Julia Boorstin: When Women Lead
Julia Boorstin has spent over two decades as a reporter, working for CNBC, CNN, and Fortune. She’s also the creator of the “Disruptor 50” franchise, a list which highlights private companies transforming the economy and challenging companies in established industries. Her first book, When Women Lead, draws on her work studying and interviewing hundreds of executives throughout her impressive career to tell the stories of more than 60 female CEOs and leaders who have fought massive social and institutional headwinds to run some of the world’s most innovative and successful companies.
Combining years of academic research and interviews, Julia reveals these women’s powerful commonalities—they are highly adaptive to change, deeply empathetic in their management style, and much more likely to integrate diverse points of view into their business strategies. This makes these women uniquely equipped to lead, grow businesses, and navigate crises in ways where their male counterparts don’t seem as gifted.
Today’s episode digs into Boorstin’s meticulously researched book as we cover a few of the female tendencies that correlate with great leadership: how women embrace the role of fire-prevention as opposed to fire fighting; their ability to avoid ethical quandaries and group think; and the value of gaining confidence through experience. The monoculture tends to focus on iconic female leaders, she tells us, but there is so much more to gain from focusing on the stories that are not being told, expanding the diversity of images of success for women and men alike.
EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:
Female qualities correlate with great leadership…14:20
Women as fire preventers…21:00
The myth of the confidence gap…39:00
Feedback bias…42:00
MORE FROM JULIA BOORSTIN:
When Women Lead: What They Achieve, Why They Succeed, and How We Can Learn from Them
Follow Julia on Instagram and Twitter
DIVE DEEPER:
“How the VC Pitch Process Is Failing Female Entrepreneurs,” Harvard Business Review
“The Remarkable Power of Hope,” Psychology Today
“Language Bias in Performance Feedback,” Textio 2022 Study
TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE LOEHNEN:
I feel outmatched. I've decided to wear my new Enya shirt for you and you look like you’ve got glam on. I know that you normally do, but anyway.
JULIA BOORSTIN:
I was just on TV. That's my excuse.
ELISE LOEHNEN:
We look like we're at a different party.
JULIA BOORSTIN:
You look like you have an award from a horse show behind you.
ELISE LOEHNEN:
I know. I don't know why. Honestly, it's like just weird artifacts that I picked up when I was an editor Lucky and would travel over the world, and we were always in pawn shops and antique malls.
JULIA BOORSTIN:
If you didn't win that horse ribbon yourself, I be very disappointed.
ELISE LOEHNEN:
I didn't, no, I didn't win it. And I buy things sometimes where I feel like this had a lot of value to the person who had it and therefore I need to give it a home. It's very weird, it's a strange compulsion. Well, friend, congrats on your book. As I was texting you, I knew it would be really good, but I was very impressed and I thought it was fantastic. And not only because I know and love you. Nice job. And I feel like we started writing at the same time and you got yours done so fast. How did you do that?
ELISE LOEHNEN:
It did not feel fast to me. Are you kidding? But in a lot of ways, I feel like this book is something that was kind of like the product of my past 21 years that I've been a working person, since I graduated college. Or 22 years, or however many years it's been. I started working the proposal in fall of 2019 and I sold the proposal in May 2020, but in a way, it made sense for me to write this book, because it's the culmination of all these things I care about: innovators, gender gaps, business leadership, like it all sort of came together. So, I took two years to write it, but it really was a lot longer than that.
ELISE LOEHNEN:
Well, it doesn't feel like a quick jaunt. It's so meticulously researched and you can tell the care that you took putting it all together, in pairing people who are very unlikely together.
JULIA BOORSTIN:
Thank you, Elise, that means so much coming from you.
ELISE LOEHNEN:
And what I tire of as a reader and, and I'm sure other people can relate, is that there's a certain echelon of women who lead companies who get a lot of media attention, rightly or wrongly. And I feel like a lot of us know those stories, or we know the headlines of those stories, but the best parts of the book, the most joyful parts of your book, I thought were all these incredible women building companies that are solving massive issues. I had never heard of them, I had never heard of the companies, so that was so delightful. And to have those juxtaposed against people who we might recognize.
JULIA BOORSTIN:
Yeah. I mean, I think what I was trying to do is take the fact that in my work, I mean I interview hundreds and hundreds of people and I was finding these amazing people and telling their stories in small ways on CNBC or with our Disruptor 50 list that looks at private startups, but a lot of these companies were so impressive to me and just weren't on the mainstream radar. And at the same time I was interviewing people like Jenn Hyman, who founded Rent the Runway, or Julie Wainright, founder of The RealReal. And the real story was one that I didn't think was really being told. I think that like the monoculture tends to focus in on these big, iconic female leaders. And some of them are great, like Ursula Burns. She’s a legend, she's amazing, she has a book that recently came out and she's phenomenal and it's great to focus on her. But, there are these other women's stories who aren't being told and at the same time, you have a couple of these women like Elizabeth Holmes from Theranos who are disasters and the media loves to hone in on them and tell their stories over and over and over. And the number of magazine covers that were dedicated to someone like Elizabeth Holmes, at the absence of all these other stories made me think we just need to rebalance this a bit. And as you saw in my book, it’s incredibly positive. There's been enough ink spilled on the disasters and on the women who are canceled for one reason or another. And I didn't feel like I needed to replicate that, that was already done. And I think there needs to be a little bit more of a diversity of images out there of what it looks like to be a CEO, not just for women. I want women to see that CEOs look like people you've never heard of who don't lead like the typical archetypal guy in a suit or dude in a hoodie, and they don't look like Elizabeth Holmes. There's a much broader array of leadership styles and I think it's not just important for women to know that, but for men to understand that as well. Because in a lot of situations, they're the ones who are controlling the Venture capital (VC) dollars and they need to see that success doesn't just look like a Mark Zuckerberg type.
