Illustration: Anthony Freda
“Why do you need to go to college?” my grandmother asked me, as I prepared to graduate from high school. She arrived in the United States as a young woman, an Italian immigrant with an eighth-grade education. She was fabulous and creative and wonderful company. Like so many women, then and now, cultural assumptions limited her definition of female success, even as grand plans were imagined for the men of the family. “Why can’t you stay home and learn how to be a secretary?” she would ask me. And in my mouthy way, I would respond, “Really, Grandma? Stay home like you did?” Having left her village on the Adriatic coast, she never went back.
Ironically, it was her trip as a young woman across the Atlantic that influenced me to envision my own options as limitless. English was a second language for both of my Italian-speaking parents. My mother’s resulting English was especially tortured. Her twisted idioms were riotously funny, but such subtleties are lost on children. She would often remark, “Your grandmother came here from Italy, alone on the boat.”
My father had a little rowboat that he’d take out fishing on the lake near our home north of Boston. And for years, as a small child, I had imagined my grandmother rowing across the Atlantic Ocean alone, in a rowboat just like his. Thinking about the tremendous danger of it, which I often did, made me shudder. How did she know where she was going? What did she do in a storm? Wasn’t she always worried she would lose an oar? Wasn’t she scared? Meeting obstacles of every kind, I would think, “If Grandma could row across the entire Atlantic Ocean, from Europe to New York City, all alone in that little boat, I can certainly do this!”
I was the first female in my family to finish high school during the day, to get a college degree, and then to get a graduate degree from an Ivy League university. I have gone on to attend parties with presidents and senators, interview leaders from Nicaragua to the former Soviet Union, and have my journalistic work reach viewers, listeners, and readers around the world. I now have a daughter in law school.
Why? Because I could imagine it. I knew I could make it happen. And because I had the support of leaders, in a male-dominated field, who opened many doors for me. When as a society, both nationally and globally, we continue to discuss the glass ceiling, we are speaking about a cultural failure of imagination and, sadly, sometimes a deliberate slamming of doors.
The best of the women in my classes at the Carey Business School at Johns Hopkins University can compete with the best of the men. And it is important to say here that I am rooting for all of them, wish them every success, and stand ready to assist them, male or female. But I have not heard from the men, as I have from some of the women, that the path to executive success appears to be obstructed by gender. In the era of Angela Merkel of Germany, Christine Lagarde of France, Condoleezza Rice—and her successor as secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton— this is puzzling. But the figures bear out the complaints.
A report issued this past spring by the White House Council on Women and Girls found that “earnings for both women and men typically increase with higher levels of education.” At the same time, the report finds, “at all levels of education, women earned about 75 percent as much as their male counterparts in 2009.” The report also found that, from 1988 to 2008, wages rose 27 percent for women heading their family households. However, “family earnings levels among female-headed families were the lowest among all family types, in both 1988 and 2008.”
And while women are more often in professional occupations, more of them are in lower-paying jobs. “For example,” the report states, “in 2009, professional women were more likely (nearly 70 percent) to work in the relatively low-paying education ($887 median weekly earnings) and health care ($970 median weekly earnings) occupations, compared to 32 percent of male professionals.” As of 2009, just 7 percent of women had taken a foothold in the fields of computers and engineering, where the pay is considerably higher.
At the Carey Business School, we say that we teach business “with humanity in mind.” We are mindful of the global village. And we know that a rising tide lifts all boats. In “The Global Glass Ceiling: Why Empowering Women Is Good for Business,” Isobel Coleman writes for ForeignAffairs.com that changing the global culture about women will mean gains for everyone. “When women are educated and can earn and control income,” Coleman writes, “a number of good results follow: Infant mortality declines, child health and nutrition improve, agriculture productivity rises, population growth slows, economies expand, and cycles of poverty are broken.”
In emerging cultures, we still hear of bombings at girls’ schools, killings of those who would educate females, and abuses of women who dare to achieve. When we, as Americans, learn of these situations, we are shocked.
At the same time, however, it is clear that women in the Western business world face challenges that, while clearly not as daunting, can be discouraging. A survey by the British Institute of Leadership and Management found this year that “almost three-quarters of women (73 percent) believe the glass ceiling exists and say there are still barriers for women looking to be appointed to senior management and board level positions in the U.K.” The survey of roughly 3,000 managers indicated that “over a third of women (36 percent) feel that their gender has hindered their career progression. This figure rises to almost half (44 percent) among those women over the age of 45.”
Have I met obstacles? Yes, many. But my advice to young women making their way is this: Do not be afraid to be excellent. Command your knowledge and your skills. Hold on to your soul. Imagine yourself as a successful individual, as the woman who could row the Atlantic Ocean if necessary! And never give up.
