Get Out of the Gender Statistics Box and Get Subversive

As women, you are no doubt fluent in the (fairly) recent statistics from the Center for American Progress that demonstrate how we are working toward closing the opportunity gaps:

• We earn almost 60 percent of undergraduate degrees, and 60 percent of all master’s degrees.
• We earn 47 percent of all law degrees, and 48 percent of all medical degrees.
• We earn more than 44 percent of master’s degrees in business and management, including 37 percent of MBAs.
• We are 47 percent of the U.S. labor force, and 59 percent of the college-educated, entry-level workforce.

Despite our opportunity numbers, you are also likely intimately familiar with the ho-hum statistics on women's leadership growth:

• We are only 14.6 percent of executive officers, 8.1 percent of top earners, and 4.6 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs.
• We hold just 16.9 percent of Fortune 500 board seats.
• In the financial services industry, we make up 54.2 percent of the labor force, but are only 12.4 percent of executive officers, and 18.3 percent of board directors. None are CEOs.
• We account for 78.4 percent of the labor force in health care and social assistance but only 14.6 percent of executive officers and 12.4 percent of board directors. None, again, are CEOs.
• In the legal field, we are 45.4 percent of associates—but only 25 percent of nonequity partners and 15 percent of equity partners.
• In medicine, we comprise 34.3 percent of all physicians and surgeons but only 15.9 percent of medical school deans.
• In information technology, we hold only 9 percent of management positions and account for only 14 percent of senior management positions at Silicon Valley startups.

Then there's the well-worn data about women and negotiation that attempts to explain the wage and leadership gaps:

• We are 4 times less likely to negotiate than men.
• When we do, we ask for between 3 and 32 percent less than our male counterparts.

And here's the latest in a slew of studies about what we women should do, shouldn't do, aren't good at so why try, etc.:

• Men can get away with small talk, but women can't.

And finally, there's the deer-in-headlights, what-the-hell-do-I-do-with-this kind of factoids about our ability to reproduce:

• The single biggest predictor of poverty among women is the birth of their first child.
• Putting off having children for 10 years doubles a young woman’s lifetime earnings.

So what do we do with all this noise?

All in the name of avoiding gender bias, gender blowback, or simply being passed over or hung out to dry, here's what we women do:

Besides being voracious consumers of personal and professional development -- hiring coaches, attending online and offline courses, workshops, trainings and conferences -- we read just about everything we can get our hands on to shore up our deficiencies in communicating, leading, negotiating, managing, organizing, mothering, parenting, partnering, wife-ing, cooking, eating, etc.

Now imagine all those statistics as bookends on a young woman's "bookshelf of life." As she winds her way through her life and career, she collects a few gems like so:

She chews her way through Women Don’t Ask and gets mad. Resolving to break the cultural causal chain, she orders Ask for It, Getting to Yes, and The Power of a Positive No, and stymied by the double bind of her gender she gets a used, dog eared copy of Nice Women Don’t Get the Corner Office.

Somewhere in her late 20s, after the B.A. and the Master’s and the year in Costa Rica counting turtles and the job coup of a lifetime, she runs into herself at an intersection. She had her feet on the ladder, a ring of promise on her finger and endless eggs cueing up to nest in her belly. Or not. The light turns green and she guns it. Pedal to the metal about her leadership potential, she reads Leadership Presence, The Prince, Primal Leadership, Drive, and Leadership and Self Deception.

But through the beveled glass of the padlocked corner office she sees men in blue dress shirts with power ties playing carpet golf and high fiving each other. She decides not to jimmy the lock just yet and adds No Excuses, Lean In, and Darling, You Can't Do Both--And Other Noise to Ignore on Your Way Up to her iPad.

Out of the blue a new book appears on her shelf, Your Baby and Child, and on the heels of that one, she desperately adds a vertical pile, each one only half read, including Getting Things Done, 168 Hours, Balance is a Crock, Sleep is for the Weak, sells them all in a garage sale and replaces them with The Power of Now,The Giving Tree, and the Bhagavad Gita, all of which she reads aloud to the innocent sponge she carries in a sling.

Let's take a pause here, because I'm talking about you...

You knew you could do it all. You’d been doing it all since you learned to walk. But somewhere in between the meetings and the diapers and the arguments and the invitations and the accolades, you pass by a news stand one day and grab a copy of Tweak It, Make What Matters to You Happen Every Day, and, um, perhaps Wife Goes On.

Utterly exhausted, you take a long overdue solo vacation to Sedona and fall asleep under the stars holding Dare to Dream and Disrupt Yourself: Putting the Power of Disruptive Innovation to Work.

No matter if you’re household executives, freelancers or entrepreneurs, cubicle expats who chose to take a breather to raise children, or c-level professionals and other kinds of brainiacs, we all reach at least one pivot point in our lives in which we question who we are and what we really want out of life.

And this is the point where all the mind-numbing studies and statistics have to be tossed out the window (if not way before fahgadsakes). After all, even if the study comes with recommendations about how to "combat the dangerous problem of X," you're going to walk away with one more thing to do because you will never be good enough.

My non-advice for getting out of the statistics box:

1. Screw the statistics. Stop reading them.
2. If you can't stop reading them, stop believing them.
3. If you can't stop believing them, question them.
4. In fact, question everything.
5. Be subversive.
6. Bend life to your shape.
7. Get the workplace to conform to you.
8. Be the only thing you can be, and that's your badass self.
9. Go get what you want. Now.
10. Read this piece too if you want more specifics.

Art courtesy of Jessica Hagy at www.thisisindexed.com

Lisa is a negotiation consultant and executive coach who knows how to bridge the gap between self worth and net worth. She is the co-founder of She Negotiates and author of four titles at lynda.com, including Negotiation Fundamentals, Conflict Resolution Fundamentals, Coaching and Developing Employees and  Asking for a Raise.