Good News from Directors & Boards 35th Anniversary Issue

41% of new board appointments July - Sept, 2011 were women.

What can you learn from these women who joined boards in 2011?

• Aaron's Inc added Cynthia Day, SEVP and COO of Citizens
• Altera Corp added Elisha Finney, Corporate SVP and CFO Varian Medial Systems
• Ambassadors Group, Inc added Nilofer Merchant, business strategist
• Cabot Corp added Sue Rataj, retired BP executive
• Dana Holding, Corp added Virginia Kamsky, Chair and CEO Kamsky Associates
• DELL added Janet Clark EVP, Treasurer and CFO of Marathon Oil
• Delta Airlines added Shirley Franklin Chair and CEO Purpose Built Communities, Inc.
• EBay added Katie Mitic, leader of platform and mobile marketing at Facebook
• Francesca's Holdings Corp added Patricia Bender, EVP and Director of Leasing Weingarten Realty
• G-III Apparel Group added Cheryl Vitali, worldwide general manager Kiehl's
• GAP added Bella Goren, SVP and CFO AMR Corp
• Huntsman Corp added Mary C. Beckerle, CEO Huntsman Cancer Institute
• IAC/InteractiveCorp added Chelsea Clinton and Sonali DeRycker partner Accel Partners
• Immunocellular Therapeutics Ltd added Helen Kim, chief business officer NGM Biopharmaceuticals
• Interpublic Group added Dawn Hudson, vice chair Parthenon Group
• Jack in the Box added Madeleine Kleiner
• JetBlue added Ellen Jewett, managing director BMO Capital Markets
• Kensey Nash added Lisa Earnhardt, president and CEO Intersect Ent
• Kior Inc added Condoleezza Rice
• Kraton Performance Pllymers added Anna Cheng Catalano
• Magellan Health Services added Mary Sammons, former CEO and current chair RiteAid
• Marathon Oil added Linda Cook, retired exec director of Shell
• Marathon Petroleum Corp added Donna James, managing director Lardon & Associates
• Netgear added Barbara Scherer, SVP and CFO Plantronics
• Network Engines added Patricia Suelts, former CEO of LogLogic Inc
• Nordstrom added Michelle Ebanks, president Essence Communications
• Patterson Companies added Jody Feragen EVP and CFO Hormel
• Oclaro Inc added Marissa Peterson, retired EVP Sun Microsystems
• Peoples Bancorp added Susan Rector, principal SZD
• Piper Jaffray added Hope Woodhouse, former COO of Bridgewater Associates
• Radioshack added Julie Dobson, chair TeleBright
• Regions Financial Corp added Ruth Ann Marshall, retired president of Americas MasterCard
• SABA Software added Nora Denzel, SVP of Marketing
• Tupperware added Susan Cameron, former chair and CEO Reynolds American
• UPS added Candace Kendle, former chair and CEO Kendle International Inc
• VIAD added margaret Pederson, president Amerexx
• West Marine added Christiana Smith Shi, VP and COO, Nike
• Xerox added Sara Martinex Tucker former Undersecretary of Dept of Education

If you know them, send along congratulations - a great networking exercise.

Girl Scouts as a pipeline to leadership for: Jill Abramson, Exec Editor NYTimes; Drew Gilpin Faust, president, Harvard University; Lois Juliber, retired vice chair and COO, Colgate-Palmolive; Janet Napolitano, Secretary of US Dept Homeland Security and more... 

http://www.directorsandboards.com/

Lead ON!
Susan
Susan Colantuono is CEO of Leading Women and author of No Ceiling, No Walls.
Follow her on Twitter |  LittlePinkBook  |  Facebook  |  LinkedInGroup |  LinkedIn

To Get Paid More, Cultivate Your Network!

Before the great recession, an author in Canada, reported that women executives have a harder time than their male counterparts finding a new job after they've been let go. If that isn't reason enough to focus a portion of your energy on developing a smart strategic network (as differentiated from a collection of friends), a new study by Marie Lalanne and Paul Seabright of the Toulouse School of Economics adds another. Improved compensation for executive director positions!

