A must-read op/ed in the LA Times about the continuation of the Old Boys Club in big businesses.
Maybe it’s time to take a different tack. Instead of pats on the back, maybe it’s time for raps on the knuckles. Catalyst, which advises corporations on women’s issues and depends on them for income, won’t do that. This year, it did not even publish a list of the stragglers. But, by updating last year’s list with information that companies provide on the Internet, we can — right here — name a few of the 64 Fortune 500 companies that still have no women on their top management teams, even though more than half the U.S. managerial and professional workforce is female.
These female-free management zones include such blue-chip names as Owens-Illinois, Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., Solectron and Williams Cos. Peculiarly, it’s not just companies we’d expect to be male bastions, such as auto-parts manufacturers and oil companies, that are remiss. There’s Saks Inc., for example. Sure, they sell women’s boardroom attire, but the suits at the top of Saks are all men.
There’s also Borders Group. More books are purchased by women than men, but you’d never know that by looking at Borders’ top executives.
And what about Newell Rubbermaid? The next time you need a container for leftovers, ladies, consider buying from its rival Tupperware instead. Unlike Rubbermaid, it has four women on the management team. Two other miscreants also profit by selling to women but failing to promote them: Toll Bros., the luxury homebuilder, and Whirlpool, whose washers, dryers and ranges are, I’d guess, used more by women than men. One could go on.
And the dishonor roll is just as glaring on the boardroom side. Apple, NewsCorp, Devon Energy, Bear Stearns and Hovnanian Enterprises are among the companies unable to get, or keep, women on their boards — not even one.
That is pretty embarrassing. But the best part of the op/ed is here:
There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about women leaving corporate America, unwilling to make the sacrifices necessary to advance. Maybe. But college-educated women still earn just 75 cents for every dollar their male peers take home, and corporate women are twice as likely as men to have staff jobs rather than the operating jobs that give them the experience to rise. Yet women are starting businesses at twice the rate of men, and those businesses are growing at twice the rate of all firms. Given those statistics, it seems far more likely that women are leaving corporations because they are not allowed into corridors of real power even after they’ve made the sacrifices.
That last blockquote is delicious.
Great op-ed. Another quote is: “Executive suites and boardrooms remain a men’s club because many men are uncomfortable with giving women power or because they fear taking the risk of promoting a woman. And when women fail — or simply don’t shine — it continues to reflect not only on themselves but also on the entire gender.”
Word. Men want their companies’ diversity stats to shine, but mostly aren’t supportive beyond the PR goal.
I think women don’t always support each other, either. There are self-proclaimed feminists who shame others for aspiring to corporate success, calling them capitalist sellouts. And saying because, say, Carly Fiorina wasn’t a saint, women rising up will just be “meet the new boss same as the old boss.” That kind of shaming and “every woman CEO or exec needs to be a shining star of ethical purity or we won’t believe that more women in corporate America would be a good thing” needs to be exorcised from the ranks of feminists themselves, not just men.
I see this all the time when discussing women in politics, or women in any male-dominated hobby or group. Although every male seems to rise or fall on his own merits, every female is being judged, not as an individual, but as a representative of All Women Everywhere.
This makes me definitely LIVID. As a female in corporate america – I get shut out of the OBC (old boys club) on a regular basis and am starting to get burned out. But reading the article to my usually-feminist husband, he was all ready to excuse the behavior.
*sigh* I need to have a good cry.
Who was it who said, “The glass ceiling isn’t really glass; it’s a very dense layer of men”?
Frequently, it seems that the glass ceiling is made of that multi-layered, bulletproof, super-duper stuff that is used for the windows of presidents’ limos or for the glass between the line-up of creeps and the identifying crime victim.
And sometimes being the standard-bearer just means you’re the one who gets shot first.
**pity party now over; sigh; back to the old grindstone**