Gender-Based Institutional Resistance

For an opening, I would like to turn to a 2002 article in which consultant Sylvia Ann Hewlett sought to explode the “myth” of “having it all.” That myth, in Hewlett's view, held that women could have both an effective executive career and “motherhood.” However, “when it comes to career and fatherhood,” Hewlett suggested, “high-achieving men don't have to deal with difficult trade-offs.” Surveying an elite group of women executives, Hewlett found that “for many women, the brutal demands of ambitious careers, the asymmetries of male-female relationships, and the difficulties of bearing children late in life conspire to crowd out the possibility of having children.”²² Her focus was on biological reproduction.

There were important insights in the article, including the potency of institutional resistance at work against women who choose parenting.²³ There were also limitations. Hewlett's presumption was that men could have it all. They faced, in her telling, no trade-off. Given the gendered nature of home life and home work, men were seen as not needing to sacrifice or strive to achieve a home/work – often presented as a private/public sphere – balance. Men who wanted children, we were informed, had children, often waiting until later in life with younger partners. Women, conversely, began to approach menopause in their forties and thus faced a more time-constrained reproductive pressure in Hewlett's view.²⁴

Hewlett was wrong. Men do make choices and trade-offs. Pressures to assimilate, to fit in, have long shaped the responses of men in the corporate setting. Men seeking upward mobility in the newly emerging post-World War II corporate order, for instance, faced their own challenge. The assimilationist pressure of that era – what was often referred to as outer-directedness or conformity – attracted an extraordinary degree of critical attention.²⁵

In her study of leadership development efforts at General Electric, Karen Ward Mahar called attention to the pressure placed on up-and-coming male executives to conform to an exaggerated concept of masculinity. Executive men were praised for enjoying “hunting, fishing, good food and drink, good stories and other things men like,” including “rare steaks and roast beef.”²⁶ Regardless of whether they did enjoy these conspicuous accoutrements of postwar masculinity, they would need to be seen as a “man's man.”²⁷

Assimilation into this hyper-masculine image of corporate executives – driven in no small part by the discomfort with homosexuality that pervaded Cold War America – was the price of admission for potential male leaders at General Electric. Not all men were willing or able to fit comfortably into that culture. There was, however, a presumption that men could and should fit in.²⁸ Women stood outside the barriers of culture.

Men may sacrifice time at home and with their family for the demands of work, or conversely choose involvement with home and family over the requirements of career progression. Men cannot “have it all” in the sense that Hewlett intended. Still, there is no question that in this struggle for balance, men experienced a privileged position at work and an asymmetric set of assumptions at home.²⁹

Even when men assumed a greater share of child care responsibility, they responded differently in the public space afforded by work. A kind of “masculine mystique” surrounded tired, overstretched fathers.³⁰ Unlike women who believed their advancement opportunities would be damaged if they allowed an abundance of their private sphere to spill over into the public work space, men were allowed to claim advantage. These “new men” came to be seen as “genius warriors, tough guys who get the job done no matter what.” Men who suffered from the strains of private pressures came to be appreciated as heroes in the workplace – at least that was the finding of Marianne Cooper's study of gender culture in Silicon Valley – while women were expected to keep the private sphere private.³¹

Gender and the Leadership Pipeline

A masculine type is not necessarily a man. There is a distinction to be made between the sex of an individual and the gendered role an individual is thought to be exercising. In the context of this discussion, sex refers to physical distinctions between men and women. Gender is a socially constructed concept, a view of the nature of differences imposed by a male-dominated culture.³²

In 1977 Erving Goffman wrote an essay on sex and gender, “The Arrangement between the Sexes.” Decades earlier, Simone de Beauvoir had associated gender distinctions with the concept of the other. Otherness, she offered in The Second Sex, was a fundamental category of human thought. “Man never thinks of himself without thinking about the Other.”³³ Constructing the One required labeling the Other.

