The Son Also Rises

Timing, as they say, is everything. My last column — “And now a word from her sponsor” — discussed the appalling and persistent paucity of women in top leadership positions and questioned how, after all this time, we still can’t break through to gender parity in business (and academia and politics and science, etc, etc). Lots of time, resources and intellectual capital have been expended on all manner of interventions and yet we’re left with an ironic state of affairs: women are still struggling to attain professional critical mass, despite the facts that 1. more women are attending and graduating from college than men, and 2. their beneficial effect on business results (i.e. shareholder value, profitability, stability) is undeniable and well-documented.

Clearly, significant roadblocks — some real, some imagined, some personal, some institutional and some sociological — still remain.

Granted, and this is no small factor, professional women often leave a lot on the table themselves by not just taking their seat already instead of waiting for the invitation or worse, for permission. Contriving safety in numbers to fortify our resolve, we’ve created women’s networking groups, women’s empowerment groups, women’s leadership groups, women’s support groups — all great but, necessary (hopefully not in perpetuity) just not entirely sufficient.

Why? First, because they’re stopgap measures, interventions of a sort, that occur at a way late juncture and therefore qualify as remediation, not real change. The women who continue to fight these battles in real time understand the need for legacy, that something needs to be better or at least different for the next generation of women, our daughters, from the get-go.

On a fundamental level, we’ve understood this for a while; hence, the now quaint “take our daughters to work day.” The intention of exposing our girls to an expanded notion of career possibility was certainly noble but like so much of our thinking, it was short-sighted. Talk about irony! How fascinating that, while trying to expand the thinking of others, we limited our own.

Not following? Well, here’s the deal. For all this time, we’ve been working on solving for only one variable — x. Sure, the value of “x” has increased — clearly impacting the product — but the increase has been arithmetic and the pace plodding.

Imagine what could happen to the equation if we also tried to solve for “y.” Now we’re talking change that multiplies geometrically, creating greater orders of magnitude, at an accelerated pace.

Translation: we not only have “x” daughters, we also have “y” sons. Daughters don’t grow up in a gender vacuum and women’s true value will be squandered if we just network with, empower, lead or support other women. Just changing the woman/daughter side of the equation is far less effective than solving for both x and y.

In other words, for our society to achieve true gender parity, we must also focus on how we raise boys. We became so consumed with empowering our girls that we neglected to free our boys from the tyranny of machismo.

One reason, according to Kate Stone Lombardi in her Wall Street Journa piece “Who Are You Calling a Mama’s Boy?” is that society still looks askance at close mother/son bonds: society’s discomfort manifests in puerile stereotypes, erroneous presumptions and hurtful conjecture. Big, antiquated mistake, as a study published in Child Development found that boys who were insecurely attached to their mothers “acted more aggressive and hostile later in childhood, kicking and hitting and yelling…” That speaks volumes when you consider the shameful fact that one in three United States women is abused.

On the other hand, boys with close relationships to their mothers were “more emotionally open, formed stronger friendships and were less anxious and depressed than their more macho classmates. And they got better grades.”

Somewhere along the line, our gender role wires got crossed. While we “dramatically changed the way we raise our daughters encouraging them to be assertive and aim high our view of the mother-son relationship has remained frozen.” There’s no question that how we socialize girls had to change but it shouldn’t be at the expense of boys which, in the end, is at all of our expense.

The good news is that the work we do raising strong daughters is starting to pay off. But we’ll continue with two steps forward, one step back unless we invest similar energy in examining and recalibrating how we raise and socialize our boys.