ELISE LOEHNEN:
No, totally. And as you point out, there’s so much pattern matching in Silicon Valley, that's how most see small circles, whisper networks, warm intros of “oh, this looks like…” or, it's like movie pitching in Hollywood, “It's like this, but this, like this meets this…” in a way that actually doesn't really serve innovation or give people who have interesting ideas or perspectives on underrepresented communities that will soon become dominant communities, a chance to really succeed. And I love that even as you mentioned that monomyth, that this idea of female leadership that is perpetuated and that we just love, you know, of toxic leaders, toxic cultures, and of course there's a lot of that with male led companies as well, but that seems to be the only narrative that people can really embrace in a way that's so reductive. And I don't wanna dwell on it too long, but in covering news, do you think that's what drives traffic? Like what's that cycle and how do we interrupt it?
JULIA BOORSTIN:
It's interesting because you know, I started working on this book in 2019 and two years earlier was the start of the whole Me Too, Time’s Up movement, and my book is also not at all about that. My book is very much, I think, a reaction to that. I think that that was a necessary movement, is a necessary movement, and it is a necessary conversation, but that is not about solutions. And I think that that whole movement was calling out men who were toxic, who were inappropriate, or who crossed whatever lines in the workforce. And then that, I think, drove a lot of the backlash against female leaders. So, okay, say if you're gonna tear down these men, women are going to be torn down along with them for totally different reasons. And a lot of times the women who were canceled, were canceled for behavior or leadership styles that may have been tolerated in men, like this idea of being too aggressive, or pushy, or demanding that people work all the time. I mean, Elon Musk talks about sleeping underneath his desk and that is celebrated as a workaholic culture.
So I think there are these two things going on. One is this negativity around, and oftentimes entirely necessary negativity around Me Too, the negativity around cancel culture and around female leaders. And what I wanted to do was something different. I wanted to show the solutions in the women who were doing phenomenal things, whose stories were not well known, and whose leadership styles have not been focused on or talked about because they didn't match the typical stereotype of what leaders look like. So I wanted to really do something different. I've been a journalist for my entire career and I think sometimes these things feed upon themselves. So one story leads to another, one story prompts another journalist to do a deeper dive or investigation, and sometimes that's not a bad thing. It's just not what I wanted to do here. I wanted to be more solution oriented and I am optimistic that if people follow the data, the data shows that companies with diverse leaders, with diverse boards, and with diverse management actually just perform better. I would love to live in a world where there's more equity in the workplace and having people approach that from a philanthropic perspective is never gonna get us there. We're never gonna get to equity if it happens because companies are like, “oh, this is our philanthropic endeavor.” No, you have to understand that investing in equity is actually going to make you more money as a company. And I think that's why I'm optimistic. I think they'll see the data.
ELISE LOEHNEN:
Let's start there actually. People might have heard of the study of the Greek murder mystery that they did at Northwestern. Can you explain it? Will you talk us through the study? And, also, the discomfort that people have?
JULIA BOORSTIN:
This is one of my favorite studies in the book. So, I started off with the interviews and then I was like, why are these leadership styles so effective? I wanted to sort-of understand what these women were doing. A lot of time, they didn't even understand it as anything other than their sort-of natural way of being in the world, so why does this make so much sense for them in their companies? And why does it work so well? So I started reading all these academic studies done by professors all over the world. Northwestern University had this study where they gathered all these college students and they asked them to solve a hypothetical murder mystery. They gave them clues and they tried to figure out which types of groups were best equipped to solve the problem, but they did it by grouping people based on their fraternity and sorority. So they would have a group of fraternity members together, like three people together, and they would bring in a fourth person. If the fourth person was not from the original sorority, had a different culture, a different code, and they didn't know each other, then they actually solved the crime much faster, with much more accuracy than if they were from the same group.
So what that effectively means is, if you are with a group of people you know and someone else comes who speaks your code in your language, you're gonna agree with each other much more easily. You're not gonna challenge each other. And so what was really interesting to me though, is the professors who did the study dug a little bit deeper, and they found when an outsider joined the group, they solved the problem better, but not because the outsider brought new ideas. It wasn't like the outsider was like, “oh, I know what to do here. This is the source of the crime.” What they found was that the outsider actually forced the people already in the group to be more careful and more cautious and reexamine their thoughts themselves. And my take away from this, is that if people are just surrounded by other people like them, they're less likely to question each other or examine themselves and ask themselves, “am I thinking this just because this is my first judgment, my first instinct? or do I really know what I'm talking about here?” And I think about this study all the time. I mean, it seems so relevant when you're watching kids on the playground. It just seems so relevant to this question of problem solving, decision making and how we are all better if we are surrounded by people who are not just like us. We can question ourselves and push ourselves to find the best answer ourselves. If there are other people there who aren't gonna just be like, “yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever you said is fine.”
