C This
A little-noticed provision in new U.S. legislation requires all federal financial agencies and firms to establish an Office of Minority and Women Inclusion to boost diversity. Banks and firms that fail to diversify their ranks do so at their own peril. According to the rule, failure to make “a good-faith effort to include minorities and women in their workforce” can result in cancelled government contracts. More on this ground-breaking provision in today’s C This.
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Laying Down the Law
Championed by California Democrat Maxine Waters, a powerful provision within U.S. financial reform legislation will hold federal agencies responsible for failing to diversify. “Firms must take steps to be more reflective of America,” said Michael Yaki of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. “This is a wake-up call for Wall Street.”
Stop, Think, Act
“Would I want my daughters working here?” It’s a simple question, but it stops many men in their tracks. “If the answer is no, then you should own part of the solution,” insists Deloitte’s Ann Weisberg.
CEOs Speak
What traits do more than 300 CEOS from 40 countries have in common? Researcher Robert Rosen endeavored to find out.
READ: “The Secret to Leadership Success,” by Harvey Schachter, The Globe and Mail, 8/9/10
A Deadly Figure
Since the start of this year, The New York Times has published 698 obituaries— and only 92 were of women. This statistic made Fast Company magazine cofounder Bill Taylor wonder “about who deserves such recognition in the first place, and what their stories might suggest about a life well-lived.”
READ: “The New York Times Is Dead Wrong,” by Bill Taylor, Harvard Business Review, 9/2/10
No Trend Here
New market research has found that single, childless women aged 22 to 30 earn, on average, 8% more than their male counterparts in many U.S. cities. Is this a cause for celebration? Not so fast. “This small slice of data is unlikely to be indicative of a larger, penetrating trend,” wrote DailyFinance’s Melly Alazraki.
READ: “Young Single Women Now Earn More Than Men,” by Melly Alazraki, Daily Finance, 9/1/10
The Catalystos
Are you a Catalysto?
A Catalysto is a man who wholeheartedly supports the work of Catalyst. He is an advocate for women, a role model for other men, and a positive force for change.
Catalystos are influential. In March, at the 2010 Catalyst Awards Conference, Frank J. McCloskey, Vice President of Diversity at Georgia Power and a true Catalysto—spoke about the impact one voice can have in the fight against inequity. “If you can just get one or two of several hundred to understand [gender inequity]—that’s a success,” said Frank. “They might impact millions.”
With this in mind, I wanted to amplify the voices of the Catalystos I knew. And I’ve started with the ones closest to me—the men who work at Catalyst.
I asked them why they support our mission, and I’ve broken their responses into two blog posts. I’ve changed their names to protect their privacy.
These Catalystos have some common traits, including a deep-rooted sense of empathy and fair-play. I was inspired by their answers. Hopefully, you will be too.
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Todd, Marketing and Public Affairs:
I come from a family predominantly of men (father and three brothers). My mother, not allowed to maintain a profession once a wife and mother (a nasty combination of religious, cultural, and patriarchal beliefs), channeled her formidable entrepreneurial and natural talents into creating sons who believed in boundless opportunities for themselves—a great challenge since we were in rigid boarding schools by first grade! She was my biggest and most unflappable fan—another challenge since I was not becoming a priest as assumed by said boarding school (and father).
I was in my late teens when my parents divorced and my mother found herself quite free to pursue her passions. She went back to her profession of nursing where I witnessed her nurture in ways I could only envision being honored to do. My own career has been very much shaped by my mother. Since her passing, I have worked solely for women and for women’s causes, and I have been extremely satisfied in those choices.
Jeffrey, Information Technology:
My wife works as a chemist and I saw that her pay is not the same as her male colleagues. Most of her supervisors are men. Hopefully, she could get paid the same someday and move up to better opportunities within her company. I do think many women out there also experience this.
Connor, Consultant:
Social justice has been a core concern of mine all of my adult life. As a consequence, I have been involved in one form or another with empowering those at the margins. Having worked in both corporate life in the States and having lived and worked in the developing world for ten years, I have witnessed firsthand the disparities in both access and equity so many women face every day at home and at work. I believe passionately that Catalyst’s mission, and the delivery of its expertise, has the potential to ably address these issues within corporate culture, and hence, to more broadly influence women’s lives across the vast expanse of their endeavors.
Vincent, Information Technology:
Since my wife and I are expecting a daughter soon, I care about the Catalyst mission now more than ever. I hope that my daughter never meets with discrimination based on stereotypes so that she can do and be whatever she wants.
An Inalienable Right
On the night of July 20, 1848, the first convention to discuss the rights of women drew to a close at the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, New York. Lucretia Mott, an outspoken Quaker deeply influenced by the Iroquois, was first to sign the closing document. The Declaration of Sentiments listed an array of “repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman,” chiefly:
He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise.