As reported in the Economist:

"They find that if you were to compare two executive directors, identical in every way except that one had 200 ex-colleagues now sitting on boards and the other 400, the latter, on average, would be paid 6% more. For non-executives the gap is 14%.

The really juicy finding concerns the difference between the sexes. Among executive-board members, women earn 17% less than their male counterparts. There are plenty of plausible explanations for this disparity, from interruptions to women’s careers to old-fashioned discrimination. But the authors find that this pay gap can be fully explained by the effect of executives’ networks. Men can leverage a large network into more senior positions or a seat on a more lucrative board; women don’t seem to be able to."

+ + + + No Ceiling, No Walls is a great gift + + + +

SPECIAL DISCOUNT HERE

 As an explanation of why women execs have a harder time getting a new job, their findings also speak to the importance of "weak ties" (that we've written about).

"According to Granovetter, the social connections that are the most valuable when looking for a job are not the closest ones but the more distant ones. Strong ties, such as close friends and relatives, are more likely to have similar information concerning job opportunities, while weak ties, such as acquaintances and coworkers, are more likely to move in different social circles and to have access to different information about job and other opportunities."

Although the cited research applies to the most senior women, it is of use to all of us. The time to cultivate your strategic network is when you don't need it!

Lead ON!
Susan
Susan Colantuono is CEO of Leading Women and author of No Ceiling, No Walls.
Follow her on Twitter |  LittlePinkBook  |  Facebook  |  LinkedInGroup |  LinkedIn

The Velocity of Women on Boards

I am a great fan of Jim Kristie's. He is the editor and associate publisher of Directors & Boards and has had a long term interest in women on boards. Here's his most recent update (with apologies for wholesale quoting!). It represents good news for those who care about greater representation of women on corporate boards.

"(Directors & Boards) has been documenting for the past two years elevated levels of women joining boards. Here are some of our latest findings (expertly crunched by Roster editor Kelly McCarthy):

• In the first quarter of 2011, 34% of new director elections that we tracked were women.
• In the fourth quarter of 2010, 38% of new directors were women.
• For 2010 as a whole, 34% of board appointees recorded in the Roster were women; in 2009, the recruitment rate was 39% — a dramatic leap from 25% in 2008.

Most major surveys of board composition point to representation of women stuck in the mid-teens range, where it has been mired for years. To my mind, there is a simple explanation for meshing these very different recruitment findings.

The major surveys are a snapshot of board composition at a fixed point in time — an annual look at who is sitting on a defined universe of boards. The Directors Roster is a snapshot of a quarterly flow of activity at a random universe of boards — companies that happen to have added a new board member.

This is a bit of apples and oranges. What we are looking at with the Roster is velocity — a moving target — whereas the annual board reports are measuring an end point. We need both sets of measurements to properly gauge marketplace activity.

As a longtime champion of board diversity, I am sympathetic to the concern my survey counterparts share with me — that the optimistic picture we present in the Roster could lull people into thinking that recruiting of women directors is going along just swimmingly, when in fact all the annual reviews of board composition do not seem to bear that out. That’s why I prominently cite other surveys in Directors & Boards that show how sluggish the progress is of board diversity.

I agree that many questions are left unresolved about the enduring impact of our measure of velocity. Perhaps it is a matter of time — and it will be a lot of time — before we see the cumulative impact of these elevated recruiting levels.

But something is going on, and that is where the Roster data play an important tracking role."

Thanks, again. Jim for your good work!

If you want to see what else we're keeping our eye on these days, check us out on Facebook.

Lead ON!
Susan
Susan Colantuono is CEO of Leading Women and author of No Ceiling, No Walls.
Follow her on Twitter |  LittlePinkBook  |  Facebook  |  LinkedInGroup |  LinkedIn

More "Colorful and Beautiful"?

Quotas have been much in the news lately. The drive to bring greater numbers of women to the World Economic Forum raised the issue once again.

The WEF goal is to have the100 corporate "strategic partners" of this year's World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland – a group that includes companies like Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, and News Corp.  —  bring at least one woman among their five delegates to the conference.  Did it work? Not really. According to Reuters, women made up only 16% of the 2500 delegates this year. Worse, 20 of the sponsors brought all male teams.