ELISE LOEHNEN:
Yeah. And then there's another component to it, which I think is really fascinating, which is the groups that have been interrupted by total strangers, and I’m quoting you, “judge themselves to be much less effective and expressed much less confidence in their solution, even if it turned out to be the correct one, which it was twice as often.” So that felt harder, right? There was resistance there that they had to overcome, but it ultimately moved them to a much better place, which is fascinating because I think of often we're like, “if it's easy, it's good.”
JULIA BOORSTIN:
Easy is not always good. It feels harder, but the outcome was better. And I think it feels harder because you're forced to question your own beliefs, question your own approach to problem solving. But, if you're surrounded by people who are not like you, who aren't going to automatically agree with you because you speak the same code and maybe see the world more in the same way, then it's harder for you, but you yourself will be better. And I think that's a great sort of overarching message from this book, which is that there is this great advantage of diversity. And one thing that's interesting is that female leaders are more likely to prioritize, not only the gender diversity, but also the racial diversity of their organizations. So that's one reason why, if you have a woman in charge, she's more likely to create situations like Northwestern University, with an out group member who comes in an outsider to the fraternity. And it says, yeah, it may not feel good, but the outcome is better. And there are actually a couple of companies in the book, who I highlight, who create scenarios where they try to bring a clash of ideas together, because they know that if you can pull ideas from anywhere across an organization, you're gonna have better ideas than if you're just solving problems with the narrow group that looks, sounds, and feels all like each other.
ELISE LOEHNEN:
Right. And as any group, as in that Northwestern study over time, you do become that fraternity or a sorority just by spending a lot of time with each other. So, let's back all the way up because I just want to highlight the range of qualities that you distilled from the women that you profiled and the way that they correlate with great leadership that might not show up as much in men, like their tendency to be more considerate of data when they're evaluating risks there, as you just mentioned, likeliness to include varied perspectives when they're making decisions, leading with vulnerability, willingness to ignore expectations and do things their own or different ways, that they frequently focus on achieving a greater purpose beyond profits, and are more likely to pursue social and environmental goals. Just to be an evangelist for your book, it made me fired up. I was like, I'm going to be a CEO. I want to solve a big social problem. I felt incredibly inspired.
JULIA BOORSTIN:
It is so interesting because women are statistically more likely to found companies with an additional social or environmental purpose. Not that men don't also do this, but women found those companies at equal numbers as men, whereas women are less likely to found companies in say the enterprise software space. But what's so interesting about that, is there is a huge advantage in founding a company with a social or environmental purpose. And I've talked to some of these CEOs about this, asking them, “what do you think the advantage is?” There's data about it, but when I ask the women, they say, “Are you kidding me? Founding a company is so hard. You have to be so determined. So persistent. The whole thing is such a nightmare to push through all these challenges. But, if you feel like there's some additional benefit, like if you know that if you succeed, you're gonna be helping the environment. Or if you succeed, you're gonna be helping young moms who are struggling with their babies, or whatever that additional thing is, it makes you more determined and it gives you more energy and reason to persist despite all these challenges.” There are also other good reasons, like if you have a consumer facing product, you're more likely to be able to draw customers, it's easier to hire employees, etc., but there is like serious reason why it's great to have that additional benefit when you're founding a company.
ELISE LOEHNEN:
And when you talk about equal number of women to men, do you mean that there's an equal number of companies? Or when you break down the number, the companies that women are founding are fewer, right?
JULIA BOORSTIN:
The data's complicated because there isn't universal data. We don't know how many people out there try to start companies. We do know that women are 42% of all business owners, but in the VC space, the tech space where they're getting VC dollars, they're only getting 3% of VC dollars, and I believe it's about 6.5% of all VC deals. So the numbers are much smaller, but the numbers get much, much more even when it comes to purpose driven companies. What I think is particularly interesting, because you talked about pattern matching and all the bias that women face, the bias actually dissipates a little bit if you're talking about purpose driven companies. There's this crazy study I included about business school students and they were asked to evaluate the same company with the same strategy, same revenue streams, whatever it was. If a woman was presenting the same company versus a man, they judged the male companies as more likely to succeed. That's bias. That's just implicit bias. If the female company and the male company both had a purpose, like an additional social, environmental purpose, they were judged the same. So the addition of purpose eliminated the bias.
ELISE LOEHNEN:
It makes sense. Yeah. Because women are supposed to care, Julia, we're supposed to be nurturing mothers. Which is all wonderful and true, but it's also kind of messed up how we're penalized. And you talk a lot about that, how men are penalized when they show these more feminine qualities as leaders and conversely women are penalized when they show up more in their masculine. We just love those gender biases.
JULIA BOORSTIN:
Yeah. And it's not fair for men. I mean there are all these statistics about servant leadership, this is this idea that you should prioritize your employees and your customers and really put them first. And by the way, this is a strategy that has worked for people like Howard Schultz, the founder of Starbucks, the CEO of FedEx, they've talked about using servant leadership as their approach. This is something that men do also, but women tend to do it more and it's very effective when women do it, but men should not be penalized for taking approaches that are more traditionally or stereotypically feminine. That's a lose-lose for everyone.
ELISE LOEHNEN:
And then, I think you called it ‘agentic,’ is that right?
JULIA BOORSTIN:
‘Agentic’ means this idea of, I'm gonna use the word bossy, because it's a word we use a lot in our family. I have two kids. Usually I'm the one being called bossy. But, ‘agentic’ means top-down, I'm telling you what to do, as opposed to a more communal, like bringing in ideas from across an organization.
