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News For You - Winter 2006We have developed this page to give our visitors the opportunity to see what's new, at a glance, in the business world and how it relates to our program. Take a moment to browse and see what's of interest to you!
Women's Pace is Slowing on U.S. Corporate Ladder
Women's Pace is Slowing on U.S. Corporate Ladder Men outnumbered women more than six-to-one last year in top jobs at U.S. corporations, where the rate of growth in the number of women filling the most powerful positions has slowed, according to an advocacy group. A study by Catalyst, a nonprofit research group in New York that promotes opportunities for women in business, looked at women in top positions of Fortune 500 companies. According to Catalyst, at the current pace, women will reach parity with men in America’s top corporate jobs in 40 years. The study found women held 16 percent of the highest U.S. corporate officer jobs in 2005, growing 0.23 percentage points a year since 2002. The growth rate from 2002 to 2005 was dramatically lower than the growth rate of 0.82 percentage points a year between 1995 and 2005, Catalyst reports. Catalyst President Ilene Lang called the pace disappointing. “The progress is very, very slow,” she said. According to Lang, research found women are excluded from top jobs largely due to three factors: gender-based stereotyping, exclusion from informal networks, and a lack of role models. In addition, companies may be satisfied with a “token” woman at the top, Lang reports. “There are plenty of people who say, ‘Oh, we have one. We have enough. We just need our woman,’” Lang said. “That very much is playing by the numbers, and it’s tokenism.” The study found the average Fortune 500 company had 21.8 corporate officers, of whom an average 3.6 were women. In other findings, the study reported women held 9.4 percent of so-called clout titles at U.S. corporations- titles higher than vice president. This percentage is up from 7.9 percent in 2002. Eight Fortune 500 companies were headed by a female chief executive, up from six in 2002. None was among the top 100 companies. According to catalyst, these rates comes against a backdrop showing that women comprised 50.6 percent of the managerial and professional work force in 2005, and women earned 32 percent of the MBA degrees that year. Source: FoxNews.com, July 26, 2006
Wall Street's Women Face a Fork in the Road Women remain the minority sex on Wall Street and many young recruits say they have grown circumspect about a career there. Women’s aversion to intersecting with Wall Street appears to be mounting: Generation Y, also dubbed the “Millennials,” say they value balance more than financial security, suggesting fewer will gravitate to the cutthroat environs of the Street. Bank executives say fewer female M.B.A.’s are choosing careers on the Street, and the banks also say they have had limited success stanching the outflow of women. The Street says it wants to change all of this, not simply because it is socially expedient but because the financial world needs a diverse work force to make money and court clients-especially when the clients themselves are not homogeneous. “It’s not looking that great for the investment banks if you think that the new generation is interested in social responsibility, high ethical standards and work-life balance,” said Claudia Tattanelli, head of Universum’s American and Asian-Pacific operations. “In the past, it was competitive compensation, a good career reference, prestige and financial strength. Work-life balance was No. 3 or 4.” This has accompanied a subtle but crucial sea of change for women throughout the business world. Twenty years ago, the gender debate centered on breaking the so-called glass ceiling that kept women out of executive suites, gaining equal access to the workplace and securing equal pay for equal work. Today, concerns more often revolve around reshaping the very architecture of Wall Street work in order to keep women involved, including compensating managers for achieving diversity goals and reaching out to female employees with families. “The first generation was about access of opportunity,” said Sylvia Anne Hewlett, president of the Center for Work-Life Balance. “It worked. It got us there. Now we have to learn not to lose the talent at 35.” In March 2005, Ms. Hewlett co-wrote a Harvard Business Review article summarizing the findings of a private sector task force, “The Hidden Brain Drain: Women and Minorities as Unrealized Assets.” The task force, which Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers sponsored, surveyed 2,443 “highly qualified” women- with high-honors undergraduate, graduate or professional degrees- about their work patterns. Among the women in the survey with children, 43 percent reported that they had left work voluntarily at some point in their careers. Of those, 93 percent wanted to return; 74 percent managed to do so, though only 40 percent of that group did so full time. Only 5 percent of women looking to return to work wanted to return to the places they had left. For those returning to business jobs, however, that figure was zero. “Has the Street changed?” asked Janet Hanson, a former Goldman Sachs banker who founded 85 Broads, a network devoted to professional women. “No, it’s a brutal business. It’s fun, but you are working weekends and until 2 a.m., and a lot of men and a lot of women, without any bitterness, are saying, ‘No thanks.’” Among the reasons? Generation Y cares less about money if it comes at too high a price, says Universum. “The days of psycho-workaholic with no work-life balance are numbered,” said Lehman’s Mr. Gregory. “It’s just not a recipe for success.” Source: The New York Times, nytimes.com, August 6, 2006
Firms Make Paltry Progress on Women Board Members The region’s largest public companies have made almost no advancement in improving their record of promoting women to board posts over the last year, according to a study released by the Forum of Executive Women. In its sixth annual study, the group that advocates an increase in the number of women in corporate leadership found that:
