The Secret Excuse for Still Holding Women and Minorities Back: “There Just Aren’t Many Like You Out There”

Some years ago, a male senior colleague shared with me why more women weren’t being promoted in our division: “There just aren’t many like you out there,” he said. I replied, “That’s simply not true.” He persisted: “It is. We’ve looked.”

In The Secret Handshake, I wrote about unspoken yet widely shared views like this that hold back women and minorities.

In 2014, I wrote at Huffpo about Apple’s announced intention to add more women to their board. They cautioned that this endeavor would take considerable time. The clear implication was that such women were like needles in a haystack. Here’s an excerpt from my response:

Thanks to Apple shareholders, the company’s board nominating committee will now be “actively seeking out highly qualified women.” Which raises the question: What has the committee been doing for more than three decades? Apparently the same thing they’ve been doing about minorities, since the woman currently on the board is also its only member of a minority group.

Worse still, Apple finds it necessary to specify that such women must be “highly qualified.” The implication is that they’re hard to find or that the good ones are all taken. I could have a list, with bios, in 20 minutes.

Usually, such antiquated attitudes aren’t expressed. Instead, they reside in the minds of those at the top as secret promotion guideposts. If we want to know why there aren’t more women and minorities at the top of large organizations, we need to unearth such hidden excuses and hold them up high and long to the light of day.