As women, we need to have confidence, self-belief and faith in our significance. When we embrace the fact that we have a unique purpose and importance that goes beyond any accomplishment or title, I believe confidence follows naturally.
As part of my series about “the five things we need to do to close the gender wage gap” I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Cortney Baker.
Dr. Cortney Baker went from teenage mom to becoming the founder and CEO of an eight-figure healthcare business, KidsCare Home Health, servicing over 5,000 special needs children. Leveraging her experiences, she coaches female entrepreneurs on how to start and scale their own service-based businesses. As a leadership expert, business coach, and mother, Cortney is passionate about empowering women to close the gender gap through the power of entrepreneurship. This area was also her area of research when pursuing her Ed.D. in Organizational Leadership from Pepperdine University. A TEDx speaker, podcast host, and author of the best-selling book, ‘The Ten Do’s and Don’ts for Business Leadership: Lessons to Lead Effectively’ and, ‘Unlimited: Conquering the Myth of the Glass Ceiling,’ Dr. Cortney shares these messages internationally for organizations, associations, and entrepreneurs. Dr. Cortney was named the 2016/2017 Texas Business Woman of the Year, and the Top 100 in Healthcare in America.
Thank you so much for joining us! Can you tell us the “backstory” that brought you to this career path?
My introduction to the working world was a little different to the rest of my high school classmates! Six months after graduating, I gave birth to my son and became a single teen mom. Surviving on double waitressing shifts and food stamps, I was eventually able to work my way through college and earn my master’s degree in Speech-Language Pathology.
I jumped straight into entrepreneurship after college and founded KidsCare Home Health, a pediatric home healthcare agency in Dallas. We’ve grown from just ten patients in the beginning, to an eight-figure national healthcare enterprise spanning 11 cities and three states.
After a decade in business, I decided to go back to school and get my doctoral degree in Organizational Leadership — something I’d dreamed about since those single-teen-mom days. As I began classes at Pepperdine University, I had something of an epiphany. We had an orientation task that involved writing our own 80th birthday toast. I put myself in the shoes of my 80-year-old self, reflected back, and realized I wasn’t living my purpose at all. I didn’t know exactly what that purpose was at the time, but I knew I wasn’t fulfilling it.
A month later, at the age of 37, I suffered a massive stroke in two places and underwent a seven-hour brain surgery. Needless to say, the experience was brutal, but I did a lot of soul-searching during my recovery.
When I returned to my studies, I knew exactly where I wanted to focus my attention: women’s leadership. I wanted to know why there were so few women leaders in healthcare. Despite women making up 80 percent of the healthcare workforce, we only occupied 11 percent of the CEO positions. What was stopping us climbing the corporate ladder?
Through my doctoral research, I found that women face four key challenges in advancing their careers:
1. Family obligations
2. Limited opportunities for growth
3. Gender-based discrimination
4. Lack of confidence
These issues are not unique to the healthcare industry; they’re specific to being female. We’re supposedly more than 100 years away from gender equality at the highest levels of leadership, and that’s not good enough for me or for future generations of women. So with the life and business experience I’ve gained from the past 20 years, I’ve made it my mission to help female entrepreneurs overcome these obstacles and scale their own businesses.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began this career?
In May 2018, I was a keynote speaker at a conference in Dallas. A young woman approached me looking, frankly, star-struck! Valerie wanted to know more about my research findings, so I shared my book Unlimited: Conquering the Myth of the Glass Ceiling.
After she implemented the strategies in the book, Valerie emailed me to tell me she’d negotiated a $10,000 raise from her employer, and to ask if I’d consider mentoring her. We met over dinner and she told me she wanted to start her own business when she was “older”. I told her that if she was serious, then I could help her right now.
Four months later, on the sixth anniversary of my stroke, Valerie launched a digital marketing agency called Lumos Creative. Within the year, she was leading a global team of ten.
Can you share a story about the funniest or most interesting mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
When I first started sharing my research, I’d publish short videos about my findings and strategies on YouTube. I’d get so many hateful comments and messages, usually from men.