And now, Germany is having a conversation about quotas for women on boards (see my posts on this topic here). As stark evidence of why something has to be done, read what The Local (Germany's news in English) had to say about the Deutsche Bank head:

“I’m pleased that the Chancellor has said that she does not want a legal quota for women,” said Deutsche Bank boss Josef Ackermann, according to Handelsblatt.

Though Deutsche Bank has an all-male executive committee, he told the paper there should be more women in executive positions, adding that they made company boards “more colourful and beautiful.”

Colorful and beautiful? Really!

No wonder quotas are in the news. 40 years into the women's movement, it will require forcing women on boards and to Davos to confront antiquated attitudes like that.

UPDATE: Article 2/13 from the U.K.'s Independent.

Lead ON!
Susan
Susan Colantuono is CEO of Leading Women and author of No Ceiling, No Walls.
 Follow her on Twitter |  LittlePinkBook  |  Facebook  |  LinkedInGroup |  LinkedIn

Spreading Good News!

Earlier this month, Jim Kristie of Directors and Boards reported good news on women on boards.

"Last year, women represented 39% of all new board appointments! That is up from the previous record high of 25% representation in 2008. And way way up from the more typical 13% when we first started recording board appointments in 1994.

That 39% figure represents 165 women out of 424 board positions filled in 2009 as recorded in the Directors & Boards Directors Roster.

We do an authoritative tracking on a quarterly and annual basis of public company board appointments. I have reviewed the parameters of our Directors Roster reporting here. These are numbers you can take to the bank.

Something big happened in 2009 — women did indeed make a major advance in securing board appointments. We may be the lone voice in the wilderness of board diversity surveys to note that, but it is true and it offers the promise of much stronger advancement by women in the boardroom in the future."

Thanks, Jim, for spreading the news! Glad to pass it on.

Lead ON!
Susan
Susan Colantuono is CEO of Leading Women and author of No Ceiling, No Walls. She blogs on networking for PINK Magazine. Follow her on Twitter.

I'll Bet $250 Million

The Facts
Until last week, the largest award that I knew of in a gender discrimination lawsuit was a $54 million award against Morgan Stanley. That has been trounced by the $250 million in punitive damages and $3.3 million already awarded in compensatory damages (with more to come*) to be paid by Novartis. The jury found the company guilty of paying women less than men, promoting fewer of them and allowing a hostile workplace.

So, I went online to see a couple of things. First, how is this being spun by various media? Second, and this one I'd bet $250 mil on, the number of women on Novartis' board?

The Spin
The New York Times led with the fine, but in the first sentence highlighted the irony of Novartis' 10 years as one of Working Mother's 100 "Best Places to Work for Women" award (this is why I think the NAFE award is much better). Market Watch led with Novartis' dispute of the finding and Business Insurance called the award "breathtaking".

The headline that galled me the most was from the WSJ: "Hit from US discrimination suit looks manageable." Excuse me! If I were a shareholder, I'd want my dividend pennies from that money - that, oh by the way, could grow significantly. Let's see...5600 times $300,000* would bring the $253.3 million up to nearly $2 billion. Unless, of course, Novartis is successful in its appeal.

But money aside, think of the "hit" the women of Novartis sales in the US have taken in diminished earnings for themselves and their families - not to mention the harassment they dealt with.

The Board Failure?
But let's return to the money. Were I a shareholder, I would be wondering where was the board in protecting my investment? Were I a betting woman, I'd bet that Novartis' board would have fewer than 3 women on it. Why? Because boards with 3 or more women (and the higher the precentage the better) are more likely to pay attention to wage and career path equity for women. So, I looked on BusinessWeek's investing site and found that - as if its last update - there are only 2 women on the Novartis board out of 15 directors.

