Women's Empowerment Programs

Could some tweaks make us less ambivalent about them?

When it comes to women’s empowerment programs—or women’s empowerment generally—I fall along the lines of Dani Audette’s brilliant post from March of this year entitled For the Love of God, Stop Empowering Me! As she says, the concept of empowerment implies that men need to give power to women. It suggests that women are deficient and need something additional to become powerful. And even worse, women’s empowerment programs often ignore systemic barriers and institutional inequities that support gender discrimination in the first place. As we talk about a lot in this newsletter, the problem isn’t women.

In law firms, women’s empowerment programs tend to be designed by—or have to be approved by—men. Alternatively, they’re often designed by HR (ugh) or senior women who are enmeshed within male leadership. This means they’re rarely designed to actually help women; instead, they’re designed to appear to help women. Design a women’s retreat and post a picture of well-dressed women smiling together on social media. Rinse and repeat.

Don’t get me wrong: I absolutely love events where I get to spend time with female colleagues. Throughout my career I’ve learned an incredible amount from women within my firm, co-counsel from other firms, and women on the other side of the v. I am absolutely not saying that women’s programs are frivolous. But the programs that are valuable are ones that are focused not on “empowering” women, but in giving women what they believe they need within a supportive community.

In this week’s Comes Now, we talk about how women’s empowerment programs might be changed to make women feel more powerful. (Note the language there: I did not say “to make women more powerful.”)

Criticisms of Women’s Empowerment Programs

Colleen M. Tolan, Deepa Purushothaman, and Lisa S. Kaplowitz recently wrote an article [paywall] in the Harvard Business Review on how to improve women’s advancement programs. They point out that most corporate women’s advancement programs center on transferring power or “teaching women a predefined slate of skills purported to give them more control over their careers.” This is problematic not only because it assumes that there’s something deficient in women preventing them from achieving success, but also because having such programs unintentionally communicates “a culture of conformity by asking women to change who they are to succeed.”

The authors explain that typical women’s empowerment programs focus on discrete interventions designed to transfer power from select groups within the organization to women. Examples of these types of interventions include:

  • The gap fill: Teaching women specific skills, especially around topics like negotiation and presenting, so that they’ll show up with more “gravitas.”

  • The confidence boost: Bringing in an expert to help female employees be more confident and “appear more powerful” like the men around them.

  • The shadow effect: Endowing power to women by providing them with (typically male) sponsors who will share their power.

  • The gift basket approach: Providing an array of resources on topics like stress and mental health, which assumes that improving' women’s access to resources relative to men will give them more power.

These approaches don’t work because “[e]mpowering and advancing women requires more than a confidence curriculum, updated lists, or empty KPIs [Key Performance Indicators] because these strategies don’t address the deeper issues of belonging, hidden barriers, or broken culture.” They can also be harmful because they reinforce that women must assimilate themselves into masculine archetypes of leadership in order to rise.

How to Improve Women’s Empowerment Programs

The Center for Women in Business (CWIB) at Rutgers Business School recently conducted a study of 300 corporate workers on their experiences of power. When participants were asked to define power, men and women largely agreed that power had to do with influence and control. But when they were asked to describe a time that they felt powerful, women were significantly more likely than men to suggest that freedom was associated with power. Specifically, women said they’d like to have the following at work:

  1. The power to lead in collective—not just competitive—ways

  2. The power to lead from lived experience

  3. The power to redefine ambitions and paths

  4. The power to make change

For the women in the CWIB study, power was about “options and the ability to build a career that works for them. It’s about the power to make change and to bring more of themselves to their work life. It’s about trusting women and helping them to lead as more of themselves.”

Given these findings, the HBR article recommended that companies examine their current women’s empowerment programs to determine if they were biased around narrow ideas of what constitutes leadership, thus encouraging conformity. It recommended that companies ask women what they need and want surrounding issues of power, rather than assuming that women experience power in the same way as men. The authors then suggested companies rewrite their empowerment programs to accommodate those desires.

Concluding Thoughts

The idea that the problems with certain women’s empowerment programs arise from a standardized notion of power was appealing to me. However, I bristled a bit reading about male and female versions of power—because of the potential to reinforce stereotypes about what constitute gender-based traits generally. After all, we can’t really say whether the 300 corporate workers surveyed by CWIC were representative of all women in professional environments, or women lawyers specifically.

To me, the most valuable part of the HBR article was its suggestion that companies ask women what makes them feel powerful, and then design so-called empowerment programs around those feelings. When we design programs around what women need and want, we avoid attempting to mold them into a single type of leader.

While asking what makes women feel powerful might go a long way towards making women’s empowerment programs more meaningful, I don’t think it’s the full answer. Why? Because if you’d asked me a few years ago what would make me feel more powerful in the workplace, I might have said something along the lines of “having my male colleagues listen to me when I speak” or “getting the same opportunities at leadership as my male colleagues.” And there’s nothing an empowerment program could have done to change those things. We can’t make women feel powerful in environments that are fundamentally hostile to them or their exercise of power. For that, our workplaces—and our broader society—are going to have to change first.

Only then, as Louisa May Alcott says, will women have a kingdom worth ruling.

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