mabinda.com Business, Education, Technology Commentary.

Often, women are judged based on what they have been able to accomplish, but men are judged not by that, but by their potential. Why is that? Often, women do outperform men both in high school and in college, they do hold more college degrees, and yet at the top of the corporate structure, there are more men than women. Even in the annual rich list compiled by Forbes magazine, there are more men that women, and often the path for women to join the list is through marriage and divorce. Women being judged on their past means that they often have to second guess whether they are qualified for a role or not, whereas men are sure, they have seen their less than stellar colleagues ascend to the CEO corner office, start world beating companies and ended up wildly successful. So, in this regard, women that have made it in the corporate structure have to reach out to younger women and advice them on the best career path for them to take, and on how to navigate the corporate space so as to emerge the top.

A Princeton alumni told Princeton current female students that they should get Princeton husbands as going out, they will be the smartest person in the room, and so the only way to maintain their intellectual vitality is by being hitched to Princeton men. To which the Princeton student newspaper public editor Abigail Rabieh advised that Princeton women should hitch themselves not to a man, but to service. It seems then that women just have to fight more if they are to be judged on potential just as men are judged on potential. But part of that could also be that in performing well in school women could have been taught more to obey rules, which men aren’t. To get an A in class, you basically have to reproduce what the professor taught you in class, and any deviation from what the professor taught you will result in a failing grade. It appears that these rules don’t work in the corporate space and here, it is risk and failure that is rewarded by men who continually embark on ever newer and bold tasks and eventually, the boss notices and rewards them with more responsibilities and job promotion.

There are very few women CEOs. An example that comes to mind is Indra Nooyi, former CEO of Pepsi Cola, and one of the Indian immigrants that are making a great mark in America, being a graduate of the world famous Indian Institute of Technologies-IITs. If more women at the top shared their secrets to the top and mentored more women, women would have learnt to be bolder and take calculated risks that would have seen them rise to the top, just as they outperform men in high school and college. The former Chief operating officer of Facebook, now Meta Inc, Sheryl Sandberg says that women should lean in to male corporate spaces, and in that way they will excel just as men do. But really, this assumes women will throw away their own feminine qualities such as cross working and collaboration and instead adopt men’s traits such as aggressiveness. What a wonder would it be if women were just as successful in the workplace as they are in college and high school? It doesn’t do us any justice if we oppress half the talents of the world, it will just shrink the global economy and reduce our collective cake.