Goffman echoed de Beauvoir's argument that gendered thinking reflected an oppositional paradigm. The constructs of masculinity and femininity were labels not predetermined by physical differences. “More to the point,” Goffman insisted, “for these very slight biological differences – compared to all other differences – to be identified as the grounds for the kinds of social consequences felt to follow understandably from them requires a vast, integrated body of social beliefs and practices, sufficiently cohesive and all-embracing to warrant for its analysis the resurrection of unfashionable functional paradigms.”³⁴ Gendered language adheres to a pattern that dates back centuries.

The concept of femininity as an oppositional construct to masculinity reaches back to the Middle Ages.³⁵ Writers, most notably Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower, invented the term “femininity” in response to a newly emerging social and economic role being played by women.³⁶ Concepts of “manhood” already existed, according to medieval literature scholar Tara Williams, and women were placed in categories relative to their relationship with men: maiden, wife, mother, and widow, with allowances made for “the sinful Eve.”

The bubonic plague, which traveled westward from Asia to Europe in the early 14th century, wiped out a large portion of the male population, opening new socioeconomic possibilities for women, particularly wealthy widows. Chaucer and Gower invented a word – femenye in Chaucer's “Knight's Tale” – in order to label that new role. It was not a neutral term. Femininity was construed in the negative, as a force to be denied and resisted because of the threat it was seen as posing to the dominance of “manhood.”³⁷

Words and concepts that serve a purpose stick around, and femininity continued to attract attention and gain refinement. Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud proposed a psychoanalytic theory for the origins of gender distinctions based on attachments and desires in infancy.³⁸ In the 1930s, reflecting the acceptance of psychoanalysis, masculine-feminine measures found their way into personality tests; first with the Terman-Miles Attitude-Interest Analysis Tests (1936), and then the popular Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (1943).³⁹ All made the assumption that gender was a single dimension, either masculine or feminine, and rooted in sex-based physical distinctions.

At the same time, anthropologist Margaret Mead challenged these rigid gender lines. Her findings from “primitive societies” reported that significant gender differences were not inherently connected to sex. Rather, they were socially constructed and highly fluid notions, or temperaments.⁴⁰ Even those who accepted Mead's findings as valid, however, were able to dismiss the fundamental lesson of social constructionism by insisting they applied only to peripheral primitive societies. “Long before recorded history,” wrote Garda Bowman and colleagues, “biological and economic necessity placed women as keeper of the hearth and man as the warrior-hunter in all but a few atypical cultures.”⁴¹ That gendered view was taken to be virtually if not strictly universal, driven by biological and economic necessity.

In a Different Voice, psychologist Carol Gilligan's 1982 exploration of gender differences, laid out the masculine and feminine types more fully. The masculine, Gilligan asserted, held a hierarchical and legalistic view of the world and saw responsibility as beginning with the self and then extending to others. In contrast, the feminine saw “the world as a network or web of relationships and is guided in more decision making by a desire to preserve connections.” At its core, the feminine idealized attention to others, sought to maintain relationships and interdependencies, and favored personal care over rigid rules and responsibilities.⁴² The gendered view of organizational leadership grew from these assumptions.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter's 1977 study of a large American corporation, focused attention on the degree to which a “masculine ethic” defined the organization. Traits associated with effective management coincided with characteristics identified as male: “a tough-minded approach to problems; analytic abilities to abstract and plan; a capacity to set aside personal, emotional considerations in the interest of task accomplishment; and a cognitive superiority in problem-solving and decision-making.”⁴³

Writing thirteen years later, Joan Acker pushed the argument even further, depicting business organizations as fundamentally gendered constructs. Acker had been concentrating for several decades on the gender bias of organizational research, noting, for instance, the treatment of women and men work groups in the classic Hawthorne studies.⁴⁴ She now turned her attention to gendered organizations.

