This week, the Cut is considering what it means to be a woman who leads. It's a conversation that Michel Martin knows well. She herself has made a boss journey up the media ranks, first as a reporter at the Washington Post, then a White House correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. She was a correspondent for ABC News before launching NPR’s show "Tell Me More," and this fall, after eight years at the helm there, she’ll be the host for the weekend edition of "All Things Considered." And through her own professional experience, she's all too familiar with the ways in which black women are excluded from talk about "having it all" — a topic she wrote passionately about last year inThe National Journal.
“Some would say this is a statement about diversity,” says Martin. “To me, it’s not! I see it as a statement about good management. It’s a statement about people not allowing demographics to get in the way of appointing people to the jobs they should have based on their skills and their track records and accomplishments.”
A recent report from the Center for Talent Innovation suggests that, unfortunately, demographics are getting in the way. According to the paper “Black Women Ready to Lead,” while black women demonstrated more ambition than white women in the workplace (22 percent of the black women surveyed reported wanting leadership positions while only 8 percent of white women did), they were more likely to report feeling stalled in their career and/or that their superiors didn’t recognize their talents.
The Cut talked to Martin about the way managing ambition and workplace politics is different for women of color, the unique set of difficulties and expectations women face, and how women of color have been leaning in this whole time.
[For more of this story, written by Allison P. Davis, go to http://nymag.com/thecut/2015/0...artin-interview.html]
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