Posts Tagged ‘leadership gap’
Take 5: Diverse Women Take a Hit
Diverse women are double outsiders. Women of African, Asian, Hispanic, Middle Eastern and Native American descent make up about 36% of the U.S. female population, but as today’s Take 5 highlights, many are excluded from high-paying leadership positions in corporate America:
1) In 2008, African-American women earned 61 cents and Latinas earned 52 cents for every dollar a white non-Hispanic man earned.
2) Among full-time wage and salary workers in 2009, Latinas’ median weekly earnings were $509—the lowest of all racial, ethnic, and gender groups—while Asian women earned $779. White men, on average, earned $845 per week.
3) In 2010, there were only nine diverse women general counsels in the Fortune 500.
4) Today, 70.1% of F500 companies have no diverse women serving on their boards.
5) The number of diverse women in F500 leadership remains stagnant: In 2010, they held 3.0% of board seats in the Fortune 500, down from 3.1% in 2009.
Catalyst recently found that for diverse women, stereotyping, exclusion from influential networks, and difficulty gaining access to high-visibility assignments can impact access to trusting relationships with managers. Mentor and sponsor relationships—coupled with targeted diversity training and mechanisms to hold managers accountable for meeting diversity goals—can increase awareness and dismantle the challenges many diverse women face.
Starts With You
A 2010 New York Times headline posed the question: “Why take our children to work?”
Amid criticism of Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day’s purpose and a decline in participation among some school districts, many parents have no doubt asked themselves the same thing as Thursday, April 28, nears in the U.S. But, the day’s importance has never been greater.
Women lag men in the workplace in pay and promotions—and remain a minority in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields. But by taking our children to work, we can inspire them to achieve anything, regardless of gender. It’s all about boys seeing women at work in all types of roles—not just stereotypic women’s positions—and for girls to see role models they can aspire to become.
The program was initially called “Take Our Daughters to Work Day” in 1993—a time when women were given even fewer chances to advance in business—but was expanded to include “our sons” in 2003. Girls today are still bombarded by images that narrow their vision of what they should and should not do when they grow up. This is why the program is still so valuable and why many companies participate.
Last year, for example, GE hosted an official event to mark the day where 176 children learned about nanotechnology, slow-motion photography, glass blowing, sign engraving, and even firefighting! This video, filmed by a parent whose daughter participated, sums up the power of the day to shape and influence young minds.
Bringing your child to work can spark new thoughts about their future. This can impact the choices they make at school and later in life as they enter the business world. Along the way, it can influence the choices of the people around them.
You are a powerful role model for the next generation of girls and boys. This Thursday, show them that they can be anything they want to be. The future is theirs—but it starts with you.
Voices on Road to Equality
One year ago, we launched Catalyzing with the belief that until women achieve parity in business leadership, we will be marginalized in every other arena. More than 70 blog posts and 65,000+ page views later, we’ve only scratched the surface.
What gives me hope amid entrenched pay and leadership gaps, and setbacks like defeat of the Paycheck Fairness Act, are inspiring interactions with women and men who share our vision of changing workplaces and lives. As I blow out the candle on our 1-year anniversary, I wanted to leave you with a selection of comments from readers. Brace yourself—they are funny, angry, and even sad. Taken together, they serve as a potent call to action, and a reminder that we will not stop until we achieve our goal:
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Ilene, congratulations on using your blog to “catalyze” the use of the gender lens. The Economist’s “We Did It!” cover aside, women have a LONG way to go and corporations need to look at their advancement efforts with fresh eyes before we get to the 50% at the top that women reflect in the pipeline.
Susan Colantuono 2010/02/16 at 9:33 am
The glass ceiling is not only still here, it’s an illusion that it is window pane thin. It is about 10 meters thick and all you can see when you look up is the bottom of a man’s $350 shoes looking down at you like a gerbil treading a wheel that goes nowhere for their own amusement.
susan clark 2010/03/04 at 6:00 pm
How can you fix what you don’t know is broken?