One comment was particularly spiteful and offensive, and I found it really difficult not to take it to heart. However, after a little digging, I found that the commenter also published videos with titles like “hot turtle sex”. Suddenly, his critique didn’t feel quite so scathing!
The lesson? As Dr Brene Brown says, consider your source. I learned that only those in the arena with me should be allowed to speak into my life.
Ok let’s jump to the main focus of our interview. Even in 2019, women still earn about 80 cents for every dollar a man makes. Can you explain three of the main factors that are causing the wage gap?
When we compare average salaries by gender, without taking into account variables like job role or qualifications, men are paid around 20 percent more than women. When we look at women of American Indian, Black and Hispanic descent specifically, men are paid 25 percent more.
But let’s take into account those variables. When we do, we see that a woman actually earns $.98 for every $1 an equally qualified man in a comparable role earns. That pay divide increases for women in executive level positions.
Now two cents per dollar may not sound like much of a difference initially, and it’s considerably less than the 20 cents we’re used to hearing about. But when you consider that money compounds and grows over time, those lost earnings are still significant across the course of a woman’s lifetime.
So what’s the cause of the disparity? There are several, but let’s look at the big three.
Occupational segregation
One of the biggest contributing factors to pay inequality is that women are generally employed in lower-paid occupations. Think childcare, hospitality, care work, etc. On the other hand, men are more likely to be employed in high-paying fields like sales, aviation, engineering, medicine, etc.
This is known as occupational segregation, and it usually happens because we’ve been raised according to certain societal expectations and gender norms. In other words, we raise our girls to play with dolls and kitchens, and our boys to play with cars and microscopes. How can we be surprised when they end up in the roles we’ve primed them for their whole lives?
Work policies vs family obligations
To ever achieve gender equality in the workplace, we have to achieve gender equality at home. Studies have shown that for every hour of house or childcare work done by a man, a woman does 1.7 hours. To meet these extra demands, women are more likely to accept lower-paid jobs that offer more flexibility, and they’re more likely to have to juggle work demands during home time. Whether it’s the boardroom or the classroom, they’re always left with the sense that they’re failing somewhere.
At work, mothers experience what’s known as “the motherhood penalty”. They’re perceived as less competent than men and childless women, and this is reflected in their compensation, benefits, and career opportunities.
When women do leave the workforce for their families, it’s not always because they want to stay home. In fact, women who satisfy their personal desire to work are proven to be better psychologically equipped for parenting. They’ve often tried exhaustively to negotiate flexibility at work or extra support at home, but with neither boss nor partner offering any leeway, they’ve felt they had no other option.
What about the child-free woman? Whether she’s planning to have kids or not, many employers assume (not always consciously) that it’s only a matter of time before a woman takes off to start a family. She’s considered more of a risky hire/promotion than her male peers, who they assume will continue their career uninterrupted by family life.
Gender-based discrimination
Women are making great strides in attaining mid-level management positions, but men are still promoted around 30 percent more often early in their careers. It’s not just a simple case of male vs female, though. The reasons are more nuanced.
First, we have the good ol’ boys club. Men have historically held the upper ranks of leadership and the power that comes with it. They get the clout, they hold the purse strings, and they control the resources — and some of them (not all) don’t want to share it with their female peers.
Second, women can be their own worst enemy. When women are underrepresented in a workplace, it creates a sense that there’s only room for a chosen few. Some women react to this by viciously protecting their place at the table from other women. Rather than supporting their progression, their manipulative or underhanded behavior simply perpetuates the stereotypes used to oppress them in the first place.
Finally, women are often led to believe that in order to compete in a male-dominated environment, they have to act like men — and are then penalized for doing so. They adopt stereotypically masculine behaviors like assertiveness, only to be labelled bitches or ballbusters. They’re damned if they do, damned if they don’t, and this “double bind” only gets stronger as they get higher up the ladder. These stereotypes directly and indirectly contribute to the pay gap and have a significant — but vastly underestimated — influence on women’s career progression.
Can you share with our readers what your work is doing to help close the gender wage gap?
We’re currently not on track to achieve gender equality at the C-level for another 100 years. I will not accept that for myself nor for my teenage daughters. I’m committed to changing it, but the only way we can make the change we want to see is to BE the change we’re looking for.