According to a recent report by the World Economic Forum, 72% of surveyed companies have no way of tracking wage equity! One of the ways to decrease that number is to have more boards with higher percentages of women on them...women who can see the relationship between their fiduciary responsibility to shareholders and a company's track record on wage and career path equity. Because one of the responsibilities of the board is risk management - and even if it's a small fraction of Novartis' revenue, I'm sure the potential $2 billion could be put to much better use than awards to defendants.

*Each of the 5,600 women in the class could receive up to $300,000 each based on the ruling of the court-appointed administrator.

Lead ON!
Susan
Susan Colantuono is CEO of Leading Women and author of No Ceiling, No Walls. She blogs on networking for PINK Magazine. Follow her on Twitter.

Together We Are Stronger

The Canadian Board Diversity Council is working to increase women's representation on boards from 13% in 2007 to 20% or more by 2011. Organizations collaborating include corporate, executive search, government. In Canada looking for a search firms making board placements?

• Korn Ferry (CBDC Member)
• Vell

In the US, ION has a new "take action" page with ideas for how individual shareholders and mutual fund holders can encourage companies to increase the number of women on boards.

And, this is legitimate territory for diversity and women's initiatives as well. We'd like to see this issue given more weight than women's initiative efforts to bring in speakers on work/life balance and other softer subjects. Why? Because studies indicate that having more women on corporate boards drives a lowering of the wage gap and a strengthening of the pipeline for executive women. Oh, and there's also a correlation between the percentages of women on boards and bottom-line corporate performance!

Lead ON!
Susan
Susan Colantuono is CEO of Leading Women and author of No Ceiling, No Walls. She blogs on networking for PINK Magazine. Follow her on Twitter.

Where Have All the Women Gone?

The 2009 statistics from organizations around the country is coming in and it's not a pretty picture. In Massachusetts, The Boston Club reports that of the 100 largest companies:

• 6.8% of executive officers are women (down from 10.9 in 2007)
• 11.3 directors are women down from 11.5 in ’07 (38 companies have no women directors)
• 1.2% director seats are held by women of color

In California, the worlds 8th largest economy, the Graduate School of Management at the University of California Davis reports that of the 400 largest companies women hold:

• 9.4% of board seats (46 percent — have no women directors; another 34 percent have just one).
• 11.6% of executive officer positions

Familiar companies with the most included top-ranked company - Bare Escentuals - with the highest share - 17.3 percent - of women in top executive positions among counties with 20 or more large firms; Jack in the Box at No. 5; Edison International in a tie for 8th place; Clorox at No. 14; Peet’s Coffee & Tea at No. 18; Health Net at No. 19; and Disney at No. 22 (For more on companies to consider doing business with look here.)

Reporting on the Chicago Women’s Network study of the 50 largest companies:

• women directors decreased from 15% in 2008 to 14.1%
• companies with no women executive officers grew to 17 from 16. And 34 percent of the 50 largest companies have no women officers.
• percentage of women of color in business leadership is down. In all, 2.7 percent of all directors are women of color, down from 3.1 percent last year and 3.5 percent in 2007.

Lest you think this is a U.S. phenomenon only, here’s the scoop from our friends across the pond.

“The 2009 Female FTSE report from Cranfield School of Management shows that corporate Britain is failing women. There were only 15 female executive directors in the top 100 companies this year, down from 16 last year, and the number of boards with more than one female director has dropped from 39 to 37. The overall number of companies with women on the board has fallen, a quarter of boards are exclusively male, and there are just four female chief executives, down from five.

…of the 156 appointments to top boardrooms last year only 23, or just 14.7%, were women, and of those, only one was a British national. The report identifies the banks as the "biggest disappointment" after the percentage of female directors in the five listed in the FTSE dropped to 9% from 12%.

"It would appear that instead of becoming a time for change, the economic climate of the last year has left the top companies more male dominated," said the report's co-author, Ruth Sealy."

Lead ON!
Susan
Susan Colantuono is CEO of Leading Women and author of No Ceiling, No Walls. She blogs on networking for PINK Magazine. Follow her on Twitter.

Women on Boards: Progress??

No, it's not I who am ambivalent...its the data (as reported by WSJ).

