TBTNEWS COMMENTARYWhat's Blocking
Black Women
Special Correspondent: Sandra Finley
To understand how well professional black women are faring in the
workplace, you need only look at the abysmal statistics reported annually as the
“gap” between white and black women in corporate leadership. Black women working
to build their careers struggle to avoid being forced into the gap by
institutional practices that effectively suppress their career development. With
the exception of a rare few outliers, most are trapped in the lower regions of
the corporate pipelines, off the critical leadership grids for succession
planning.
For our newest survey, Daughters of the Dream:
Their Lack of Sponsors, Support and Promotions, the League of Black Women
asked 273 professional black women—nearly 75 percent of whom hold advanced
degrees—about their experiences as they try to cross the bridge to leadership
opportunity at work.
More than 72 percent told us the greatest barrier to advancement was
lack of sponsorship and access to senior leaders who can advocate for their
advancement. As a result, 35 percent said they hadn't been promoted in five
years or more.
Our survey reveals that the prospects for upward mobility for black
women are grim—and that is a real problem for them and the companies they work
for. Today, we still have just one black female CEO in the Fortune 500, Ursula Burns of
Xerox. Women of color make up just 3.2 percent of corporate boards. In 2012,
just 5.3 percent of black women were employed in managerial and professional
roles, while white men made up 70 percent of executive teams and 68 percent of
corporate directors.
Black women respond to the barriers by redoubling their efforts to
reach for leadership opportunity by pursuing advanced degrees more than ever,
and taking on the mounting debt that goes with them. However, lack of support
for advancement, especially in positions with profit and loss responsibility,
will impede ROI on
work experience and those degrees. That affects long-term wealth creation if
corporations continue to suppress the economic gains that would result from
removing institutional barriers to leadership opportunity for black women.
ACCESS TO
SPONSORSHIP: Interestingly, white men came in second (21.5 percent)
behind other black women (41 percent) as most supportive mentors of black women.
While mentorship is important, it is not the same as sponsorship—influential
senior corporate leaders who publicly endorse proteges. We need access to
sponsorship because it affords access to the protected privilege that powers the
way corporate America works. To move up to leadership opportunity, that must be
tapped.
Savvy CEOs will step up and send a warning to their executive
reports. “Here's your bottom line: Black women with advanced degrees, the
requisite number of years and manner of experience, are stuck in our pipelines
while others advance around them. Eventually, we will lose them. And the
business intelligence and competitive advantage that they distinctively
contribute here, every day, follows them out the door to our competition.”
For companies, it comes down to this: If diversity and inclusion are
such modern imperatives, why are black women so egregiously under-sponsored? It
is illogical to expect talented, highly educated black women to remain anyplace
that does not meet their leadership ambitions with deliberate talent development
investment, access to executive sponsorship and a transparent measurement for
success that supports the talent pool of succession planning.
The majority of our respondents said they do not share their career
plans with senior leaders. Black women, for their part, must eschew outdated
advice to keep our heads down, work hard and hope for the best. We are the best
of the best, and we require the challenge and reward of leadership opportunities
with critical assignments that will reveal that we are the women who have come
to make the decisions that shape our world.
(Sandra
Finley is President and CEO of the League of Black Women,
based in Olympia Fields, Il.)
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