Women in Business Have Come So Far, But We Can Still Be So Much More.
The following is adapted We Are So Much More by Aster Angagaw.
A Reckoning for Women
“When you feel tired, look back and see how far you have come. When you feel complacent, look ahead and see how much is left to do.”
— My mother, Etaba
Bongiwe Ntuli, Chief Financial Officer (CFO) and Executive Director of the South Africa-based fashion retailer The Foschini Group, has embraced being single and used the extra time to focus on building her career and thinking positively. Certainly this has made it easier for her to network with male colleagues and in most instances break into the inner sanctum of the boys’ club. As she grows older and reflects on her professional and financial success, she is happy with her accomplishments but regrets what she didn’t do. “I have had a full life,” Bongiwe says. “However, if I had been more realistic and more patient, I could have had a fuller life.”
Subha Barry was once a top wealth manager at Merrill Lynch & Co. When some prospective clients wanted to switch to “an advisor from the United States” after meeting with the Indian-born woman for the first time, Subha realized that living in the United States would require overcoming systemic discrimination. As she moved up the ladder at Merrill Lynch and other companies and began raising a family, Subha worked so hard to prove herself on the job, while ensuring that everything at home was perfect, that she often slept only three to four hours a night. She often wonders if this lack of sleep made it harder for her to fight off multiple bouts of cancer — first Hodgkin’s lymphoma and then breast cancer.
Raja Al Mazrouei, Executive Vice President of FinTech Hive, part of the Dubai International Financial Centre, has spent her life transcending the expectations of her family and her culture. Born in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), into a culture of arranged marriage, Raja overruled tradition and picked her own husband. She is also the only woman in her family to pursue a career. While she is justifiably proud of her accomplishments, she has told me she feels something is missing. “I try to be so many things: mother, daughter, spouse, leader,” she said. “And I lose sight of myself.”
I’ve heard many stories like these from women who’ve made it to the top ranks of business and industry — in places such as South Africa, India, UAE, China, Malaysia, the Philippines, France, the United Kingdom, Brazil, and the United States. They resonate with my own experiences as a woman of color. I was lucky to have a family that raised me to be confident, ambitious, and hardworking, and to have many great mentors and sponsors, both male and female.
I have experienced overt prejudice at work from time to time, which I often ignored. But the higher I moved up the ladder, the more of a target I became. I encountered subtle and not-so-subtle comments questioning how I got my position and whether I deserved it. When I confronted such commenters head-on, they became passive-aggressive and worked behind my back to make my life more difficult. While I eventually learned to deal with this, I didn’t always handle it very well, and as a result my relationships, sleep, and overall health suffered at times.
Sadly, this is common in the backstories of high-achieving women in business, especially those of women of color. This is why our ranks are still far too small: while a higher percentage of women than men graduate from college, and while women start careers at an impressive rate, our numbers dwindle higher up the ladder. And we don’t make it to the top without doing battle along the way — against persistent bias on the job and unrealistic expectations for managing our relationships and households off the job. We are forced into compartmentalizing our work and home lives, and into making agonizing choices, yet we are judged and unsupported whatever the choice we make.
The Paucity of Women at the Top of Big Companies
Women who strive to make it to the highest level of a company, the so-called “C-suite,” still must overcome too many obstacles on the way up and sacrifice too much of themselves to get there — at the cost of their relationships, their personal growth, their interests, and even their health. The problem is most acute for women of color because our barriers to the top are even greater. As a result, we are underrepresented.
For sixty-six years, only one Black woman, Xerox Chief Ursula Burns, held the top role at a Fortune 500 company. Things began to change in early 2021, when TIAA named Thasunda Brown Duckett as its next CEO, and Walgreens chose former Starbucks COO Rosalind Brewer to lead the company. These are breakthroughs, but we still have far to go.
In 2020, only forty-one female CEOs were leading Fortune 500 companies in the United States. That is just 8 percent, and only three were women of color — Joey Wat of Yum China, Lisa Su of Advanced Micro Devices, and Sonia Syngal of Gap Inc. — and not one of them was a Black woman. Women occupy a meager 18.5 percent of top executive positions in the Russell 3000, while 13.4 percent of Russell 3000 companies have no women on their boards. And according to Catalyst, the global nonprofit that tracks how well workplaces work for women, the number of women in the C-suite remains minuscule — only 27 percent in S&P 500 companies, with only 6 percent of those serving as CEOs. Only 4.7 percent of executive or senior-level positions at S&P 500 companies are occupied by women of color.
Why are so few of us leading the biggest corporations in the world when so many of us are more than capable? What kind of political maneuvering and personal sacrifice does it take to get there? And when we do make it, what is it like to be the only woman, and the only woman of color, at the table? We don’t have a lot of women at the top who can show us the way or talk frankly to us about the price they paid in their personal lives.
Based on my personal history and the insights from these remarkable colleagues and friends, here is what I believe:
To grow into a leadership role without burning out, a woman must make thoughtful choices that nurture and integrate seven dimensions of her life: not just career, but also community, play, growth, self-care, money, and most importantly, purpose.
My mother, whose quote began this article, was a remarkable person of great industry and purpose who, despite enduring major hardships, found joy in life and passed it on to others. She showed me that despite my need to make an impact in the business world, I could be and do so much more.
To learn more about the stories of women in the business world, We Are So Much More is available on Amazon.
Aster Angagaw is the seventh of ten children, born and raised in Ethiopia during a time when her parents faced tremendous struggles. In the face of many challenges, her mother, whom her children lovingly called Etaba (meaning “big sister”), was the glue that held the family together. Aster shares Etaba’s profound wisdom throughout this book.
Through hard work and her mother’s inspiration, Aster continued her lifelong journey for growth, earned a BA in organizational management from Eastern University and an executive MBA from Temple University, and became a graduate of the Harvard University Advanced Management Program. Today, she has more than twenty-five years of senior leadership experience in global multibillion-dollar corporations.