WSJ headline yesterday (alerted through Twitter) was "Study: More Women Named to Boards". Being a huge advocate of more women on boards, I quickly read the report which said,

"Are more women moving into corporate boardrooms?

Good News: "At least one study says yes. In the first three months of the year, 38% of new directors – 38 of 101 appointments – were women, according to data compiled by quarterly journal Directors & Boards. That's the highest number and percentage since the publication began counting in 1994.

Women's share of board appointments has been climbing for the past two years and spiked in the most recent quarter, says James Kristie, editor of Directors & Boards. For all of 2007 and 2008, it averaged about 25%; in 2006 it was 18.5%..."

Good news challenged: "Others who follow new-director appointments aren't seeing a surge. Julie Daum, who heads the North American board services practice at executive search firm Spencer Stuart, says about 20% of its director placements in the past quarter were women, up only slightly from 17% to 18% in 2008."

More good news at the end of the article, which, by the way was written by Erin White was, also from Julie Daum:

"Boards are much more thoughtful about how they recruit – there's much more of a process in place where they define what they're looking for," she says. "Which is different from saying, 'We have an opening. Does anybody know who might be good?'"

Glad to see that Kerrii Anderson, who was interim CEO at Wendy's joined the board of Chiquita Brands International. She's one of the CEOs I write about in my new book.

I occasionally correspond with Directors and Boards Editor and Associate Publisher Jim Kristie and he gave me a look at the news release from which Erin's article was written. Information not covered includes this that's worth a look:

“'Thirty-eight percent of new board appointees is an awesome number,” Kristie says. “I have been a champion of board diversity since becoming editor in 1981, and I hope this trend stays as strong as we have seen it in the first quarter.'” He adds that the data so far for April shows a near-even split of male/female board appointments.

From 1994 until 2002, the percentage of women named to boards typically averaged in the low to mid-teens. For that first year, 1994, the total was 13 percent. In 1996 it dipped to 9 percent.

• A consistent uptick to the high teens began in 2002. Kristie speculates that this was an early reaction to the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) governance-tightening regulations in July of that year. SOX, he says, created new opportunities for women by stimulating a push for independent directors, as newly defined by the stock exchanges and the Securities and Exchange Commission, and for financial experts on boards.

• From 2003-2006 “the data veered widely,” Kristie says, with some quarters backsliding to the teens while other quarters hit 20-25 percent of board appointments being women.

• 2007 marked “the first solid breakthrough trend,” he says, with every quarter that year above 20 percent for women directors. For the whole year, the average was 25 percent, same as with 2008."

Thanks, Jim, for the good work you're doing to keep this issue on the radar screen. It's important because studies continue to show a correlation between improved performance and higher percentages of women on boards.

Lead ON!
Susan
Susan Colantuono is CEO of Leading Women. She blogs on networking for PINK Magazine. Follow her on Twitter.

Views from Abroad (no, that's not a broad!)

In Jamaica the U.N. is demonstrating its commitment to advancing women onto boards. 100 women will be trained because a study...

"...found that in the last decade, women's participation on boards in Jamaica only moved marginally by two per cent in the private sector and four per cent in the public sector. It also found that while men believe overwhelmingly that women are prepared for senior decision making positions on boards and commissions, women themselves do not share this view as enthusiastically."

And with data about women and the quality of board governance that I hadn't seen before, Sandra Glasgow, executive director of the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica, opened the program noting that...

"...a major study conducted by the Conference Board of Canada in 2002 on women and corporate boards, suggested a strong link between female numbers on boards and good governance credential. In this, researchers found that more female directors pay attention to audit and risk oversight and control; that women more than men tend to consider the needs of more categories of stakeholders and that 72 per cent of boards with two or more women conduct formal board performance evaluations, while only 40 per cent of all-male boards do."

As a strong advocate for getting more women on boards, I know that correlation isn't the same as causation and address explanations for this kind of finding. Nevertheless, it's important to broadcast this data widely. Read more about the Jamaican program here.

I continue to find value in Jim Collins Good to Great research, especially the qualities of "personal humility and intense professional will" that he noted as attributes of the executives he and his team of researchers studied. Adele Horin, writing an op ed for the Brisbane Times, has an interesting take on luck, humility and success in this age of economic turmoil.