ELISE LOEHNEN:
Got it. Let's go to this idea of divergent thinking. I feel like people always say, and it's not actually maybe born out in research, that women are better at multitasking, but there is research that suggests, and this is socialized and probably not natural or who we are out of the body, but that we're better at contextualized or divergent thinking. Could you expound on that for us a little bit?
JULIA BOORSTIN:
Yes. And I will say I'm not a scientist, I'm a journalist. I try to stay away from biology in every way possible. I do think a lot of these leadership things I wrote about in the book are cultural. It's so socialized and it's expectations of both men and women, so I’m staying away from the brain science, which there's plenty of, but that's not my expertise. It's what I would call seeing the forest versus seeing the trees. This is the idea that when women are problem solving, they're likely to go off on a tangent, say like, so we're trying to solve this problem of healthcare, but maybe we should really look at social services, and whether the people who are coming back to the emergency room has housing falling through, or they're not getting their food stamps benefits. Let's try to figure out, big picture, what their challenges are. So that's the convergent, like let's look at all the different pieces of this, let's look at what their transportation challenges are, maybe that's something that's putting additional pressures on them. So basically going off topic to try to understand the full scope of a problem. The opposite of that is saying, let's just try to get this person into the emergency room, fix their immediate health problem, and get them out the door immediately. Men are typically more likely to try to drive towards an immediate solution more quickly, whereas women are described, for example by one of the women I put in the book, as being “fire preventers.” Instead of being firefighters rushing to put out the blaze, women are saying, “What can we do to prevent a fire from happening next time? Let's do big picture problem solving here.”
And the healthcare company I was just alluding to, is one I profile my book. Her name is Toyin Ajayi. She's now CEO of a company called City Block Health. She started off as a founder, and this is a company that's basically trying to help fix the healthcare system by providing social services and addressing the whole person. So trying to figure out if there are people who are on the lower end of the income scale and are ending up in the emergency room at great expense to the whole healthcare system over and over and over. They're clearly not getting their needs met in a way that's efficient, effective, or makes any sense whatsoever. So they get paid on the long term health outcomes of their clients, of the people in the healthcare system. They will go to patient’s homes, they'll try to learn about them, and make sure they're getting all of their needs met and really trying to relieve the pressure on the emergency room system. Ultimately, in the long term it's much more cost effective, but it's a totally different model of thinking about healthcare. The woman, Toyin, who's the CEO, talked about it as “fixing the water supply.” She started off her career in Sierra Leone, in a hospital where she was trying to fix this pediatric hospital where people wouldn't bring in their kids until they were near death. It was just a horrible situation for a pediatric hospital. There was no running water when she got there. She had just been in medical school in the UK and she had gone to Stanford and she's was like, “Guys, we cannot have this pediatric hospital function until we fix the water supply.” They literally were bringing in water from outside anytime they needed water, they couldn't sterilize instruments. I think this concept of “fixing the water supply” is that you have to get back to basics, think about solving the underlying problem before you can really figure out what needs to have a bandaid on it.
ELISE LOEHNEN:
And then, what I thought was another really beautiful and moving part of that story is how she went out into the community to understand why everyone was waiting to bring their children in and learned a really valuable lesson in that culturally or socially people saw that hospital as the place where your children die, because there was this self perpetuating cycle of kids arriving near death and not emerging. So there was no faith in the system and instead they were going to this medicine woman because they knew her.
JULIA BOORSTIN:
Yeah, it's all about trust. And actually trust is something that comes up a lot in this book and this idea of building trust and building relationships. So Toyin was like, I need to understand why people aren't coming in until their children are so sick that they're close to death. Then they were saying, we're not coming in because our kids are dying in your hospital. And it was this vicious cycle. And she realized she needed to earn their trust. And I loved what she told me about how she knew these families who live right near the hospital would rather buy their medicine from a natural healer than they would come to the hospital and get scientific medicine, scientific solutions, because they trusted this woman and they knew her. So Toyin went and bought some of these natural medicines from the healer and she kept them in her purse for years as a reminder of this idea that you need to have trust with the community and if you don't, you're never gonna be able to help them, you're never gonna be able to serve them. I just thought that was such a priority on trust with your community and also with your customers or your employees. It's all comes down to trust. And also this idea of humility. I mean she went and sat on the floor of people's homes, on their dirt floors and she said, tell me what I need to know.
And this idea of humility is something that comes up a lot and in this chapter I wrote on managing in crisis, there are these huge, you know, massive nonprofits that are trying to deal with the pandemic. One was Feeding America, the other is Care USA, which is part of Care International. Care USA operates in 69 countries. It's a massive organization, thousands and thousands of people. But what they found is during the pandemic, it turns out they didn't know what to do. They thought they knew what to do. They had a plan, they were distributing soap and sanitizer and doing what they thought was right and the people on the ground were saying, we can't eat soap, we do not need your soap. That is not helping us. So they had the humility to go around and listen to what individual communities needed and if they hadn't had that humility, they would not have been able to figure out how to actually serve the people. And that was their job, to serve these people. That was true for Feeding America and also for Care and I think it was true for Toyin, she just needed to sit there on the ground and listen, and with humility you can learn.
ELISE LOEHNEN:
Yeah. I had a big crush on that CEO of Feeding America, too and her incredible story, and her family who had raised 108 foster kids.