Sixty-eight women and 32 men signed the original declaration, yet only one woman, Charlotte Woodward, would live long enough to vote in a U.S. election. It took more than 70 years to secure this inalienable right.
Women’s Equality Day, held annually on August 26th, commemorates this long struggle and reminds us of the challenges still ahead. The 1848 Declaration railed:
He has monopolized nearly all the profitable employments, and from those she is permitted to follow, she receives but a scanty remuneration.
Generations have passed since these words were written—and gaps in pay and employment persist. But I draw strength from Lucretia Mott and other trailblazers, who pledged their faith in “the final triumph of the Right and the True.”
Full equality will be achieved.
The Invisible Woman
Look at the money in your wallet. Consider the name of the street you live on. Think about the great monuments in Washington, D.C., or your favorite Hollywood director.
Chances are you’re thinking about men.
Women make up 47% of the non-farm U.S. workforce and 50.7% of the U.S. population, but we are absent from the symbols, icons, images and voices that fill our world. I call it The Invisible Woman phenomenon. And it’s pervasive.
Only one of the 45 major monuments in Washington D.C. honors women, and women make up only nine out of the 100 statues in National Statuary Hall. About 7% of traffic circles in D.C. are named after women, a trend representative of street names nationwide. Only 21% of U.S. postage stamps produced from 2000 to 2009 feature an image of a woman. And all U.S. paper money features men.
The invisible woman phenomenon is not just about statues and coins. The phenomenon includes disparities across politics, media and arts. Women hold 16.8% of seats in the U.S. Congress, while less than 20 female world leaders are in power. Women hold only 3% of positions of clout in mainstream media. Less than 10% of TV sports coverage in the United States is devoted to female athletes. And of the 250 top-grossing movies produced last year, 7% were directed by women. And that’s just a small sampling.
So what’s the deal?
We have inherited a legacy of male-dominated monuments and street names, a by-product of thinking women had less to contribute to society than men. And ingrained biases persist. These shadows of the past still permeate our lives. They need to be replaced.
We tell our children that they can be anything they want to be, but The Invisible Woman phenomenon narrows their vision. Our sons need to see women out there if they are to embrace a culture where everyone is valued when they grow up. And if all our daughters see and hear is men, what does this tell them about themselves and their position in the world?
Women must be visible. Everywhere.
C This
American women got the vote 90 years ago this month. It wasn’t easy. After 70 years of hard state-by-state campaigning, suffrage came down to a final vote in the Tennessee Legislature. The deciding ballot was cast by Harry Burn, a 24-year old who switched to “yes” after receiving a last-minute nudge from his mother. “I know that a mother’s advice is always the safest for a boy to follow,” Burn later said.
Read more about this historic struggle, plus all the news about women and work, in C This.
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Three’s a Charm
Elena Kagan joined the U.S. Supreme Court, and ForbesWoman asked: “Will three finally be the magic number that effects real change for women in terms of pay parity, access to education and sexual harassment in the U.S.?” I hope so, but let’s not stop there. Women make up roughly 51% of the U.S. population. To really reflect America’s diversity on the Supreme Court, let’s see at least one more woman—ideally, a woman of color.
READ: “And Kagan Makes Three,” by Meghan Casserly, ForbesWoman, 8/8/10
Know Before You Go
What can you do to counter gender biases that influence hiring decisions? In this article, Amy Williams lays out four rules, including learning about “illegal questions” and sex discrimination before you go in for the interview.
READ: “Four Ways to Fight Sexist Interviewers,” by Amy Williams, Ms., 8/16/10
Mentored to Death
In the latest edition of the Harvard Business Review, INSEAD’s Herminia Ibarra and Catalyst’s Nancy M. Carter and Christine Silva reveal how high-potential women are not getting enough from mentors. Many are under-sponsored and over-mentored. “I am being mentored to death,” said one exasperated respondent. Are you?
Hear Them Roar
Who are the “new feminists”? The Guardian profiles seven courageous women “who dare to articulate what others would rather not see.” “I receive death threats all the time, but I’m not afraid,” said Shahla Farid, a lawyer who challenges the Taliban.
READ: “The New Feminists: Still Fighting,” by Susie Orbach and Shahesta Shaitly, The Guardian, 8/15/10
Rocking the Vote
What was the biggest obstacle to women’s right to vote in the United States? The U.S. Congress. Gail Collins recounts the long, hard slog to suffrage in this New York Times column. While we celebrate Women’s Suffrage Day on August 26, Collins prefers to commemorate August 18—the day of a tense final showdown in the Tennessee Legislature.
