a modest manifesto for shattering the glass ceiling

A Modest Manifesto ForShattering the Glass Ceiling

by Debra E. Meyerson and Joyce K. Fletcher

Reprint r00107

he new millennium provides an occasionto celebrate the remarkable progress made bywomen. That women now hold seats on corpor-

ate boards, run major companies, and are regularlyfeatured on the covers of business magazines asprominent leaders and power brokers would havebeen unimaginable even a half century ago.

But the truth is, women at the highest levels ofbusiness are still rare. They comprise only 10%of senior managers in Fortune 500 companies; lessthan 4% of the uppermost ranks of CEO, president,executive vice president, and COO; and less than3% of top corporate earners.1 Statistics also suggestthat as women approach the top of the corporateladder, many jump off, frustrated or disillusionedwith the business world. Clearly, there have beengains, but as we enter the year 2000, the glass ceil-ing remains. What will it take to finally shatter it?

Not a revolution. Not this time. In 1962, 1977,and even 1985, the women’s movement used radi-cal rhetoric and legal action to drive out overtdiscrimination, but most of the barriers that persisttoday are insidious – a revolution couldn’t findthem to blast away. Rather, gender discriminationnow is so deeply embedded in organizational lifeas to be virtually indiscernible. Even the womenwho feel its impact are often hard-pressed to knowwhat hit them.

Copyright © 1999 by the President and Fellow of Harvard College. All rights reserved. 127

A ModestManifesto for Shatteringthe Glass Ceiling

It took a revolution to get

women where they are

in business today. But now,

to push hard-won gains

wider and deeper, a different

approach is necessary. It is

a strategy based on small

wins –incremental changes

that have the power to

transform organizations

positively for both men

and women.

by Debra E. Meyerson and Joyce K. Fletcher

T

AR

TW

OR

K B

Y J

AN

ET

DR

EW

That is why we believe that the glass ceiling willbe shattered in the new millennium only through astrategy that uses small wins2 –incremental changesaimed at biases so entrenched in the system thatthey’re not even noticed until they’re gone. Our re-search shows that the small-wins strategy is a pow-erful way of chipping away the barriers that holdwomen back without sparking the kind of soundand fury that scares people into resistance. And because the small-wins strategy creates changethrough diagnosis, dialogue, and experimentation,it usually improves overall efficiency and perfor-mance. The strategy benefits not just women butalso men and the organization as a whole.

The Problem with No NameTime was, it was easy to spot gender discriminationin the corporate world. A respected female execu-tive would lose a promotion to a male colleaguewith less experience, for instance, or a talented fe-male manager would find herself demoted after hermaternity leave. Today such blatant cases are rare;they’ve been wiped out by laws and by organiza-tions’ increased awareness that they have nothingto gain, and much to lose, by keeping women out ofpositions of authority.

That doesn’t mean, however, that gender in-equity has vanished. It has just gone underground.Today discrimination against women lingers in a plethora of work practices and cultural normsthat only appear unbiased. They are common andmundane – and woven into the fabric of an organi-zation’s status quo – which is why most peopledon’t notice them, let alone question them. Butthey create a subtle pattern of systemic disadvan-tage, which blocks all but a few women from careeradvancement.

For an example of this modern-day gender in-equity, take the case of a global retail company based in Europe that couldn’t figure out why it had

so few women in senior positions and such highturnover among women in its middle-managerranks. The problem was particularly vexing becausethe company’s executives publicly touted their re-spect for women and insisted they wanted the com-pany to be “a great place for women to work.”

Despite its size, the company had a strong entre-preneurial culture. Rules and authority were infor-mal; people were as casual about their schedules as they were about the dress code. Meetings wereroutinely canceled and regularly ran late. Deadlineswere ignored because they constantly shifted, andnew initiatives arose so frequently that peoplethought nothing of interrupting one another or de-claring crises that demanded immediate attention.

128 harvard business review January–February 2000

A M odest M ani festo for Shatter ing the Glass Cei l ing

The Research: A Joint Effort

The research for this article began in 1992 and is ongoing. Our work –including interviews, surveys, archival data, focus groups, and obser-vations –has taken place at 11 organizations.They included three Fortune 500 companies,two international research organizations, twopublic agencies, a global retail organization, aninvestment firm, a school, and a private founda-tion. The goal of each project was to create thekind of small wins and learning reported in thisarticle.