To say that an organization is gendered, explained Acker, “means that advantage and disadvantage, exploitation and control, action and emotion, meaning and identity are patterned through and in terms of a distinction between male and female, masculine and feminine.”⁴⁵ The processes that unfold within organizations cannot be understood without reference to gender. The underlying logic of corporations, including the very mechanisms intended to ensure gender-blind practices, reflect images of “successful, forceful masculinity.”⁴⁶

Barbara Bird and Candida Bush pushed the gendered organization thesis back even further, into the entrepreneurial founding of companies. Literature on business start-ups assumed that the “individual entrepreneur is motivated by achievement and power,” is a “driven individual,” is motivated solely by economic purpose, and will/should establish a “clear chain of command or hierarchy.”⁴⁷ In short, the ideal entrepreneur was masculine.

In much of the discourse, the notion of a gendered organization was problematized; a construct that inherently disparaged the other; in this case, the nonmasculine. A gendered organization was a masculine organization in which the grooming of women for leadership positions was discouraged. Part of that resistance emerged from the sexism that resided in the males who served as the gatekeepers of the leadership pipeline.

Are Women Executives People?

In 1965 the Harvard Business Review ran the results of a survey under the (presumably ironic) title, “Are Women Executives People?” The role of the Review in shaping the discourse is worth paying special attention to. If there exists a quasi-official outlet for the thoughts of America's executive class, the Review is it.

Fourteen years after the opening of the Harvard Business School, Dean Wallace B. Donham launched the Review with the goal of providing business executives with the “breadth of view so urgently demanded of business administrators in this century.”⁴⁸ The Review's ambition extended beyond providing helpful how-to articles on management techniques.

From its inception, the Review took a special role in presenting “the economic and social, the national and international background” that would help shape the thinking and actions of its readers.⁴⁹ As a fully owned and operated arm of Harvard University, the Review attracted major management theorists from the world of academics and business who mingled with economists and other intellectuals to publish in its issues. By focusing on and analyzing the great questions of the day, the Review editors and writers hoped to inform and guide the thoughts and actions of the country's leading business executives.⁵⁰

Forty-one percent of male respondents in the Review's 1965 poll self-identified as “anti-women executives.” These men argued that women were “a special kind of people with a special place – which is not in the ranks of management.”⁵¹ A featured quote at the outset of the article captured that attitude: “I probably should be more broad-minded – no pun intended – in exploring the possibilities of women as managers.”⁵² “Broad” was a dismissive gender term popular in the ring-a-ding culture of 1950s America.⁵³

It is hard to imagine that such a poll conducted today would offer the same results or feature such a disparaging quote. Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique had appeared before the Review's initial poll and helped focus attention on the role of women in a male society.⁵⁴ The legal framework certainly changed after the article.

Two decades later, a follow-up poll found some indication of improvement. “Today, only 9% of the men and 4% of the women surveyed think that women don't want top jobs. And men, in general, are far more willing to accept women as colleagues and to see them as competent equals.”⁵⁵

Despite the generally positive spin applied to the 1985 survey results by the authors, not all the findings were encouraging. More than half of the respondents did not think women would ever be accepted wholly in business. Forty-seven percent of males said they would be “comfortable” working for a woman, but only 21 percent believed that “men” – that is, men other than themselves – “feel comfortable working for women.” Fifty-nine percent of men and 83 percent of women agreed that “a woman has to be exceptional to succeed in business today,” and 20 percent of men and 40 percent of women concurred that “the business community will never wholly accept women executives.” That 40 percent figure from women represented a drop from 47 percent in the 1965 survey; an improvement, to be sure, but still an indicator of ongoing skepticism and a conviction that “anti-woman executive” attitudes had not disappeared entirely.

