Her heels click as she walks down the hall. Whispers fill the room like foghorns blaring in her ears, framed with big silver hoops. Her walk grows unsteady with each step. What feels like a thousand people in dark suits with striped ties and neatly combed hair look at her with judgment and doubt.
Experiences like these aren’t rare. This single moment displays a much bigger reality — one where double standards and gender-based discrimination affect the lives of millions of women worldwide.
When she walks into her office, the anxiety she feels isn’t just in her head. Every time she tries to be taken seriously or go above and beyond, she hopes to prove that she is worthy of respect.
“She knows when she walks into a room that people will value her opinion a little bit less than the man sitting next to her. She feels her comments weigh less than those of others in the room. That’s just a gut instinct that she has,” said Joel Pomerenk, the chief financial officer at Cara Collective in Chicago, IL.
Gender-based bias dates back to early civilization. Women were often relegated to domestic roles, while men were expected to do the hard and meaningful work. This expectation reinforces the notion that only men can be successful, thereby making the experience of women in the workforce extremely difficult.
According to the Center for American Progress, leadership roles in fields such as technology, business, and engineering are predominantly held by men. In this case, a cycle forms where male perspectives shape decisions for those companies. This often leads to fewer opportunities for women to succeed or even enter those industries in the first place.
“In the back of my mind, there is sort of that underlying feeling that I want to prove myself to my peers. Often, I’m at meetings and look around to see that there are very few women present. Someone I know was interviewing for a project, and it was suggested to her that there should have been a male on the team,” said Regan Shields Ives, the principal at Finegold Alexander Architects in Boston, MA.
Ives’s experience isn’t an isolated incident. Seeing very few women at this meeting goes beyond a single project interview or a single meeting room.
According to Fortune, only 10.4% of Fortune 500 companies have a woman as their chief executive officer (CEO).
“We can be what we can see. If men consistently aspire to be CEOs, then other men believe they can be CEO as well. Ninety percent of Fortune 500 leaders have inspired a new generation of men to see and think that maybe they, too, can achieve this. It’s harder for women when they see that only 10% of their gender are accomplishing what they want to accomplish,” Pomerenk said.
Between 2012 and 2017, one of these few female CEOs was Marissa Mayer. She is a highly successful woman in the technology and business world. Some of her notable accomplishments include serving as the former CEO of Yahoo and being the first female engineer at Google.
According to The Computing and Commerce Association, Mayer’s leadership at Yahoo oversaw the expansion of the company’s mobile base to 650 million monthly active users, generating over $1 billion in advertising revenue. She also oversaw the hiring process for acquisitions.
“I was doing a lot of acquisition hires, and I saw a headline that said ‘Marissa’s shopping spree.’ That bothered me because at the time, many other male CEOs were doing the same thing, but you never saw a headline saying ‘Mark Zuckerberg’s shopping spree.’ I felt like that underestimated me,” Mayer said.
Omar El Akkad, a technology reporter for The Globe and Mail, described Mayer’s strategic purchases as a “shopping spree” and suggested that her decisions were impulsive or reckless.
Despite the criticism driven by sexism and stereotypes involving women, many continue to persevere by fueling themselves with passion.
“Passion is a gender-neutralizing force. I really try not to look at things through a gender lens. I think that it can really hinder you. I really try to keep focus on the task at hand and what I am working on. If you’re really passionate about the same things that the company and the people around you are working on, it takes gender out of the equation,” Mayer said.
This strong mindset not only helped her succeed, but it also proved that other women could succeed in the technology industry. The same year Mayer became CEO, the number of female students attending Stanford University’s renowned Computer Science Department increased by 10%.
These trends represent slow but substantial growth in opportunities. Recent data indicate that, although gender gaps in the workforce persist, younger generations of women are entering competitive fields at higher rates than ever before. According to the National Science Foundation, women have earned nearly 50% of all science and engineering bachelor’s degrees since the late 1990s.
“It wasn’t that long ago that women were only teachers or nurses. The professional women when I was growing up weren’t in those kinds of leadership roles. Now, more of us pursue it, even if we still aren’t as well represented. Things are changing over time. It’s certainly more than it was ten years ago, and probably more than it was ten years before that,” Mayer said.