The ideas presented in this article were devel-oped in collaboration with three colleagues:Robin Ely, an associate professor at ColumbiaUniversity’s School of International and PublicAffairs in New York City and an affiliated facultymember at the Center for Gender in Organiza-tions, Simmons Graduate School of Manage-ment, in Boston; Deborah Kolb, a codirector ofthe Center for Gender in Organizations, a professor of management at Simmons GraduateSchool of Management, and a senior fellow atthe Program on Negotiation at Harvard LawSchool; and anthropologist Deborah Merrill-Sands, a codirector of the Center for Gender inOrganizations and an expert in conductingresearch on gender in organizations.

The research in this article builds directlyon the foundational work of Lotte Bailyn, theT. Wilson Professor of Management at the MITSloan School of Management in Cambridge,Massachusetts, and Rhona Rapoport, directorof the Institute of Family and EnvironmentalResearch in London. They also collaborated onmany of the projects mentioned in this article.

Debra E. Meyerson is a professor of management at theCenter for Gender in Organizations at the SimmonsGraduate School of Management in Boston and a visit-ing professor at Stanford University’s Graduate Schoolof Business in Palo Alto, California.

Joyce K. Fletcher is a professor of management at theCenter for Gender in Organizations at Simmons Gradu-ate School of Management and a senior research scholarat the Jean Baker Miller Training Institute at the Welles-ley College Centers for Women in Wellesley, Massachu-setts. She is the author of Disappearing Acts: Gender,Power, and Relational Practice at Work (MIT Press, 1999).

The company’s cultural norms grew from itsmanner of conducting business. For instance, man-agers were expected to be available at all times toattend delayed or emergency meetings. And thesemeetings themselves followed certain norms. Be-cause roles and authority at the company were am-biguous, people felt free to make suggestions –evendecisions – about any area of the company that interested them. A manager in charge of windowdisplays, for example, might very well recommenda change in merchandising, or vice versa. To pre-vent changes in their own area from being madewithout their input, managers scrambled to attendas many meetings as possible. They had to in orderto protect their turf.

The company’s norms made it extraordinarilydifficult for everyone – women and men – to workeffectively. But they were particularly perniciousfor women for two reasons. First, women typicallybear a disproportionate amount of responsibility forhome and family and thus have more demands ontheir time outside the office. Women who workedset hours – even if they spanned ten hours a day –ended up missing essential conversations and im-portant plans for new products. Their circumscribedschedules also made them appear less committedthan their male counterparts. In most instances,that was not the case, but the way the company op-erated day to day – its very system – made it impos-sible to prove otherwise.

The meetings themselves were run in a way thatput women in a double bind. People often had tospeak up to defend their turf, but when women didso, they were vilified. They were labeled “controlfreaks”; men acting the same way were called “pas-sionate.” As one female executive told us, “If youstick your neck out, you’re dead.”

A major investment firm provides another exam-ple of how invisible – even unintentional – genderdiscrimination thrives in today’s companies. Thefirm sincerely wanted to increase the number ofwomen it was hiring from business schools. It rea-soned it would be able to hire more women if itscreened more women, so it increased the numberof women interviewed during recruiting visits tobusiness school campuses. The change, however,had no impact. Why? Because, the 30 minutes allot-ted for each interview –the standard practice at mostbusiness schools – was not long enough for middle-aged male managers, who were conducting the vastmajority of the interviews, to connect with youngfemale candidates sufficiently to see beyond theirdirectly relevant technical abilities. Therefore, mostwomen were disqualified from the running. Theyhadn’t had enough time to impress their interviewer.

The Roots of Inequity

The barriers to women’s advancement in organiza-tions today have a relatively straightforward cause.Most organizations have been created by and formen and are based on male experiences. Eventhough women have entered the workforce in drovesin the past generation, and it is generally agreedthat they add enormous value, organizational defi-nitions of competence and leadership are still predi-cated on traits stereotypically associated with men:tough, aggressive, decisive. And even though manyhouseholds today have working fathers and moth-ers, most organizations act as if the historical divi-sion of household labor still holds – with womenprimarily responsible for matters of the hearth.Outdated or not, those realities drive organizationallife. Therefore, the global retail company was ableto develop a practice of late and last-minute meet-ings because most men can be available 15 hours a day. The investment firm developed a practice ofscreening out women candidates because men, whowere doing most of the interviewing, naturallybond with other men. In other words, organizationalpractices mirror societal norms.