JULIA BOORSTIN:
Yeah, Claire Babineaux-Fontenot, CEO of Feeding America. I mean, such an amazing story. I wept on the phone with her, because I interviewed her several times over the course of the pandemic and she was so determined to have Feeding America work and have it stretch and do things that no one would've ever thought was possible pre-pandemic. She had this amazing hope and optimism that really came from her parents, and her parents had either adopted or fostered 107 other kids, other than her. So there were never more than about 15 kids at home at one time, but over the course of her parents' life, they had all these kids that they took care of. Her whole attitude was like, they couldn’t not help someone they saw in need.
ELISE LOEHNEN:
And they weren't wealthy.
JULIA BOORSTIN:
They were not wealthy. They lived in Louisiana, they would harvest crops that they grew just in their tiny backyard. They would buy a cow or a pig and they would kind of graze it around the neighborhood. The pig would eat kitchen scraps and they all just chipped in and helped each other out. And they were not wealthy, but they made it work. Claire is so amazing, I just love the quotes she had in there so much because it just makes you realize that if you were determined, you feel like you can't fail. Like her parents could not, not feed those kids. They saw kids in need, they had to take them in. So they would all go harvest crops together and bring home the extras. I mean they just had systems to make it work. They would go to the cannery, you know, it was just amazing. But this applied when she was trying to raise money during the pandemic, trying to get people to share more resources with them because Feeding America is this massive network of food pantries and food banks and she said we had to make work.
And I include this crazy study from Harvard, from like the 50’s or 60’s, called the Hope Experiment, where they put a rat in water and figured out how long it takes rats to drown. Then they figured out that if they save the rat right before it's about to drown and then they put it back into the water, the rat will, instead of living for like 15 minutes, it'll live for like 60 hours. Once you give an animal hope that it's gonna be saved, it has super unbelievable abilities that did not seem physically possible before. It is a kind of creepy experiment and kind of gross, but it does say something that she was just like, we have to do this, we're gonna do this, I have hope. She really tried to lead that way and it seemed like it had an influence across her whole organization.
ELISE LOEHNEN:
I wanna talk about glass cliffs, but before we get to this whole idea of glass cliffs and companies in crisis and how women are often brought into lead, let's table that for now. I wanna go to Sally Krawcheck, who I also adore, and this idea of morality or, you know, reformers and different moral codes for women and how typically, and not to generalize, but we are less inclined to distort ourselves and more inclined, I wanna say towards integrity, even when that decision is really hard.
JULIA BOORSTIN:
It's interesting, there are some studies about this. Women are more likely to make decisions based on ethics than men are, and they're expected to be even more ethical than men are expected to be. So they may be more ethical, but then they're also held in even higher standard than that. So part of it is true and then part of it is this double expectation. And therefore, if women fall short, if women do have an ethical failure, they're judged much more harshly than men are because they're held to that other standard.
ELISE LOEHNEN:
Yeah. And if people don't know Sally, she was, I guess the most powerful woman on Wall Street for a period. She insisted that there were clients of Citi that were given terrible advice and that they needed to restore trust and honor to the institution by refunding clients. They did that to some extent, but she knew in the process of fighting for this at the board level that she would be fired and that's exactly what happened. And now she has Ellevest and I love Sally.
JULIA BOORSTIN:
Yeah. I mean, she's amazing. The way she described it to me was so powerful because she said she knew that the company had done the wrong thing and it was a mistake. They hadn't intentionally misled clients, but the financial crisis happened, they promised clients that the value of some investment wouldn't fall more than a certain amount and it fell basically by 99%, and they had said they'd never presented it as such. So it wasn't intentionally misleading, but they were wrong, they had mislead clients, and she describes this debate about what do I do? Do I push for this? You know, she'd already pushed for it and everyone had said like, why would you bother giving money back? And we don't need to, we're not legally obligated to, and she polled everyone in the office and said, what would you do?And a lot of people were like, look, you're in a powerful position, just stick it out, you'll be able to fight for the right side next time around. Others were like, do the right thing. So, she went home that night and she remembers having dinner with her kids and this moment of looking at her kids who were old enough to know whether what she was gonna do was gonna be the right thing or the wrong thing. She was like, I don't wanna go home to my kids and tell them that I didn't do the ethical thing, I have to do the right thing. And she went into the board meeting for Citi and she basically went over her boss's head, because he had said no and she said, I think we need to do this, we need to pay back people the money that they didn't think they could possibly lose with this financial instrument. So she got pushed out in a way that these things sometimes happen, you get your power taken away from you slowly, and she felt like she was effectively getting pushed out, but she did the right thing. She said later on that three of the people in that boardroom, later, not while in the room, later they sort of thanked her and apologized for everything.
ELISE LOEHNEN:
In the moment guys, time to stand up for other people in the moment. Not to be binary, but I thought this was a really interesting quote from a psychologist who was an amazing last name, Merete Wedell-Wedellsborg, she coined this term cultural numbness, which is how you might think that you are immune to unethical behavior, but that you can become so accustomed to a company's culture and its practices that “no matter how principled you are, the bearings of your moral compass will shift toward the culture of your organization or team.” And this is more likely to happen the longer you are at a company, and yet, women appear to be more resistant to cultural numbness than men, but I'd never heard of that concept and I think it's really interesting.
