Despite advancing in education to become one of the nation’s most educated groups, black women continue to face barriers to obtaining chief executive positions in corporate America. While there are more women (32) in CEO jobs at Fortune 500 companies this year than there were in 2016 (21), there are currently no black women in charge of a Fortune 500 company.
Even with black women graduating from college in record numbers, “not enough are coming out of the education system to get them all the way through to the C-suite,” says [Ursula Burns, former CEO of Xerox]. And the black women who do make it often end up in support positions rather than the operational roles that lead to CEO jobs. “HR isn’t going to get you there,” she says. “Communications and the arts aren’t going to get you there.” The juice lies with people who are close to the product and the money. “So, now look at the numbers of women we have now. Unless you’re bringing people in from Mars, it’s going to be a while.”
Burns says there are plenty of things corporate America can and should be doing to make sure that the black women currently in the pipeline have a chance to succeed on their own terms.
This is called the Black Ceiling. While the glass ceiling may have cracked (or at least shifted) for other women, black women still face limitations in terms of social and cultural factors which prevent them from being considered for leadership opportunities. This starts with networking—black women are often excluded from networks that allow them informal opportunities to learn about jobs, mentoring and sponsorship. But it also includes experiences of microagressions and discrimination at work that impact their sense of motivation on the job.
Black women are at a disadvantage in trying to bridge the familiarity gap with white men in positions of power, because in the words of talent management research firm Catalyst, they are “double outsiders”: They’re neither white, nor men. [...]
But the research, which is drawn from a large group of survey respondents Catalyst has tracked for years, also shows that black women often grow demoralized in the workplace. They report environments that they feel continually overlook their credentials, diminish their accomplishments, and pile on cultural slights—about their hair, appearance, even their parenting skills. And they often have fraught relationships with white women, who tend to take the lead on issues of women and diversity. “This is what we call an ‘emotional tax,’” says Dnika J. Travis, an executive and researcher at the Catalyst Research Center for Corporate Practice. “The burden of being on guard all the time affects our lives in really negative ways.”