The leadership gap we don't talk about – and the chart that shows just how bad it is

You’ve heard it all before: the gender gap, whether in the world of politics, business or the arts, is real. While progress is still painfully slow, at least people – from presidential candidates to Hollywood stars – are talking about it.

But there’s another side to this story that doesn’t get discussed quite as often: the racial dimension.

“A lot of the leadership research is about all women,” says Catherine Hill of the American Association for University Women (AAUW). “I think the stories about black and Hispanic women and other minorities get shadowed.”

A new report from the AAUW hopes to shed some light on this: “Women always have a race and an ethnicity, so a discussion about gender without reference to race and ethnicity is simplistic and can be misleading,” it says.

Their findings back up what most of us probably already knew: for women of colour, their gender and race present a “double burden” of sorts. “Gender and racial stereotypes overlap to create unique – and uniquely powerful – stereotypes.”

What this means in practice is that women of colour are often even more under-represented in leadership positions than women more broadly, as this chart shows.

Whereas black women make up almost 8% of the private sector workforce in the US, they represent only 1.5% of senior-level executives. The figures are not much better for Hispanic women: they occupy just 1.3% of top positions, even though they make up 6.2% of the total labour force.

That compares unfavourably even against white women, who themselves are under-represented compared to their male counterparts. While we often hear about the “glass ceiling” holding women back at work, women of colour have reported facing even more obstacles.

“The metaphor of a ‘concrete ceiling’ stands in sharp contrast to that of the ‘glass ceiling.’ Not only is the ‘concrete ceiling’ more difficult to penetrate, women of colour say they can’t see through it to glimpse the corner office,” another report from almost 20 years ago noted. Since then, little has changed.

What explains the shockingly low numbers? It’s difficult to say, because unlike women’s work and leadership issues more broadly, the very specific barriers encountered by women of colour have not been studied in any depth. “Research specifically on gender and leadership that adequately explores (race and ethnicity) is, unfortunately, sparse,” the AAUW report recognizes.

Slowly, at least in the US, the topic is starting to be discussed more openly, thanks in large part to cultural leaders like Beyoncé and Roxane Gay, who have helped spark national debates on the ways gender discrimination intersects with racial stereotypes.

As noted by Amy Cuddy and Adam Galinsky – two of the few leadership scholars to have researched this issue – this debate will go a long way to helping us understand leadership gaps, whether racial or gender, more broadly.

“Considering the overlap between racial and gender stereotypes – our gendered race perspective – opens up new frontiers for understanding how stereotypes impact the important decisions that drive our most significant outcomes at work and at home.”

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