In 2023, a collaborative global study by the IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV), Chief, and Oxford Economics conducted a global study revealing that women held only 11 percent of C-suite positions and 10 percent of Board seats. These figures fall below the global average of 12 percent for both levels of leadership. Despite this disparity, there’s a notably higher representation of women in junior professional/specialist roles, standing at 41 percent compared to the global average of 40 percent. The IBM Institute for Business Value conducts a global survey bi-annually to evaluate opportunities and obstacles for women’s career advancement.

When we see men predominantly occupying the greatest share of leadership positions despite the advances in laws and policies, one could simplistically attribute it to men just being better. It’s easy to forget that despite those new laws, we still do not have a level playing field. Biases will take a long time to shift. Glass ceilings still exist. And even just physically, women have much less time available for their jobs than men. So, kudos to the women who still make it to the top!

Given the fact that women are starting from behind in a system so heavily stacked against them, should we, like in golf, allow women to play with a handicap so that they can compete more fairly? After all, they typically hold more responsibilities than men, and even more physical demands on them (like carrying a pregnancy to term and then weaning a child for many more months afterward). But we know what the most competitive women would say: I don’t want a handicap. I want to beat those men at the same game on the same terms. It is at this point that I start getting conflicted in my desire to create equal opportunities for women.

If I subjected them to the exact same conditions as men, they would need to make extraordinary sacrifices to keep up; in some ways, they would find themselves fighting against mother nature—rejecting the possibility of having a child, aborting a child (God forbid), or opting for surrogacy so as not to fall behind in their career advancement while still having a child. In most of those cases, I don’t expect a happy ending, but the women who make those choices actually expect to find happiness, or else they wouldn’t make those choices. We seem to be up against a cliff then, with no way out.

Now if you haven’t noticed, in our discussion so far we have played right into the hands of people who for a long time have dictated the terms of reference that then frame this discussion for us. We have unwittingly accepted that the highest goods we should strive for are successful careers, top positions, perfect flexibility, control of our career progress, and self-advancement above all else. This whole discussion is actually a values game, and we have accepted the values proposed to us by society as being the greatest goods worth striving for. I’m thinking of values here as things we consider to be of great worth and of great importance to us – things we value. If we accept those goods as the ones we value most, then we will prioritize them over all other goods and premise our happiness on the attainment of career success and recognition.

Understanding this discussion as ultimately a values issue came powerfully to me through one of our students. She came to me just after I had given them a career talk and said:

“Hearing you speak about realizing our potential of becoming high flyers and having a tremendous impact left me wondering whether my dreams are valid. Is it okay that what I want most in life is a happy marriage and a beautiful family? Would I be a let-down and a failure if I chose to be a homemaker instead of joining the rat race and competing with others?” I, of course, validated her vision, which is more consistent with my deep appreciation and gratitude to the millions of women who go unnoticed because they chose a quieter life, away from the limelight but one that is still deeply meaningful.

Such a life may have fewer direct touch points with mainstream society, but that doesn’t lessen how far it can go in terms of the depth of personal experience and growth. So if we set ourselves free of value systems that have come to be widely accepted and reclaim the power to prioritize goods differently, we regain the freedom to choose whether to have an out-and-out competition between men and women, whether to sacrifice all for one’s career or to sacrifice one’s career for one’s family, or whether to seek a middle ground. From a psychological standpoint, if you match your decisions and actions with your expectations, you will find happiness, at least in the short term. And a mismatch will lead to dissatisfaction.

If you haven’t noticed, even by framing the discussion as a game of ranking the goods one values and going for the ones one prioritizes, I have still boxed you into a different but still limited way of framing. This reveals my bias towards the field I am most schooled in—organizational behaviour or organizational psychology. Choices are subjective (which doesn’t mean imaginary—our feelings are still real phenomena that either result from stimuli or can themselves cause  stimuli or behaviour). We can understand people’s behaviors and choices if we understand the priorities and feelings that caused them. Even if we have different value systems, we don’t think women who go for abortion or surrogacy are crazy. They are definitely resonating with beliefs and feelings and pressures that lead them to make those choices in the belief that they will find happiness that way.

In our search for ultimate happiness, though, we have to go beyond this psychological framework and ask deeper questions. For example, are all goods of the same value, and is the value assigned to different goods ultimately a subjective affair entirely dependent on me? Are we wired in particular ways that limit our choices? Or are we free to ignore the wiring and therefore to rewire ourselves with no consequences for us and for society? Is my happiness dependent on my pursuing the things I personally value, no matter what those things are? To get the answers to those questions, we would need to move out of the psychological framework, which helps us understand why we feel and act the way we do, and move to a philosophical framework, which attempts to tell us who we ultimately are and to predict what would give us not just short term but lasting happiness instead.

Article written by: Dr. Vincent Ogutu, Vice Chancellor, Strathmore University.