“A positive finding from this years study is that six nominating committees are now chaired by women – two more nominating committees than last year,” Kyra G. McGrath, president of the Forum of Executive Women and senior vice president for strategic projects and general counsel at WHYY Inc., said. Aside from board membership, of the 480 highest-earning positions in the area, women represented just 6.5 percent, down from 7.3 percent the previous year. The percentage of women in top executive positions also decreased to 8.6 percent from 10.2 percent last year. “The reasons why the region’s companies are not using more qualified women and people of color are subjective,” said Autumn Bayles, chairwoman of the forum’s research committee and senior vice president of strategic operations at Tasty Baking Co. of Philadelphia. “…Many times there are qualified women available – in positions that would typically make them eligible to serve on boards – who are not appointed to a board position.” “This is a situation where old habits die hard,” McGrath said. “This is the way it has been for a very long time, and now what we’re seeing different is the pool of qualified women is increasing each year. Also, companies are beginning to recognize more so than in the past, the value of diverse voices on their boards. We hope that those two things will stimulate companies to change and have an inclusive process to decide who will get on the board.” Source: Philadelphia Business Journal, September 15-21, 2006
Do mothers make better leaders than women without children? A survey last Mother’s Day by the professional women’s networking organization WorldWit found that 69% would rather work for a mother than a non-mother, and only 2% prefer a non-mother. They say mothers have patience and listening skills, and understand when other encounter family demands. However, Cornell associate professor of sociology Shelley Correll found a “motherhood penalty” when she submitted nearly identical resumes for fictitious women applying for a job as marketing director at a communications company. Some resumes said the applicant was active in the Parent-Teacher Association, an obvious hint at motherhood. That cut the chances of getting a job by 44%. Follow-up research found that salary offers decrease with each additional child. WorldWit founder Liz Ryan said she was unaware that mothers were treated differently until she had twins. She found herself overcompensating by working harder and ignoring her children to prove she was serious about her job. While many men are guilty of thinking motherhood hurts competency, she says the worst critics are women who say they have chosen career over children. With them, mothers are doomed, Ryan says. There is another camp that believes motherhood hones leadership. Lois Quam, CEO of Ovations, the largest division at UnitedHealth Group and one of the most powerful women in health care, had three boys within 23 months, including twins who are now 14. She says there were many days when she arrived at work to find she had to leave to get a child to the doctor. That taught her to get the most important work done early. Success in business and life comes down to being “crystal clear about priorities every day and (to) relentlessly follow through,” she says. “You have to get up in the morning and know what’s most important. What’s the mission and the priorities.” After Jennifer Wolfe was bedridden with pregnancy complications three years ago, she wrote a business plan that led to the largest female-owned firm in Ohio. Seven of the firm’s ten attorney’s are women. Wolfe wonders if the motherhood-leadership connection is a chicken-and-egg thing. She says she has always had a compassionate streak. Maybe, she says, motherhood doesn’t make for good leaders, but the qualities that would make a good mother – whether there are children or not – are the same qualities that make a good boss. Source: USA Today Friday, May 12, 2006
Do Smart Girls Finish Last in Love? Growing up as a smart, ambitious girl in America, you can’t miss the assumption that neither of those attributes wins you points in the love game. Dumb it down, we learned. Men don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses. There’s just one problem. It’s not true – not anymore. A growing body of research finds that the success penalty – the lower marriage rates among high-achieving women vs. their lower-achieving sisters – has nearly disappeared. “While there are certainly some men who want a woman to play fetch for them, the majority of men, and certainly the ones we would want to date, are definitely looking to volley with an equal,” says Christine Whelan, author of the new book Why Smart Men Marry Smart Women. As recently as the 1980s – a woman with a graduate degree was 16% less likely to be married by age 44 than a woman with a high school diploma. Now, while 55% of women with graduate degrees marry by age 29 vs. 61% of other women, after 30, the odds reverse. A single, 30-year-old woman with a graduate degree has about a 75% chance of getting married. A single 30-year-old woman with less education has about a 66% chance. The Center for Economic and Policy Research reports that women ages 28 to 35 who earn more than $55,000 a year (roughly the top 10%) are just as likely to be married as other women who work full-time. Source: USA Today, Wednesday, October 18, 2006
**Did you know $0.77 is the average wage a woman earns for every dollar a man does? The liberal Economic Policy Institute says the gap – the smallest on record – is shrinking mainly because, while all wages are falling in real terms, men’s are falling faster due to lost manufacturing jobs. Source: Fortune, October 2, 2006 **According to figures released by Out & Equal and the market-research firms Witeck-Combs and Harris Interactive, 15 million individuals (5 percent of the total U.S. population) identify as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT). The population estimate of 15 million individuals who identify as LGBT have a $641 billion buying power. The most recent report revealed that LGBT consumers tend to be:
Source: The New York Times Magazine, September 24, 2006
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