Two Fewer F500 Women CEOs

This summer Mary Sammons, resigned as CEO of RiteAid.

This morning I read of Brenda Barnes' resignation as CEO of Sara Lee to focus on her health after suffering a stroke earlier in the year.

For the past few years, I've been able to post photos of the 15 women F500 CEOs, whom I call "your virtual mentors" in my book No Ceiling, No Walls. The important message they convey comes through their wide ranging diversity. They come from different backgrounds and lead with different styles.

It's doubtful that we'll get back up to 15 any time soon (although I hope I'm proved wrong).

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.

How'd I Miss This?

Back in March, the World Economic Forum (have I already mentioned that I love their research?) issued a new report on the gender gap in worldwide corporations. The Corporate Gender Gap Report is a complement to the Global Gender Gap Report and highlights one of the areas that the WEF analyzes to come up with its country rankings. Here are excerpts from the news release about the report. I'll download and read the entire document over the weekend.

"The United States (52%), Spain (48%), Canada (46%) and Finland (44%) have the highest percentage of women employees at all levels among the responding companies. India is the country with the lowest percentage of women employees (23%), followed by Japan (24%), Turkey (26%) and Austria (29%). At the industry level, the findings of the survey confirm that the services sector employs the greatest percentage of women employees. Within this sector, the financial services and insurance (60%), professional services (56%) and media and entertainment (42%) industries employ the greatest percentage of women. The sectors that display the lowest percentage of women in the 20 economies are automotive (18%), mining (18%) and agriculture (21%).

Female employees tend to be concentrated in entry or middle level positions and remain scarce in senior management or board positions in most countries and industries. A major exception to this trend is Norway, where the percentage of women among boards of directors is above 40% for the majority of respondents. This is due to a government regulation that mandates a minimum of 40% of each gender on the boards of public companies.

The average for women holding the CEO-level position was a little less than 5% among the 600 companies surveyed. Finland (13%), Norway (12%), Turkey (12%), Italy (11%) and Brazil (11%) have the highest percentage of women CEOs in this sample.

Although wage gaps between women and men are a universally recognized problem, 72% of the companies surveyed do not attempt to track salary gaps at all. However, a more positive revelation is that almost 40% of the companies surveyed claim to be setting specified targets, quotas or other affirmative policies to improve women’s participation in their structures. With the exception of Mexico and Brazil, the majority of companies in most countries claim to offer longer-term leave or career breaks for parents or care-givers."

Lead ON!
Susan
Susan Colantuono is CEO of Leading Women and author of No Ceiling, No Walls (Dec 2009). She blogs on networking for PINK Magazine. Follow her on Twitter.

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.

World Cup of Women's Advancement?

I love soccer! Although I played field hockey, I cheered for my brother when he played. Needless to say, I've been watching the World Cup. (Congratulations to Spain!)

While watching, I couldn't help but imagine if the World Economic Forum were able to turn the Global Gender Gap Report into a live action competition.

Countries would compete to demonstrate how they had improved the status of women in the 4 measured categories:

• Economic participation: salaries, participation in the economy, access to high-skilled employment.
  
• Educational attainment: access to basic and higher education.
  
• Political empowerment: representation in decision-making bodies.
  
• Health and survival: life expectancy and gender ratio
  

Picture it now...

• Teams of CEOs highlighting the advancement of women to executive and board positions.
  
• Politicians racing to deliver photos of their more balanced governing bodies.
  
• Parents competing to demonstrate that their daughters are in school at all levels.
  
• And the medical community testifying to the extended life expectancy of women and the health of girls.
  

Imagine the suspense...will Norway once again rise to 1st place? Will Sri Lanka, the Phillipines and Lesotho remain in the top 10? Will the US improve on its (mortifying) number 31 position?

Wouldn't that have a greater impact on the world than soccer/futbol?

Anyone want to produce a reality TV show?

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.

Factoring In the Male Factor

Last month was the 47th anniversary of the Equal Pay Act and women are still suing for wage and gender discrimination - e.g. the Novartis award in May(see prior post), and also the class action suit against WalMart that got the go-ahead last month.

So, why 40 years later are women still behind in compensation, too few in the executive suite and experiencing blatant discrimination?

Surely, there are things about us that need addressing. For example, as I discuss in No Ceiling, No Walls, women must effectively speak the language of business to counter the stereotype that we don't have business acumen. As discussed by Shaunti Feldhahn in The Male Factor, there are communication and attire issues to attend to.

