women in particular are absent from the upper echelons of the private sector, as noted in our Introduction. At this writing, only one of the twenty-two women at the helms of Fortune 500 companies is black, and only two black women—Mellody Hobson and Ursula Burns—serve as chief executives of publicly traded companies.42
Power eludes black women and white women today, we find, for reasons that owe much to their different histories and starting gates.
Black Women Want Power
Our data reveals black women to be nearly three times as likely as white (22 percent vs. 8 percent) to aspire to a powerful position with a prestigious title. Black women today draw strength and inspiration from a long line of matriarchs: women who prevailed as breadwinners, heads of household, and leaders in their churches, schools, and communities despite a relentless undertow of discrimination and economic hardship. “Our mothers had power, our grandmothers had power, we see what it can do,” says Ella Bell, founder and president of ASCENT: Leading Multicultural Women to the Top (a leadership development program), as well as an associate professor of Business Administration at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. “The reality is, the way we view gender, as it intersects with race and class—and you can’t look at it otherwise—gives us our understanding of who we are as women,” says Bell, whose book, Our Separate Ways, maps the personal and professional journeys of dozens of women in both communities. “As a result, what it means to be a woman, a feminist, in the black community is very different from what it means to be a woman in the white community. Rosa Parks is part of my lineage. Because black mothers raise their daughters to understand the shoulders we stand on, we have a different sense of who we are, what we can take on, and what we can survive.”
Part of black women’s interest in private-sector power can be explained by the fact that their mothers and grandmothers simply did not have access to it. As Geri Thomas points out, “you knew black women could be in charge. They ran schools, they were head nurses—in black schools and black hospitals.” Thomas’s mother was one of them: she had a college degree, but no opportunities to exercise it outside of education or nursing. “My mother had to be a teacher,” Thomas says. “That was all you could be, then. So my sister and I, we were going to grab ambition by the horns.”
With increased access to higher education in the seventies, says Bell, black women attained degrees in fields where their authority was guaranteed: in medicine, law, education, and accounting. Legally, with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, black women had to be provided equal access to employment opportunities across all industry sectors.43 “But just because the law said so didn’t mean behavior followed,” explains Thomas. Consciously or unconsciously, black women favored employment where they could be assured of job security. “We talked about getting hired by the private sector,” recalls Charlene Drew Jarvis, “but we also knew you could be terminated at any time for any reason. I remember thinking, ‘I never want to be subjected to that kind of uncertainty or unfairness.’ I did not want to be at the mercy of some white guy who had no respect for my intellect, or my contribution; who saw me as somebody who counts pencils. I wanted more control than that.”
Perhaps that explains why black women’s representation in the ranks of corporate America is a relatively recent phenomenon. According to talent specialists and corporate educators, they come with clear goals and intense commitment to achieving them. “They know what they want to do, and how they want to do it,” says Bell, who runs leadership development programs for women at several multinational companies. “The level of confidence you see in these women is because, compared to a generation ago, they have a better understanding of expectations, assumptions, and opportunities. They’re not afraid to bring more of themselves to the table, to share who they are and make known their experiences and perspectives.”
Portraits in Power: Melissa James
As early as high school, Melissa James, managing director and global head of loan products at Morgan Stanley, knew she wanted a career in business. By her sophomore year of college, she knew she wanted to go into finance. “Earning well was part of it,” she says.
But not because she’d grown up poor: quite the contrary. James came from a privileged household. Her father, a physician, had attended medical school in Switzerland; her mother had graduated from Fisk, a historically black college, before earning a PhD in anatomy and physiology from the University of Chicago. Even her grandparents (on her father’s side) had college degrees. James was enrolled in a private elementary school; she leveraged a specialized high school experience at Stuyvesant High School, a magnet school, to get into Yale University, and obtained an MBA from Harvard University.
But because she lived in the inner-city community where her father served mostly black patients, ranging from the working poor to the middle class, James was keenly aware of the disparities which existed between different socioeconomic classes. “Because many blacks didn’t have the economic safety net of their white counterparts, I learned early how important it was to be master of your own destiny,” says James. “I saw the value of entrepreneurship: that to accumulate real wealth, you needed to own and control the means of production. That is what I was in pursuit of.”
James also liked telling other people what to do. “I was bossy as a kid, and business was a place to be bossy,” she observes, laughing. Yet what hooked her when she got to Wall Street was finding that she’d landed among her own: “smart people with backgrounds like mine, liberal arts majors who were similar to my undergrad peers at Yale.” She loved working alongside bright, highly motivated, performance-oriented people. “You can make the world a better place by being in finance, but that’s not the only thing that drew me,” she says. “I saw myself being empowered, and being in a position to empower others.”
Today, James is one of the 75 Most Powerful Blacks on Wall Street.44 She oversees $70 billion in loan commitments, a business she helped establish for Morgan Stanley. She’s overseen many of the firm’s lucrative endeavors, particularly in debt capital markets, where she helped raise billions in capital for corporate clients. She’s also had a hand in the firm’s most complex transactions with General Electric Capital Corporation, DuPont, and Agere.
“I have to pinch myself sometimes,” says James, “because I’m living my dream. This is the vision I had for myself, and with the help from others along the way I’ve been able to live it and am very grateful.”
Our data echoes Bell’s observation about confidence: black women we surveyed are 25 percent more likely than white women to have both clear near-term (50 percent vs. 40 percent) and long-term (40 percent vs. 32 percent) career goals. They are also considerably more likely than white women (43 percent vs. 30 percent) to be confident that they can succeed in a position of power.
So it is all the more surprising, and dismaying, that despite their confidence, their ambition, and their credentials, many qualified black women fail to get traction on the steep road to the top—a situation alarmingly similar to the one that Geri Thomas described upon entering the white-collar professional workforce in 1970.
Ambitious, but Ambivalent
White women are more conflicted about pursuing and wielding power. They hunger for influence, we find, but believe they can have influence without the platform of formally recognized leadership. Leadership scares them. Asked whether they would accept an executive leadership position if it were offered tomorrow, 36 percent said no; 43 percent said they would accept it with reservations.
To be sure, both black and white women are aware that leadership will impose some heavy demands. Some 56 percent of white women and 52 percent of black women believe the burdens of leadership outweigh the rewards. Among the negatives that factor into their calculus is the fear that they will have no control over their schedule: 67 percent of white and 65 percent of black women say that needing to be available “anytime, anywhere” does not appeal