Even when organizational leaders expressed values supportive of equal opportunity and diversity, institutional resistance continued to be a factor in suppressing the grooming of women leaders. It was in the early 1970s that Virginia Schein started her stream of pioneering “think manager, think male” work. Her point was that managers of both sexes described requisite managerial characteristics in highly gendered, masculine terms. In casting a wider net beyond the United States, she found evidence of global gender bias, making it difficult for women to reach top jobs in international organizations. And her research, published shortly after the Review's follow-up survey results, confirmed that female attitudes had changed significantly more than their male counterparts.⁵⁶

That deeply held and widely shared belief that managers were masculine was only one of many instances of institutionalized resistance that have been recognized in the discourse:

• A number of findings pointed to the relationship between sexually charged workplaces and the resulting hostile work environment on one hand, and a highly gendered company culture on the other. Albert Mills, for example, found a highly gendered and purposefully sexualized culture endemic throughout the airline industry. Male executives used recruitment, selection, supervision, and promotional tools, with the added reinforcement of marketing images, to shape a highly gendered workplace.⁵⁷

• Nancy Adler uncovered a pattern of denying women the opportunities for international placement based on mistaken assumptions about women's reluctance to move overseas and the inaccurately presumed inability of women to operate effectively in some countries.⁵⁸

• Joyce Fletcher highlighted the tendency of much of the contribution made by women in organizations – anticipating problems before they cropped up, working to keep teams functional – to get “disappeared” from performance appraisals and consideration for promotion. That disappearance occurred not because the contributions were ineffective or misaligned with the organization's strategy; they were, in fact, both effective and strategically aligned. Rather, the contributions were rendered invisible “because they are associated with the feminine, relational, or so-called softer side of organizational practice.”⁵⁹

• Joan Williams and colleagues noted that work flexibility policies designed by institutions to allow for customized hours for parents were underutilized by women employees because their use created a stigma that resulted in wage penalties, lower performance evaluations, and fewer promotions.⁶⁰

• A major stream of the gendered discourse focused on the inflexibility of organizations in dealing with pregnancy and parenting. A hostile context created by organizations to parenting placed unreasonable and non-task-related demands on employees.⁶¹

• Even when women leaders were perceived as being effective, they were characterized as doing “unexpectedly” well or as being lucky rather than deserving. That backhanded kind of praise translated into a need for aspiring women leaders to prove themselves repeatedly, and not into rewards equal to their male counterparts.⁶²

• The engineering culture so dominant in the high-technology industry was singled out by a number of authors for carrying gendered assumptions favoring males as more analytic and less emotional than females and working to the distinct disadvantage of potential women leaders in that vital sector of economic activity.⁶³

When women adopted gendered assumptions themselves, the effects could also undermine their passage to leadership positions.

Her Place at the Table

A 1986 Wall Street Journal article by Carol Hymowitz and Timothy Schelhardt introduced readers to the concept of the glass ceiling. That image was traceable to a profile two years earlier in which magazine editor Gay Bryant suggested that women reached a certain point in their careers at which a “glass ceiling” presented a barrier, a solid roadblock to women's upward mobility.⁶⁴

As powerful as that metaphor was, authors Alice Eagly and Linda Carli suggested it was misleading. Rather than conceptualizing roadblocks to the advancement of women in organizations as a single, invisible barrier that suddenly asserted itself near the top of the hierarchy, they preferred the image of a labyrinth through which women would be forced to navigate throughout their careers. That labyrinth “contains numerous barriers, some subtle and others quite obvious.”⁶⁵

Negotiating the labyrinth presented a complex challenge to women seeking upward mobility in an organizational hierarchy. In 2014's best-selling business book, Lean In, Facebook's chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg suggested that “in addition to the external barriers created by society, women are hindered by barriers that exist within ourselves.”⁶⁶ Although Sandberg's formulation underemphasized the obstructions erected and maintained by business organizations themselves, her point that women were disadvantaged by playing the assigned feminine role was important to consider.