JULIA BOORSTIN:
I mean, I think it's like a version of group think, right? It's basically like group think, but this idea that if you're just part of an organization long enough, you're gonna lose sight of what might be offensive or wrong, you know? And I think one reason why women may be more resistant to cultural numbness is because unfortunately, more often than not, they're outsiders. You know Sally was very rare in that she was a woman in that environment and she could not have lost sight of that. So I think if you've become an insider but your whole life have been an outsider, you're more likely to hold onto that outsider perspective.
ELISE LOEHNEN:
Yeah. That's really interesting. Let's talk about glass cliffs because I think that this happens not only to women, but to men of color as well, but I might be wrong on that. But this idea that the company needs a turnaround, or it's going downhill quickly, and they're like “Ah, put a woman in, like she'll probably fail.”
JULIA BOORSTIN:
Or how much worse could it get? Or like who cares? What happens now? It's tough anyways, let's give a woman a shot at fixing it. So glass cliff is a great term, but what it technically refers to is this idea that when a company's already in trouble you would put a woman in and so in a lot of ways she might be more likely to fail, because you're putting her into a position where the company's already teetering in a tough situation. So you could say that in some of Sally Krawcheck’s roles, the company was in a tough situation. She was put in to save the day. But I think that hopefully women are going to hit more of a critical mass in leadership positions, so this happens less and less. One thing that's interesting is that in when companies are in crisis, the employees say they would actually rather have a woman in charge. So there gonna be various various reasons for that, including this idea that women are supposed to be more nurturing. But, this idea that women are put in when a company's on the verge of a major challenge is not a good thing for women in business, because then you have these high profile failures and then that's all anyone can talk about instead of the successes.
ELISE LOEHNEN:
Yeah, exactly. I also thought it was fascinating how, and this goes back to the beginning of our conversation, but how the public reacts to the announcement of a female CEO and you gave a little stock tip, that when women CEOs get a lot of media attention, it is not positive and the stock drops and you should buy it because it typically always rebounds and then some, right? But then it's the inverse for men?
JULIA BOORSTIN:
Look, I'm not a stock picker here, Elise.
ELISE LOEHNEN:
You heard it from Julia.
JULIA BOORSTIN:
Historically, if a lot of attention is paid to the fact that a new CEO is a woman and how rare that is and how unusual that is, that is not traditionally or has not statistically been a good thing for the stock. And over time, it all evens out, but there's something that one of the women in the book, Jennifer Hyman, who CEO Rent the Runway, says she has to spend so much of her time just talking about being a female CEO, what is it like to be a rare female CEO? That there's this crazy double standard spend on just her femaleness and that femaleness eats up so much of her time and energy that it's not fair for multiple reasons. But I do think that this idea that the media, does do this thing of othering women who are CEOs, like “look how crazy it is, a female CEO.” Certainly for that period of time, that they were tracking the stock movements, it was not good for the stocks, and then ultimately over a six month period things normalized again.
ELISE LOEHNEN:
Yeah. So, bye bye, bye. This is a conversation that we've had together before, so one of the things, as you might remember, that drives me nuts is when people suggest that women have a confidence issue or confidence gap, that there's something inherent in us that prevents us from stepping up to the plate. And this drives me nuts because I don't think that women have a confidence gap at all. We just feel that we have to state that we have a confidence gap because the world is so eager to put us in our place. So, I think it's a performance, modulating ourselves according to the culture so that people don't think that we are too big for our britches. And I loved your conversation because there is actual data. And again, I would argue that I think younger women aren't stating their confidence, but regardless women women's confidence goes up and men's confidence declines. Is that accurate?
JULIA BOORSTIN:
Yes. I love the data so much too. And also look, I feel like one reason this book is so jam packed with data for me is because I needed to justify and have evidence for my confidence in these things that I'm sharing and saying.
ELISE LOEHNEN:
I know. I get it. I did the same thing.
JULIA BOORSTIN:
Yeah. So statistically women start out in their twenties, not as confident as men are and and men start out more confident. And if you think about it straight out of college, like, should you really be that confident? Like, I don't know, should men graduate from college so sure they could take on the world? I would say I graduated not so confident as a 20 year old.
ELISE LOEHNEN:
You weren't Mark Zuckerberg with his I'm CEO bitch business cards.
JULIA BOORSTIN:
He was very confident. So men start off more confident, women start off less confident and then somewhere around 40, it crosses and women and men start to have, around 40 or 50, around the same amount of confidence. As women get older, they become more confident and men's confidence, declines, relative to women. So what that indicates is that women gained confidence based on their experience, their years in the workforce, their understanding of what they can do. They're just getting to know themselves and their experience better and feeling more confident every year based on what they learn. Because of that, we see more women taking risks around 45-50, because their confidence is sort of excelled. But to me, what that says, is that women's confidence rises in correlation with their experience and abilities, you should get more confident every year. I've gotten so much more confident every year, because I know, I know more, I'm not just a kid trying to figure things out. So to me, it's a great thing to have your confidence grow with age, as it should. And maybe it indicates that men shouldn't have been so confident right off the bat with no reason to be so confident. I think a lot of that is just taught, that is taught and socially accepted. But my other favorite thing about the confidence piece, as someone who can be very anxious and nervous myself, is that sometimes it's valuable not to be confident. And there is this piece in the book about how everyone would benefit, if when you're making decisions, you start off in an information gathering stage. And instead of being super confident, when you're trying to gather data, you turn down your confidence, be not confident at all, be confused, be concerned, be anxious, gather all the data as many differing viewpoints as possible. Once you've figured out the right answer with all the humility that you could possibly have, you know your decision, then jack back up your confidence, and then you execute. And this idea that confidence can be on a dial and there's value in not being confident sometimes is something that I was never taught and it feels very reassuring to learn.
