By day, Anne Devereux-Mills was the CEO of an international advertising company; by night, she was a single mother of two who survived melanoma cancer and cervical cancer. She did not talk about her struggles at work or at home. But she wish she had.
“I had to hold everything inside,” said Devereux-Mills, who is now 53. “One of the biggest mistakes I’ve made in my career, and as a mother, was not talking about how hard it was.”
She did not have many female peers in her workplace. And Devereux-Mills did not want her male counterparts to doubt her ability to lead as a woman.
Devereux-Mills is a strong and highly-intelligent leader, and always has been. She was president of her class at Wellesley College.
Still, throughout her 25 years of corporate life, Devereux-Mills said the most difficult part of being a woman in an executive position was the stigma that if she talked about her problems she would appear weak.
It’s a mentality that can isolate some women in high-level positions, she said. For her, it was a loneliness that led to an unsustainable level of stress.
Nearly 4 in 10 high-achieving women leave work voluntarily at some point in their careers, according to the Harvard Business Review.
A research symposium published by the Harvard Business School debunked the myth that women take breaks from their career to care for children. “Ninety percent cited workplace problems,” the research stated.
Career interruption is one of the factors that causes gender gaps in leadership positions. The percentage of women on all U.S. corporate boards has remained in the 12.1 percent to 12.3 percent range over the past decade, according to the Center for American Progress, a progressive public policy research and advocacy organization.
In New York, 10.9 percent of senior executive positions are held by women, which is a 0.8 percentage point decrease from 2010, according to the Women’s Executive Circle of New York 2013 census.
But there should be more women in leadership positions, considering that 44 percent of master’s degrees in business and management are earned by women, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Women also earn 37 percent of Master of Business Administration degrees.
To tackle this gender gap, countries such as Norway and Germany have required quotas for female board members.
But a recent Cambridge University study commissioned by BNY Mellon found that having a quota for women in senior positions does not necessarily keep women in such positions.
Quotas can cause women to devalue their leadership skills. It causes women “not to take credit for successes at work, and compare themselves unfavorably with those they believe were selected on merit,” stated a study called “Women executives: Health, stress, and success” that was published in the Academy of Management.
Changing Negative Perceptions
Devereux-Mills and a growing number of successful female professionals are coming forward to share their experiences on how to change such negative mindsets.