We, by whom Sandberg meant women who aspire to executive leadership positions, “hold back in ways both big and small, by lacking self-confidence, by not raising our hands, and by pulling back when we should be leaning in.” Gendered assumptions sent “negative messages” to women: saying “it is wrong to be outspoken, aggressive, more powerful than men.” Compared to men, “fewer of us aspire to senior positions.” Rather than waiting for societal barriers to crumble, women should work proactively at “getting rid of these internal barriers.”⁶⁷

The blowback to Sandberg's “lean in” argument was immediate and fierce. Critics argued that she was blaming the victim for internalizing a role enforced by a male-dominated organization, offering individual solutions to institutional problems, speaking to and for a privileged class of professional women, and failing to address issues of social, political, and economic inequality.⁶⁸ Nonetheless, her underlying point – that the adaption of a feminine role disadvantages women as they negotiate a path through the labyrinth – represented a significant stream of gender discourse. Deborah Kolb, for instance, inquired into the role of gender in negotiations.

Although Kolb took negotiations as her setting, her focus was much broader than the dynamics that unfold within a well-defined negotiation structure such as a union-management or management-government context. For her, negotiations were a form of discursive formation in which participants sought to create identity.⁶⁹ Negotiations marked “the activities involved in designing jobs, doing work, avoiding work, achieving status, and establishing boundaries of authority and responsibility.” The stakes ran the gamut “from a change in title and responsibility, to credit for work, support for a project, or the more routine resources for a new hire.” Women entered such negotiations disadvantaged, not – in contrast to Sandberg's analysis – because of their individual characteristics, but because of the gendered nature of the workplace.⁷⁰ Practices “that appear neutral on their face” nonetheless “result in different experiences for, and treatment of women and men, and for different groups of women and men.”⁷¹ For Kolb, these patterns contributed to a “negotiated order” in which an organizational context that privileges some over others was regularly created and recreated.⁷²

As women sought leadership positions in organizations, they faced a “fundamental obstacle,” Kolb and colleagues noted. “A woman lacks the presumption of credibility and competence when she takes on a leadership role,” a presumption far more likely to be granted to a man.⁷³ Their practical advice to women seeking to negotiate the career labyrinth on the way to top leadership positions – gather intelligence, negotiate the backing of key players, amass resources, make sure your contributions are recognized – was less interesting conceptually than their core point. “People do make choices. Negotiation skills can help structure better choices.”⁷⁴ Nonetheless, women could work to improve their position within the process of negotiations that help address what Kolb refers to as second-generation biases.

When women take on parenting in a society with clear demarcations for gender roles at home, the discourse becomes even more contested.

Suggesting a “Mommy Track”

Felice Schwartz believed she was being helpful and supportive. When her article, “Management Women and the New Facts of Life,” appeared in 1989, she addressed a corporate audience with the intent of helping the largely male gatekeepers see possibilities for women's career advancement.⁷⁵

Schwartz had reason to believe she would be construed as supporting women and their journey through the corporate labyrinth. She had founded the National Scholarship Service and Fund for Negro Students shortly after World War II. Then, in 1962 she created Catalyst, a consulting firm dedicated to advancing women in business. She was still serving as Catalyst's president when the article appeared.

Schwartz never used the term, “mommy track.” Nonetheless, her focus was on maternity, which she defined as “childbirth,” including the “continuum that begins with an awareness of the ticking of the biological clock, proceeds to the anticipation of motherhood, includes pregnancy, childbirth, physical recuperation, psychological adjustment, and continues on to nursing, bonding, and child rearing.”⁷⁶ That experience, she argued, reverberated through career interruptions, career plateauing, and turnover.

The piece opened with a statement that Schwartz admitted was “jarring,” not the least because, she maintained, it was true. “The cost of employing women in management is greater than the cost of employing men.” People were reluctant to talk about this supposed truth, but Schwartz believed that organizations and the women they employ would benefit from a thoughtful airing.⁷⁷ But just what was the evidence that women “cost more” to employ?

Schwartz cited one study conducted (by whom, it was not clear) within an unnamed company that indicated women were 2.5 times more likely than men to leave management positions. The added cost accrued from the assumption that the time and money put into the development of these women was wasted in comparison to a like investment in men.

