Room at the top for women

American Demographics,  July, 1996  by Bickley Townsend

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SUMMARY Women are becoming visible at the top of corporate ladders, but remain few and far between. Female executives and male CEOs often agree about what helps women get ahead, but not about what holds them back. Senior-level women set priorities to achieve balance in their lives. Companies seeking to make the most of women's talents should do the same.

Conditions have never been more favorable for women to ascend to leadership in all sectors of the U.S. economy. Women aged 45 to 54, of prime age to attain senior management positions, will account for more than one-third of all net additions to the nation's work force between 1994 and 2005, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics projections.

Three factors drive this inexorable trend. First, the massive baby-boom generation will swell this age group during the next decade. Second, labor force participation rates among women aged 45 and older will rise as boomers replace a less well-educated, less career-oriented cohort of women. And third, men's labor force participation at older ages will continue its long-term gradual decline. These demographic developments virtually ensure that utilizing female talent will continue to gain prominence as an issue for U.S. employers in the years ahead.

A pioneering generation of American women has already begun to attain top positions in the nation's largest corporations. Although no Fortune 500 company boasts a female CEO today, Catalyst has documented substantial progress of women in big business in recent years. At the apex of corporate decision-making, women now hold about 10 percent of seats on boards of directors of Fortune 500 corporations, according to the 1995 Catalyst Census of Female Directors. Eighty-one percent of these companies had at least one woman on their boards last year, up from 69 percent just two years earlier. What's more, companies are moving beyond the tokenism of a single female director; 165 of the Fortune 500 now have two or more women on their boards.

                            Boss Ladies

Women in corporate management often struggle with fitting into the organizational culture without losing a sense of their own identity. Some counsel "learning to play the game as men play it," including keeping one's personal life out of the office and taking up sports. Terry Savage, a Chicago-based financial authority and director of the McDonald's Corporation, advises: "Learn to play golf. I took it up two years ago, and now I know what they do. It's not about golf. It's about riding around in the cart and sitting around afterward and talking. I was always holding out, thinking, `I'm different. I'm a woman, and I don't have to play the games.' Now I think that you can't set yourself aside and not socialize. It doesn't mean you have to be one of the guys. You can still be yourself. But it's nice to be able to be around them."

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Other executive women emphasize that they have succeeded without compromising their personal style or identity. "In 1977, when I finished business school, women were coming in trying to be something that they weren't. They felt that they had to behave in a more masculine manner," says Fudge of Maxwell House. "One of the things I decided in my somewhat rebellious state was that if I felt like wearing a dress instead of a suit, that's what I was going to do. I decided I would be judged not by style, but by what I did in managing the business. That's the bottom line. Honestly, I think too many times we try to adapt, and we overadapt."

WHAT'S HOLDING WOMEN BACK

Fortune 1000 CEOs exhibit a striking degree of consensus as to the key factors preventing women from advancing to corporate leadership. A decisive 82 percent point to lack of significant general management or line experience as the most crucial barrier. A second critical obstacle, according to two-thirds of CEOs, is that women have not been "in the pipeline" long enough; that is, until recently, the executive talent pool has included few women. No more than one-third of chief executives single out any other factor that might account for women's lack of advancement.

Senior women concur with male CEOs that women's lack of significant general management or line experience is a barrier to their ascendance on the corporate ladder, although they rank it third after gender stereotyping and exclusion from informal networks. The female executives in Catalyst's sample attest to the scarcity of senior women in line management: just 15 percent are in general management or sales and marketing jobs, and more than 60 percent hold staff positions.

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The implication is clear. For the pipeline to contain a critical mass of women requires that significantly more women become plant managers, presidents of operating divisions, and other senior line managers with profit and loss responsibility. Yet, because these are nontraditional roles for women and because few female role models exist, some women may be reluctant to put themselves forward for line management jobs. Companies also typically regard it as riskier to assign women to these positions. "There's a certain amount of reluctance on the part of any manufacturing company to ask some young woman to move to a remote location to work as a foreman," admits one Fortune 500 CEO. "And I think there's reluctance on the part of women to want to do that."