This Can (Counterintuitively) Damage Women's Careers

Last week I attended Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit. And I wrote, for Fortune, about how the very act of being named to their Most Powerful Women’s List could actually be harmful to women’s careers. (I wondered how they would react, but they published it.) In it, I remembered when I was on “the list”:  

“I remember it well. This was before I was aware of the research that shows that success and likability are damningly inversely related in women. It was before there were the stacks and stacks of studies revealing that professional women must navigate the razor thin edge of “not too hot, not too cold” behavior at work to be successful….

“….I still somehow sensed that professional women could be punished for receiving attention. And that the carefully calibrated balancing act that many of us had developed to succeed within our companies was shifted in an important way by that recognition. The MPW list raised our profiles to the outside world, forcing that daily dance out onto a more visible stage. As a result of the accolade, any stumble, any miscalculation in the ‘too hot, too cold’ equation, was amplified.

“It also raised our visibility within the workplace, often increasing it beyond that of our similarly senior peers. Many of the driven, confident women who make it onto the list quickly shift into ‘I’m so surprised’ and ‘I can’t imagine how this happened’ and ‘I don’t deserve this’ mode with their peers—an attempt to restore equilibrium.

“One of the key unspoken rules for women, even in the most competitive fields, has always been, ‘Thou shalt not appear to be seeking power [or outside recognition].’ Consider the Harvard Kennedy School study that found that ‘when female politicians were described as power-seeking, participants experienced feelings of moral outrage (i.e., contempt, anger, and/or disgust) towards them.’ Ambitious male politicians did not spark the same reaction.”

You read that right: disgust. Ok, wow. And that reaction—to women appearing to seek power and recognition— was the same for both men and women.  (Flashback to when Hillary Clinton ran for President eight years ago. My dyed-in-the-wool Democrat mom: “I don’t like her. She’s so….you know….ambitious.” Me: “Mom, how can you say that? You know I’m ambitious, right?” She: “Well, that’s different.”)

In the Fortune piece, I went on to share a personal story:  

“I’ve felt the sting. Twice I’ve been brought into large banks to turn around troubled Wall Street businesses: first to Citigroup to run Smith Barney in the wake of the research scandal of the early 2000s and then to Bank of America to turn around its Merrill Lynch wealth management business during the 2008 crisis. And twice my hiring was a high-profile event, orchestrated by the companies. But in one case there was a price to pay for that exposure: I will never forget a meeting with my new boss at one of these companies (the CEO who hired me having retired) in which he told me, complete with reddened face and raised voice, that I needed to get my outside profile down.

“’But I haven’t done any press interviews except ones that company requested I do,’ I told him. His response: ‘This is your problem, and you need to solve it.’ And lest I somehow missed his message, he dispatched the head of HR the next day to reiterate it. [Ok, it was worse than that: the head of HR asked me to repeat back ‘what I had heard’ the night before.]

“Shame is not a word I often associate with work, but in that moment I felt ashamed, believing that I had broken some unwritten rule by receiving outside attention. I can even feel the flush of that shame years later, as I write this. This was a guy who was dealing with multi-billion dollar losses at the company—but this was the one perceived transgression that I saw drive him to anger. There was something almost primal about his reaction; it felt a lot like the “moral outrage” noted above. (And, no, it didn’t end well for me at the company.)”

Now not all company cultures are like this, and we have more and more examples of ones that celebrate everyone’s successes. Think Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Immelt, who clearly recognize that greater senior-level diversity leads to better business performance. Along with this, they seem to also recognize that more visible senior level female role models can send a much more powerful message to talented potential employees than announcing yet another new corporate diversity initiative.

When I was at the Fortune MPW conference last week, I heard from a number of women there who said that they had felt the same thing: that being on the list could actually damage their careers. And that this is something that we should be discussing to a greater degree.

My answer: building business cultures that celebrate the accomplishments of all our team. (Check out this article in Fast Company this morning about the contributions of our talented lead designer, Melissa Cullens.) And building businesses to help women succeed: Ellevest is a digital investment platform for women, to help them invest to become more financially independent (which, IMO, is the best career advice women aren’t getting). And Ellevate Network, the global professional women’s network, to help women form connections to help them succeed.

What do you think? Does this concept – of women being hurt professionally by receiving attention – ring true? If so, how do we get past this?

Sallie Krawcheck is the CEO of Ellevest, a digital investment platform for women. You can sign up for VIP access here. She is the Chair of Ellevate Network and soon-to-be-author of Own It: The Power of Women at Work.

For information about Ellevest, a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) registered investment adviser and its financial advisory services, please visit the firm’s website (www.Ellevest.com) or the SEC’s Investment Adviser Public Disclosure website (www.adviserinfo.sec.gov).