How much progress has been made toward creating a more equitable workplace for women?

We've been heating up the water for a long time, and the glacier is finally moving. I would like to see us doing much more to celebrate the accomplishments of women leaders, rather than continuing to focus on the obstacles that women face. It's not that we should ignore the deficits, it's just that there's an enormous amount of great stuff happening that doesn't get any airtime. Going back to my sports background, I compare it to the 1950s, when it was an unequivocal "medical certainty" that a human being could not run a mile in less than 4 minutes. But Roger Bannister didn't believe that, so he ran it in 3:59:40. There was all this fanfare about it, and it was the best thing that could have happened. Another guy did it about a month later, and a few more a couple of months later. I think of women's accomplishments in terms of the sub-four-minute mile. We have to publicize the breakthroughs so that we can change perceptions about what can be done.

That's why the Institute for Women's Leadership has started a consortium for breakthroughs in women's leadership. I was so sick and tired of reading analytical reports and overwhelmingly negative statistical evidence and not reading much of anything about people getting out there and putting ideas into play. We're recruiting 6 to 10 companies to commit the next two years to causing a breakthrough in the advancement of women in their organizations. They will share best practices with one another and leverage resources, so that if one group of women is great at mentoring and the other group of women is great at recruiting, then each company will benefit from the other's expertise.

At the end of two years, I want to publish the progress results using a breakthrough strategy, which is what all of our work is based on -- breakthrough change, rather than incremental change. We can't just crawl person by person up the ladder and say, "Well, we got one more off." Give me a break. We've got millions of transistors on a little piece of silicon that you can barely even see. We've got people walking on a space station up in the sky. There's no reason that we can't achieve breakthroughs in the work of advancing women.

Cheryl Dahle (cdahle@fastcompany.com), a Fast Company senior writer, is based in Silicon Valley. Contact Rayona Sharpnack by email (rayona@womensleadership.com), or learn more about her work on the Web (www.womensleadership.com).

Sidebar: Leadership Moments

What if I didn't see the glass ceiling?

Oceana Lott
Manager, training and development
Levi Strauss & Co.
Personal breakthrough: Beat the "glass ceiling" mentality
Attended Sharpnack's Session: Spring 1999
Age: 38

Herstory: "The program gave me a blueprint for how to pull off breakthrough projects. But more than that, the program gave me back my soul -- that essential part of me that had always been out on the edge, vital and enthusiastic. I learned how to be that person more often, whereas before the program, it was a fluke when the real me showed up.

"When I took the seminar, I had just relocated to a part of Hewlett-Packard that was particularly challenging to me as a black female. (Lott recently left HP to join Levi Strauss.) And while I was able to do the kind of work that I love there, it seemed to me that the ceiling was really, really low. I felt squished. It seemed as if everything I was doing that was compelling to me had a really high personal cost. I found myself adapting to what I thought the environment was like -- basically adapting myself out of my authentic self.

"During the course, a discussion emerged about the story that we have collectively created around the glass ceiling. I was able to see that it is a story about context that somebody made up. And when I looked at it on a different scale, things actually changed. The glass ceiling surrounding gender issues was not as absolute as I had always thought it was. Once the ceiling began to crack, so did my belief system about what was true and absolute. I had felt that I was personally experiencing the glass ceiling because of several different bad encounters. But I had actually chosen that disempowering story as the explanation.

"That is not to say that the statistics are not true. But the question of whether or not you're experiencing the glass ceiling as an individual is up in the air. If you believe that you are, and you string together lots of events in support of that story, then that's the story you get to carry around with you -- living every day believing that you're limited in what you can accomplish. And I had to ask myself, To what degree is this true solely because I think it is? Are there times when I don't take risks or when I approach someone suspiciously? How does this belief lead to behavior that proves the belief? I realized that to overcome obstacles and remain true to myself, my story had to be about possibilities, not about limitations.