Aspiring business leaders want to have it all: a successful career and a great marriage. What shocked me was that a subset of these aspiring leaders -- female Harvard Business School (HBS) students -- believed that to get both from HBS, they needed to downplay their career ambitions in front of their male classmates.
This surprising conclusion came from a recent Harvard study of more than 2,200 HBS students. The women surveyed by Harvard chose to minimize their career ambitions in front of HBS men -- including withholding their opinions, avoiding career-advancing opportunities, and offering to take a lower salary.
In two experiments conducted in the fall of 2016, researchers first asked newly admitted elite MBA students to answer questions about themselves and their career preferences which would be used to place them in summer internships.
Specifically, students were asked to rate their own ambition, competitiveness, assertiveness, desired salaries, and willingness to travel and work long hours. Students also were asked whether they were single or in a relationship.
Some were told that all their classmates would see their answers while the answers of the remaining students would be shared solely with staff at the career center.The audience made a huge difference to the women MBAs. They told career counselors that they would work and travel just as frequently as the men and accept less money to do so.
But the single women who were told their classmates would see their answers said they would take $18,000 less a year less in salary, travel seven fewer days per month, and work four fewer hours per week than the female students who thought their answers would be seen only by the career counselors.
Twin Ambitions
What do you make of these findings? To me, they suggest that the single women MBAs entered HBS with twin ambitions: to prepare for a great career and to find a spouse. Do single HBS women believe that their male cohorts will be more willing to pursue a long-term relationship if they perceive the women to be less ambitious?
HBS is a bit of a matchbox -- meaning that single women's twin ambitions can be realized there. After all a 2015 HBS alumni survey found that of alumni between ages 25 and 30, 31 percent of married women and 16 percent of married men married an HBS alum.
Women's dual ambitions also seem to affect conduct in the workplace.
In a related survey, MBA students were asked whether during their two years before business school they had avoided career-boosting conduct -- such as speaking up at meetings, offering to lead sales pitches, seeking out team leadership roles, or asking for raises or promotions -- to keep from appearing too ambitious or assertive.
The largest proportion of respondents who did at least one of these things were single women (73 percent). Next down the list were attached women (63 percent), attached men (50 percent), and single men (43 percent).
In a related survey, single women were asked to fill out a hypothetical career selection questionnaire which asked if they would seek more-demanding jobs. When the women were told that the results would be shared only with female peers, 68 percent of them said they preferred higher pay and demanding jobs. When told that male peers would see the results, a mere 26 percent of them said they wanted the bigger job.
What Leaders Should Do
What should business leaders do about these findings? One possibility is to conduct their own research into these questions to see whether the findings of this MBA population also apply to their own firms.
If such research does reinforce the idea that single women are looking for careers and spouses in the workplace, leaders ought to design career paths to accommodate their desire for both goals.
One way to do this might be for highly demanding employers to offer different work schedules at different life stages. For example, in the last few years, investment banks have switched their work approach from requiring associates -- who are often single -- to work long hours seven days a week -- to giving them weekends off. This change makes it possible for single people to have social lives.
Should these employees -- women or men -- get married and start families, the company ought to provide flexibility in their work schedules so they can tend to both work and family matters. In order to retain top talent, companies should pay people enough so they can hire people to help in the home.
As more women rise to executive positions and enjoy great family lives, the less I hope some will feel the need to downplay their career ambitions.
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