Yes, Women Are Making Progress and I’m Thankful. But It’s Not Enough. Yet.

When Kamala Harris got on stage as the vice president-elect, I looked at my little girl and felt palpable excitement.

Finally. America is almost 245 years old and we’ve had 48 vice presidents. Senator Harris becoming Vice President Harris is a very big deal. Finally my girl could see - and I could too - a woman (and one of color at that!) occupying the second-highest public leadership position in our country. Yes, Blake-Anne (my four year old daughter), it is possible.

Yesterday, President-elect Biden announced that the exceptional Janet Yellen is his pick for Treasury Secretary (which made this finance major stoked!), the first woman who would hold the role. Finally.

Two weeks ago, Kim Ng became General Manager of the Miami Marlins. That is also history making: she’s the first woman to occupy this role in the MLB. A female GM! Again, we say finally. Here’s a woman who has doggedly worked and interviewed for this role - for which she is incredibly, incredibly qualified - multiple times: “The Los Angeles Dodgers in 2005. The Seattle Mariners in 2008. The San Diego Padres in 2009. The Los Angeles Angels in 2011. And the Padres, again, in 2014.”

It’s another win, another opportunity to say, “At last.” To celebrate that saying, if you can see it, you can be it. And it is something to be excited about. This Thanksgiving, I’m so thankful for these opportunities and these women.

I am excited. But I am also still pissed.

There is a lot of very real, very routine sexism that continues to plague the advancement of women at all levels in all industries. Too often, the excuse is, “Well, she’s never done that job.” Yes, Kim Ng never hit a home run in the MLB. Oh really? So what? Senator Harris has never served in the military - but neither have the last four vice presidents. And? I’m still waiting on why this matters.

I don’t code or create marketing content or consider myself an expert in user interface design. Neither do most of my male CEO counterparts. We still run companies and we do it really well. In fact, our job is really to add the best of the best to our team to complement our skills. But the myth that you have to be in all roles before you’re ready for the CEO job is especially deployed to disqualify women. Like most men, they haven’t played every position or taken on every job, yet it’s one of those unwritten standards they’re asked to meet. It’s an easy reason to pass women over when their name comes up.

It’s in the family of other common reasons that women are sometimes relegated to the “no” pile. I was once deliberately not invited to an important meeting because, in my then-boss’s words, “You have a baby and I don’t want you to have to choose your baby or to travel.” What about what I wanted? What about what I was willing - and, in fact, eager - to do? The intent might be well meaning but the result is that it boxes women out of the interactions and experiences that allow them to make an impact and move up.

I am genuinely excited about these big prominent wins for women. With Kim Ng, I thought: Look at this woman who has been interviewing for her dream job for four times longer than my kids have been alive and she never gave up. I’m convinced the Marlins are going to be the best managed team in the league because no one could possibly care or know more than she does. 

I give the biggest shoutout to these glass-shatterers who have seized their chance through an exceptional level of work and commitment. I am thankful to them for continuing through the bullshit to see their dreams become reality. And yet there’s something so difficult to accept about the amount of investment these firsts have to do to get the job. “Above and beyond” really is table stakes for women and that’s exhausting. There’s also danger in celebrating so much that we forget just how far we still have to go:

• In 2020, for every 100 men promoted to manager, only 85 women were - and, no surprises, it was even worse for women of color (51 Black women promoted; 71 Latina women).
• This year, women make up just 38 percent of manager-level positions and men hold 62 percent.
• In 2018, 4.8 percent of the Fortune 500 CEOs were women. 

As prominent women come to high-profile positions, they are normalizing women in leadership roles, moving us closer to a day when women in powerful roles are so common as to be unremarkable.

But we all must help by doing our part in our own organizations:

• Calling out soft sexism when we see it and reframing the discussion
• Hiring more women in all roles and demanding a diverse slate of candidates for EVERY role
• Pressing leadership to ensure pay equity, generous family leave, and other benefits

So I’m thankful for our progress. I’m thankful for the glass shattered and scattered across the male-dominated fields of politics, finance and sports. Yet the work continues and we can all contribute to making progress. Now it’s your turn to keep the progress going and take these actions to push for even more progress. I pray for the Thanksgiving when we can take women in leadership for granted. That is what I’ll really be thankful for.