"It's been unfashionable in the greedy years to give luck the credit it deserves in shaping destiny. For women in particular luck is a tricky issue. Research shows men attribute their success to talent and hard work and most women attribute their success to luck. Such self-effacement has not reflected well on women...

In the greedy years, the male explanation for success became the norm. Humility went out the window. Hard men like Mark Latham made it sound that anyone could succeed if they were "aspirational". Idealogues like John Howard put the onus on individual effort, and free choice. Those with the drive, the talent, and the plan could move deliberately and purposefully up the ladder. The word "loser" came into vogue to describe the people who lacked the moral fibre, the gumption and the strategy to succeed.

But now the best-laid plans are in tatters. If it is not plans for a well-remunerated retirement, it is plans for promotion that are in shreds, or for a career in finance for the thousands of commerce graduates coming through, or for the job-with-prospects in print media for the hundreds of journalism students. All such plans have been ripped apart by a tempest that was unforeseen."

In India, women entrepreneurs and CEOs have joined hands to form the first-of-its-kind social networking platform to encourage more women in becoming entrepreneurs.

"The organisation will be holding workshops, knowledge and training sessions across 15 cities in the next three months to encourage more women to start businesses of their own. The best of the lot, handpicked by a panel of leading women entrepreneurs, will be presented with the Stree Shakti Awards during June this year."

Stree Shakti, the women's wing of the world's largest non-profit organisation of entrepreneurs (TiE), hopes to have Melinda Gates and Indra Nooyi attend the celebration...great choices both!

Lead ON!
Susan
Susan Colantuono is CEO of Leading Women. She blogs on networking for PINK Magazine. Follow her on Twitter.

The Week in Review

Boards are from Mars, Consumers are from Venus! ION has published its 2009 Report on women in boardrooms and the numbers are appallingly few. The report this year offers a very positive focus on actions to increase the number of women on boards in the face of what could be a wave of turnover due to tenure and age of current directors. Here you can find a link to vote your proxy to influence board composition as well. ION also posts the top 10 on the same page. Among them: Bare Essentials*, Estee Lauder, Kraft*, Avon*, Pepsi*, Xerox*. Do you buy their products? (* means woman CEO)

What's almost as bad as the lack of women directors is the lack of publicity the report has received. What is it about self-fulfilling cycles of old-boy advancement and incompetence that the media doesn't get? This could be a really big story - check out my earlier post on board short-signtedness here. I guess what I call "the myth of meritocracy" is a tough one to bust, even in the face of contrary evidence.

I always appreciate it when white, business men over the age of 45 (and it helps if they're republicans) "get it" and advocate for women's advancement. Recently one who fit the bill, the CEO of Ernst & Young, James S. Turley used the bully-pulpit at the World Economic Forum and the release of his own company's Groundbreakers report to make the case for moving women up in organizations in order to solve and prevent future economic crises. He said,

"At a time when our global economy is facing its greatest challenge in decades, we have to capitalize on the contributions women make as leaders, entrepreneurs, and employees. Many corporations and governments have been making efforts to advance women – now is the time to accelerate those efforts. It's time to place renewed emphasis on women's advancement and women’s perspectives as a key tool in moving businesses and economies ahead."

F500 Women CEOs Rock! Two of my favorite F500 women CEOs have relatively new videos on YouTube. Check out Anne Mulcahy's Silfen Leadership Series discussion of the Xerox turnaround here and Indra Nooyi on CEO Stardom and more here. It's been inspiring to be researching them and the others for my upcoming book.

Great Places to Work NAFE's 2009 Top Companies have been chosen. Find them here. If you want to learn about the 12 strategies these companies use to get women to the top, read about it here. I was pleased to note that even though it's gone out of favor, some of the companies directly tackle issues of stereotypes, assumptions and gender bias.

Where to Work has a list of global companies supporting women's advancement. You'll find it here.