That the “problem with no name” arises from amale-based culture does not mean that men are toblame. In fact, our perspective on gender discrimi-nation does not presume intent, and it certainlydoes not assume that all men benefit from the waywork is currently organized. Lots of companies runby men are working hard to create a fair environ-ment for both sexes. And many men do not em-brace the traditional division of labor; some mensurely wish the conventions of a Father Knows Bestworld would vanish.

Men, then, are not to blame for the pervasive gen-der inequity in organizations today –but neither arewomen. And yet our research shows that ever sincegender inequity came onto the scene as one of busi-ness’s big problems, women have blamed them-selves. That feeling has been reinforced by man-agers who have tried to solve the problem by fixingwomen. Indeed, over the past 30-odd years, organi-zations have used three approaches to rout genderdiscrimination, each one implying that women aresomehow to blame because they “just don’t fit in.”

Tall People in a Short WorldTo describe the three approaches, we like to use ametaphor that replaces gender with height. Imag-ine, therefore, a world made by and for short people.In this world, everyone in power is under five-foot-five, and the most powerful are rarely taller than

harvard business review January–February 2000 129


five-foot-three. Now imagine that after years of dis-crimination, tall people finally call for change –andshort people agree that the current world is unfairand amends should be made.

Short people first try to right things by teachingtall people to act like short people – to minimizetheir differences by stooping to fit in the doorways,

for example, or by hunching over to fit in the smallchairs in the conference room. Once tall peoplelearn these behaviors, short people insist, they willfit right in.

Some short people take another approach to rout-ing discrimination: they make their world moreaccommodating to tall people by fixing some ofthe structural barriers that get in their way. Theybuild six-foot-high doors in the back of the buildingand purchase desks that don’t knock tall people’sknees. They even go so far as to create some lessdemanding career paths – tall-people tracks – forthose who are unwilling or unable to put up withthe many realities of the short world that just can’t be changed.

Other short people take a third approach: theycelebrate the differences of their tall associates. Tallpeople stand out in a crowd, short people say, andthey can reach things on high shelves. Let’s recog-nize the worth of those skills and put them to gooduse! And so the short people “create equity” by put-ting tall people in jobs where their height is an ad-vantage, like working in a warehouse or designingbrand extensions targeted to tall people.

Those three approaches should sound familiar to anyone who has been involved in the many gen-der initiatives proliferating in the corporate world.Companies that take the first approach encouragewomen to assimilate – to adopt more masculine at-tributes and learn the “games their mothers nevertaught them.” Thus, HR departments train womenin assertive leadership, decision making, and evengolf. Male colleagues take women to their lunchclubs, coach them on speaking up more in meet-ings, and suggest they take “tough guy” assign-ments in factories or abroad.

Companies that take the second approach accom-modate the unique needs and situations of women.Many offer formal mentoring programs to compen-sate for women’s exclusion from informal net-works. Others add alternative career tracks or an

extra year on the tenure clock to help women intheir childbearing years. Still others offer extendedmaternity leave, flexible work arrangements, evenrooms for nursing infants.

In the third approach, companies forgo assim-ilation and accommodation and instead emphasizethe differences that women bring to the work-

place. They institute sensitivitytraining to help male managers ap-preciate traditionally “feminine”activities or styles, such as listeningand collaborating. And they eagerlyput women’s assumed differences towork by channeling them into jobs

where they market products to women or head upHR initiatives.

All of these approaches have helped advancewomen’s equity in the corporate world. But by nowthey have gone about as far as they can. Why? Be-cause they proffer solutions that deal with the symp-toms of gender inequity rather than the sourcesof inequity itself. Take the first approach. Whilemany female executives can now play golf and haveused relationships formed on the fairways to moveinto positions of greater power, these new skillswill never eradicate the deeply entrenched, sys-temic factors within corporations that hold manywomen back.

The same is true of the second approach of accom-modation through special policies and benefits. Itgives women stilts to play on an uneven playingfield, but it doesn’t flatten out the field itself. So, forexample, mentoring programs may help womenmeet key people in a company’s hierarchy, but theydon’t change the fact that informal networks, towhich few women are privy, determine who reallygets resources, information, and opportunities.Launching family-friendly programs doesn’t chal-lenge the belief that balancing home and work isfundamentally a woman’s problem. And addingtime to a tenure clock or providing alternative ca-reer tracks does little to change the expectation thattruly committed employees put work first – theyneed no accommodation.

