HBR Women at Work Boxed Set (6 Books)

19

The Power of Women Supporting Women

by Anne Welsh McNulty

As my experience of advancing from rookie accountant to managing director at an investment bank taught me, conversations between women have massive benefits for the individual and the organization. When I graduated college in the 1970s, I believed that women would quickly achieve parity at all levels of professional life now that we had “arrived”—I viewed the lack of women at the top as a pipeline problem, not a cultural one. But my expectation of finding support from female colleagues—the feeling of sisterhood in this mission—didn’t survive first contact with the workplace.

When I was a first-year accountant at a Big Eight firm (now there’s only the Big Four), I kept asking the only ...