38 TIMEOctober 23, 2017
Ariel
Investments
president
Mellody
Hobson
onstage at
Fortune’s
Most
Powerful
Women
Summitbefore the ‘other’ label is abandoned
and each member is valued for
him- or herself.”
Getting to that 30% organically has
proved all but impossible for women
at high levels in most industries, from
Silicon Valley to Hollywood. As Reshma
Saujani, CEO and founder of Girls Who
Code, put it at a panel on inclusion,
she has come to realize that “people
don’t give up power easily.” And at a
dinner, Canada’s Prime Minister Justin
Trudeau talked about the push he and
the government of Canada are making
to get more women in
the political pipeline. He
famously jump-started
equality by making his
Cabinet 50% women
when he took office two
years ago.
Women of color
have it doubly hard.
Mellody Hobson, presi-
dent of Ariel Invest-
ments, pointed out that
most diversity advance-
ments have benefited
white women. And in
a poignant moment, Hobson’s fellow
panelist Thasunda Duckett, CEO of
Consumer Banking at JPMorgan Chase,
challenged the audience of mainly white
executives to step up on behalf of women
of color: “What we need from all of you
is to commit that this is a sisterhood. Be-
cause there’s not enough of us up here.”
One place where women seem to
have reached a tipping point is sexual
harassment and assault. A few brave
women stepped out to accuse Harvey
Weinstein of bullying young female
actors for sexual favors, and then the
floodgates opened as they have in other
recent cases where dozens of women
have come forward to back up their
sisters. As a result, famous men who’ve
been rumored to be sexual predators for
years have finally been called to account
for their behavior. It’s hard to know
what’s changed or just what happened to
reach critical mass now. But we can only
hope that there’s no going back. □IF WOMEN RAN THE COUNTRY, THE LEADERSHIP
would probably look like the crowd atFortune’s annual
Most Powerful Women Summit. The usual male-female
ratio is reversed. For three days, you can visit a parallel
universe where the high-level leaders in every conceivable
field are women—onstage, in the audience, at the hotel bar.
Gone is the lone female general or CEO in a group shot of
guys in suits; instead she’s just one of 300
elite women in the room. It’s a normalization
of female power that’s so unusual, it’s a
bit startling.
In this world, the senior Senator from
Minnesota, Amy Klobuchar, would probably
be President. She opened the summit with a
fierce and funny keynote about equality and
the importance of women’s voices, prompting
more than a little speculation that she might
really run for the top job. She jokes that
people often think she works for the other
Senator from Minnesota, Al Franken. As she
points out, she’s still not what we think a
Senator looks like. Fewer than 50 women have
been elected to the Senate in U.S. history.
Her talk was a reminder that outside the Washington hotel
where the summit was held, women are losing the numbers
game. A lot of the attendees were the first and only women in
the upper echelons of their professions. Just 6% ofFortune 500
companies are run by women.
THIS IMBALANCE IS A SIGNthat we have not reached a tipping
point that changes the power dynamic. Nilofer Merchant, a
former tech CEO and the author ofThe Power of Onlyness,
explains it this way: “When you are less than 15% of a dominant
majority group, it’s harder to voice your own ideas. There’s
tremendous pressure to assimilate for your own survival
rather than risking your place in the group by challenging the
majority.” This is understandable: in the hierarchy of needs,
belonging is just after food and shelter.
And if you’re one of very few women, or people of color,
Merchant says you may feel that you can’t always be the one
speaking for women or Muslims or African Americans or
whatever makes you different. You’re just more scrutinized,
and that can constrain your ability to be seen as an individual
with your own ideas. Merchant says there’s a critical mass
at which point this dynamic changes: “Research has shown
that at least 30% of a group has to consist of nonconformists
The tipping point:
When do female leaders
become the norm?
By Susanna Schrobsdorff
The ViewMost Powerful Women
STUART ISETT FOR FORTUNE MOST POWERFUL WOMEN