The limits of the third approach are also clear.Telling people to “value differences” doesn’t meanthey will. That is why so many women who areencouraged to use “feminine” skills and styles findtheir efforts valued only in the most marginalsense. For example, women are applauded for hold-ing teams together and are even told, “we couldn’thave succeeded without you,” but when promo-tions and rewards are distributed, they are awardedto the “rugged individuals” who assertively pro-moted their own ideas or came up with a onetime



Telling people to “value differences” doesn’t mean thatthey will. That is why so many women who are encouragedto use “feminine” skills and styles find their efforts valuedonly in the most marginal sense.

people together – becauseboth will ultimately ben-efit from a world whereheight is irrelevant to theway work is designed anddistributed.

Returning to the realworld of men and women,the fourth approach startswith the belief that genderinequity is rooted in ourcultural patterns and there-fore in our organizationalsystems. Although its goalsare revolutionary, it doesn’tadvocate revolution. In-stead, it emphasizes thatexisting systems can bereinvented by altering theraw materials of organiz-ing – concrete, everydaypractices in which biasesare expressed.

The fourth approach be-gins when someone, some-where in the organizationrealizes that the businessis grappling with a genderinequity problem. Usually,the problem makes itselfknown through several tra-ditional indicators. For ex-

ample, recruiting efforts fail to get women to jointhe company in meaningful numbers; many womenare stalled just before they reach leadership positions or are not rising at the same rate as their male col-leagues; women tend to hold low-visibility jobs orjobs in classic “women’s” departments, such as HR;senior women are waiting longer or opting to havefewer (or no) children; women have fewer resourcesto accomplish comparable tasks; women’s pay andpay raises are not on par with men’s; and women areleaving the organization at above average rates.

After recognizing that there is a problem, the nextstep is diagnosis. (For a description of the diagnosisstage of the small-wins strategy, see the sidebar“How to Begin Small Wins.”) Then people must gettogether to talk about the work culture and deter-mine which everyday practices are underminingeffectiveness. Next, experimentation begins. Man-agers can launch a small initiative – or several atone time – to try to eradicate the practices thatproduce inequity and replace them with practicesthat work better for everyone. Often the experi-ment works – and more quickly than people would


technical fix. Ultimately, the celebration approachmay actually channel women into dead-end jobsand reinforce unhelpful stereotypes.

A Fourth Approach: Linking Equity and EffectivenessSince 1992, we have helped organizations imple-ment a fourth approach to eradicating gender in-equity. This approach starts with the premise – tocontinue the metaphor – that the world of shortpeople cannot be repaired with piecemeal fixesaimed at how tall people act and what work theydo. Because the short world has been in the makingfor hundreds, if not thousands, of years, its assump-tions and practices – such as job descriptions thatconflate the physical characteristics of short peoplewith the requirements of the job – will not be un-done by assimilation or accommodation or evencelebration. It will be undone by a persistent cam-paign of incremental changes that discover anddestroy the deeply embedded roots of discrimina-tion. These changes will be driven by short and tall


Because the small-wins strategycreates change through diagnosis,dialogue, and experimentation,it benefits not just women but alsomen and the organization as a whole.

suspect. Sometimes it fixes only the symptom andloses its link to the underlying cause. When thathappens, other incremental changes must be triedbefore a real win occurs.

Small wins are not formulaic. Each organizationis unique, and its expressions of gender inequityare, too. Consider, then, how the following compa-nies used incremental change to bring about sys-temic change.

Let’s begin with the European retail companythat was having trouble keeping its women em-ployees. When the problem finally became impos-sible to ignore, the president invited us to help theorganization understand what was going on. Theanswer wasn’t immediately obvious, of course, butas we began talking to people, it became clear thatit had something to do with the lack of clarity anddiscipline around time. Then the question wasraised, Did that lack of clarity affect men and womendifferently? The answer was a resounding yes.

After discussing and testing the idea further, ex-ecutives started using the phrase “unbounded time”to refer to meeting overruns, last-minute schedulechanges, and tardiness. The term struck a chord; it quickly circulated throughout the company andsparked widespread conversation about how meet-ing overload and lax scheduling damaged every-one’s productivity and creativity.