That was a narrow and thoroughly dubious construction of employment costs, and erected a rickety platform for the remainder of the argument. If the focus was purely on the cost of maternity leave, Schwartz was overlooking the degree to which such leaves extracted a cost from the women who availed themselves of the leave rather than the organization granting the leave.⁷⁸ The contribution made by well-trained women before taking leave was not considered in Schwartz's calculation. Neither was the cost of male turnover for reasons other than paternity; seeking a new, higher-paying position for instance. Finally, the fact of unequal pay for women was unacknowledged.

Schwartz added another “startling fact,” one that referenced the role of gender within organizations: “The greater cost of employing women is not a function of inescapable gender differences. Women are different from men, but what increases their cost to the corporation is principally the clash of their perceptions, attitudes, and behavior with those of men, which is to say, with the policies and practices of male-led corporations.”⁷⁹ To help organizations overcome this problem of gendered assumptions clashing with the needs of women who were family oriented, Schwartz had a proposal.

Although Schwartz denied seeking to “pigeonhole” women, she urged corporate (male) executives to think of their high potential women as falling into one of two categories. “Career-primary women” were those who forwent parenting and were willing and able to make the same commitments as their male counterparts. “Career-and-family women” wanted to continue to make a contribution to the organization and find individual fulfillment and satisfaction, but to do so in balance with the demands of parenting.

The high-performing “career-and-family woman can be a major player in your company,” she lectured executives. “She can give you a significant business advantage as the competition for able people escalates.” And there was always the possibility that, later in her career and personal life, she would “switch gears” and “reenter the competition for the top.”⁸⁰

The negative reaction was explosive. Betty Friedan took to the press to voice not just opposition but outrage. Schwartz's article was “dangerous” and “retrofeminism.” The “Mommy Track” was the term quickly attached to Schwartz's concept of career-and-family women by critics. It should really be the Mommy Trap, insisted Friedan. “It says to women that if they choose to have children, they pay a permanent price. It's another word for sex discrimination.”⁸¹

None of these highly visible, often controversial treatments of women and leadership in business organizations spoke about the question of race. Were they addressing white women or all women? A number of scholars suggested that the implicit answer was white women.

“African American women are virtually excluded in the gender and leadership literature,” Patricia Parker observed. Researchers had “focused on the identity and experiences of a select few – almost exclusively White, middle-class women,” and then implicitly generalized in a manner that “excludes the experience of African American women, as well as other women of color and of different class statuses.”⁸² Just how gender and race intersected to shape leadership in organizations, then, becomes a serious topic for consideration.

Race-Based Institutional Resistance

“The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line,” W.E.B Du Bois famously observed of the United States. Despite the occasional proclamations of a postracial society in the aftermath of Barack Obama's 2008 election, race continued to dominate American life well into the 21st century.⁸³ Earlier, I spent time untangling the differences between sex and gender and the impact of gender construction on women in organizations. But what about race? Is it a biologically fixed category? Or is it, like gender, a social construction, built on an impulse to define otherness?

Just What Is Race?

Perhaps the most common conception of race, certainly the dominant theory of the early 20th century, was that “humans were divided into a few distinctive racial types, each with its own fairly ingrained or even immutable characteristics.” When white Europeans defined other races, Peter Wade noted in his survey of Western views of race, they arranged the categories “in a stable moral, social and intellectual hierarchy” in which they placed themselves at the top.⁸⁴

The view of race as a biologically fixed category, however, has long been contested. Franz Boas and W.E.B. Du Bois fought against racial typologies.⁸⁵ Racial skeptics argued that race was an “intellectually bankrupt” concept that was both false and dangerous. Social constructionists insisted that race was not about biology (even if it may have been at the earliest stages of human evolution) but was a grouping created by a sociohistorical context that worked to establish, inhabit, transform, and even destroy categories.⁸⁶

Genetic testing revived the debate over the validity of race as a biological category. Some claimed to find significant overlap between racial classifications and generic clusters. Others denounced that conclusion, insisting that the results were the outcome of ahistorical technologies whose findings were achieved through “statistical mischief.”⁸⁷ Regardless of the outcome of that genetic argument, anthropologists took a stand against race as a valid biological category.

