What if You Were in Charge?

July 5, 2021

I was taking part in an event recently with women in the finance and private equity fields, and the conversation turned to the women’s experience with interviews. A number of women talked about being careful not to mention their children in job interviews. Others noted that they don’t even mention that they are married, as they know a hard-working single woman comes across as less risky than a married one of child-bearing age. All of this in spite of the fact that laws now exist to protect women against discrimination in the workplace. They were just being realistic about the nature of their chosen, male-dominated field.

And then one of the panelists spoke up. She told the story of how she used to ask potential employers in interviews, “Why are there not more women in senior positions here?” And when the interviewers threw something out like “We have some female associates,” she would press on: “I mean at the executive level. Why are there not more women there? That makes me wonder about working at this company.”

Wow, that’s an altogether different approach. Instead of trying to angle herself into a company by stepping carefully around their prejudices, she let the employer know that they would be missing out on hiring her if they didn’t get their act together. (She went on to co-found a highly successful private equity firm of her own.)

This story rang particularly true when another panelist told of leaving the corporate world and starting a successful tech company. She shared with the group what she witnessed watching other women in funding pitches. She found that female founders (including herself) tended to ask investors to help them with capital because they had a great idea. Successful male founders, on the other hand, told investors that they would be missing out if they didn’t invest in the founder’s great idea—that the founder’s company was positioned to own the market and become a billion dollar opportunity.

And so she transformed her own pitch to do the same, and started raising more capital.

Now, you might be thinking: In changing her approach in her pitches, wasn’t this tech founder just doing the same thing that the other women had been doing in their job interviews? Wasn’t she changing how she came across in order to gain a footing in a male dominated world? Not exactly. The women interviewees were trying to sidestep sexism by making themselves seem smaller and less risky. But the tech founder was crushing sexism by making herself bigger and more valuable.

She learned the game the male founders were playing, starting playing it, and won.

And so what is the moral of this story? The way to change the world for women isn’t by sidestepping or fighting the “male power” game. It’s by learning how to play it, mastering it, and eventually (as our tech founder and private equity co-founder friends are now doing) changing it by investing in other women.