Finding the Self-Made Woman

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America loves the story of the self-made man – the man who started his life in abject poverty and rose to the pinnacle of wealth and success. It is story of extremes, drive and determination. And it seems to be an almost exclusively male story.

I went through the lists of the wealthiest men and women in the world. Many of the wealthiest men were self-made men. However, all of the women inherited their wealth from their father or husband. While there were plenty of men who also inherited their wealth, the common thread was that it was a man who started the company and created the wealth.

As I looked down through the list of “self-made women,” Oprah Winfrey stands out as a true self-made woman, as well as Judy Faulkner who founded Epic Systems – ever hear of her? Probably not, because she is ranked #722 in wealth. (Oprah wasn’t in the top 500 either.)

The other “self-made women,” co-founded the company with their husband which makes us wonder: Given that the list of wealth-creators is so overwhelmingly male, should we assume that it was really the husbands who founded the company and their wives received co-founder status as a benefit of marriage rather than effort?

That may seem unfair to the wives especially when we recall the saying:

Behind every great man is a great woman

And the unsaid second part:

Who really deserved to be out in front because she had 10 times the business sense!

This discrepancy reveals the difference in how we value the roles men and women play in a business.

In many start-up family businesses it is typically the man who provides the technical skills that produce the company’s product or service, while the wife provides the business (financial) sense to keep the company going. While both skill sets are needed for success, we give more credit to the men and their skills that produce the product or service. The wife’s business skills are considered secondary support skills.

A modern example of this is Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg – the corporate marriage of technical skills and business skills. He has $74 billion while she has a mere $1.6 billion. But how much of his $74 million is a direct result of her business skills?

As women, this disparity is something we have to come to terms with. We must recognize that the people who have the technical skills to create a new product or service and then start a company will always be compensated far better and given more credit than those who provide the support skills.

This is why women need to take a two-layered approach to starting our own businesses. First, we need technical skills whether is it in a profession or a trade. We need to know how to do, create or produce something. (A college degree doesn’t guarantee a skill)

If we aren’t ready to be an entrepreneur with brand new product, we go into an established workplace and build our expertise. The dangerous part about this is that we can find ourselves trapped in a functional silo doing the same type of tasks over and over again. This is why we make lateral moves.

Lateral moves allow us to stay within our profession where our current skills are valued but add on a new skill. For example I’ve been in Operations but also in Purchasing and Business Development. Lateral moves broaden our perspective and we begin seeing what our male colleagues and male-dominated workplaces often miss – how our two skill sets should be integrated so or workplace achieves greater efficiency and delivers more money to the bottom line.

When women start thinking this way, we stop thinking only in terms of technical skills. We start thinking like the business savvy wife who sees better ways to get things done. The important marriage and blending of technical skills and business savvy occurs within us.

Understanding both the technical aspects and the business aspects of a company is what makes women, as business owners stand out.

Over the years I’ve met many very successful single women who started and owned their own trucking companies. Talking to them and watching my own construction industry I learned that women should learn skills typically associated with men and the male-dominated industries with the goal of eventually starting their own business. The women truckers and I are confident these woman-owned businesses will be incredibly successful and out-perform their male-owned competitors.

As women we have a long way to go to catch up with men in creating insanely successful businesses that put us at the top of the billionaire list. But that’s okay because I question if accumulating massive wealth is the right measure of success for women. I find it hard to describe but being at the very top seems like an extreme and disconnected position – so that when you get there, there is something unsatisfying and empty about it. Instead of feeling a huge sense of achievement, you feel alone so all you want to do is come down and reconnect with real life and real people.

As women maybe our goal should be much simpler – ensuring we assert ourselves and live up to who we are. We stop being the great woman who remains hidden behind the great man and become the great self-made woman who challenges herself and achieves her full potential. And who knows, by doing so, maybe half of the top self-made billionaires will be women.