I have a much loved uncle who, when I told him about the wage gender gap refused to believe it existed….I then spent the remainder of that Thanksgiving breaking down how it occurs, why it hasn’t stopped, etc., and by the time he left, he was writing a letter to his congressman asking why there weren’t laws against it. Hopefully there are more ah-ha moments happening every day
Shayna 2010/04/09 at 3:33 pm
We hear so much about the importance of senior men mentoring women (and it is important), but it’s very refreshing to reverse this and think about the benefits of women mentoring men.
Lynn Harris 2010/04/28 at 1:54 pm
I have implemented many mentoring-projects for women with mentoring men in Austria. Thanks for your blog, because I really think that it is time for an change. We have so many good women, who would be great mentors for open minded men.
Daniela Stein 2010/05/04 at 3:19 pm
Champions for Change
Last night we celebrated ten years of Catalyst in Canada at our sold-out Catalyst Canada Honours gala dinner. We kicked off the festivities by opening trading at the Toronto Stock Exchange. And in the evening, we inaugurated The Catalyst Catalyst Honours, recognizing three champions of women’s advancement in business: Ed Clark, President and CEO of TD Bank; Colleen Sidford, Vice President & Treasurer of Ontario Power Generation Inc.; and Sylvia Chominska, Group Head of Global Human Resources & Communications at Scotiabank. It was so moving that I want to share the day with this fresh posting from Deborah Gillis, Vice President, North America and head of our Catalyst Canada office. Coming soon: pictures, video and a retrospective of the celebration!
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If a single theme predominated the inaugural dinner of The Catalyst Canada Honours last night, it was change.
Scotiabank President and CEO Rick Waugh, who is also Chair of Catalyst Canada Advisory Board identified the most important change over the past ten years in the business world as “the cultural shift that has begun in Canadian business and in our broader society.”
Champion Sylvia Chrominska spoke of the cultural shift at Scotiabank since she started in 1979, as more women joined the senior ranks, and both women and men began to recognize the business benefits of diversity at the very top.
TD Bank Financial Group’s Ed Clark—another champion—spoke of the journey for answers to the increasingly complex issues of diversity, and the importance of commitment from everyone in the organization.
Champion Colleen Sidford’s leadership as Vice-President of Ontario Power Generation has shifted attitudes and created opportunities for women in the traditionally male nuclear industry.
In preparing my own notes, I also thought back to one of my earliest disillusionments: the realization in my final year of high school that a university education would likely allow me to earn only 69.6 cents for every dollar in the pay packet of my male colleagues.
Time for introspection. Some of it, not pretty.
I thought about the first Catalyst research project in Canada. In 1997, Canadian CEOs believed that women in senior management would jump from 13% to 24% by 2002. Well, by 2002, senior management ranks were 14% women. In 2008, the percentage had reached 16.9%. In fact, if we continue at the current rate of change, we won’t see that 24% prediction until 2022!
And the pay gap that shocked me so much in 1983? In 2008, women earned 68.3 cents to every dollar earned by our male colleagues!
So what is this cultural shift that everyone is seeing? I believe we’ve seen a fundamental shift in the conversation, a shift that gives me hope that things are about to change.
Back in 1983, I believed that women should earn as much as men because it was fair. Fairness was the basis of the equality rights section of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Fairness was the foundation of the Employment Equity Act of 1985.
Businesses complied with the legislation, but compliance alone does not create equity or an inclusive workplace. Today, CEOs like Rick Waugh, Ed Clark, and Bill Downe know that their businesses are stronger, more competitive, and ultimately more profitable because their senior ranks reflect the Canadian population in all its diversity. They know that women bring a valuable perspective to their senior tables.
Most importantly, they know that Canadian companies and the Canadian economy can no longer afford to ignore the talents, skills and commitment of 50% of the population – not to mention those who are outpacing men in higher education degrees.