At that point, the president could have asked thecompany’s female managers to become more avail-able (assimilation). He could have mandated thatall meetings take place between nine and five (ac-commodation). Or he could have suggested that fe-male employees work together in projects and attimes that played to their unique strengths (cele-bration). Instead, he and a few other senior manag-ers quietly began to model a more disciplined use oftime, and even discouraged people who suggestedlast-minute or late-night meetings.

Soon people began to catch on, and a new narra-tive started to spread through the company. Thephrase “unbounded time” was used more and moreoften when people wanted to signal that theythought others were contributing to ineffectivenessand inequity by being late or allowing meetings torun overtime. People realized that the lack of clarityand discipline in the company had negative conse-quences not just for people but also for the qualityof work. Over a nine-month period, norms began toshift, and as new people were hired, senior man-agers made sure that they understood the companywas “informal and disciplined.” To this day, theconcept of “unboundedness” pops up wheneverpeople feel the organization is slipping back intonorms that silently support gender inequity.



How to Begin Small WinsOnce an organization determines that it has a prob-lem –female employees won’t join the company, say, or women are leaving in alarming numbers –itis time to start searching for causes. Such diagnosis involves senior managers probing an organization’spractices and beliefs to uncover its deeply embeddedsources of inequity. But how?

An effective first step is often one-on-one inter-views with employees to uncover practices and beliefs in the company’s culture –how work getsdone, for instance, what activities are valued, andwhat the assumptions are about competence. Afterthat, focus groups can more closely examine ques-tionable practices. Some companies have found ituseful to have women and men meet separately forthese initial discussions, as long as the outcomes of these meetings are shared.

Diagnosis isn’t always straightforward. After all,the group is looking for the source of a relatively invisible problem. Yet we have found a collection of questions that help keep the process on track: n How do people in this organization accomplish

their work? What, if anything, gets in the way? n Who succeeds in this organization? Who doesn’t?n How and when do we interact with one another?

Who participates? Who doesn’t?n What kinds of work and work styles are valued in

this organization? What kinds are invisible?n What is expected of leaders in this company?n What are the norms about time in this organization?n What aspects of individual performance are dis-

cussed the most in evaluations? n How is competence identified during hiring and

performance evaluations? After the initial diagnosis, managers should iden-

tify cultural patterns and their consequences. Forexample, Which practices affect men differentlythan women, and why? Which ones have unintendedconsequences for the business? Following thisanalysis, change agents can discuss these patternswith different people. We call this stage “holding upthe mirror,” and it represents the first part of devel-oping a new shared narrative in the organization.

The next step, of course, is designing the smallwins. We have found that by this point in the pro-cess, groups usually have little trouble identifyingways to make concrete changes. It is critical, however,that the managers guiding the process keep thenumber and scope of initiatives relatively limitedand strategically targeted. Managers and otherchange agents should remind the organization that a single experiment should not be seen as an end initself. Each small win is a trial intervention and aprobe for learning, intended not to overturn the sys-tem but to slowly and surely make it better.

The small-wins strategy also worked at the in-vestment firm that tried – unsuccessfully – to hiremore women by increasing the number of inter-views. After executives realized that their 30-minute interviewing approach was backfiring, theybegan to investigate their entire recruiting prac-tice. They examined how the questions they askedcandidates, their interview procedures, and eventhe places in which they were recruiting might begiving traditional people – that is, male MBAs – anadvantage.

And so a series of small initiatives was launched.First, the firm lengthened its interviews to 45 min-utes. Partners acknowledged that shorter inter-views might have been forcing them to rely on firstimpressions, which are so often a function of per-ceived similarity. Although comfort level maymake an interview go smoothly, it doesn’t tell youif a candidate has valuable skills, ideas, and experi-ence. Second, and perhaps more important, the firmrevised its interviewing protocol. In the past, part-ners questioned candidates primarily about theirprevious “deal experience,” which allowed onlythose who had worked on Wall Street to shine.Again, that practice favored men, as most invest-ment bank associates are men. In their new ap-proach, managers followed a set protocol and beganasking candidates to talk about how they wouldcontribute to the firm’s mission. The interviewsshifted radically in tone and substance. Instead ofboasting from former Wall Street stars, they heardmany nontraditional candidates – both women andmen – describe a panoply of managerial skills, cre-ative experiences, and diverse work styles. And in-deed, these people are bringing new energy and tal-ent into the firm. (As an added bonus, the followingyear the firm arrived at one prominent businessschool to find it was earning a reputation as a greatplace to work, making its recruiting efforts evenmore fruitful.)

