It’s True, Women Lose Power As they Gain Power: Here’s Why
As we continue striving towards a world of perfect gender equality, there’re still areas where stark imbalances remain — few more so than the repercussions which a successful career has for a woman compared to a man.
As a man notches up professional accomplishments, his elevated status makes him more attractive to women, and may even now make him a contender for women who might not previously have given him the time of day. As a man gains in status, his romantic life enjoys an equivalent boost.
The same is not true for women. It has famously been said that as a woman gains power she also loses power: as a she becomes more successful, more accomplished professionally, her romantic life takes a dive.
I’m going to have a stab at explaining the reasons for this: some reasons are undeniable, some debatable, and a few controversial. And full disclosure: I’m a man.
Where’ve all the good men gone?
Compared to her less successful sisters, accomplished women have a shorter list of eligible bachelors from which to choose, simply because some men — be they a pizza deliveryman, school teacher or corporate CEO — find a woman’s success unattractive. This might be because it threatens their masculinity, it challenges their envisaged role as provider, or simply because a career-focused spouse does not mesh with their view of doting wife and mother.
Whatever their reasons, these men are off the table as marriage candidates for high status women.
The men remaining are those who’re unfazed by her success, maybe finding it attractive. These men fall into two categories: those who are themselves as accomplished, or even more accomplished, as she is, and men who are less accomplished.
These less accomplished men are also off the table because, well, women tend not to marry-down professionally. Even today, generations since the feminist movement of the 1960s, women still prefer men who earn more than them (or at least the same) and who they see as their intellectual superior. Remember the controversial statements I mentioned earlier? That’s one of them.
I believe that there are strong evolutionary origins for this female behaviour, as opposed to it being a cultural artefact. Our female ancestors preferred men with status and resources because it ensured her offspring had a better shot at surviving.
But whatever the cause, the fact remains that, all things being equal, women gravitate towards higher status men, even if the woman herself is of high status.
This is not something we see the other way around: high status men have zero problem marrying less accomplished women. Here’s a statement no man has uttered, ever: “I’m really searching for a wife who will challenge me intellectually.”
It’s a cliche that successful men prefer dumb, pretty trophy wives. This might have been true generations ago, but today we have plenty examples of successful men married to successful, intelligent woman. Nonetheless, for your typical guy, intelligence and status are, at best, nice-to-have qualities, not must-have.
So, simply because of her success, a woman’s pool of potential husbands boils down to those men not threatened by her success and who themselves are as accomplished, or more accomplished, than she is. Unlike her less accomplished female friends, her choices of husband is squeezed.
Motherhood
There’s another force sucking the power from successful women — motherhood, or lack of it. There’s a good chance that her professional rise has been fuelled in part by maternal sacrifices. Maybe her career prevents her from being a engaged and present mother. Or maybe she’s chosen to postpone motherhood, or give up on the dream of motherhood altogether.
To be sure, not all women want to be mothers, and perhaps those who don’t naturally invest more in their careers. But recent census data out of the US and UK show that the vast majority women eventually become mothers — only one in six women reach their forties without having had a child.
The 20 most powerful women in business
How can we know for certain whether women do tend to lose power as they gain power? One way might be to examine the personal backgrounds of a selection of highly successful women. So that’s what I did.
The Forbes list of the 20 most powerful women in business seemed like a good place to start. I went through the list to determine each woman’s relationship status: when she got married, if she has children, and roughly at what age she started her family. I only did the first 15 on the list because there’re only just so many hours in the day.
1. Sheryl Sandberg — COO, Facebook
Married Brian Kaft when she was 24 years old. The marriage lasted just one year. Ten years later she married Dave Goldberg, CEO of SurveyMonkey, and the couple had two children. Goldberg died tragically a few months ago.
2. Indra Nooyi — CEO and Chair, PepsiCo
Married Raj Nooyi when she was 24. The couple started their family when Indra was around 30 (can’t tell for certain). They have two daughters.
3. Irene Rosenfeld — CEO, Kraft
Married Philip Rosenfeld while still at university and they had two daughters. Philip died in 1995. Irene’s second husband is an investment banker.
4. Virginia Rometty — CEO, IBM
Met her husband, Mark Rometty, when she was fresh out of college. The couple do not have any children. Mark is an oil investor.
5. Ursula Burns — CEO, Xerox Corp.
Married to Lloyd Bean, a scientist and researcher. The pair met at Xerox. Lloyd is 20 years older than Ursula, and she credits their success at raising a family (son and daughter) to having a retired husband.
