Walgreens CEO’s Exit Highlights Isolation of Black Female Leaders

The fact that there are so few Black women at the helm of major companies itself creates a problem: One of the challenges Black female corporate leaders must overcome is isolation. In US C-suites, many Black women must confront the reality of being “the only.” Even if other Black women have held senior roles before them, there are so few that it’s unusual to have more than one on a board or executive team at a time. That can leave each one feeling like she’s the first, reinventing the wheel. Whereas White women have long talked of a “glass ceiling,” the term many Black women use is a concrete wall. You can’t even see the other side.

As Ella Bell Smith and Stella Nkomo wrote in their book Our Separate Ways, Black women “face special hurdles in the journey to the top and … when they get there, may find corporate America a lonely, hollow, haunted place.”

That’s among the reasons that Black women are so over-represented among entrepreneurs: A 2021 study found that 17% of Black women were currently trying to start their own business, compared to only 10% of White women and 15% of White men. Black women account for about 14% of the US’s female population and 42% of its new, women-owned businesses. Sidelining that hustle is corporate America’s loss. 

When researchers led by Joan C. Williams, Katherine W. Phillips and Erika V. Hall surveyed scientists working in established companies, Black women mentioned isolation more than any other group. “You don’t know who you can trust,” said one. “This has been a very lonely life.” Some mentioned being excluded by colleagues, while others mentioned intentionally keeping their personal lives private, even when personal discussions at work were common. They feared — with good reason — that sharing personal information could undermine their authority or even be used against them. 

What’s also isolating: the feeling that you can’t ever make a single mistake. That’s what Black female architects repeatedly told researchers in a different study of architects, co-authored by Williams with Rachel Korn and Rachel Maas. All women have to continually demonstrate their fitness for the job, but it’s even more true for Black women. Williams has found that Black women in an array of professional fields are markedly more likely than White, Asian or Hispanic women to say they have to provide unusual amounts of evidence of their competence. Three-quarters of Black women in science, math and engineering careers said they had experienced this form of “prove it again” bias. Women of color, and Black women in particular, are also more likely to be mistaken for cleaning staff. 

As a result, Black women are less likely to get the kinds of high-profile assignments that lead to upper management. We know from peer-reviewed academic research that women and minorities tend to be over-assigned grunt work and under-assigned glory work; this is especially true for women who are also racial minorities. In that study of architects, only a third of White men, but two-thirds of Black women, said they’re seen as “worker bees,” leaving them to get stuff done behind the scenes.

The relative lack of high-profile assignments holds these employees back from promotion. For example, in a third study, this time of technology firms, Williams, with Rachel Korn and Asma Ghani, found that women of color were significantly more likely to get stuck doing work that was beneath their level of expertise or entirely outside of their job description. Men were allowed to do the technical jobs they were hired for; Black women were asked to become unpaid diversity, equity and inclusion consultants. That’s not the path to becoming CEO. 

These biases play out at every level, winnowing the pool of women available for executive roles. In a 2021 study by Yale’s Kelly Shue, looking at a large North American retail chain, the research team found that even when women’s performance reviews showed higher ratings than men, they were rated lower on their “potential” — and thus promoted at a lower rate. Depressingly, the contrast between performance and potential got even starker at the higher levels of the organization. 

“Women get progressively lower potential scores relative to their actual future performance as we rise up the corporate ladder,” Shue told Yale Insights. “So this is going to contribute, I think, to a stronger and stronger glass ceiling the higher up we go.”

Or, if you prefer, a stronger and stronger concrete wall.

More From Bloomberg Opinion:

• Republicans Wasted Their Summer Attacking DEI and ESG: Sarah Green Carmichael

• Diversity Attacks Make Black Workers Unfair Targets: Anna Branch

• Which Corporate Diversity Efforts Are Now Illegal?: Noah Feldman

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Sarah Green Carmichael is a Bloomberg Opinion editor. Previously, she was managing editor of ideas and commentary at Barron’s and an executive editor at Harvard Business Review, where she hosted “HBR IdeaCast.”

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