How powerful women behave
The Most Powerful Women franchise, just a decade old, is already Fortune’s second biggest after the Fortune 500. Amazing, isn’t it? This fact attests to the power of women in a year when so many powerful women – including Hillary Clinton and Morgan Stanley’s (MS) Zoe Cruz and Lehman Brothers’ (LEH) Erin Callan - got so close to the top and then fell. Even so, the power of women in business and beyond is clearly expanding. And Thursday we celebrated with the second of our nationwide MPWomen dinners, this one in San Francisco.
Quite a turnout. We had the top women from companies as diverse as the Gap (GPS), Wells Fargo (WFC), KPMG (thank you, KPMG!), and the Silicon Valley gang including Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, senior venture capitalists from Kleiner Perkins, Google (GOOG) Asia-Pacific/Latin America boss Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, and eBay (EBAY) SVP Stephanie Tilenius. She has run just about every part of eBay and could lead the entire company someday. That’s what former eBay CEO Meg Whitman has told me.
Cassidy and Tilenius, along with new lululemon athletica (LULU) CEO Christine Day, were on the Rising Stars panel that I led before dinner at the wonderful SF restauarnt Jardiniere. As usual, the questions from the audience were much about how successful women display power. I asked the three up-and-comers whether they believe that the acceptable band of behavior is narrower for powerful women than for men. Essentially, they said no – though Tilenius remarked that she wished that Hillary Clinton had campaigned more like a woman than a tough guy.
On this issue of female leadership style, there’s a generational divide. The debate began as soon as we sat down to dinner. I was sitting with Genentech (DNA) president Susan Hellman, Cisco (CSCO) chief technology officer Padmasree Warrior, SAFECO CEO Paula Rosput Reynolds, and other influential women spanning two generations. The older women generally insisted that they, throughout their careers, have been forced to behave a certain way – to rein in their aggressiveness and tone down their style.
This is true particularly in financial services. But Genentech’s Hellman, a former practicing oncologist who is now the most powerful woman in pharma, said that in her business, women aren’t so constrained. In science and medicine, the guys usually don’t even notice your gender. If you’ve got brains, you succeed.
P.S. Do you think that the band of acceptable behavior is narrower for powerful women than for powerful men?
The Girl Scout Research Institute studied almost 2500 girls and more than 1500 boys and found that girls don’t want to be leaders in the traditional “comand-and-control” (i.e. bossy) model. But given the chance to be their ideal of a leader — someone with principles, ethical standards and the ability to affect change and make things better — they’ll step right up! Girls are redefining leadership. See http://www.swgirlscouts.org and click on Change It Up! What Girls Say About Redefining Leadership, or go to http://www.gsusa.org. Girl Scouting is the expert on girls. Our mission is to build girls of courage, confidence, and character who make the world a better place and we have been building leaders for 96 years.
This topic has been so intriguing and one that warrants much attention as the next generation of women leaders rise in America and around the world and as the number of women are outnumber the number of men in colleges and universities. At the core of any leadership position, personal values and ethics, vision and drive must be highly regarded. Without these principles, it becomes really quite challenging for women to rise to the top.
Im 79, my generation really had a tough time with men. I heard lousy things from men i worked with, from men higher and lower and even my husband on occasions. It still happens with less educated men. The main difference now, is how i react. I look at them for the idiots they are and once in a while i blow up, but usually i just consider the source. I was in the banking field. The females in my family admire me, but i dont get that same respect from the males.j.p.wms.
In response to the question at the end of your commentary, I would hope that “the band of acceptable behavior” is no narrower for women than it should be for men.
My male boss used to tell me women who BEHAVE don’t make history. I do believe women become more assertive—not less—as we age.
Esther Wojcicki: The last newspaper generationJournalism teacher and newspaper adviser at Palo Alto High School
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Patricia Sellers has written some of Fortune's most talked-about cover stories, including "Can Meg Whitman Save California?", Melinda Gates ("The $100 Billion Woman"), "MySpace Cowboys," Martha Stewart ("I cannot be destroyed"), Ted Turner ("Gone with the Wind") and Oprah Winfrey ("Oprah Inc."). And she has broken ground with insightful pieces on career management issues such as ego ("Get Over Yourself!"), and "Charisma: Do You Need It? Can You Get It?" Pattie chairs the annual Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit, the preeminent gathering of women leaders in business, philanthropy, government, academia, and the arts. And she has helped oversee Fortune's "Most Powerful Women in Business" cover package since its launch in 1998. She started at Fortune in 1984, covering the big consumer brand companies.
Jessica Shambora started with Fortune as a reporter in June of 2008, following a stint as assistant editor at Travel+Leisure Golf. Shambora has written for Sports Illustrated, SI Latino, Women's Health, and Triathlete. She is a frequent contributor to Postcards. 
I encourage women to be in leadership positions. But I doubt it will ever be equal until women take on the most difficult tasks of the rank and file. An example; there will never be an equal number of women generals in the armed forces until women are both allowed to be in combat AND (this is the most significant part) willingly fill combat roles in equal numbers to men. I can cite other examples, but this one comes to the top.