“With the vast expansion of scientific knowledge in this century,” proclaimed the executive board of the American Anthropological Association in their 1998 Statement on Race, “it has become clear that human populations are not unambiguous, clearly demarcated, biologically distinct groups.”⁸⁸ That scientific knowledge, however, cannot negate an important reality: race still stands as a way of thinking about identity and group affiliation.

A Paucity of Attention

Given the centrality of race in American life, the paucity of literature on race and leadership in corporate settings is notable. Stella Nkomo made that point on the pages of the Academy of Management Review. Even though it was widely accepted that race “has been a profound determinant of one's political rights, one's location in the labor market, one's access to medical care, and even one's sense of identity,” the issue had largely been excluded.⁸⁹

A 1986 survey by Taylor Cox and Nkomo found that, of the 11,804 articles published in sixteen leading management journals over the previous fifteen years, only 201 addressed issues of race or ethnicity. The thinness of the discourse is especially apparent when contrasted with the rich literature that has addressed issues of gender.

There is no consensus on why this is so. Citing Thomas Kuhn's insight that problem selection and the search for explanations occurs within a dominant paradigm, Nkomo insisted that the “study of race is an especially sensitive issue because scholars must not only be aware of how prevailing societal race relations influence their approach to the study of race but they must also understand the effects of their own racial identity and experiences on their work.” Believing they were searching for universal truths, social scientists conducted their research within “the values and concerns of dominant societal groups.”⁹⁰

In a critical review of the literature on race, ethnicity, and leadership, Sonia Ospina and Erica Foldy suggested that “the inside perspective of people of color are often downplayed or ignored” because their experiences are treated as a “special case.”⁹¹ There is, researchers have largely concluded, no opportunity to form general theories.⁹²

There are exceptions. A 1978 review article by Kathryn Bartol and colleagues noted that little consistent evidence had been produced to suggest that black and white leaders behaved differently. That was true regardless of the ethnic composition of the work group being led. There were some indications that systematic bias worked against black supervisors in job evaluation and assessment situations, although here the lack of “objective performance data” rendered the findings inconclusive.⁹³ By highlighting a small number of studies, all of which focused on the impact of race on supervisors and subordinates, that review reinforced the lack of serious consideration of race in the leadership discourse.

Three years later, Bernard Bass’ Stogdill's Handbook of Leadership considered “Blacks and Leadership,” along with “Women and Leadership” and “Leadership in Different Cultures” in a category called special conditions.⁹⁴ “A 300-year legacy of master-slave relationship is giving way by fits and jumps prompted by war, civil strife, legislation, and education,” wrote Bass, “to the rise of blacks into positions of leadership in sizeable numbers.”⁹⁵ The research cited in his chapter referenced how the race of individuals influenced their job evaluations by supervisors and patterns of interaction between black supervisors and black employees.⁹⁶ The research, however, was again sparse and typically set in college labs or military units rather than in business organization.

In his 1999 book with John Gabarro, Breaking Through: The Making of Minority Executives in Corporate America, and again in a 2001 piece, David Thomas turned his attention directly to the construction of the leadership pipeline in corporate America. Thomas’ argument was fundamentally critical of corporate attempts to build a “race blind” context for executive development.

In the years preceding Thomas and Gabarro's book, legal scholars had formulated what came to be known as critical race theory, calling into question the alleged neutrality and objectivity of America's legal structure. Sure, the civil rights movement and consequent federal laws and court rulings had managed to achieve a kind of race blind posture. Equal opportunity was thought to mean access and opportunity unconstrained by factors such as race.

