Recent Hype Belies Sparseness At The Top
From the glass slipper to the glass ceiling: Women are back on the front pages as the nation’s business press takes another look at our success in landing top executive jobs.
As it turns out, our success remains minimal and it takes a lot to achieve it - like delaying surgery for breast cancer or accepting a job transfer a few months after a labor and delivery that almost kills mother and child.
But, first, the good news:
There’s glitzy Advertising Age and its 25 Women to Watch. No. 1 on the list is the glamourous Jamie Tarses, who at 32 landed the top programming job at ABC. Of course, developing a vacuous hit like “Friends,” which Tarses did for NBC, is a gender-neutral formula for success in TV-land. And, the guess is, Tarses’ long legs and hair didn’t hurt either.
Then there’s BusinessWeek and its recent cover story, “Wise up, guys!” A female partner at Coopers & Lybrand who is thankfully less va-va-voom than Tarses, but still plenty perky-looking, beckons us to learn about companies where women are “Breaking Through.”
Inside, the list is short and the BusinessWeek story is forced to state the grim truth: only 10 percent of top jobs at the nation’s 500 largest companies are held by women.
“When the field is narrowed to the elite tier of chairman, president, chief executive officer and executive vice president, the portion drops to just 2.4 percent,” concedes BusinessWeek.
But the grimmest news yet comes in a Page 1 story in a recent Wall Street Journal.
The message is clear. There are female success stories, but if you want to succeed like a man, you’ve got to work harder and longer than they do. In short, you must out-macho the men around you.
The article takes a look at women graduates of top business schools like Harvard and Stanford who are now in their 40s.
Finally, raves the Journal, they “are breaking through cracks in the glass ceiling, landing top front-line corporate jobs once monopolized by men.”
The authors could have added, “if they don’t kill themselves first.”
Take Carol Bartz, the first “success story” presented by the Journal. She was diagnosed with breast cancer just two days after taking over as chief executive of Autodesk Inc.
She had a “stopgap lumpectomy,” and kept on working for another month before undergoing a radical mastectomy. She returned to work four weeks after surgery because she feared having a “female illness” would diminish her effectiveness.
There is a happy ending. Bartz is still alive and the company is now the fourth-largest maker of personal computer software.
The Journal’s next success story involves a woman who is a managing director for Goldman Sachs & Co.
Seven years ago, Goldman decided to close its Los Angeles office where she worked. While her husband was away on business, the woman went into labor and encountered complications that threatened her life and her baby’s.
Still, when Goldman asked her to move to its Chicago office, she left her infant with her in-laws and commuted to Los Angeles for weekends.
It is hard to recount these stories without sounding judgmental about the choices made by these women.
No doubt they believed they had no other choice. Sadly, they are probably right.
Men have been making similar sacrifices for years, shortchanging their families and themselves. It has been reported that Robert Allen, chairman of AT&T Corp., would be back to work by the end of the month after undergoing surgery to replace a defective heart valve.
But why should women push for other women if the girls end up following the same game plan as the guys? They become women acting like men, not women bringing something special - like balance and perspective - to top executive spots.
The hope is when enough women arrive at the top, they can show an organization other paths to productivity and excellence. The fear, however, is they won’t because the route they were forced to follow cost them so dearly they won’t want to make it any more pleasant for anyone else.
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