Shifting the Lens 1 In a speech I gave on Women's History Month, I spoke of the importance of thinking not only of women in history, but of shifting our lens to look at the experience of women's equality (or lack thereof) in history. Here's an example of what I mean, Britain's Green Party is led by Dr. Caroline Lucas. She is proposing a woman-centric slate of legislation that would address the 17% wage gap, get more women onto boards and make it easier to take equal pay lawsuits to court. Without looking through a lens of women's experience, these proposals wouldn't be on the table. You can read about them (called "radical" by the article's author) here.

Shifting the Lens 2 JFK established the first Commission on the Status of Women, every president had a similar body until George W. Bush disbanded Bill Clinton's White House Office for Women’s Initiatives and Outreach. Now President Obama has appointed Melanie Verveer as Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women's Issues.

"The President's decision to nominate an Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women's Issues is unprecedented and reflects the elevated importance of global women's issues to the President and his entire Administration."

He has also created the White House Council on Women and Girls to ensure that all Cabinet and Cabinet-level agencies consider how their policies and programs impact women and families. This year the council (made up of cabinet members and others) will focus on:

• "Improving women’s economic security by ensuring that each of the agencies is working to directly improve the economic status of women.
• Working with each agency to ensure that the administration evaluates and develops policies that establish a balance between work and family.
• Working hand-in-hand with the Vice President, the Justice Department’s Office of Violence Against Women and other government officials to find new ways to prevent violence against women, at home and abroad.
• Finally, the critical work of the Council will be to help build healthy families and improve women’s health care."

Way to Go, Kiwis! News from my dream destination...not only is it lovely, the citizens have elected a woman as Prime Minister (but that's old news). The new news is that a Grant Thornton business research report finds that 27% of senior managers in New Zealand are women. This puts NZ ahead of the U.S., Great Britain, EU and Australia (also studied by GT).

If you're wondering why all the pink...I'm celebrating spring!

Lead ON!
Susan
Susan Colantuono is CEO of Leading Women. She blogs on networking for PINK Magazine. Follow her on Twitter.

You've GOT to be Kidding Me!

If this is the kind of thinking widely represented on corporate boards, no wonder our economy is in such trouble. The lack of logic is mind-boggling!

The search firm, Heidrick & Struggles and the University of Southern California surveyed directors of publicly traded companies. More than 55% said they would not want to diversify their boards by increasing minority representation. Here's where the lack of logical thinking comes in:

"...while there is little commitment to increasing representation on the board, many directors (82 percent) recognize that having a diverse board can be beneficial to the company because diversity contributes to a broader range of decision options for consideration."

Let's see if I understand. They're saying they know diverse boards are good for business, but >55% of them don't want to diversify. Who's holding directors accountable?

On another note, among the <45%> who...

"...would like to increase board diversity, 30 percent of them are giving special consideration to women, 21 percent to African Americans, 17 percent to Hispanics/Latinos and nine percent to Asian Americans."

If you dare, you can read more about the September, 2008 study, you'll find it here.

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels?

I apologize in advance, but I just have to say this. If those in power in business stereotyped themselves, no one would put money in banks (or other financial situations) run by white men over the age of 45.

This is not an original thought. A colleague of mine made that observation back in the era of the savings and loan debacle. But it was brought to mind recently when I read this article by Saabira Chaudhuri of Women's E News and FastCompany.

I wondered how many women directors sat on the boards and in the executive offices of the failed/rescued companies. Here's what I found in a short while this morning.

• Bear Stearns: 0/12 directors.
• Lehman Brothers: 0/11 directors. (I can't find executive officer info.)
• AIG: 0 women corporate executives, 2 out of 15 on the board
• Fannie Mae: 2/10 women corporate officers (can't tell if they're direct reports to the CEO), 7 out of 54 directors. 54! Am I missing something? I don't see how a board (in this case advisory council) can function with that many members. (oops, I guess it didn't) Of those 54 directors, 33 work for Fannie Mae! Directors also represented Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers, Citigroup and Bank of America.
• Freddie Mac: 2/10 executives. 3/11 directors

To read more about women on boards, check out the Leading Women WOB page.

