Good morning, Broadsheet readers. Brazil’s incumbent president will remain in power for another term, and belated birthday wishes to Hillary Clinton, who turned 67 on Sunday. Read on to learn why focusing on boardroom diversity could be a problem for corporate America. Have a great start to your week.
EVERYONE'S TALKING
•PresidentDilma Rousseff re-elected. Brazil's left-leaning incumbent, who has been in power since 2010, beat centrist candidate Aecio Neves after a closely-fought campaign. “Some times in history, narrow results produced much stronger and faster changes than very wide victories,” she said. “From now on in Brazil we will have a debate of ideas, clash of positions that may produce areas of consensus capable of moving our society along the paths of change that we so badly need." Bloomberg
ALSO IN THE HEADLINES
•New Jersey nurse steps up against Ebola law. Nurse Kaci Hickox, who traveled to West Africa and then was forced into quarantine after showing no symptoms and testing negative for Ebola, is threatening to sue both New Jersey and New York over her enforced isolation. She may aid the White House as it challenges states whose Ebola policies exceed federal regulations. Time
•A first in Indonesia. Retno Marsudi, previously Indonesia’s ambassador to the Netherlands, will be the country's first female foreign minister. Marsudi -- described as a "progressive diplomat" -- was appointed by President Joko Widodo as part of his new 34-member cabinet. Bloomberg
•Former Obama staffer turns down Attorney General gig. Kathryn Ruemmler, the former White House counsel, will not replace Eric Holder. Ruemmler is known as a close adviser to the President, which was viewed by many in the White House as making her less likely to be confirmed. The Wire
•S'well founder on gender diversity. Sarah Kauss, the founder and CEO of water bottle maker S'well, has 20 employees and only two of them are men. "If you hire the best people that come in, sometimes they look like you. We have a coder, a wonderful senior web developer, who’s a hacker—and she’s a woman. I hate to make a big thing of it, but that's really cool to me," she told Fortune.Fortune
• New York City Marathon diversifies. Mary Wittenberg, the New York Road Runners CEO who was blasted for mishandling Superstorm Sandy in 2012, is back to growing the NYC Marathon — by staging major races in the city’s outer boroughs. “We’re growing the borough series to be the equivalent of a marathon in each borough in terms of impact,” she says. Fortune
BROADVIEW
Why focusing just on boardroom diversity is a problem
Before getting more women in the boardroom, we need more women working from cubicles to stick around long enough to attain leadership positions.
Hoards of female college graduates are entering the workforce with lofty aspirations about becoming executives. In fact, more women than men aspire to top management when they are in the first two years on the job, according to a report on gender parity published recently by Bain & Company.
Then, something striking happens.
After as little as two years on the job, many women lose their ambition – measured by whether they seek executive roles - by more than 60%, while men’s ambition level stays the same. Among experienced employees, just 16% of women aspire for a top job compared with 34% of men. Also, as they move up the ranks in their career, women’s confidence falls by about half, while men’s stays unchanged.
Partly as a result, women fill only 5% of CEO roles at Fortune 500 companies and comprise 17% of board members.
“The difference is striking,” says Julie Coffman, partner with the Bain & Co. Chicago office and the chair of Bain’s Global Women’s Leadership Council. “We need to unpack what is happening during those early to mid-level years of a career that is changing these aspiration and confidence levels so dramatically.”
An easy explanation would be that more women than men take time off work to have children and start families. Yet when Bain took a deeper look at the data, marital and parental status did not significantly differ for women who aspire to the C-Suite and those who don’t. Instead, Bain’s research indicated that women’s confidence and aspiration levels erode because they don’t feel supported by their supervisors and they had a hard time fitting into stereotypes of success within the company. Women also have far fewer role models in senior and top management than men do.
Click over to Fortune.com to read my full story.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
• If Norwegian women can’t have it all, who can? Norwegian women enjoy the best standard of living of anywhere in the world, according to the UN. Yet they are still struggling to get ahead. Why? "Too many women are striving for perfectioninstead of success, and think the former is required to climb business ranks." The Atlantic
•Talking while female. "Too squeaky, it's too loud, it lacks authority, it sounds childish, it's grating or obnoxious or unprofessional." These are just some of the ways that women find their voices described by male colleagues. Rindy Anderson, a biology professor at Florida Atlantic University, explains the "biologically-driven judgment" against higher voices and why several female leaders try speaking from a lower register. NPR
ON MY RADAR
We still judge Monica Lewinsky more harshly than Bill Clinton Vox
Mindy Kaling was mistaken for Malala Yousafzai NYTimes
Satya Nadella's accidental giftLinkedIn
At work, how you behave is more important than what you know WSJ
How to be a more authentic leader Fast Company
Companies with the best perks for parents Fortune
QUOTE
If you’re not failing, sometimes that’s not good because that means you’re not daring enough. The most important thing is wanting to wake up in the morning and you can’t wait to get to work because this is what you want to do. Some days you might feel that nothing is working, but you’ve got to have the discipline and the energy to go in and do it anyway.
Dr. Laurie Glimcher, dean of Weill Cornell Medical College, tells the <em>NYTimes.</em>
