Why Women Matter, Part 3

Closing the Leadership Gap: Why Women Can and Must Help Run the World
by Marie C. Wilson

(Page 3 of 5)

When I first looked at this topic why women matter and how women matter I thought to myself, is this a question men would ask? I think not. They would ask, why does NATO matter, why does the UN matter, but they wouldn't ask why they matter.

— Laura Liswood, cofounder,
Council of Women World Leaders, Harvard University

October 1, 2002. Fortune magazine gathered the top leaders of the female business elite into a packed auditorium of the New York Stock Exchange. Powerful women women who normally speak alone at a podium participated on panels at a summit to discuss issues that ranged from corporate governance to foreign policy.

Among the guests: Ann Moore, chair and CEO of Time Inc.; Pat Mitchell, president and CEO of PBS; Andrea Jung, chair and CEO of Avon Products, Inc.; tennis legend Billie Jean King; House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi; Abby Joseph Cohen, managing director of Goldman, Sachs & Co.; ABC correspondent and anchor Barbara Walters; and actress and playwright Anna Deavere Smith. Anna, who plays the president's national security adviser on The West Wing, could watch her real-life counterpart, Condoleezza Rice, give a keynote address that afternoon.

At a panel on leadership, former Dateline NBC anchor Jane Pauley, the moderator, put a question to Anne M. Mulcahy, chair and CEO of Xerox Corporation: Do you think there's any significance to your being a woman?

Mulcahy's answer wound its way to no. The conversation bounced from Sherry Lansing, chair of Paramount Motion Picture Group, to Geraldine Ferraro, the first and only woman candidate to run for vice president of the United States from a major party. It became clear that these gifted leaders cared deeply about the progress of women, but few connected their gender directly to their work. "All of us are in this room because we are deserving," said Lansing.

Just six months before, at the same summit (postponed from September 2001 for obvious reasons), Carleton S. (Carly) Fiorina, chair and CEO of HP, created a stir when she denied there was a glass ceiling, saying women have to play by male rules and allow themselves to be judged by male standards, that if they don't, they risk being marginalized. (In July 2003, she modified that comment, telling an audience that she has faced barriers herself and knows they exist for others, but prefers not to focus on them.) Dinner conversation at the summit raged on both sides of the debate. At the end, during a radio show, women leaders disagreed with and yet understood Fiorina's point.

In the words of Anne Sweeney, president of ABC Cable Networks Group and president of the Disney Channel Worldwide: "I believe we will get to the point God knows when it will be when we will get to Carly's point [of having people be known] as the best in your field period, amen not man or woman." Marie J. Toulantis, CEO of Barnes & Noble.com: "There is not a woman I have ever spoken to in any position of authority in any company that will say [being a woman] has not made a difference, that they haven't had to be twice as smart as their male counterparts, have worked ten times harder, [waited] many years longer to get the [executive] position..." She also said, "I don't think it marginalizes women to say [we're different]; it recognizes we all have different styles. We are different than men and we should celebrate it."

Do we women lead differently? Yes, we do, whether from learned responses or lack of testosterone, and it is a hot underground topic for women at the top. "This is the great unspoken truth, the new orthodoxy that every woman I have encountered acknowledges although usually only in private or with a group of other women," says author and businesswoman Margaret Heffernan in a 2002 Fast Company article. "Their caution betrays a fear that... acknowledgment of difference will come to mean an acceptance of inequality. A fear that 'different from' will morph into 'less than.'"

And so we find ourselves wedged into stereotypes, often acting against female values, trying to fit the male definition of leadership. It has come at a cost, but it has allowed us to slowly infiltrate the locker rooms of business and politics an inch at a time.

We are finally in the Senate on our own (without succeeding a deceased husband), and we govern states and cities. A woman has been nominated for vice president, and some have served in presidential cabinets. Madeleine K. Albright, the first female secretary of state, now heads an international group of three hundred women government ministers. We run Fortune 500 companies and large universities. We are among the fastest growth groups for entrepreneurship, with a woman starting a business every sixty seconds. Offices now experiment with alternative work arrangements. In the 1990s, the number of families with stay-at-home fathers and working mothers rose by 70 percent, resulting in nearly 2 million couples in reversals of traditional roles. Working Mother magazine goes beyond naming the 100 Best Companies for Women, now also naming the Best Companies for Women of Color.

You've come a long way, baby. Or have you? Let's look at those advances through a different filter.

Women are 51 percent of the U.S. population and 47 percent of the labor force, mostly in the lower rungs. Of workers making the minimum wage of $5.15 an hour or less, 63 percent are women. We also have a "second shift": More than 60 percent of us have jobs, but we're still responsible for domestic chores and child care in four out of five marriages.

Women may start a company a minute, but these businesses rarely reach scale, let alone achieve the "status of legend." If you take a couple of zeros off the Fortune 500, you have the approximate number of female CEOs amid them: Six. Parity on Fortune 500 board seats, if the current rate continues, will be reached in sixty years. We sit on 13.6 percent of the boards of the Fortune 500; at that rate, we will still occupy only 25 percent of the seats in twenty-five years. Women who are among the top five wage earners at their companies make 68 percent of the compensation of men doing the same job. Even in the world of nonprofits, where women are thought to be doing well, we see an enormous pay gap: Women at the top, on average, earn nearly $100,000 less than their male counterparts: $170,180 compared to men's $264,602.

We are only 14 percent of the present Congress, and it took us a long time to get there. Of nearly 12,000 people to serve in the legislature since the founding of the nation in 1776, only 215 (1.8 percent) have been women (and it is a very white world; the only black female ever elected to the Senate was Carol Moseley Braun, Democrat of Illinois). We are only 12 percent of both state governors and the mayors of the one hundred largest U.S. cities. Since the nation's founding, 582 people have served at the cabinet level under presidents; only 29 of them, or about 5 percent, have been women (the first being Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins under President Franklin D. Roosevelt from 1933 to 1945). Of those 29, two-thirds have served in the last decade, mostly in the administration of President Bill Clinton.

© 2006 Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Marie C. Wilson is cofounder and president of the White House Project, which she launched to advance women's leadership in all sectors. She was president of the Ms. Foundation for Women for more than twenty years, through which she cocreated Take Our Daughters to Work Day. A frequent guest speaker, she has been quoted in numerous national news outlets.