6. Meg Whitman — CEO, HP (formerly CEO of eBay)
Married Griffith Harsh when she was 24 years-old and the couple have two sons. Griffith is a neurosurgeon.
7. Maria das Graças Silva Foster — formerly CEO of Petrobras-Petróleo Brasil
Married to Colin Foster, the president of an electronics systems company. The couple has two children (and one grandchild).
8. Marissa Mayer — CEO, Yahoo
Married lawyer and investor Zachary Bogue in 2009. On the day Yahoo announced her hiring, Mayer revealed she was also pregnant. The couple now have a young son.
9. Anne Sweeney — formerly the co-chair, Disney Media and President, Disney–ABC Television Group
Met her husband, Philip Miller, at Harvard when she was 20. The couple have a son and daughter. Philip is an attorney.
10. Angela Braly — former President & CEO, Wellpoint
Married with three children. She had her children between the ages of 31 to 37, suggesting that she met her husband and married in her twenties. Her husband is a stay-at-home dad.
11. Susan Wojcicki — CEO, YouTube
Married to Dennis Troper in 1998, the same year she let Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google’s founders) set up office in her garage. Dennis is also a Google exec and together the couple have 5 children.
12. Arianna Huffington — co-founder & editor-in-chief, The Huffington Post
Married politician and activist Michael Huffington when she was 36 and divorced in 1997. Arianna has not remarried. The couple had two daughters.
13. Diane Von Fürstenberg — Fashion Designer
Fürstenberg met her first husband, Prince Egon of Fürstenberg, when she was 18. They had two children but the marriage lasted only a few years. Since 2001 she has been married to Barry Diller, an american media mogul.
14. Amy Pascal — former co-chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment
Amy married Bernard Weinraub, a journalist and playwright, in 1997 and they have one son. Weinraub is 21 years her senior.
15. Sheri McCoy — CEO, Avon
Married to Terence. They have three adult sons, suggesting that Sheri, who’s 55, married and started her family in her twenties.
A couple caveats before I start drilling into this data. The list is a little out of date — Graças Foster resigned as head of Petrobras in February. Braly and Pascal are no longer in their positions at Wellpoint and Sony respectively.
I’ve no idea what methodology Forbes used to assemble this list, but it’s a business publication which relies on subscriptions and advertising for revenue, so there’s probably some bias at work.
Finally, with a sample size of just 15, it’s hard to argue that the list is representative of all highly accomplished women in the workforce.
Despite these limitation, I still think there’s meaningful insights to be gleaned.
What does the list reveal about uber-successful women?
Every woman on the list has been married. That legitimately surprised me. I’d have expected at least one or two to have never wed. What’s more, with the exceptions of Arianna Huffington, who has not remarried after her divorce, and Sheryl Sandberg, who only recently lost her husband, the rest seem to be currently married. Some have remarried after divorce or being widowed, but as of the time of writing, Arianna Huffington is the only one who’s legitimately single.
The next most striking finding is the number of women on the list without children: a grand total of one — IBM’s leader, Virginia Rometty. All the other 14 have at least one child, and Google’s Susan Wojcicki has five! A childless rate of one in 14 is just 7%, less than half the national averages for countries like the US and UK.
Far from placing marriage and motherhood beyond reach, a high-powered career has not deterred these super accomplished women from having it all. At least that what it seems like at first. Scraping beneath the surface reveals some interesting dynamics at work.
Let’s look at the age these women married. At least eight of the 15 married young. By “young” I mean in their twenties. Fürstenberg and Sweeny were barely out of their teens when they tied the knot. The list could contain as many as 10 young brides, but I’ve not been able to find reliable details for McCoy and Braly. And I’ve not included Sandberg as a young bride even though her first marriage was at age 24.
Considering the size of the young bride list, it should come as no surprise that the young mother list is also long. Only five of the 15 had their first child in their thirties — Braly, Huffington, Mayer, Pascal and Wojcicki — and Braly and Pascal enjoyed the benefit of a stay at home husband. Nooyi had her first daughter somewhere between 28 and 30 so she might not belong on the young mother list, but by her own accounts, much of her daughters’ rearing fell to her mother, husband, and even her secretary.
One final revelation from the list would probably be the most striking finding, were it not so unsurprising. With the exception of Angela Braly who’s husband is a stay-at-home father, the remaining women whose husband’s profession I’ve be able to determine are married to accomplished men. And not just casually accomplished. The list includes a German prince (Furstenburg), a CEO (Sandberg), neurosurgeon (Whitman), politician (Huffington), lawyers and investors (Mayer, Sweeny and Rometty), and one of the most powerful men in media (Furstenburg).