ELISE LOEHNEN:
Yeah, no, I think that's a great moment. This is a staggering study and this made me very sad, but I also wonder if this isn't why confidence builds over time as women learn to trust themselves more than they learn to trust exterior feedback, which is this fortune study of 250 employee performance reviews, when they assessed these, they found, and as you write, this is not a typo, 71% of women and 2% to 3% of men had received negative feedback. Whereas 81% of men received constructive feedback, only 23% of women did. The majority of feedback for women centered on personality traits rather than workplace performance. Okay, so I think anyone listening is like, that's probably true, right? It's staggering.
JULIA BOORSTIN:
I mean, what's interesting is 250 people is a relatively small study compared to most of the studies in the book, which are many more people. But I think there was something about that, that resonated so much with me and this idea that women are given feedback on their style, and men are given feedback on their substance, is doubly offensive. And it bothers me because not only is it just obviously unfair, but women are missing out on valuable feedback. I mean, I'm desperate for feedback every day in my job. Speaking of confidence, I'm never gonna get better if I don't have people telling me what I've done wrong or what I could do better. And so I think there's something that's really, really, insidious, and unfair about that approach of giving people feedback on their style rather than their substance. But what was helpful for me learning that and seeing that study, is that it helped me understand when people told me I was being harsh or aggressive, or abrasive, or any of the words that have been used to describe my style as a journalist, I could say, wait a second, is this actually fair? Is this guy saying anything about me and how I'm actually doing? Or is it really just his reaction to me and not his inability to look at my actual performance. So having that study in the back of my head, I think, been really empowering for me to know not to take things personally.
ELISE LOEHNEN:
Yeah, it's interesting, and you write a little bit about this, but as a journalist who's profiling and obviously very pro-woman, but when you are harder on a woman, or when you push her as a journalist, the feedback can be that you're ganging up on them, right? Or being harsh or there's an in this wider cultural movement towards women supporting women that that's a binary approach and that you as a woman must condone everything that every other woman does and condemn everything that every man does. How do you hold that as you do your job, which is to be an objective truth and fact finder and storyteller?
JULIA BOORSTIN:
I think that if that's not in my head, I'm just doing my job. I've been doing this for so long. I've been a journalist since 2000. I've always done business news. I think I get better every year. I know what I'm doing, but I tell this story in the book about how I was interviewing Ann Sarnoff, who at the time was CEO of Warner Brothers. And the company just made a really controversial decision to put all of their movies on HBO Max at the same time as in theaters and it was just one of these things where everyone was really upset about it, and so I really pushed her on it. I cited all of these examples of people who were saying this was a terrible idea and filmmakers weren’t gonna wanna work with them. And I just did my job and when she obfuscated I pushed her, but it was all like a very normal interview. I was tough where it felt appropriate and I listened to her, I didn't interrupt her. To me, interrupting someone shows that you're not listening to their answer, but I really listened to her and then I pushed her when I was appropriate.
Then I got a phone call from a PR person, who was like, gosh, you were so mean you were so harsh. And of course, I don't want some PR person to keep his clients from talking to me because he thinks I’m going be mean in an interview, but I had just read that Fortune Magazine story, so I said, gee, would you have said the same thing to one of my male colleagues? And I named a couple of my male colleagues who also do interviews. They do interviews all the time, do you ever think they're mean or harsh? And this PR person was gobsmacked, because I really was like, what are you talking about here? Like is this really fair? And he did not expect me to say that. And he just thought about it for a second. And he said, you know what? I think I would've expected that from them, I just didn't expect it from you. And so basically what he was admitting was that he did have a double standard and he recognized it and I was just doing my job and I was doing a good job. I was doing a good job and he just had a double standard and he was like, you know, I'm gonna think about that. And I was proud of myself because I got him to back off and admit he was in the wrong. I've been called many names, most of which I think are not fair because I'm just doing my job.
ELISE LOEHNEN:
Yeah. I'm sure one of your male counterparts would've been called tough, right? Which doesn't have the same association.
JULIA BOORSTIN:
Yeah, yeah.
ELISE LOEHNEN:
I know we're almost out of time, but I wanna touch quickly on networking and this was shocking to me as an introvert and someone, you know, I don't really join clubs. I don't know if I've ever been in a club, Julia, but, I'm missing out, right?
JULIA BOORSTIN:
It's not just about clubs. It's about groups of women. I was so surprised by this data. The data shows that groups of women really help each other and not just help each other by like having a good time, feeling good. There's data that shows that just being in a group of women can help prevent bias and stereotype from bothering you. So one of the studies in here, and I could go on and on about this forever, is that they put groups of women together and they told them, these are engineering students, that women just aren't as good as math and then they gave them a math test. The women who were not in a group of women, who were told the stereotype and then had to take the math test underperformed, how they would typically perform and underperformed men. If you put a group of women together, give them the network, the ability to talk together, and then you present them with a stereotype that women are bad at math, and then you present them with a math test, the stereotype had no impact whatsoever.
