Yet, the research by Catherine Tinsley, Raffini Professor of Management and director of the Georgetown University Women’s Leadership Institute, and Kate Purmal, senior industry fellow at the institute, found an emerging pathway to the C-suite that an increasing number of women may be using: corporate board service.
The question for women leaders is not if they will fail, but how they recover, according to Catherine Tinsley, professor at Georgetown University McDonough School of Business and executive director of the university's Women's Leadership Institute. She says too much emphasis is placed on preventing failure and not enough on acknowledging that it is going to happen.
An article by Cathy Tinsley, Raffini Family Professor of Management and director, Georgetown Women’s Leadership Institute and Emily Amanatullah, senior policy scholar: “Though general participation in the U.S. workforce has achieved gender equality in terms of men and women (women are exactly 50 percent of the non-farm U.S. workforce as of January 2019), we are far from parity within actual jobs.”
An article by Cathy Tinsley, Raffini Family Professor of Management at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business and the faculty director of the Georgetown University Women’s Leadership Institute: “The news about U.S. women’s presence in the C-suite — and especially the CEO job — has been pretty bleak. Nationwide, fewer than 5% of CEOs of public companies are women. In the Fortune 500, that number fell by 25% from 2017 to 2018, dipping from 32 (6.4%) to 24 (4.8%), before rising back in 2019.”
This doesn’t prove that board experience was the reason the women were hired as CEOs. But the researchers think there’s a strong case for correlation. “First, as board members these women get into the executive network, thus when companies are looking to create a candidate pool for an outside CEO appointment, these women’s names are more likely to be surfaced than if they had not been part of the board network,” Catherine H. Tinsley, a management professor at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business, tells Quartz. “Second, board service gives these women opportunities to show their skills and leadership abilities to people outside their own firm.”
As Catherine Tinsley and Robin Ely write in the Harvard Business Review, “on average, the sexes are far more similar in their inclinations, attitudes, and skills than popular opinion would have us believe. There are “sex differences in various settings, including the workplace—but those differences are not rooted in fixed gender traits. Rather, they stem from organizational structures, company practices, and patterns of interaction that position men and women differently, creating systematically different experiences for them.”
“All the personal information she put out there made Sandberg more likable and more trustworthy", said Catherine Tinsley, a professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. “People conflated this likability and trustworthiness, thinking she has their back, and actually what she has is the corporation’s back.””
Research shows there’s no huge difference in confidence levels between men and women. Yet “empowertising” is designed to lead women to believe otherwise. The more we discuss how much help women need, Tinsley says, the more workplaces perpetuate a system that keeps women feeling isolated and inferior to their male counterparts.
Three Georgetown University researchers – economists Adriana Kugler and Olga Ukhaneva and management professor Catherine Tinsley – wrote in a recent working paper that receiving low grades in a stereotypical male discipline where men already are overrepresented may present a potent combination of disincentives for women to continue their studies in that field.
In a recent paper titled “Gender Diversity on U.S. Corporate Boards: Are We Running in Place?” O’Reilly and coauthors Catherine Tinsley from Georgetown University, James Wade from George Washington University, and Brian Main from the University of Edinburgh analyzed archival board data from 3,000 American publicly traded companies over 10 years. After that analysis revealed that a woman is more likely to be appointed to another woman’s seat, while a man is more likely to be appointed to another man’s seat, the researchers replicated the effect in lab studies.
A big part of the challenge is organizing. Having already brought millions of women together, the Women’s March provides an opportunity. On International Women’s Day, its leaders organized boycotts, even forcing the closure of a few school districts to protest President Trump’s policies. Yet critics say it was a lost opportunity. “If you’re going to do a power move, you have to couple that with a clear demand,” said Catherine Tinsley, an expert in gender leadership at Georgetown University.
“A billion women will enter the workforce in the next decade. Think about how important confidence will be to their success,” said Dr. Catherine H. Tinsley, the Raffini Professor of Management at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business and Academic Director of the Georgetown University Women’s Leadership Institute. “Confident people are more likely to solve problems, be more innovative at work and work independently. Therefore, businesses have a real incentive to cultivate worker confidence.”
“All the personal information she put out there made Sandberg more likable and more trustworthy", said Catherine Tinsley, a professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. “People conflated this likability and trustworthiness, thinking she has their back, and actually what she has is the corporation’s back.””
Unfortunately, we are still underserving our female athletes, at least relative to their male counterparts. Despite participation progress, a stubborn gender gap persists in scholarship dollars, team operating budgets, coaching salaries, and even player salaries.
Tinsley and her co-authors describe how other studies also document this phenomenon in hiring, pay, and promotion decisions. Using ten times as many firms as an older study of Fortune 500 firms from 1990 to 1999, they conclude that “gender matching can be a mechanism by which people can attend to gender and not increase gender parity on corporate boards.”
Women’s aversion to competition explains about a 10th of the gender pay gap among high-ability professionals, a recent study of young MBAs found, not only because women opt for less-aggressive fields but because men may do better when negotiating bonuses.
Making boards more diverse—in terms of gender and other factors—is now such a common goal that you’d think companies must have worked out how to do it by now. But researchers from the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University have identified one big problem that stymies efforts to boost the ranks of female directors. It’s quite simple: women are more likely to be appointed to seats vacated by other women. When men step down, they are more likely to be replaced by men.