Posted by: Susan Colantuono

Honor and Shame

Catalyst's 2008 reports on women on boards and women corporate officers was released this week. Among the information they released were lists of companies with over 25% women on boards and women corporate officers. The honor role includes these companies which are in the top 25 on both lists:

• Kraft Foods
• Macy's
• Office Depot

Something to think about when you spend your dollars.

There are over 90 companies that have 25% or more women corporate officers and over 70 that have 25% or more women directors.

The halls of shame (companies with no women directors or no women corporate officers) include these well-known companies:

• Hertz
• Fidelity National Financial
• GMAC
• Hershey
• Apple (darn, I LOVE Apple!)
  
• Blockbuster
• DELL
  

For links to the complete lists go here for corporate officers and here for directors.

For more on how Leading Women supports women's success and the activities of internal women's networks, visit our website.

Uneven Progress

Many organizations around the country track local progress on women at the top of organizations and on corporate boards. Last week The Chicago Network released its most recent statistics and the results are mixed.

"2008 Census key findings:

• Women directors increased from 14.3% from 15.0%, the highest level since The Network began tracking.
• Six companies, up from four, have no women directors.
• Women executive officers increased 0.4% to 14.4%, after falling for two consecutive years.
• The number of companies with no women executive officers grew from 12 to 16
• The number of companies with no women among top earners rose to 36, from 31."

Look for the report here.
Read the Chicago Tribune article here.

The Debate...

40%?

...moves to Wales and UK.

Citing Norway's nearly overnight achievement of 40+% women on corporate boards, David Williams wonders whether Wales and the UK should pass similar legislation. The arguments for and against are typical, but at least it's getting an airing. I haven't seen a similar article in the states recently.

Would that it could happen here!

Valkyries on Board!

In 2003, Norway legislated a 40% representation of women on corporate boards - a percentage to be met last January. Since then, Norway has taken the lead as the country with 44.2% of women directors. This up from a mere 6% in 2001! Norway is well ahead of second place Sweden with 26.9%. From Britain's Guardian:

Thjømøe and Sætersmoen agree that fresh blood makes for more competent boards. "Decisions are made in the room and not in pre-discussions among people who know each other privately," says Thjømøe, "and that is key because the board has a legal and financial responsibility."

She adds: "Selection committees have become more professional and look wider to find candidates. They are not just selecting the man sitting next to them, who looks exactly like them." But she also points out that this was already happening with the increased focus on corporate governance in recent years.

"The pool to choose candidates from is larger, so there are more opportunities to find good candidates," says Sætersmoen, adding that it is understandable why women had difficulties getting board positions. "When you pick a board member, you want someone you know and trust, so it has to be a person from your network. But for many, their networks don't include a lot of women."

Sætersmoen said the quota has enabled boards to monitor management more closely. "You are getting more independence as you are recruiting from a larger pool. It makes it easier for directors to ask the difficult questions that are necessary in critical situations."

Dismal News from DownUnder

This post is an update to an earlier posting.

This year's Australian Census on Women in Leadership shows a decline in the numbers of women at the top of organizations there. (This is a similar trend that's been reported here in the U.S.) As reported by news.com.au:

"In two years, the proportion of women executive managers in the biggest 200 public companies has fallen from 12 per cent to 10.7 per cent...Women hold a mere 8.3 per cent of board directorships, down from 8.7 per cent in 2006...Only 5.9 per cent of these senior line management roles are held by women, down from 7.4 per cent in 2006."

Women on Boards: GA Style

I've been concerned that among the F500 the percent of women on boards has decreased since it's 2002 high of over 15%. My hope was that smaller companies might be doing a better job. Not necessarily so...this just in from Georgia:

"That “thump” Georgia’s women executives are feeling may be their heads hitting a glass ceiling.

More than half of the state’s public companies have no women directors, according to a new study by the Board of Directors Network.

Women fill 99 of 1,323 board seats at Georgia’s 161 public corporations, down from 106 seats held last year.

'We seem to have stalled out, 'says Roxanne Douglas, president of the Network and chief counsel at McKesson Corp. The numbers, she says, 'don’t come close' to representing the clout of women in business."