But there is one factor that's substantively dropped off the radar screen - direct action by men to confront the impact of their positive and negative stereotypes about women and men. (For example, the positive stereotype that men have more business acumen is as powerful a force against women as the negative stereotype that women are more emotional. This is because people are unlikely to seek contrary evidence to their beliefs.)

In the 1970s, cutting edge corporations tackled attitudes head on until. By virtue of their ages, many of the women who have become F500 CEOs were the beneficiaries of mentoring and promotions by men whose eyes were opened to the impact of gender stereotypes - whether through corporate programs or in the general media. Soon, though the mantra "don't mess with people's attitudes, just focus on behaviors" put an end to these efforts.

A reflection of this has been the nature of diversity training. Today, many diversity training programs tackle general concepts of inclusion for all groups (addressing as one conceptual lump age, gender, race, nationality, sexual orientation) instead of carefully examining group-specific stereotypes and assumptions. I believe that this is why the status of women of color has been particularly slow to change.

There is more robust research now than 40 years ago; research that could be used to address gender-based attitudes. For example, in addition to advising women how to work in male-dominated environments, it would be powerful to use the excellent research of The Male Factor to examine the beliefs that men hold. For example, most men believe that when one is emotional s/he can't also be logical. Brain research suggests that this is true for men, but not for women.

If you play a leadership role in your organization's women's initiative, consider adding work on stereotypes to the good work that you're already doing.

On another note, where have I been the past month? I went to Antigua and Lake Atitlan in Guatemala to make connections with several women's cooperatives. Keep your eyes peeled for an innovative leadership development program coming from Leading Women.

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.

Another Smorgasbord

Executing Executive Compensation
In a recent Bloomberg News article about F500 women CEO compensation, a compensation expert was quoted as saying,

“When you see numbers like this, one can truly say that the glass ceiling in Corporate America has been shattered,” said Frank Glassner, CEO of San Francisco-based Veritas Executive Compensation Consultants LLC. “I don't remember seeing women ever getting paid more than men.”

He was commenting on the fact that, according to Bloomberg, the 15 F500 women who were also CEOs in 2008 got a 19 per cent raise in 2009 — while the men took a 5 per cent cut.

This has VERY little to do with the glass ceiling being shattered. As several studies in the past have indicated (and later comments in the Bloomberg article attest) most of those women were earning significantly less than their male counterparts. This isn't a smashing of the glass ceiling, it's what could be called a "market adjustment" in response to wage inequity. To quote Graef Crystal, the analyst who crunched the numbers,

"compensation committees are saying we don't want to have any trouble" over underpaying women, "so if we err, let's err on the side of giving them too much."

A Peek Into IWiNs
We call internal women's initiatives and networks IWiNs. Sylvia Ann Hewlett and DeAnne Aguirre recently provided a peek into the women's advancement activities at AMEX, Deloitte, Citi and Cisco. Read about them here.

Tearing My Hair Out
If I see another study that over-emphasizes interpersonal skills or personal attributes to explain why women are better leaders, I'll go bald! Not long ago, ASPIRE released the most recent claiming that women will be the leaders of the future because they self-describe as matching 8 out of 10 of the most needed leadership attributes. What are these? Integrity, emotional intelligence, responsible, takes action, people-person, aware of behaviors, change agent, true to self, visionary, inspirational. (BTW again as I mention in my book, No Ceiling, No Walls, the women do NOT match on "inspirational", although men do.)

These are not the criteria that get people into the corner office. They are nice, but insufficient. Along with them are the hard skills like business, strategic and financial acumen. As long as studies continue to under-measure these, the more women will wonder why they aren't moving into the C-suite!

Damned if You Do...Doomed if You Don't
This earlier Catalyst finding (that women are seen as competent or liked, but rarely both) seems to be turned on its head the higher women move up the ladder. A new study led by assistant professor Ashleigh Shelby Rosette of Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business found that:

“In business environments, even if women are thought to be sufficiently competent, they are frequently thought to be not very nice,” said Rosette. “But on the tiptop rungs of the corporate ladder, competence and niceness may have a certain level of compatibility for women top leaders.”

Although both top executives and middle managers were described as successful, students only evaluated females more favorably than males when they were in top-level positions. They rated these women as more competent for having faced double standards and triumphing over exceptional hurdles.

Participants in the second study also rated women as more relationship-oriented because they expected top women to engage in a more traditionally ‘feminized’ type of leadership, an employee-focused leadership style that is increasingly viewed as effective.

Both the double standard and feminization of management perceptions help explain why women top leaders were rated as more effective leaders overall than men."

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.