Ambition in Black + White. Melinda Marshall
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all of the bank’s lines of business.
Then came the acid test. Shortly after she arrived in HR, the bank announced it was freezing all hiring, and that there would be lay-offs in each department. Thomas braced for bad news. “I was last to come in, so when they said they’d be cutting, I assumed it would be me that would be the first to go,” she recalls. But when the dust settled—and despite the fact she hadn’t yet finished her degree—she still had her job. For the first time, Thomas says, it occurred to her that, despite working in an environment so white she had to walk outside to see another person of color, she had career prospects. Her opinion mattered; colleagues sought her out for it (“People would ask me what I thought, and I was silly enough to believe they wanted me to tell them,” she recalls. “And I would.”). Three years later, when the woman for whom she’d worked in HR started reporting to her, Thomas realized what those prospects were: management.
Certainly she felt herself capable. “I often assessed my supervisors and thought, ‘Seriously?’ I knew for sure I was smarter than a lot of people ahead of me. And I worked hard enough, so why wouldn’t I be running things? If I’m going to do it, why wouldn’t I be at the top? That’s how I approached it.”
And while she was under no illusion that her opportunities were equivalent to what was offered to her white peers, she saw a pathway to leadership open up for her. When Nation’s Bank (later rebranded as Bank of America) took over in the nineties, Thomas was invited to be on its first diversity council. In 2002, she was appointed to run its diversity and inclusion practice, and in 2009, she became Georgia market president, a position that tasked her with driving business integration opportunities across the state as well as overseeing corporate social responsibility. No one in HR had ever been asked to take on that role, but with her ties to the greater Atlanta community—Thomas sits on the boards of Councilors of the Carter Center and the Buckhead Coalition, and serves on the Board of Directors of the Atlanta Committee for Progress, the Georgia State University Foundation, Leadership Atlanta, and the Executive Leadership Council—no one else, as her sponsor pointed out, was nearly as qualified. “He said, ‘Geri, I’ve thought about this, I’ve talked with Ken Lewis, we’ve looked around, and you’re the only person really who could be market president.’” Thomas thought about it, and agreed. “If you’re going to have to do the work, you may as well have the role,” she remembers her husband telling her.
Looking back on her career today, Thomas takes pride in the fact that she succeeded on the basis of who she was. “I never wanted to be viewed as not authentic,” she says. “If people asked me what I thought, I’d tell them. I was bold, because I was willing to accept the consequences. Not everybody is.” She reflects a moment and then adds, “I did it on my terms. And at some point, my terms were okay with everybody else.”
Despite significant barriers to success, some black women pushed through to positions of national prominence. Shirley Chisholm, for example, made history when she was elected to Congress in 1968 and further demolished both racial and gender barriers when she announced her bid for presidency in 1972 under the auspices of the Feminist Party.29 Coretta Scott King, another trailblazer, kept the memory and mission of her husband, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., alive through her outspoken condemnation of the South African system of apartheid in the 1980s.30 Writers Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker garnered international acclaim with their unflinching portraits of black women and men; Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.31
It is no coincidence, however, that most of the leadership gains made by black women in the past three decades have been outside the corridors of corporate America. While black women today find themselves, as Rhimes noted, far better off than they were thirty years ago in terms of access to white-collar professions, within those professions they are still confronting challenges that slow their advancement and deny them empowerment. As a result, we find they’re even more stuck and stalled than white women: 17 percent of white women make it to the marzipan layer, that sticky band of management below leadership, but only 9 percent of black women do. Indeed, black women hold a mere 5 percent of managerial and professional positions, and less than 3 percent of the board seats of Fortune 500 companies.32 And just one black woman—Xerox CEO Ursula Burns—helms a Fortune 500 company.33 These numbers are all the more dismal in light of the fact that many Fortune 500 companies target high-potential women with initiatives aimed specifically at advancing them into leadership.
Black women’s career stall stems in part from the fact that antidiscrimination measures look at race and gender separately. As we have seen, diversity initiatives and activist groups frequently target women or people of color, but not black women, who are marginalized by both groups—an approach that race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw attributes to widespread failure to grasp the intersectionality of black women’s experience.34 “When African American women or any other women of color experience either compound or overlapping discrimination,” she observes, “the law…just [is] not there to come to their defense.”35 So while Fortune 500 companies congratulate themselves on having met their diversity quota with a (still meager) 17 percent of women directors, the vast majority of those women are white.36 As Crenshaw puts it, “Women of color are invisible in plain sight.”37
With findings from nationally representative survey data and scores of interviews, we intend to probe this intersection, and put an end to black women’s invisibility. It is our contention that feminism can only move forward for all women if first we recognize—and honor—the differences among women.
PART ONE: WOMEN AND POWER
Women have arrived in the C-suite, but not in numbers remotely representative of their workforce participation or leadership potential. In this section we show what power looks like when women wield it, with portraits of two remarkable leaders. Then we explore how power eludes black women and white women today, for reasons that owe much to their different histories and starting gates.
1
Power in Black and White
In 2000, as a newly anointed Henry Crown Fellow, Mellody Hobson attended a week-long seminar at the Aspen Institute in Colorado. It was a heady experience, she recalls, spending each day in the mountains discussing the works of Gandhi, Hobbes, and Locke with sixteen other extremely accomplished young leaders, particularly because the seminar was moderated by Skip Battle, the retired titan of Arthur Andersen Consulting and former CEO of online search engine Ask Jeeves. “Pearls of wisdom fell from his mouth,” she recalls. When the week came to a close, Battle turned to her. “Mellody, no doubt you will do good in our society,” he began. “But are you willing to put yourself in harm’s way?”
At thirty-one, Hobson had already done a lot of good. She was president of Ariel Investments, steering a firm with over $3.5 billion in assets under management. In her community, she served as director on the boards of the Chicago Public Library, the Library Foundation, and the Civic Federation of Chicago. She also sat on the boards of the Field Museum, the Chicago Public Education Fund, the 21st Century Charter School, the Women’s Business Development Council, Do Something, and St. Ignatius College Preparatory. And yet she knew exactly what Battle was getting at: was she daring to speak her truth, as a black woman—however uncomfortable it would make those around her? Was she capable of being that kind of leader?
In the ensuing years, Hobson seized every opportunity to speak out where she felt her truth might make a difference, using her board seats to advocate for membership to include more women and people of color, and using her platform as president of Ariel to help people grow their financial literacy. Wherever she went, whomever she was with, she elected to be “unapologetically black.”
Then, in May of 2014, presented with the opportunity to command the TED stage, Hobson delivered a fourteen-minute talk called “Color Blind or Color Brave?” She talked openly about her own challenges as a person of color, and then she urged listeners to talk openly about differences.
It was undeniably a risky truth to speak. Friends and colleagues alike had told her not to do it. “People will see you as militant,” they warned. “They’ll typecast you, make you ‘the race issue,’ see you as having your fist in the