Both the retail company and investment firmsaw their equity and performance improve after im-plementing changes in their systems that couldhardly be called radical. The same kind of successstory can be told about an international scientificresearch institute. The institute, which producesnew agricultural technologies for farmers, had a strong cultural norm of rewarding individualachievement. When a breakthrough was reached, a new product was developed, or a grant was won,individual scientists usually got the credit and re-wards. The norm meant that support work by sec-retaries and technicians, as well as by scientists andprofessionals in departments like biotechnologyand economics, was often ignored.

Paradoxically, top-level managers at the institutespoke enthusiastically about the value of team-work and asserted that success was a group, not anindividual, product. In fact, the organization plannedto move to a team-based structure because seniormanagers considered it an imperative for address-ing complex cross-functional challenges. But in theeveryday workings of the organization, no one paidmuch heed to supporting contributors. The starswere individual “heroes.”

The undervaluation of support work was an issuethat affected many women because they were morelikely to be in staff posi-tions or scientific rolesthat were perceived assupport disciplines. Inaddition, women moreoften took on supportwork because they wereexpected to do so or be-cause they felt it was critical to a project’s success.They connected people with one another, for in-stance, smoothed disagreements, facilitated team-work, and taught employees new skills.

Many women expressed frustration with thistype of work because it simply wasn’t recognized orrewarded. Yet they were reluctant to stop becausethe costs of not doing it were clear to them. With-out it, information would flow less easily, peoplewould miss deadlines, more crises would erupt, andteams would break down. As we talked with them,women began to recognize the value of their efforts,and they gave them a name: “invisible work.”

As in the European retail company, naming theproblem had a striking effect. It turned out that in-visible work wasn’t just a problem for women. Menand women started talking about how the lack ofvalue placed on invisible work was related to muchlarger systemic patterns. For example, people notedthat the company tended to give sole credit forprojects to the lead scientists, even when othershad contributed or had helped spare the projectsfrom major crises. People, especially women, ad-mitted that mentors and bosses had advised them –and they had often advised one another – to avoidtaking on invisible work to focus on work that wouldafford more recognition. Stemming from these in-formal discussions, a narrative about the impor-tance of invisible work began to spread throughoutthe organization.

For senior managers who saw the link betweeninvisible work and their goal of moving to a team-based structure, the challenge was to find ways tomake invisible work visible – and to ensure it wasvalued and more widely shared by men and women.



Small wins are notformulaic. Because eachorganization is unique,its expressions of genderinequity are, too.

A task force on the topic proposed a new organiza-tionwide evaluation system that would gather in-put from peers and direct reports – people to whoman employee’s invisible work is visible. Althoughthat step seemed insignificant to many, it was ap-proved and launched.

Several years later, people say that the institute isa different place. The first small win –the new eval-uation process – gave way to others, such as a newprocess to increase information flow up, down, andsideways; new criteria for team leaders that empha-

size facilitation ratherthan direction; and newnorms about tapping ex-pertise, no matter whereit resides in the hierar-chy. Implicitly, thesechanges challenged theprevailing masculine,individualist image of

competence and leadership and opened the way foralternatives more conducive to teamwork. Todayboth men and women say there is a stronger sense offairness. And senior managers say that the systemicchanges brought about by the small-wins strategywere central to the institute’s successful move to ateam-based structure.

Small Wins Can Make Big GainsIt’s surprising how quickly people can come upwith ideas for small wins – and how quickly theycan be put into action. Take, for example, the caseof the finance department at a large manufacturingcompany. The department had a strong norm ofoverdoing work. Whenever senior managers askedfor information, the department’s analysts wouldgenerate multiple scenarios complete with sophis-ticated graphs and charts.

The fact was, however, senior managers often onlywanted an analyst’s back-of-the-envelope estimates.People in the finance department even suspected asmuch, but there was an unspoken policy of neverasking the question. The reasons? First, they worriedthat questions would indicate that they couldn’tfigure out the scope of the request themselves andhence were not competent. Second, many of the re-quests came in at the end of the day. Analysts fearedthat asking, “How much detail do you want?” mightlook like a way to avoid working late. To show theircommitment, they felt they had to stay and giveevery request the full treatment.