For the last two years, I’ve been helping female entrepreneurs start and scale their own service-based businesses through my two signature programs, From Side Hustle to CEO and Scaling Society. Let’s stop asking for a seat at the table and build our own damn tables!
Can you recommend 5 things that need to be done on a broader societal level to close the gender wage gap? Please share a story or example for each.
Reframe the glass ceiling
I do not believe in the glass ceiling. When a woman accepts she’s going to held back by this invisible force, she surrenders her power. So reject the myth of the glass ceiling and stop perpetuating your own powerlessness! Reframe your perspective and the language you use to describe your journey, and you will better arm yourself to achieve success.
Gender equity starts in the home
Balancing family and career continues to be a source of struggle for women, with little support being offered on either side. When couples split the childcare and financial labor evenly, children are happier, moms experience less guilt, and men are more connected to their families. Everybody wins in an equal home, and there’s a weight of evidence to back this up.
Get comfortable with hard conversations
Conflicts are inevitable on any career path. To be successful, we need to lean into this and master the art of the hard conversation. To communicate our point assertively, but also be respectful of everyone involved. To let go of passive aggression and express ourselves with honesty, compassion and conviction. To give feedback constructively, and accept feedback gracefully.
Women tend to receive more generic, less constructive feedback than men. Rather than actionable points, they’re given fluff and filler. How are we supposed to course-correct or grow from that? If we don’t speak up, then we can’t.
It can be uncomfortable, but all leaders, male and female, should practice giving clear, direct and actionable feedback to women. And women should practice requesting this feedback should it not be offered.
Socialization, media, and playing on the same team
Female workplace harassment is on the rise, and four in five women claim that other women have sabotaged their careers. When women engage in this behavior, they’re only supporting the very stereotypes that are being used to oppress them.
Female aggression is the result of young girls being socialized to internalize their anger. Instead of healthy outward expression, they’re taught to be more indirect and underhand in expressing negative feelings. And of course, they’re not supposed to be competitive, at least not overtly. This is strongly reinforced by the media, with caricatures of bitchy, catty, spiteful women far outnumbering representations of positive female teams or leaders.
If we’re to buck this trend, we need to raise our girls with a strong sense of self, a healthy outlet for their emotions, and an appreciation for competition. Women with solid self-esteem and high emotional intelligence are much less likely to engage in aggressive behaviors, and those who experience competition in a team environment are better equipped to work collaboratively with others.
The definition of confidence
One of the biggest challenges women face in the quest for the corner office is a lack of self-confidence. Regardless of the success we’ve earned, our own insecurities and fears can shape our internal and external narratives. We feel this in every area of our lives — work, finances, parenting, you name it — and it manifests in our relationships too.
My theory is that confidence is found in resilience, which is developed through perseverance. When you face adversity head-on without crumbling. When you have the courage to grow after failure, stagnation, or loss. When you know your purpose and you stand by your integrity.
As women, we need to have confidence, self-belief and faith in our significance. When we embrace the fact that we have a unique purpose and importance that goes beyond any accomplishment or title, I believe confidence follows naturally.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
I’d start the #screw100years movement, because we’re not waiting 100 years for pay equality! When women gain their confidence, realize their power in a healthy way, and begin to collaborate with each other, I believe we can make tremendous strides in gaining gender equality much sooner.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“In a world full of rhinestones, be a diamond.”
We’re all put in positions where we can decide how we want to show up and who we want to be. We don’t have to accept anything we’re given, whether it be a circumstance or a label. When I was a single teen mom on Medicaid and food stamps, I decided I wanted more. I knew my worth, I showed up, and I built a better life for myself and my child.
We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might see this, especially if we tag them.
Dr Brene Brown is doing some incredibly transformational work around workplace culture and leadership change right now. I’m a big proponent of her message and I’d love to see how her work can be used to help decrease the gender gap sooner than the projected 100 years. And as a bonus, she’s a fellow Texan! 🙂
This was really meaningful! Thank you so much for your time.
Dr. Cortney Baker: 5 Things We Need To Do To Close The Gender Wage Gap was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.