When I started my first technology company in my early 20’s it never even crossed my mind that I was a bit of an anomaly being a female CEO in a male dominated tech industry. Frankly, the first time I really even became aware of how few women executives there were in the tech industry was when I attended a national technology leadership conference. As I walked the exhibit hall it was pointed out to me by one of the male CEOs that I appeared to be one of the only females in the hall that wasn’t there as a hired “booth babe” (his words, not mine) to help draw executives into their booths to hear about companies latest technologies. I looked around the room and to my surprise, he was right. At the time I simply thought to myself, “hmm, that’s interesting” but it didn’t even cross my mind to consider my gender as a worry or limitation. Perhaps that came from being raised by parents who taught me that boys and girls were equally valued. And it probably didn’t hurt that at the age of four my mother bought me a t-shirt that read, “Anything boys can do, girls can do better.” I had no reason not to believe that, so I didn’t let it worry me.
What I do remember worrying about was whether people would perceive the fact that I was a mother of two small children to be a weakness in business. I remember well, in those early years, my hesitation to ever bring up any scheduling issues that involved me needing to tend to my children for fear that I would be instantly dismissed as not being someone to be taken seriously in business. For some reason I had it in my head that being a mother would be perceived as a liability to my ability to be a successful CEO. So when scheduling conflicts came up, I would do everything I could to avoid to bringing up my kids as my reason, and the times it couldn’t be avoided, I found myself apologizing profusely for the fact that my child’s schedule needed to come first. Until something amazing happened…
I had flown down to Texas to attend a meeting at the office of a very important client. I was around 28 years old, the CEO of a healthcare technology company, and the mother of two young children. Sitting in the meeting I looked around the room and realized that I was the only female in this conference room filled with the top executives of this fortune 500 company. As I expressed before, that didn’t bother me one bit. But then the point in the meeting came that we needed to schedule the next follow-up meeting, so everyone pulled up their calendars. One gentlemen threw out a date and before I could even check it one of the other men in the meeting spoke up and said, “That date doesn’t work for me. My son has a soccer game.” Then something amazing happened. The other men in the room didn’t get upset or bothered at all. They all nodded their heads as if to understand and without hesitation they picked a different date for the meeting.
As I sat on the plane ride home I still remember my feelings of awe as I thought to myself, “Wow, he must have been extremely important to be able to have them move the meeting for his son’s soccer game!” And then it hit me – if his insisting that the meeting be moved to accommodate his child’s event made me believe he was incredibly important, then perhaps if I did the same thing it would make people believe I was important enough to work around my kid’s schedules too. I determined to try it. The next time someone asked to schedule a meeting when it conflicted with one of my children’s events I simply spoke confidently and unapologetically and told them that we would need to pick a different date because my child had an event at that time. Lo and behold, they were FINE with it! I did it again and again and got the same result – people were absolutely fine with it! That’s when I realized that all of my fears and insecurities that motherhood would be seen as a liability to my being taken seriously in business were self-imposed and unnecessary. I didn’t need to apologize at all for putting my kids’ needs first, I simply needed to give people the confidence that doing so wasn’t hindering my ability to excel at my job.
Years later myself and my COO, who was also a female and a mother, were interviewing candidates for several openings in our company. A woman who appeared qualified on paper sat down with us and as we were talking she brought up that she had something she felt she needed to share, but she said it in a worried way, which in turn, caused our own worry meters to jump. She shared, very apologetically, that she had a child at home that required extra medical attention that would require her to leave work at times to take care of. She said she was very sorry about it and she was aware that it made employers nervous to hire her. When she left the interview my COO and I turned to each other and said, “If she is that worried about it, then we had better be worried about it too!” After all, we had just met this woman and we didn’t know her at all, but clearly she knew herself and she was incredibly worried that she couldn’t handle things - so who were we to second guess her concerns?
It’s important to reiterate that here you had two female executives, who were also mothers, interviewing this woman. If anyone was equipped to understand and empathize with the demands of work and motherhood we were. But her expressed worry and apologizing scared even us off from feeling confident that she could handle things. And I can only imagine how much more scared off a man would have felt if he were the one that had been interviewing her.
That was an “A-HA” moment for me. Had that woman come in and confidently and unapologetically let us know that there was this special situation she needed to attend to, but she was confident it wouldn’t hinder her ability to get the job done, we would have believed her. We would have felt confident hiring her. And I believe a man doing the interview would have been confident hiring her as well. All any executive wants is to find employees who they can feel confident will get the job done with integrity.
Motherhood doesn’t prohibit a woman’s ability to get the job done with integrity. Sure it may require some extra balancing in order to accomplish everything that needs to get done, but it certainly isn’t something to act apologetic for or ashamed of in the business world. Just the opposite, a woman who is handling motherhood and business clearly has an incredible work ethic, not to mention an ability to multi-task and problem solve. So to all of you women in business who are also mothers, I would say to you, “Whether you decide to “Lean In” at work or not, at the very minimum sit up straight and hold your head high because you have no reason to apologize and every reason to be confident!”
~Amy Rees Anderson (follow my daily blogs at www.amyreesanderson.com/blog )