The norm of devoting hours on end to each re-quest hit women in the department especially hard.As women in an industry dominated by men, they

felt they had to work extra hard to demonstratetheir competence and commitment, especiallywhen commitment was measured, at least in part,by time spent at work. However, the norm nega-tively affected men, too. The extra work, simplyput, was a waste of time; it lowered productivityand dampened enthusiasm. The organization suf-fered: talented people avoided the department be-cause of its reputation for overtime.

The small-wins process at this company beganwhen we met with a group of analysts and man-agers in the finance department. We presented ourdiagnosis of the root causes of the overwork prob-lem and asked if they could come up with small,concrete solutions to counteract it. It didn’t takethem long. Within an hour, the analysts had de-signed a one-page form that asked senior managersto describe the parameters of each request. Howmuch detail was required? What was the desiredoutput? The form very simply took the onus off in-dividuals to ask taboo questions, relieving women ofthe fear that they might appear less than commit-ted and allowing all analysts – not just women – touse their time more productively.

Interestingly, after only a short time, the formwas dropped. Analysts reported that simply havinga conversation with their managers about the com-pany’s norms and taboos changed the department’sdynamics. By establishing an open dialogue, ana-lysts could now ask clarifying questions withoutfearing that they were signaling incompetence orlack of commitment.

Small wins make sense even at companies thatalready have programs designed to combat genderinequity. Consider the case of a New York advertis-ing agency that was particularly proud of its men-toring program aimed at developing high-potentialfemale leaders. Although that program got women’snames into the mix, the jobs that women were ulti-mately offered tended to be in human resource-typepositions – positions women were thought to beparticularly well suited for. These jobs often re-quired a high level of skill, but their lack of rain-making potential resulted in career disadvantagesthat accumulated over time.

The situation was compounded by an unspokenrule at the company of never saying no to develop-mental opportunities. This norm, like so many oth-ers, seems gender neutral. It appears to be a risk forboth men and women to pass up opportunities, par-ticularly those offered in the name of developingleadership potential. Yet because of the differenttypes of opportunities offered, women stood to losewhether they said yes or no. Saying no signaled lackof commitment. But saying yes meant they would



The reason small winswork so effectively is thatthey are not randomefforts. They unearth andupend systemic barriersto women’s progress.

spend valuable time and energy doing a job that wasunlikely to yield the same career benefits that menwere deriving from the opportunities offered tothem. What made the situation particularly prob-lematic for the organization was that the HR-typejobs that women were reluctant to accept were of-ten critical to overall functioning.

The women in the mentoring programs were thefirst to realize the negative impact of the company’sinformal policy of channeling women into thesecritical HR positions. So they got together to brain-storm about ways to extricate themselves fromtheir double bind. (Like many small-wins cam-paigns, this one was launched with the knowledgeand approval of senior management. For ideas onhow to start the change process without officialsanction, see the sidebar “Going It Alone.”) Thewomen coached one another on how to respond tothe HR-type job offers in ways that would do mini-mal damage to their careers. For instance, theycame up with the solution of accepting the job withthe stipulation that senior managers assign itsyear-end objectives a “rainmaking equivalencyquotient.” The group pushed senior managers tothink about the underlying assumptions of puttingwomen in HR jobs. Did they really believe mencould not manage people? If so, didn’t that meanthat men should be given the developmental oppor-tunities in HR? These questions led senior man-agers to several revelations, which were especiallyimportant since the organization had recently de-cided to sell itself to potential clients as the rela-tionship-oriented alternative to other agencies. Thefull effect of this small-win effort, launched re-cently, will likely be seen over the course of thenext few years.

The Power of Small Wins Small wins are not silver bullets; anyone familiarwith real organizational change knows that there is no such thing. Rather, the reason small winswork so effectively is that they are not random ef-forts. They unearth and upend systemic barriers towomen’s progress. Consider how:

First, small wins tied to the fourth approach helporganizations give a name to practices and assump-tions that are so subtle they are rarely questioned,let alone seen as the root of organizational ineffec-tiveness. When the retail company started usingthe phrase “unbounded time,” people began devel-oping a shared understanding of how the lack of dis-cipline around time affected men and women dif-ferently and how the lack of boundaries in theculture contributed to people’s inability to get work

accomplished. The act of naming the “problemwith no name” opens up the possibility of change.

