Gramscian advocates run aground on the shoals of real data

From Research: How Female CEOs Actually Get to the Top by Sarah Dillard and Vanessa Lipschitz. Some quite interesting research that buttresses some work I have done.

The author's explore two questions.

First. Standard career advice to young women in the corporate world is fairly anodyne.

Ambitious young women hoping to run a major business someday are often advised to take a particular career path: get an undergraduate degree from the most prestigious college you can, an MBA from a selective business school, then land a job at a top consulting firm or investment bank. From there, move between companies as you hopscotch your way into bigger roles and more responsibility.

That’s what we were told as undergraduates, and later on as students at the Harvard Business School and the Harvard Kennedy School. It’s what Meg Whitman did, more or less, and it’s what Sally Blount, dean of the Kellogg School of Management and the only woman running a top-ten business school, recently recommended: “If we want our best and brightest young women to become great leaders…we have to convince more of them that … they should be going for the big jobs,” which for her meant “the most competitive business tracks, like investment banking and management consulting.”

Admirably wanting to know if the theoretical advice matched the empirical reality, the authors looked at the careers of the 24 women who currently lead one of the Fortune 500 companies.

One of the arguments I have been making over the years is that most advocates (race, gender, class, etc.) significantly underestimate the role that continuity, volume, and adaptability play in determining who emerges at the top end of the performance pyramid (in business, art, academia, law, sport, etc.). Talent, motivation and circumstance play important roles but usually are matched or outweighed by continuous years of intense effort. All things being equal in terms of talent, motivation and circumstance, the individual who puts in twice the number of hours over a fixed duration of time, performs better than the person having spent less time. Part of this is obviously a function of practice makes perfect (volume of time). Part of it is a function experience (duration of time): in other words, you are more likely to deal with more variation over a long period of time than a short. The more variation you are accustomed to dealing with, the more likely you are to advance.

In most fields, women constitute between 15-30% of the top performers and it is strongly correlated with volume and duration of time. The primary cause of reduced time and shorter durations is maternity.

This hypothesis of performance is borne out by the research.

Most women running Fortune 500 companies did not immediately hop on a “competitive business track.” Only three had a job at a consulting firm or bank right out of college. A larger share of the female CEOs—over 20%—took jobs right out of school at the companies they now run. These weren’t glamorous jobs. Mary Barra, now the CEO of General Motors, started out with the company as college co-op student. Kathleen Mazzearella started out as a customer service representative at Greybar, the company she would eventually become the CEO of more than 30 years later. All told, over 70 percent of the 24 CEOs spent more than ten years at the company they now run, becoming long-term insiders before becoming CEO. This includes Heather Bresch at Mylan, Gracia Martore at Gannett, and Debra Reed at Sempra Energy.

Even those who weren’t promoted as long-term insiders often worked their way up a particular corporate ladder, advancing over decades at a single company and later making a lateral move into the CEO role at another company. This was the experience of Patricia Woertz, CEO of Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), who built her career over 29 years at Chevron. And it was the experience of Sheri McCoy, who became CEO of Avon after being passed over for the CEO role at Johnson & Johnson, where she worked for 30 years.

The consistent theme in the data is that steady focus wins the day. The median long stint for these women CEOs is 23 years spent at a single company in one stretch before becoming the CEO.

What is the mean male CEO duration?

To understand whether this was the norm, we pulled a random sample of their male Fortune 500 CEO counterparts. For the men in the sample, the median long stint is 15 years. This means that for women, the long climb is over 50% longer than for their male peers. Moreover, 71% of the female CEOs were promoted as long-term insiders versus only 48% of the male CEOs. This doesn’t leave a lot of time for hopscotch early in women’s careers.

This is an interesting finding in itself and I regret that the authors don't investigate it in more depth. My theory of time volume duration, and adaptability as a determinant of outcome is very testable. If it is accurate, then those female CEOs who have no children should have a long stint duration comparable to their male counterparts at about fifteen years. Those female CEOs with children should have longer stint durations. Even within that group there should be material differences between those who 1) continued working in the same pattern as their peers during their maternity years, 2) those who took a hiatus in the form of working fixed schedules during their maternity years (i.e. forty hours a week nine to five), 3) those who worked reduced-hours for some stretch of time, and 4) those who may have taken time out from the workforce for some period.

The research is not thick on the ground but those studies I have seen indicate that anything short of high volume time, continuous time, and adaptable time has an outsized impact on final outcomes. The adaptable part is often overlooked. Two individuals may both work 50 hours a week but if one is on a fixed schedule of ten hours a day but the other is adaptable to business need and usually works 40 hours a week but is able to pitch in during times of need to work longer hours or on the weekend, it is the second individual who advances faster than the first.

The second half of the article is just as interesting and is non-gender specific. The authors ask the question how important is the prestigiousness of your alma mater? Not very.

What about the prestigious college? Does that matter? While Whitman’s high-prestige background may seem like it should be the norm, she is one of only two woman running a Fortune 500 company to have an undergraduate degree from an Ivy League institution. (This doesn’t appear to be a gendered issue. Only four percent of the men in our sample attended an Ivy League school.)

What about other factors like experience in consulting or banking? Also a bust.

Early stints in consulting and banking also hardly seem to be a prerequisite for either gender: about three-quarters of the men and women do not have any reference in their publically available resumes to time spent in either industry, liberally defined, at any time. Prestigious MBA programs are also hardly a requirement; only 25% of the women and 16% of the men hold an MBA from a top-ten school. In short, for both male and female Fortune 500 CEOs, collecting a single conventional badge of prestige, let alone collecting a handful of them, may help, but is hardly a gating factor.

This matches with my experience. I have known a good number of Fortune 1000 CEOs over the years and their backgrounds match what the authors are describing. Sure, a few prestige MBAs and occasionally someone out of the consulting or banking fields, but overwhelmingly they are individuals that are bright, paid their dues, stayed focused, invested time and effort, did well, kept their nose clean.

The Gramscian advocates out there who want to define the world as privileged one percenters from country club backgrounds and old boy networks based on where you went to school just don't have empirical objective data on their side.