According to Susan Butler, CEO of the Susan Bulkeley Butler Institute for the Development of Women Leaders in Tucson, Ariz., women make up only 3 percent of all the CEOs in the Fortune 500. Only one woman is the CEO of the list’s top 50.

For years, women in business have agonized over the prospect of hitting the glass ceiling, the invisible barrier that keeps them from achieving the same levels of success as their male counterparts. It has long been assumed that the reason this glass ceiling exists is because of institutionalized sexism within most companies, a holdover from the days before the equal rights movement.

With a woman currently one of the top contenders for the presidency, one might think that such sexism is a thing of the past, and that women have the chance to become business leaders just as easily as men who are as qualified. However, a glance at the statistics shows that there’s still a way to go.

According to Susan Butler, CEO of the Susan Bulkeley Butler Institute for the Development of Women Leaders in Tucson, Ariz., women make up only 3 percent of all the CEOs in the Fortune 500. Only one woman is the CEO of the list’s top 50.

Are women being adequately prepared for business leadership? Are companies doing enough to make sure women have the same opportunities their male coworkers do? Are women taking those opportunities being offered to them? The questions don’t have easy answers, but some of the possible answers may shed some light on where problems might lie, and what companies can do to fix them.

The Gilded Treadmill
Dr. Marcia Reynolds is a certified business coach and author of Outsmart Your Brain, and she recently completed her dissertation on the factors that keep women out of executive positions in the United States. For her research, she profiled and interviewed 75 high-achieving women with at least 10 years of corporate experience in the United States.

Reynolds says the problem she discovered wasn’t a glass ceiling, but a gilded treadmill of jobs that don’t offer women much of what they’re looking for. “What I found is that a lot of the high-achieving women are opting out on their own,” she says. “They don’t really stay long enough to achieve those positions.”

Rather than opting out to start families, Reynolds says her research discovered that many women leave their jobs to start their own businesses. Many of them said they felt unfulfilled by their jobs and wanted something more substantial.

“This group in particular, they have strong needs for continual new challenges, and ‘new’ is a key word,” she says. “They love to be challenged intellectually. If they’re not happy with their work, they just move on.”

The lack of challenge may stem from an unexpected source, Reynolds says. Whereas previous generations of business leaders weren’t sensitive enough to women’s needs in the workplace, today it’s possible that just the opposite is true. Reynolds says many of the women she talked to reported being left out of challenging projects because of their family responsibilities.

“In some cases, it was found when they were interviewed that there was this attitude of, ‘Well, she’s still got kids at home, she’s got a lot to balance so we’ll give it to a male,’” she says. She says this shows that the old-fashioned forms of discrimination still exist, albeit in softer and gentler forms.

Women might also be conditioned by decades of positive reinforcement to expect more out of their jobs than those jobs can deliver. Reynolds says the current generation of women in business grew up during the 1960s and 1970s with self-help books and Title IX telling them that anything is possible for them.

“What we’ve bred is this generation of women who are out there thinking, ‘We can do it,’ and when they get out in the world they hit these walls,” Reynolds says.

Be Your Own CEO
Even with these roadblocks in the way, Butler says, women in business are still much better off than they were in years past, although it’s still not good enough. “I think that we’re light years ahead of where we’ve been, but I don’t think we’re near where we need to be,” she says.

Companies need to prepare, not only themselves, but their female employees, for women in leadership positions, Butler says. However, women need to realize that they will have to be proactive and make certain changes happen for themselves.

Women should not be afraid to ask for help and seek out feedback when working on high-level projects, she adds. “Women still believe that they have to do everything themselves,” she says. “If they ask for help, it shows that they’re not competent, perhaps.”

Leadership development programs are a good thing, but Butler says she isn’t sure those programs offer women the right type of guidance. “I believe that there are a lot of training programs primarily for women, and I think leadership training is where people focus, but is it true experiential learning?” she says. “Are you put in a position where you are given responsibilities and then are you receiving immediate feedback?”

Women shouldn’t be satisfied with “You’re doing great” as feedback, she continues. Rather, they should be constantly seeking out areas for improvement. Peer networks can be a good source for this, she says.

“I’m a big believer in women’s networks,” Butler says. She says groups like the Committee of 200, a group of top female entrepreneurs, came about because women in business needed to share their experiences. “They didn’t have people at their level to talk to, so they formed this group,” she says.

On the company’s side of the equation, Butler says change needs to start at all levels. “I say that to make an impact it has to come from the top down and the bottom up,” she says. “If the CEO says we’re going to make it happen and it’s a strategic initiative, then the expectations are that the senior-level officers are going to help the women get up the ranks. And I’m not saying they’re going to get preferential treatment, it’s just making sure they have the roles and responsibilities to move up the ladder.

“It’s a two-way street,” she says.

Reynolds says such development programs need to involve all management, and companies should not look at diversity as a quota to fill but a chance to develop new talent.

“If they only say, ‘We’ve got this women’s leadership program because we don’t have enough women in top management,’ and that’s it, it looks like they’re trying to solve a problem rather than give support to their top people,” she says.

“One of the things that I have heard from women is that they don’t necessarily want to be like the people at the top, and my feedback to them is that we need to get ourselves up there and then we can begin to change the culture,” Butler says. “The culture of an organization starts at the top, and if we can get men’s skills and women’s skills at the top, then we can have the best of both worlds.”