So basically it's this idea that a group of women can help immunize you against stereotype and help bolster you and prevent you from being bothered by stereotypes. So much of this is about what you have to figure out how to tune out and not listen to and being in a group of women can really help you with that. And also there's data about having women who are not just people who you work with, but diverse women from different backgrounds, you can help each other learn to negotiate better and to figure out how to navigate different work environments. So, unlike you, Elise, I am an extrovert and I love being around different groups of women, but I'm not a joiner and I'm not in a lot of clubs, but once I saw this data, I realized when I was feeling discouraged at work, just being in a group of women, whether it's just organizing a dinner with a group of friends or going to some event to hear a reading, or a book talk, or something, there's actual statistical value for how it helps women navigate workplace challenges when they have that sense of community, or an actual group of people to draw on for advice.
ELISE LOEHNEN:
Yeah, I thought it was staggering, like people who went to conferences and like 3x compared to the control group who hadn't gone yet received promotions. Honestly, Julia, I felt like When Women Lead felt like gathering, it has that inspirational power where if you're an introvert like me, maybe you'll get the same effect from these pages. And maybe you need When Women Lead, like a network effect, you need to do Lean In circles, but do it in the 2022 way.
JULIA BOORSTIN:
Well, I am very flattered by that Elise. But I do think there are all these amazing organizations that are out there and they really have grown in the past, call it, five years. A lot of them started around 2017, 2018. And there are, I mean, they're amazing resources, not just Lean In, but they're some of these professional organizations like Chief or the We Suite or The Cru. And, some of them are like industry specific and I just think there are all these amazing organizations or conferences of women, that's one you were referencing, women who went to these conferences were more likely to get promotions and pay raises than women who had signed up, but had not yet gone yet. So pretty good control set there.
I think that there's this myth out there that, you know, women aren't necessarily gonna help each other. And I just think it's a myth and it is not true. And what I saw in reporting this book is that especially women of our generation, they understand that not only do they want each other to succeed, but we need each other to succeed, to help each other. And there's this, I think it's a generational shift, and this momentum towards lifting each other up because we know that will benefit all of us.
ELISE LOEHNEN:
Yeah. And Cru, which you mentioned is C-R-U. And Chief, you have to be a C level executive, I believe, unless they've modified that. But Cru is for anyone who's interested.
JULIA BOORSTIN:
Chief is VP level and above and Cru is for anybody. And by the way, Tiffany Dufu, who founded that company, who's in the book, is a phenomenal leader. She wrote a great book called Drop the Ball, if I could tease that a little bit, about figuring out which things you could let go of and sort of separating from the stereotypes of all the things that working women need to do.
ELISE LOEHNEN:
So I'm grateful for your friendship and you also talk about this idea of gratitude and the difference between how men and women, I think, react to receiving gifts, but also how they experience gratitude in their lives. Can you close us out with an explanation of that?
JULIA BOORSTIN:
Sure. Well, I'm very grateful for your friendship and your support through this crazy book writing process. But, the studies find that women are more comfortable expressing gratitude and feeling gratitude. And that's something that sometimes men feel more uncomfortable with. That could be because it's associated with maybe owing someone something, but women are just okay and enjoy this feeling gratitude that has something to do with leadership because there are these studies showing that if you, as a leader, feel gratitude, maybe it's gratitude for the ability to solve a problem, to be in a position, to see something that needs fixing. Then if you feel gratitude, you're gonna make longer term decisions. They did a study about offering people money now or money later, and then asking them to reflect on something they felt grateful about. The people who experienced that feeling of gratitude were dramatically more likely to wait and take the long term reward.
And the same thing is found to apply to leadership. So if you're feeling very grateful for the position you're in, like this woman I profile named Julia Collins who runs a company called Planet Forward that's trying to address climate change and global warming. She is planning for a hundred years. She's going for the long term goal, she's not looking for the short term gain. And I think in life, in business, we should all be thinking long term and not just for the short term payoff and the instant hit of getting something now versus waiting for something bigger and better later. And this idea that practicing gratitude is so valuable in life and business and work is something that I try to try to think about a lot in my life when we're just like rushing through the day and thinking what we need now, now, now, practicing gratitude is actually a business skill.
ELISE LOEHNEN:
I love that. And I'm glad you mentioned her because I loved her story too. Good job, bud.
JULIA BOORSTIN:
Thank you so much, Elise.
ELISE LOEHNEN:
If you can’t tell, I’m really enthusiastic about Julia’s book, When Women Lead. And even if you don’t run a business or don’t work for a business, or aren’t really interested in entrepreneurship or leadership, it’s a fascinating read. And I think will inspire all of you by what some pretty incredible women are accomplishing in the world. It definitely made me feel more optimistic about our future, I’ll certainly say that. I just wanted to read you a bit from Julia’s conclusion, she writes: “I set about writing this book because I had a strong sense from years of accumulated encounters with female entrepreneurs that there was something special about them. At the outset, I expected to find at least a few innate traits, superpowers, shared by these impressive women, and I did indeed find a number of powerful commonalities. Women tend to have an attention to context and an instinct to search for structural solutions, rather than quicker but more temporary fixes. They are more likely to seek out diverse perspectives and incorporate them into their decision making and they tend to pursue purpose driven companies and show vulnerability. All of these things are conducive to successful leadership, yet are less often recognized as essential traits for a successful leader. What was most surprising to me about these characteristics, though, was that they were not innate. I found that women had, over the course of their careers, created their powers by practicing and honing a series of strategies and approaches." What I think is so fascinating about all of that, and the fact that these are cultural attributes and not inborn, is that men can learn them too, and maybe from there we’d have a more equitable and balanced world.