READ: “My Favorite August,” by Gail Collins, The New York Times, 8/13/10
Be Somebody—Get Sponsored
I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
–Emily Dickenson
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How does a nobody become a somebody? By being sponsored.
Sponsors are like mentors—except they advocate for advancement. The latest Catalyst research on the careers of more than 4,000 M.B.A. graduates shows that more women than men have mentors, but these mentoring relationships are less likely to lead to promotions for women. A lack of sponsorship may help explain why women lag behind men in pay and promotions.
Sponsors combine power, influence, and a willingness to promote you—and they have the clout to do something concrete. The results can be dramatic.
Newly minted Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan had a powerful sponsor, Abner J. Mikva. Mikva learned the value of sponsorship early on. During his first year of law school, he tried to volunteer with the Democratic Party. “Who sent you?” asked the man behind the desk of local party office.
“Nobody,” Mikva replied.
“We don’t want nobody nobody sent,” the man huffed.
The experience, noted The New York Times, spurred his interest in public service and in “being the somebody who sent future somebodies.”
And that’s what he did for Kagan. According to the Times, he hired her as a clerk when he was a federal appeals judge in Washington DC. Mikva then recommended Kagan for a Supreme Court clerkship for Justice Thurgood Marshall. He promoted her for a professor’s job at the University of Chicago. Then he pulled her into a role in the Clinton White House. The rest, as they say, is history.
Sponsors stick with you—they don’t ditch you at your first promotion. They protect you from enemies. They push the right buttons. They understand the Unwritten Rules. And they ensure you’re visible. In short, they shape your career.
Of course, sponsorship is not an entitlement—you have to “earn it” by being a top performer. Your sponsor won’t take care of all the heavy lifting.
Companies are starting to realize the importance of sponsorship, and so should you. Mentors are important, but a good sponsor is gold. Seek one out. Become a somebody.
What’s Up in Australia
Guest blog by Anne Summers, writer, journalist and author in Sydney
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Australia’s reputation for being a “blokey,” male-dominated, female-unfriendly country is being mugged by the reality that women now occupy a significant number of the nation’s highest positions.
The Prime Minister, the Governor-General (Australia’s head of state), the deputy leader of the Opposition, 20% of the federal cabinet, 35% of the Senate, 27% of the House of Representatives and three of the seven members of the highest court are women.
In New South Wales, the most populous state, a female triumvirate reigns supreme: the state’s governor, the premier, and the mayor of its capital city, Sydney, are all women—as are 28% of its parliamentarians. Oh, and the deputy Premier is female. A woman also heads Queensland—a state that in the past was often referred to as the “Deep North” for its aggressively masculine and, often, racist culture.
When the politically powerful get together, the photographs sometimes suggest that men are now the minority when it comes to running the country.
Yet even Australians are surprised when presented with these facts. It’s as if we had not noticed these incremental improvements until just seven weeks ago when Julia Gillard became Australia’s first female Prime Minister. It took all the publicity that accompanied Gillard taking over the highest job in the land to reveal the welcome news that with so many other women in important positions, maybe Australia was not such a chauvinist backwater after all.
Suddenly, as we looked around, and counted up the women, we could hold our heads high. Even if the picture is not so rosy when it comes to business, when it comes to political leadership Australian women are finally at the podium, the table, the bench, everywhere it counts.
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Anne Summers is a Sydney-based writer, journalist and author, whose latest books are The Lost Mother and On Luck. She writes opinion columns for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Sunday Age. Anne helped organize and facilitate the annual Serious Women’s Business conference, Australia’s pre-eminent conference for women aspiring to leadership, from 2001-2009. Her book The End of Equality was published in 2003 and her autobiography Ducks on the Pond came out in 1999.
Numbers Game
Read the research—the numbers tell the whole story.
A lot of ink has been spilled over a recent New York Times article which argued that childless women had careers that tracked men’s. “Women do almost as well as men today, as long as they don’t have children,” a Columbia University professor told the Times.
The article hinged on a recent study of M.B.A. grads from the University of Chicago that probed “women’s underperformance in the corporate and financial sectors.” But what did this report really show?
The authors found a vast wage gap exists between women and men. According to the report, women earn $115,000 on average at graduation and $250,000 nine years out, while men earn $130,000 and $400,000, respectively. “Mean earnings by sex are comparable directly following M.B.A. receipt,” they wrote, “but they soon diverge.”
How’s that for an understatement? Their “comparable” earnings are a $15,000 difference. I’m not sure about you, but I’d be pretty ticked at making $15k less just because I’m a woman.
Was this dramatic finding headline news? Nope.