What I see is both a conversion and a conversation that has shifted from fairness to business case. The participants in the conversation are no longer only women standing outside the senior management door. The conversation—and the passionate advocacy—has moved through that door, and men have become partners in the conversation.
And the question is no longer “Why?” but “How?” and “How quickly?”
I take considerable pride that Catalyst Canada has lived up to our name over the past ten years. Our partnership with business has provided a venue for the conversation. Our research has informed business programs to support the advancement of women, such as Sylvia’s work at Scotiabank, Colleen’s emPOWERed women program at OPG, and Ed’s Women in Leadership initiatives.
The Catalyst Canada Honours dinner marked our tenth anniversary. Our Champions—Ed Clark, Sylvia Chrominska, and Colleen Sidford—are leading the way. And, if the enthusiasm of the sell-out crowd of over 500 members and friends is any measure, their advocacy is gaining supporters in all sectors and businesses across Canada.
Let the conversation continue! Bring on the change!
Targeting Inequity in DC
Earlier today, I testified before the Joint Economic Committee in Congress. No, Stephen Colbert was not there right along with me!
The hearing, titled “New Evidence on the Gender Pay Gap for Women and Mothers in Management,” examined, among other topics, new findings by Catalyst on pay and corporate leadership gaps. These gaps persist across most industries—and have closed at a glacial pace.
The latest Catalyst data on women in Fortune 500 companies is alarming. Although women are 46.4% of total Fortune 500 employees, they are 13.5% of Executive Officers, hold 15.2% of board seats, and are 2.6% of CEOs. If inequities persist in America’s most powerful and influential companies, they are present in smaller businesses too.
On the issue of the pay gap, I testified how in 2009, women made up only 6.3% of top-earning Executive Officers within the F500 and discussed how our “best and brightest” women—M.B.A. grads—still earn less than equally qualified men, regardless of parenthood status. On average, women earn $4,600 less in their first post-M.B.A. job. And this pay gap widens over time.
To help explain to Congress why these gaps exist—and have remained largely steady over time—I recounted a simple test I often perform during lectures. I ask audiences to close their eyes and picture a business leader. How often do they imagine a woman or someone ethnically or racially diverse? Not very.
I doubt many lawmakers attending the hearing did either.
And this is the problem. The notion that women are less strong and less committed—and that trusting their judgment to lead is risky—remains entrenched. Too many people—women and men alike—think of a male when asked to think of a leader. It’s engrained in our conscious and reinforced by media and the images we see everyday. But it needs to change.
By shining a light on pay and leadership gaps, I hope my testimony will inspire the change-makers in Washington to rise to the challenge. Holding a hearing on these issues was a great step forward.
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.
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.
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
Diversity of Nature
Guest blogger: Laura Liswood, Secretary General, Council of Women World Leaders, and Senior Advisor, Goldman Sachs
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I love nature and its diversity. It provides many wondrous experiences—a plethora of flowers and animals, diverse landscapes, and a fabulous array of human beings.
And yet nature is tricky, too. I’m particularly focused on two parts of nature.
One part is that nature promises to happen “naturally.” And some things do. The sun rises and sets naturally, salmon swim upstream to spawn naturally, birds migrate naturally.
For women, we have often been told that our progress will occur naturally. That is, fill the pipeline, get into the organizations, educate and provide healthy lives for girls and women, and we will prosper and succeed naturally. Turns out some things just aren’t as natural as we thought.
For example, the World Economic Forum has published a gender gap index for five years. It tracks the gaps between resources allocated, and positions in society, for men and women in four areas: health, education, economic empowerment and political participation. The good news is that gaps in healthcare and education are almost closed in many countries of the world. Many of us believed once those gaps closed, the economic and political gaps would close naturally. Nothing could be further from the truth. The gaps in the latter two categories are staggering—only 59% of the gap closed economically (and even worse in some countries) and just 17% of the gap closed politically. It turns out we will need much more affirmative approaches to close these two gaps, and that won’t be easy nor will they close naturally.