This is not to say that their husbands are more accomplished, or even as accomplished. Being the leader of a global corporation like IBM, PepsiCo or Facebook is hard to top. But by most measures, these women’s husbands are successful.
It would be interesting to know exactly where in their careers these women were when they first met their husbands and, of even more interest, where was their husband’s career. Without conducting personal interviews with each women, it’s impossible to tell. But we can make some inferences.
For the women who married young (twenties), the fact that several of them met their spouse while at university means we can assume that, at best, she was level with her husband.
For the women who married older (and we’d assume more established in their careers) there’s a clear trend: their husband is just as successful (or more successful), or he is much older than her and retired. Huffington married a politician at 36, Wojcicki married a fellow Google exec at 30, and Marissa Mayer married a man worth $300m at 34. Sandberg’s and Furstenburg’s second marriages were to corporate CEOs.
Conversely, Ursula Burns and Amy Pascal married men who were (probably) less successful, but who were 20 years plus their senior and retired.
So, what have we leant?
Firstly, it confirms that women, even highly accomplished women, do not marry down professionally. Some will argue that this is simply because, for example, a female VP Business Development of a fortune 100 company will spend much of her time working and socialising with similarly senior male executives, so it’s not surprising that her husband will be drawn from this stock. But if that’s the case, then the same logic must be true of successful men. So, for example, we would not expect to see a male CEO married to his PA, or his personal trainer or his Starbucks barista. But of course, we do — so much so that it raises no one’s eyebrow.
The list also dispels the myth that motherhood is a sacrifice some career minded women have to make. But the secret is to marry and start your family early. If you leave it later you’ll struggle to find a man your age who’s as accomplished as you (and who’s interested in marrying you). If you find yourself in this position, then an accomplished husband who’s much older (ideally close to retirement) is the next best strategy.
If this sounds eerily similar to the much criticised advice Susan Patton famously gave in a Valentine’s Day article in The Wall Street Journal, then you’re not far off. Patton’s open letter to college girls encouraged them to start their search for a husband while still at university, arguing, in part, that never again will an ambitious female have access to such a high concentration of men “who share your intellectual curiosity and potential for success.”
Marrying before success vs. marrying into success
I have a theory why marrying young gives an ambitious, career-driven woman a much better shot at having it all — the accomplished husband, the kids and white picket fence.
While at university and into early adulthood, there’s no doubt these women would have displayed the same ambition and drive that would eventually lead them to the pinnacle of their professions. But in their twenties, whilst dating her future husband, her accolades and achievements were off in some unknowable future. The pay rises and promotions, the steady climb up the corporate ladder, would be a journey she would share with her husband.
Marrying before success versus marrying into success might seem a subtle difference, but it’s night and day to some men and is essentially what this article is all about.
Picture a young couple, recently out of university, just starting out on their professional journeys with a shared ambition and drive. The world’s their oyster. Even if their paths diverge, and her career takes a more stellar trajectory, a supportive husband can take some of the credit for her success, making it more palatable to his masculine identity.
For many men, status and salary are integral to how they identify themselves. The more success a women racks up before she locks down a husband, the more difficult it is for a potential spouse to visualise his role as protector and provider within the relationship.
The precipice of disruption
More women than men are now graduating from university, leading to predictions that we’re not far from having a majority of households with the woman as top earner. If this comes to pass, it will be disruptive to marriage as we know it.
How this disruption manifests itself remains to be seen. As women become entrenched across the professional spectrum, taking their fair share of high status and high earning positions, cultural norms will be forced to morph accordingly, readjusting our traditional views of gender roles.
It’s possible that a sense of masculinity tethered to the image of provider and protector are relics from our fathers’ generations. Perhaps we’ll see the next generation of men shift away from relying on pay and profession as proxy measurements for manhood. If this happens, a high earning wife ceases to be threatening, and may even be desirable.
Or maybe the pursuit of status and resources has been evolutionarily hardwired into male biology and the pursuit of high status men hardwired into the female. And no amount of cultural gymnastics will ignite a woman’s sexual and emotional passion for a man she sees as less accomplished than herself.
Either way, we’re on the precipice of disruption, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. As something we humans invented, marriage has always been in a state of flux, and the current version has been long overdue an upgrade.