Instead, media coverage fixated on a detail buried deep into the report. On page 243, the authors’ state:
“Limiting the sample further to women without children, and with no career interruptions by 10 years out, makes the career paths of the women in the sample similar to those of men. For that comparison, the gender earning gap starts out slightly larger than for all women, but grows less rapidly.”
This suggests that for women without children, there’s still a gap at the start of their career after business school, and the gap still grows over time—albeit less quickly than it does for women with kids or who have taken time off.
Not really breaking news, is it? Catalyst actually reached a similar conclusion in Pipeline’s Broken Promise, which found that even among women and men without children, women still started behind men and the gap still grew over time.
The original New York Times article is accurate in saying there’s a bigger penalty for women who have kids and/or take time off (which isn’t surprising), but was misleading in suggesting to the reader that women without kids will face a level playing field with equal pay. The numbers are clear: Women are paid less than their male colleagues. They don’t call it a gender wage gap for nothing.
Gender at Core
Gender is at the core of workplace inequity.
But you wouldn’t know this from reading The New York Times.
Citing a University of Chicago study, the Times reported this week that women who had no children and never took time off had careers that “resembled those of men.” This is misleading—here’s why.
The Chicago study found that men earn roughly $15,000 more than women upon receipt of an M.B.A. Nine years later, men earn about $150,000 more. Women who had children or took time off suffered a greater penalty over time than women without children. This is not surprising—workplaces still penalize women for dialing down or temporarily leaving a traditional career track. But, remaining childless does not level the playing field for women.
Our report, Pipeline’s Broken Promise, found that men who left a corporate job for a nontraditional assignment and then returned experienced no penalty in either position or compensation, but women did. The report also found that post-M.B.A. women start behind men in job level and salary—and they never catch up. These findings hold true regardless of previous work experience, industry, geography, aspirations and parenthood status.
What to make of the fact that the last three women nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court were unmarried and had no children? The Times article implies that not having children allowed these women to focus on their careers. But what of the many female leaders who have children?
In Women and Men in U.S. Corporate Leadership, Catalyst surveyed nearly 1,000 senior-level women and men, most within two levels of the CEO. We found that 81% of the women were married or living with a partner, compared with 97% of the men. And there was less discrepancy around whether they had children living with them: 51% of the women did, compared with 57% of the men.
The most powerful businesswomen in America are mothers, too. There are currently 14 female Fortune 500 CEOs. At least 12 of them have kids.
Blaming inequity on factors like motherhood obscures a simple truth: entrenched biases and sexist stereotypes impact all women. Misrepresenting this reality doesn’t solve the problem. It distracts all of us—including employers who lose out on great talent—from addressing core inequity.
C This
In the early days, men dominated the Internet. Now more women than men use it for shopping and social networking. Details about the shift, plus news about the corporate leadership gap in South Africa, a new “sneaky” form of sexism, and tales of 40 women who have made strides in business, are included in this edition of C This.
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Sexism on the Sly
Sexist images permeate the media. According to author and columnist Susan Douglas, the imagery reflects “a new sneaky, subtle form of sexism that seems to accept, even embrace feminism on the surface, but is really dedicated to the undoing feminism and keeping women—especially young women—in their place.”
LISTEN: “Interview with Susan Douglas,” Progressive Radio, 7/19/10
Women in South Africa
Listed companies in South Africa have more women on their boards than Australian, U.K., Canadian and U.S. companies, but the slow pace of change in South Africa means it could take up to 40 years for women to hit parity on boards and in executive management.
READ: “South Africa: Boardroom Gender Change ‘Minuscule,’” by Sue Blain, allAfrica.com, 7/29/10
Got to Have Grit
In Women of True Grit, authors Edie Hand and Tina Savas tell the stories of 40 women who paved the way for others. “Women today don’t have a clue that they are standing on the shoulders of women before them,” Savas told The Miami Herald. “We’ve overcome a lot of things, but we have a way to go in making strides.”
Networked Women
A new survey by comScore, a U.S.-based Internet research company, found that 76 percent of all women online visited a social networking website in May 2010 compared with 70 percent of men. Similarly, more women than men engaged in ecommerce, and many visited online gambling and adult websites. “This is clearly a long-term cultural paradigm that we’re seeing,” said comScore analyst Andrew Lipsman.
Getting Out of the Ghetto
The so-called “pink ghettos”—female-dominated disciplines such as nursing and social work—come with low respect and low pay. What’s worse, men still outrank women in their leadership. “It’s time for communities of practice in these fields to set a new standard,” wrote Selena Rezvani. “To start with, organizations must adopt more transparent methods around compensation.”
READ: “Even in the Pink Ghetto, Women Fall Behind,” by Selena Rezvani, The Washington Post, 7/23/10
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