Companies are hiring women (and other diverse groups) in higher and higher numbers. But they don’t seem to be making it to the top—women are 50% of the labor force and only 3% of CEOs at Fortune 500 companies. Nature abandoned these groups.
The second bone I have to pick with nature is the sleight of hand it has played on us in regards to diversity. There is no question that diversity of plants, animals, foods, people, or ideas is a good thing. But when organizations commit to that goal of diversity when it comes to people, they often stumble. As Catalyst points out in its extensive research, even in a simple dyad of diversity—women and men—we are baffled and burdened by stereotypes and preferences and assumptions and archetypes.
In my book, The Loudest Duck, I reflect on how the Noah’s Ark approach that many organizations take isn’t working. (“If we could only get two of each in the Ark, we’ll have our diversity.”) The workplace giraffe looks at his colleague, the zebra, and thinks, consciously or unconsciously, that this zebra is one funny looking animal and can’t possibly perform given its stubby neck, silly stripes and propensity to “talk” kind of strangely.
Our unconscious beliefs and perceptions about who others are get in the way of creating a fair and meritocratic workplace for those who are diverse. I once saw a sign that said, “We hire because they are different and fire because they are not the same.” Nature provided us with diversity. If only it had given us the tools to naturally use it.
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Laura Liswood co-founded the Council of Women World Leaders with Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, President of Iceland. Liswood serves as Secretary General of the Council, which is composed of women presidents, prime ministers and heads of government. In 1997, Liswood co-founded The White House Project, which is dedicated to electing a woman President of the United States. Her work with women presidents and prime ministers was the inspiration for the Project, which seeks to change the cultural message in the United States about women as leaders. In 2001, Liswood was named Managing Director, Global Leadership and Diversity, for Goldman Sachs, a global investment bank, and today is a Senior Advisor to the firm.
Think Bigger Than Firsts
Back in 2005, I received a flurry of interview requests concerning Laura Bush’s selection of Cristeta Comerford as White House executive chef—a first for a woman.
Yes, it’s an achievement, I noted, but I was not surprised she got the job. I was amazed that it had taken more than 200 years for a woman to land this top culinary position!
And what’s worse, the buzz surrounding Comerford’s appointment as head chef eclipsed news about George W. Bush’s plan to replace Sandra Day O’Connor with a male Supreme Court Justice. “Out of the courtroom and into the kitchen,” I thought at the time.
Kathryn Bigelow’s best director Oscar for The Hurt Locker reminded me of the Comerford episode. Bigelow rightfully earned a spot in the annals of female firsts for her gripping film about men at war. (Another irony, perhaps?) But it’s 2010. We shouldn’t be surprised that a woman has actually won the top honor in this category. We should be shocked that it has taken 82 years for it to happen!
Let’s not get distracted by the narrative of female firsts. After all, firsts only go so far.
In 1917, Kate Gleason became the first woman president of a national bank, 50 years later Muriel Siebert became the first woman to own a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, and in 1972 Katherine Graham became the first woman CEO of a Fortune 500 company. These are all important firsts—but women are still nowhere near half of Fortune 500 CEOs, executive officers, or board members in the United States today.
The same is true for women in the film industry. The Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film produces a wealth of information about the so-called celluloid ceiling. Its latest report found that in 2009:
- Women comprised 16% of all directors, executive producers, producers, writers, cinematographers, and editors working on the top 250 domestic grossing films, a decline of 3 percentage points from 2001 and a figure unchanged from 2008.
- Women accounted for 7% of directors, a decrease of 2 percentage points from 2008 and a figure even with the rate in 1987.
This data reminds me that an overemphasis on the importance of “being first” can distract us from what’s really important. In the case of women and work, it can obscure the deep inequities that still exist.
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