Gendered routes to water utilities’ top executive jobs
different ways to the top for boys and girls
Once an afterthought, workforce and leadership diversity is by now a subject of major attention in the water sector. A study of American water utility chief executive officers (CEOs) that I led more than a decade ago found remarkable demographic homogeneity. Twelve years later, Wisconsin PhD student Natalie Smith and I are back with a follow-up. With the financial support of Spring Point Partners’ Delta initiative, we gathered demographic and career path data on the leaders of more than 1,100 drinking water utilities across the United States.*
I’m reporting the new study’s major findings in a series of blogposts.** The first post focused on gender: we found that, although women still are a small minority of CEOs—just 13%—the share of utilities led by women has more than doubled over the past twelve years. We also found that women are more likely to lead in larger, public sector utilities. This post continues the analysis of gender, with attention to career paths. As we’ll see, the typical route to a water utility’s top position office looks different for men and women.
Ramps and ladders
As with most jobs, water utilities fill their executive posts in one of two ways: they hire a new leader from outside the organization or promote someone from within the organization. Both approaches are common in the water sector; our data indicate that about 60% of utilities promoted their CEOs from within, while about 40% hired their leaders from the outside.
Top executive jobs are not entry-level positions (hereditary monarchs notwithstanding), and so CEOs’ careers advance through multiple jobs en route to the corner office. An individual can advance vertically by joining an organization at an entry- or mid-level, then climbing an organizational “ladder” through multiple jobs to reach the CEO position. Alternatively, a person can advance diagonally by moving from one organization to another via “ramps”.
To illustrate, consider the careers of two prominent leaders of American water utilities: Courtney Driver at Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Utilities and Kishia Powell of WSSC Water.
two women, two engineers, two career paths—one via ladder, one via ramps
Ms. Driver’s career path has been almost entirely vertical: after a few years as a consulting engineer, she joined the City of Winston-Salem’s staff in 2008 and rose up the city government “ladder.” Meanwhile, in 2008 Ms. Powell was appointed head of Baltimore’s Water & Wastewater Bureau, and advanced along “ramps” to executive posts in Jackson, Atlanta, and Washington, DC before taking leadership of WSSC Water last year.
Research on executive careers shows that “ramp-climbers” tend to thrive as innovators and policy leaders, while “ladder-climbers” tend to excel as organizational stewards and faithful executors of policy. By the same token, organizations that hire executives from the outside often seek change agents, while those that promote from within typically seek stability. Neither career path is inherently better or worse; effective (or ineffective) leaders can rise from either ramps or ladders.â€
Gendered career paths
Analysis of utility CEO careers reveals different dominant career paths for men and women. Here is the likelihood that a utility’s CEO was promoted from within over utility size, separately for men and women:
Estimates from logistic regression, adjusted for CEO race and education, and utility ownership.
Two things stand out here. First, most utilities promote their CEOs from within, and the likelihood of vertical promotion increases as utility size increases. That’s not surprising; a larger organization has a larger in-house candidate pool, and many large utilities have formal leadership development programs that help channel people into executive posts.
The more notable thing is the marked gender difference in career path in utilities of different sizes: women executives are much more likely than men to have been promoted from within—especially in the larger utilities where women most frequently emerge. For a utility that serves a population of around 30,000, there is little difference in the likelihood of vertical promotion to CEO for men and women—it’s about 55-60% for both. However, a statistically significant gender gap in career path begins to emerge at a population of around 80,000. If a utility that serves a population of one million has a man in charge, there is a 76% chance that he was promoted from within; if its CEO is a woman, that likelihood jumps to 92%.
None of this is to say that men and women are destined for particular career paths—human behavior is probabilistic, not deterministic. But the probabilities we find here indicate that, when it comes to women’s careers in water utility leadership, Courtney Driver is typical and Kishia Powell is an outlier.
Why different paths for men and women?
It’s impossible to say what’s behind these gendered differences from the data we’ve got. However, the gender disparity in executive ranks is hardly unique to water utilities, and research on gender in other organizations offers some ideas about what might be happening here.‡ Since CEO jobs are part of a labor market, you can think of supply-side and demand-side factors at work here.
On the supply side (i.e., people looking for jobs), women, on average, have less interest in pursuing professional advancement than men. Women who are interested in advancing are often slow to pursue advancement, in part due to general risk aversion, and in part because women tend to perceive themselves as less qualified, even when others in their organizations perceive them as qualified for leadership. Diagonal advancement via exit to another organization is inherently more uncertain than vertical advancement, and so these gendered patterns of risk aversion/tolerance might help explain the patterns we see. Finally, marriage and family make job mobility costly for any professional, but research shows that tradeoffs associated with family responsibilities make commute distances costlier for women than for men. Advancement that involves a geographic move is particularly difficult for women with families, and work-related home relocations are usually driven by husbands, not wives.
On the demand side (i.e., utilities looking for leaders), larger organizations’ may offer formal mentoring programs that channel internal personnel into leadership posts, with particular attention to women. Less happily, gendered career paths may be in part the result of subtle sexism: men enjoy a greater presumption of competence, and so utilities might be more willing to hire men from outside and pay them more but will promote women from within because an internal hire is a “known commodity.”
Future research on gender in the water sector is needed to figure out how much each of these factors contributes to the patterns we observe. For now, what we know from other fields carries some…
Implications for gender representation in the water sector
Today, women are most likely to emerge into leadership roles by rising from within their organizations, so improving women’s representation in water’s executive ranks starts with building stable career ladders within utility organizations. Providing multiple entry-points for people with different experience and educational backgrounds can help in this regard. Formalizing job posting and promotional practices is particularly important for gender equality.
Mentoring and leadership training programs are popular means of improving women’s opportunities for advancement in organizations. Despite these programs’ widespread use, studies find mixed evidence about their effectiveness in helping women advance. Leadership training often is ill-suited for ambitious women’s needs, and the enthusiasm for mentoring women often outstrips the enthusiasm for actually promoting them. Recent research suggests that sponsorship—encouragement and active support in pursuit of immediate advancement opportunities—is a much more potent means of improving women’s representation in leadership.As Griffeth and her colleagues write, “one of the key reasons women are underrepresented in executive ranks is because, compared to men, they are over-mentored, under-sponsored, and lack the important advocacy of superiors.”
offer a hand up the ladder, not advice on how to grip the rungs
Opening up wider “ramps” for women’s advancement via movement across organizations involves reducing family impacts and transaction costs associated with job mobility—particularly in early-career stages. Evidence from other industries indicates that flexible scheduling, carefully structured family leave, and remote work can help contribute to women’s advancement in the water sector. As usual, we need much more rigorous research on water organizations to understand the impacts of these and other practices.
*We used a randomized, stratified sample to capture a representative sample.
**Natalie and I are also cooking up some stuff for peer-reviewed outlets, but academic publishing is agonizingly slow, obscure, hard to read, and often paywalled. Hence this blog!
†For a deep dive on the implications of career paths for executive behavior, personality, and performance, check this out.
‡ I learned most of what I know about women and career paths from the brilliant Robin Saywitz, who joins the faculty of Saint Louis University later this year.