Second, small wins combine changes in behaviorwith changes in understanding. When a small winworks – when it makes even a minor difference insystemic practices –it helps to verify a larger theory.It says that something bigger is going on.

Third, and related, small wins tie the local to theglobal. That is, people involved in small wins seehow their efforts affect larger, systemic change, in



Going It AloneOne of the most important virtues of the fourthapproach is that it helps people realize that theyare not alone: the problems are systemic, notindividual. That said, individuals or smallgroups may still have to “go it alone” withoutthe support of an organizational mandate orformal change program. Although first effortsare aimed at subverting the status quo, overtime they may, in fact, be embraced by theorganization because they create the impetusfor learning and positive change.

Individuals can adopt one of two methods.First, they can simply operate solo. They canconduct a diagnosis, identify sources of genderdiscrimination, and design small wins them-selves. That approach is hard, as the processdepends so heavily on frank discussion and test-ing of ideas. That is why we suggest that individ-uals use a second method: finding like minds tojoin them in the exercise. The group can be inter-nal to the organization or it can include peoplefrom various organizations. It can include onlywomen or it can include women and men. Thepoint is to hear one another’s stories about work-place practices and their consequences in orderto discover common themes and underlying fac-tors. Small groups can generate small wins ontheir own and experiment with them quietly butpersistently.

So often, the “problem with no name” is ex-perienced by women as a situation that affectsthem alone or worse, as a problem with them. Inour executive education programs, we have seenthat when women share their experiences, theyrecognize that many of the problems they expe-rience as individuals are actually systemic andnot unique to them or to their organization.And they realize that promoting change can bene-fit the organization as well as the men and womenin it. That insight motivates them to work ontheir own and in collaboration with others tocreate small wins that can make a big difference.



equity. And it removes the label of troublemakerfrom women who complain that something is notright. Small wins say, “Yes, something is wrong. Itis the organization itself, and when it is fixed, allwill benefit.”

As we enter the new millennium, we believe that it is time for new metaphors to capture the subtle,systemic forms of discrimination that still linger.It’s not the ceiling that’s holding women back; it’sthe whole structure of the organizations in whichwe work: the foundation, the beams, the walls, thevery air. The barriers to advancement are not justabove women, they are all around them. But dis-mantling our organizations isn’t the solution. Wemust ferret out the hidden barriers to equity and ef-fectiveness one by one. The fourth approach asksleaders to act as thoughtful architects and to recon-struct buildings beam by beam, room by room, re-building with practices that are stronger and moreequitable, not just for women but for all people.

1. Statistics on women of color are even more drastic. Although women ofcolor make up 23% of the U.S. women’s workforce, they account for only14% of women in managerial roles. African-American women compriseonly 6% of the women in managerial roles.

2. The small-wins approach to change was developed by Karl Weick. See“Small Wins: Redefining the Scale of Social Problems,” American Psy-chologist, 1984.

Reprint r00107 To place an order, call 1-800-988-0886.

much the same way as people taking part in small-town recycling campaigns come to understandtheir impact in decreasing global warming. Thisbig-picture outlook is both energizing and self-reinforcing, and it links seemingly unrelated smallwins together.

Fourth, small wins have a way of snowballing.One small change begets another, and eventuallythese small changes add up to a whole new system.Consider again the investment firm that revisedits recruiting processes. It realized that somethingas simple as lengthening interview time could be-gin to address its recruitment problem. But if ithad stopped there, it is unlikely that fundamentalchanges would have occurred. Recognizing why thelength of an interview was an issue – how “feelingcomfortable” and “fitting the mold” had been im-plicit selection criteria –helped the firm make addi-tional, more substantial changes in, for instance,the questions asked. This change is encouraging theexecutives to look into initiatives to revise otherpractices, ranging from publicity to training, thatalso held hidden biases, not just for women but alsofor other underrepresented groups.

The fifth and final source of power in the small-wins approach is that it routs discrimination by fix-ing the organization, not the women who work forit. In that way, it frees women from feelings of self-blame and anger that can come with invisible in-

a modest manifesto for shattering the glass ceiling

Documents