Women in business: No progress

When I hear from the folks at Catalyst, the leading nonprofit that seeks to expand opportunities for women and business, I usually brace myself for bad news. Today's release of the 2011 Catalyst Census: Fortune 500 Women Board Directors was no exception.

Sadly, women in business have made no significant gains in the last year and are no further along the corporate ladder than they were six years ago, despite the advances of the 50 most powerful women in business.

Here are some of the sobering conclusions of the survey:

-- Women held 16.1% of board seats in 2011, compared to 15.7% in 2010

-- Less than one-fifth of companies had 25% or more women board directors

-- About one in 10 companies had no women serving on their boards

-- Women of color still held only 3% of corporate board seats

-- Women held 14.1% of Executive Officer positions in 2011, compared with 14.4% in 2010

-- Women held only 7.5% of Executive Officer top-earner positions in 2011, while men accounted for 92.5% of top earners

-- Fewer than one in five companies had 25% or more women Executive Officers and more than one in four had zero.

When I met Ilene H. Lang, the President & CEO, Catalyst a couple of years ago, I gave her a hard time. As a woman who had owned her own firm, I tried to poke holes in some of her arguments -- weren't women opting out of the workforce and then falsely expecting that they could get back in when they wanted to do so, on their own terms? Ilene smacked me down with lots of research and I am a full-blown convert to her cause.

What seems preposterous about the current state of affairs for women in business is previous Catalyst research that proves how much companies have to gain by advancing women to leadership positions. Lang notes that there is a "powerful correlation between increased women's leadership and better business performance."

Don't believe it? According to Catalyst, companies with more women in top leadership positions, on average, far outperform those with fewer. Additionally, in a post-crisis world, where we now know how board leadership failed in so many organizations, a long-term Catalyst study (The Bottom Line: Corporate Performance and Women's Representation on Boards (2004-2008)), found that gender diversity in the boardroom correlates with better corporate performance, and not by just a little. Companies with three or more women board directors in four of five years outperformed companies with zero women board directors by 84 percent return on sales, 60 percent return on invested capital, and 46 percent return on equity.

The numbers speak for themselves. The big question is: when will companies finally wake up and take action?

[JudyMartin8]

It's frustrating to see these stats with minimal progress. Fortune 500's have much to gain by supporting the CEO path for women, but I wonder how much incentive there is for women to do so.

These days entrepreneurship seems more enticing than battling the old school corporate culture that for too long still keeps the women's voice at bay. A culture shift is necessary and that means exalting corporate leaders, whether male or female, who are progressively supporting an innovative demographic change in the boardroom.

[Ming_on_Mongo]

I'm retired now but have worked in "male" cultures, and I've worked in "female" ones, where the great majority of employees, including management, were female. And regardless of "good" or "bad", they're very different, to say the least, with generally distinctly different approaches to everything from emotional displays, to teamwork, to problem solving, to hierarchies. For example, the notion of "professionalism", where we at least "attempt" to put our feelings aside while performing out jobs, seems to be fairly non-existent one for most women in the workplace, and within a female culture, "drama" is just much more tolerated..

Then perhaps understandably each culture just prefers to work among it's own "kind", especially since there's so little historical precedent for them working together, let alone men being in a subordinate position. Then get enough of either gender in positions of control, and it pretty quickly becomes dominated by one culture or the other. So it's simply more about the mechanics of biology and culture, than "misogyny". We're still in the early stages of this "experiment" and maybe in another couple hundred years or so, most of the "bugs" will be worked out.

[vickidonlan]

The women's movement never gained traction in the boardroom - why? Because the men in the boardroom like things just the way they are and they don't see any real reason to make a change. Can you imagine the man leading the nominating committee suggesting that a woman be nominted to the board? What would the other guys think? Boardrooms are still the old boy's club and regardless of the studies that show companies perform better with women on the board and in the executive suite---as long as the boys are allowed to choose who to let in it won't be a woman.

[VinePR]

Catalyst's report is eye opening about all the work that still needs to be done to even the playing field.
Florida has seen some change - an increase of 5% - and with more organizations like Women Executive Leadership, more change is definitely possible.