In 2021, white women held 32.6% of managerial positions in the U.S., while Black women held only 4.3%. This year, women run 52 Fortune 500 companies. Black women run just two of them.
Despite modest female representation progress in senior leadership roles, Black women still face unique barriers to reaching the upper ranks, and their much slower promotion pace has led them to, on average, take more frequent career risks than their white counterparts.
Researchers from Durham University Business School, Cambridge University Judge Business School, Cranfield School of Management, The University of Sydney Business School, and Charles Sturt University reviewed the speeches, backgrounds, and career paths of 757 women leaders of all races and over two centuries to understand their career challenges and how they overcame them.
The subjects studied came from fields spanning politics, science, and technology and included Black female figures like Rosa Parks, Michelle Obama, and Oprah Winfrey.
While Black women were likelier than white women to take risks to reach the next level of their career across each stage, the study found it to be especially true in the early career stage. Black women in this stage were more likely to take risks to diversify their careers and experience, working in an average of 2.13 sectors, compared to white women who worked in an average of 1.59 sectors. Researchers cited Hazel O’Leary, who was the first woman and Black American to serve as the U.S. secretary of energy from 1993 to 1997 and who engaged in three professional fields: She was a lawyer, politician, and university administrator and excelled in each.
The study also found that as white women’s careers progress, they tend to reduce their risk-taking behaviors, while Black women increase theirs to compensate for career stagnation.
The findings underscore the need for organizations to recognize the distinct experiences and challenges faced by minority female leaders and devise policies and strategies tailored to their unique needs so they don’t feel pressure to take extreme risks to succeed, researchers said. They added that it’s not enough for organizations to take an ad-hoc approach to increasing the number of minority leaders by, for instance, creating promotion opportunities for one particular minority female leader.
Instead, companies should take a holistic view and facilitate organizational changes that create positive leadership experiences for all employees and elicit more opportunities for minority leaders to emerge.
“Becoming a successful leader has a very costly barrier for minority leaders…because they are required to take a lot of risk to succeed,” researchers wrote. “If they start to see that problems are resolved and if their experiences become more positive, minority representatives will enter the leadership scene more as the cost of entry will be reduced because they will not need to compensate [for] the lack of change with risk-taking.”
Ruth Umoh
@ruthumohnews
ruth.umoh@fortune.com
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