Don’t Underestimate the
Power of Women
Supporting Each Other
at Work
By Anne Welsh McNulty
Don’t underestimate the power of women connecting and
supporting each other at work. As my experiences from
being a rookie accountant to a managing director at an
investment bank have taught me, conversations between
women have massive benefits for the individual and the
organization. When I graduated college in the 1970s,
I believed that women would quickly achieve parity at
all levels of professional life now that we had “arrived”
- I viewed the lack of women at the top as more of a
“pipeline” problem, not a cultural one. But the support
I expected to find from female colleagues - the feeling of
sisterhood in this mission - rarely survived first contact
within the workplace.
When I was a first-year accountant at a Big Eight firm
(now the Big Four), I kept asking the only woman senior
to me to go to lunch, until finally she told me, “Look,
there’s only room for one female partner here. You and
I are not going to be friends.” Unfortunately, she was
acting rationally. Senior-level women who champion
younger women even today are more likely to get negative
performance reviews, according to a 2016 study in The
Academy of Management Journal.
My brusque colleague’s behavior has a (misogynistic)
academic name: the “Queen Bee” phenomenon. Some
senior-level women distance themselves from junior
women, perhaps to be more accepted by their male
peers. As a study published in The Leadership Quarterly
concludes, this is a response to inequality at the top, not
the cause. Trying to separate oneself from a marginalized
group is, sadly, a strategy that’s frequently employed. It’s
easy to believe that there’s limited space for people who
look like you at the top when you can see it with your own
eyes.
By contrast, men are 46% more likely to have a higherranking
advocate in the office, according to economist
Sylvia Ann Hewlett. This makes an increasing difference
in representation as you go up the org chart. According to
economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett. This makes an increasing
difference in representation as you go up the org chart.
According to a 2016 McKinsey report, Women in the
Workplace, white men make up 36% of entry-level
corporate jobs, and white women make up 31%. But at the
very first rung above that, those numbers change to 47%
for white men and 26% for white women — a 16% drop.
For women of color, the drop from 17% to 11% is a plunge
of 35%. People tend to think that whatever conditions
exist now are “normal.” Maybe this (charitably) explains
men’s blind spots: at companies where only one in ten
senior leaders are women, says McKinsey, nearly 50% of
men felt women were “well represented” in leadership.
Worse than being snubbed by the woman above me was
the lack of communication between women at my level.
Of the 50 auditors in my class, five were women. All of
us were on different client teams. At the end of my first
year, I was shocked and surprised to learn that all four
of the other women had quit or been fired — shocked
at the outcome, and surprised because we hadn’t talked
amongst ourselves enough to understand what was
happening. During that year, I’d had difficult experiences
with men criticizing me, commenting on my looks, or
flatly saying I didn’t deserve to work there — but I had no
idea that the other women were having similar challenges.
We expected our performance to be judged as objectively
as our clients’ books, and we didn’t realize the need to
band together until it was too late. Each of us had dealt
with those challenges individually, and obviously not all
successfully.
I resolved not to let either of those scenarios happen
again; I wanted to be aware of what was going on with
the women I worked with. As I advanced in my career, I
hosted women-only lunches and created open channels
of communication. I made it a point to reach out to each
woman who joined the firm with an open door policy,
sharing advice and my personal experiences, including how
to say no to doing traditionally gendered (and uncompensated)