Critical race theorists dissented. Race-blindness actually functioned to “reproduce manifestations of group advantages and disadvantages.” Laws pertaining to work-place equality, in particular, left untouched “many mechanisms able to subvert, manipulate, or obfuscate the law,” resulting in an “unequal racialized balance of power.”⁹⁷

Although avoiding the rhetoric of critical race theory, Thomas and Gabarro argued that structural elements continued to support institutional resistance to minority advancement in the leadership pipeline. Individual racism surely accounted for a significant degree of resistance. “Virtually everyone writing on the career experiences of minority and women managers and professionals” – note how they tie in gender and race to their analysis – “identifies race and gender based prejudice as a major – perhaps the major – barrier to advancement.” Thomas and Gabarro were less focused on the “mean spirited actions of bigots,” however, than on “institutionalized discrimination.”⁹⁸

The line drawn by Thomas and Gabarro separating individual bigotry from institutionalized discrimination was perhaps not as clear as the authors’ suggested. A number of forces worked to the detriment of minorities to advance in the pipeline, including:

• The tendency of networks of individuals to seek each other's company – referred to as homophily – worked to build both in-group and outsider identification.⁹⁹

• The tendency of white employees to label black subordinates as “high risk” because of negative attributions concerning attitudes toward work.¹⁰⁰

• Additionally, people “habitually seem to prefer working with people who are racially similar. Thus, while superior-subordinate relationships that cross race lines may provide the interaction needed to get work done, they often fail to lead to close interpersonal bonds that form between mentor and protégé.”¹⁰¹

These were ways in which individual racism gets baked into institutional processes.¹⁰²

Jeffrey Greenhaus and colleagues identified what they labeled “treatment discrimination,” which occurred “when subgroup members received fewer rewards, resources, or opportunities on the job than they legitimately deserve on the basis of job-related criteria.”¹⁰³ Thomas and Gabarro added that people “systematically give higher performance ratings to members of their own racial groups.” Selection committees created to first identify and then groom potential future leaders often lacked minority representation. That structural reality, combined with the high-risk attribution often ascribed to black managers “decreases even further the likelihood that minorities will be identified as having high potential.”¹⁰⁴

Thomas pushed these observations about institutional resistance to their logical if uncomfortable conclusion in his 2001 piece. By the time this article appeared, a kind of equal opportunity backlash had set into the cultural/legal discourse in the United States. Kicking off with the 1978 Regents of the University of California v. Bakke case, attention turned from discrimination against women and racioethnic minorities to supposed discrimination against the “innocent white male.” The suggestion was that affirmative action represented discrimination against the majority. In this topsy-turvy paradigm, the one and the other became reversed. Citing the ideology of meritocracy and relying on the comforting delusion that racial discrimination had ceased to exist as a force, white males sought legal recourse.¹⁰⁵

Thomas did not reference the increasingly conservative disposition of the U.S. court system. Nonetheless, that turn helped define the context in which he wrote. And his message was explicit. He placed it right there in his title: “race matters.” To be race blind was, in essence, to be race ignorant and resistant to minority advancement. Whites and minorities “follow distinct patterns of advancement” in what are separate “tournaments” for access to top positions in organizations.¹⁰⁶

In particular, future black executives found themselves parked in middle management positions for far longer periods of time than their white counterparts, who tended to achieve a “fast track” designation earlier in their careers. As a “pernicious result,” many high-potential minorities “became discouraged” by what Thomas fearlessly labeled a “separate and unequal” two-tournament system.¹⁰⁷ Creating an environment for success, then, involved not race blindness but race consciousness to the barriers that existed within organizations.

In the cases of both gender and race, institutional resistance decisively shaped a white male leadership pipeline. But there is another question that can be asked. When women and racioethnic minority employees found themselves in leadership positions, did their behaviors in the enactment of that role mimic their white male counterparts or did it depart in some significant way? The discourse has attempted some fascinating but not entirely conclusive inquiry into just that question.