Stop Trying to Be a Finance/Tech Bro (Open Letter to Corporate Women)

“Be Like Mike," “Not Like the Other Girls," and “Girl Boss” all send the same subliminal message: act like a man to survive as a woman.

Is that motto truly the best advice for women? Most of us might be on our way to jail if acting like Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) is part of our professional development.

To this day, women are being told directly or indirectly to be like one of the boys to inch closer to the billions invested in finance and tech companies with (white) male founders.

Why has this been the default strategy, especially for Black women at the bottom of the corporate and VC pyramid? The reasons are cliche by now:

1. only 21% of board members for finance institutions around the world are women;

2. women are in only 19% of all the finance C-suite roles that exist worldwide and represent only 5% of all CEOs globally;

3. women are in only 28% of “computing” roles in America;

4. less than 25% of the tech workforce in 2020 (during the pandemic) were women (which must've dropped significantly since the recent layoffs).

LeanIn.org, Black Girls Code, & Clever Girl Finance are just three of a plethora of girl-boss movements founded to teach women how to beat these odds.

LeanIn specifically approaches this by pairing women with men who will “mentor and sponsor” them, to guarantee a meteoric rise within these male-dominated spaces. Their website explicitly says women will succeed when these men “show us the ropes” for climbing to the top. Their advice for this approach to mentoring includes getting rid of the “likeability penalty” (i.e. calling outspoken women “bossy”) and giving women more opportunities to speak during meetings.

LeanIn does NOT, however, warn against teaching women to perpetuate unethical business practices under a patriarchal/imperialistic system, nor does it encourage men to consider how gender diversity in leadership reduces the risk of corruption in companies (and even governments).

If women are taught only to play the corporate game by existing rules, they would (and probably should) suffer the same consequences as their male peers (à la SBF).

Have the ends justified the means? What are the pros and cons of mimicking the finance and tech bros? There aren't consistent approaches to measuring outcomes.

LeanIn’s reported outcomes include 50,000 women starting Lean In Circles (or peer groups) around the world, and 15,000 pictures curated “in partnership with Getty Images” of women and girls in STEM...yay feminism?

Black Girls Code outcomes on its website include 15 chapter cities running STEM workshops worldwide, and 30,000 Black girls served (I could not find an annual report for 2022 to pull data from). Important point: outlets like Business Insider reported on poor employee morale and leadership squabbles at the nonprofit organization, which was founded/led by a Black woman.

Clevel Girl Finance, a for-profit company led by a Nigerian-American woman, simply lists a handful of positive testimonials on its website. No quantifiable or comparable data are available to gauge its success in placing more women in finance jobs.

For those women who broke through the gates and glass ceilings, are they happier? For this, I have ample data, but I'll focus on the least represented in these industries—Black women.

A study on status anxiety among Black women tells us that

• the highest-paid Black women in the U.S. are just as likely to suffer from mood disorders as the lowest-paid Black women, and

• “Work settings that incentivize cooperation versus competition, for instance, could dampen [status anxiety]."

However,

• studies published by the American Psychological Association (APA) and the Journal of Clinical Psychology show that microaggressions against Black women in workplaces (e.g. labeling Black women as “aggressive” when they're direct or attempting to collaborate with others) are increasing.

• Additionally, these microaggressions are having a negative impact on Black women’s mental health, putting them at risk of suicide ideation and eating disorders, among other illnesses.

So, what do we do instead? Women-centered groups and programs, knowingly or unknowingly, are asking us to be like one of the boys as a solution to gender inequity. And that is killing us, literally and professionally.

Perhaps the best solution lies in unlearning what we claim are gender norms, and learning how to be real, relatable, and responsible human beings.