outward confidence can be disguising inner worries and anxieties. It’s more about optimism, emotional intelligence, adaptability, and keeping one’s head when under pressure.

The pace of change in organisations continues to accelerate. Coupled with this, studies such as one published in June by ForbesWoman and TheBump.com have found that 92% of working mothers felt overwhelmed by work, home and parenting responsibilities. Only about 15% of working parents now have a stay-at-home partner.

The rise of the dual career couple is here to stay, adding to the pressure on work, family life and relationships. We all feel squeezed. In the UK, for example, at any time around 20% of the British workforce reports being affected by stress, with 77% of these also reporting problems with relationships at home caused by stress at work.

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Contributed by Dr. Suzanne Doyle-Morris

Shhhh… there’s a secret that no one is talking about. The woman sitting at the next desk, your high-flying cousin, perhaps even you… is likely to earn more than your male partner. The trend for women to earn more than the men with whom they share their lives is increasingly prevalent, yet it’s a secret we don’t discuss. The statistics are similar in the US and UK with 20-25% of women outearning their male partners. This is not even including households that are headed by single mothers or professional women who live alone – who by default are the primary breadwinners. With the number of women leaving university now outpacing men, female breadwinning is a trend that is only going to grow.

Before writing Female Breadwinners: How They Make Relationships Work and Why They are the Future of the Modern Workforce, I began to notice how many of my coaching clients, like myself, were main earners for their families. Yet it’s a taboo topic many women avoid for fear of appearing disloyal to husbands or to salve his ego. Did this secrecy mean it wasn’t an issue for these women and the men in their lives? Far from it. As Annie, a documentary filmmaker said: ‘It’s the biggest discussion we don’t have. If we have a row about anything, money’s the one area we avoid. It’s just too problematic.’

Explaining why they avoid talking about her earnings compared to her husband’s, who is investing his time and savings in a start-up company, Annie says: ‘If you open up that can of worms, you can never go back. My way of dealing with it is to avoid bringing it up. I know if that if I forced the issue, about him contributing more with the children, for example, it could get ugly. If I looked at it like his or my money, we’d have a lot more trouble.” So as the number of female breadwinner rise, what are the challenges they face entering uncharted territory between the genders?

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Contributed by Karol Wasylyshyn, author of Behind the Executive Door: Unexpected lessons for Managing Your Boss and Career

When historians write about business in late 20th and early 21st century America, they will say it was a time of intense leadership scrutiny – not only of executives’ results but of how they achieved them. This focus on leadership behavior has been my life’s work.

Or, in other words, I’ve been in the right place at the right time to deliver on a distinctive value proposition.  Specifically, my integration of a business background and training in clinical psychology has enabled me to provide the behavioral guidance necessary for senior business leaders to thrive and win in a global business climate.

In my consulting experience, thriving and winning in a business climate that has become exponentially more complex and volatile is as much about effective leadership behavior as it is about smarts, industry knowledge, and classic leadership competencies such as strategic thinking and innovation management. Even a cursory examination of the flame-outs of well-known business leaders to include Carly Fiorina, Robert Nardelli, Al (“Chainsaw”) Dunlap, Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, Tony Hayward and Mark Hurd bear this out.

A few years ago I became intrigued by a couple of questions. First, Do the executives with whom I’ve worked fall into any particular behavior patterns? And second, If they did represent specific behavioral patterns (they did), how could this information be helpful to both them and the people who report to them?

Based on my analysis of 300 executive coaching cases, I identified three distinct behavioral patterns or leadership types that I named Remarkable, Perilous, and Toxic. Subsequent empirical research found these three types to be empirically distinct based on two commonly used psychological tests – one based on the Big Five Factor theory of personality and the other a measure of emotional intelligence.

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Contributed by Dana Theus, Founder of InPower Coaching

There’s no snappy research study to prove that “just being yourself” is every woman’s ticket to upper management, but I believe it’s true. I’m going to make a good argument for it in this article, and why – when your head hits the glass ceiling and “playing by the rules” isn’t working – tapping into your unique personal power is an awesome hammer.

There’s a lot of research coming out that paints a dismal picture of women’s chances of getting into top leadership posts. Here’s a small sampling:

• Leader stereotypes are masculine – so men are perceived as better leaders.
• Women are penetrating leadership in big companies at a glacially slow pace.
• The language of female leadership is less empowered than men’s, and we tend to self-censor more than men do.

This data, plus the ever present equal pay dilemma make it hard to find the silver lining in being a woman aspiring to leadership positions these days.

However, there is tons of evidence that women in leadership actually help companies perform better than those with fewer women up top.

• Four major studies have found that when organizations have more women in top leadership, they outperform those that don’t.
• Women’s presence in any group raises the group’s intelligence.
• Women in developing economies boost the whole country’s performance.

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