Thought Leadership: How to Improve Women’s Advancement Programs

This article by Colleen M. Tolan, Deepa Purushothaman, and Lisa S. Kaplowitz was originally published in the Harvard Business Review.

“Women’s empowerment” is a common goal of gender-equity initiatives. But what do we really mean when we say we’re empowering women?

A recent study conducted by the Center for Women in Business (CWIB) at Rutgers Business School uncovered critical differences between men’s and women’s experiences of power. This study, conducted by Colleen Tolan, Alexander Van Zant, and Terri Kurtzberg, is part of ongoing research to better understand gendered perceptions of power. The study included over 300 participants and found that men more often associated power with control, while women said power is more often tied to freedom.

This matters, because most corporate women’s advancement programs center on transferring power, or teaching women a predefined slate of skills purported to give them more control over their careers. By taking this approach, companies may be unintentionally communicating a culture of conformity by asking women to change who they are to succeed. This leaves many women, especially senior women, feeling stuck, because strong leaders need to have the ability to set expectations, not just fulfill them.

Instead of focusing on transferring power from those who hold it to those who need more of it, or on pushing down traditional ideas of what women need in order to be seen as powerful, companies should get more curious, ask more questions, and refocus their efforts around what actually makes women feel powerful.

Why Traditional Empowerment Efforts Fall Short

When companies discuss women’s empowerment, it’s often thought of as a top-down, one-size-fits-all, zero-sum effort. Leaders and decision-makers in power remain its arbiters, transferring power from select groups to women in their organizations. To do this, companies often look to advancement programs, focusing on interventions including:

• The gap fill: Teaching women specific skills, especially around topics like negotiation and presenting, so that they’ll show up with more “gravitas.”
• The confidence boost: Bringing in an expert to help female employees be more confident and “appear more powerful” like the men around them.
• The shadow effect: Endowing power to women by providing them with (typically male) sponsors who will share their power.
• The gift basket approach: Providing an array of resources on topics like stress and mental health, which assumes that improving women’s access to resources relative to men will give them more power.

But our data suggests these efforts, however well intentioned, are not translating to real or felt power among women. Empowering and advancing women requires more than a confidence curriculum, updated lists, or empty KPIs because these strategies don’t address the deeper issues of belonging, hidden barriers, or broken culture.

Further, when companies implement skill-building curricula, they usually pull from traditional, often more masculine archetypes of leadership. This can cause harm by reinforcing that women must assimilate in order to rise, rather than becoming the best version of themselves. It also doesn’t factor in the double bind that demands women leaders must be both likable and competent, a standard not imposed on male leaders. If we don’t want to set women up to fail or feel like imposters, we must take into account not only the biases they face, but their own perceptions of power.

For Women, Power Means Freedom

We surveyed 310 corporate workers in the U.S. about their understanding of power. When participants were asked to define power, men and women largely agreed that power has to do with influence and control. But when they were asked to describe a time that they felt powerful, the women mentioned something the men didn’t: freedom. Not only did women in the survey explicitly discuss freedom as an important indicator of power in their responses, but they were also significantly more likely than men to suggest that freedom is associated with power.

One way to think about this difference is through prior research that talks about the three dimensions of power: power over, power with, and power to. Most people define power as power over, but the majority of women in our survey saw freedom at work as linked to the third dimension: power to.

Here’s what female participants told us they’d like to have at work:

The power to lead in collective — not just competitive — ways.

When asked to describe a time they felt powerful, women mentioned freedom of choice in decision-making, whereas men more often described being put in charge of others. Instead of expecting women to conform to a single ideal of leadership, women expressed that leadership should include “the freedom to choose to make decisions for the group as a leader or open the floor up for more group-based decision-making.” Women were also four times more likely than men to describe helping others as a time they felt powerful. This suggests empowerment efforts should consider a wider array of leadership styles and seek to develop female leaders by cultivating their collaboration styles. Women should have space to lead from their strengths and in ways that work for them.

The power to lead from lived experience.

Many of the women we surveyed suggested that power comes from being able to be themselves at work. One participant said that power is “the freedom to be who you are.” Others wrote about the desire to lead in their own ways, to step away from the pressure to fit in, and to break free from pre-established norms and archetypes of leadership. Traditional empowerment efforts don’t always see value in lived experiences and instead require adapting, which can leave women feeling powerless instead of powerful. This can be even more challenging for certain groups, like women of color, who face additional expectations to adapt.

The power to redefine ambitions and paths.

Freedom is about more than flexibility; it means empowering individuals to make choices that best fit their leadership style and where they are in their lives. Women in our survey suggested that power means less stress and more freedom to make things go how they want. Some women talked about the desire to have more freedom in choosing their long-term career paths, promotion timelines, and managerial responsibilities. Women were also three times less likely than the men to describe “winning” as a time they felt powerful.

All of this suggests that women may want different things in pursuit of leadership. Consider a female leader who sees winning as antithetical to strong leadership and seeks to move away from zero-sum efforts or isn’t solely focused on getting to the top of her organization. This direction may not be seen as “powerful” in the old paradigm. But the power to redefine ambitions is an important part of felt power, and recognizing it will help companies not miss out on talented women leaders.

The power to make change.

Our research found the agency–power connection seems to resonate in a special way for women. The women we surveyed don’t just want to stay the course by fitting in and adapting — they want to set the course by evolving the cultures around them. They want more personal agency. They said that freedom and power at work were tied to making change. One participant said, “I felt powerful when I had the decision to choose how to set the rules with my team.” Empowering employees means giving them the freedom to reevaluate what is and isn’t working within company culture and providing ways for them to voice solutions.  

These ideas reinforce the concept that power isn’t about changing or fixing individuals. For the women in our survey, power is about options and the ability to build a career that works for them. It’s about the power to make change and to bring more of themselves to their work life. It’s about trusting women and helping them to lead as more of themselves.

How Companies Can Rethink Empowerment

As companies look to empower women leaders, they need to be willing to broaden their ideas around power as well as listen to individual women’s experiences and perspectives related to it. More specifically, they need to understand that power is multidimensional and, for many women, a utility for freedom.

To that end, companies should:

• Evaluate and adapt their current programs to determine if there is bias or narrow assumptions around leadership skills and leadership traits. Get curious. Most organizations are embedded with implicit biases, and current approaches may be reinforcing that there is only one way to rise, and individuals must conform.
• Ask what women in the company need and want related to power, and listen to what they say. Because experiences of power are personal, asking employees what they need to feel more powerful may provide you with new insights and ways to move forward.
• Refocus and rewrite programs and culture to accommodate what individual women want and need to find freedom and feel powerful. Companies need to start seeing the value in supporting women in being who they are and encouraging them to lead out of their lived experiences.

Workplaces thrive when employees feel empowered. But if companies continue to perpetuate a single dimension of power, redistribute it in its current form, and expect women to mimic old patterns and archetypes, nothing will ever change, and we won’t advance and empower women leaders.

The goal of advancement programs should be for women to get to the top spots with the freedom to lead in their unique ways when they get there. Putting more emphasis on freedom may be how companies break through, truly empower women, and help them realize their full potential and power.