OK. Well those are the books I've written. One is about the lack of
women directors in the Fortune 500. And the second book, which just
came out, is about the lack of women CEOs and also of the women who
have made it to the corner office. Some study about how they got there.
Now, the latest thing I've been doing is comparative research. I just
got back from Australia, where I'm part of a team that consists of two
Australians, two English persons, a Norwegian professor of management,
a New Zealand-er or Kiwi, and a French person.
And we interviewed 14 women directors and we interviewed four male
board chairs. And we interviewed four persons from additive
organizations like the Australian Institute of Corporate Directors. And
we're going to replicate this in England, in Norway, and France and try
and put together a book that I suppose would be somewhat similar to the
book I did about CEOs. What I learned is this is a very hot topic in
Europe and in Australia, New Zealand. Some extent in Hong Kong.
It's
been kind of on the back burner in the United States. Some people
ascribe that to diversity fatigue. That numbers of management in the
large corporations have been pressured so much that it's kind of a time
out period. Norway passed a law that 40 % of the directors of public
corporations must be women. There's some severe teeth in the law. If
companies don't achieve that, they can lose their stock exchange
listing.
The downside of it, of course, is Norwegian companies
have perhaps proceeded too rapidly. And there's one report of a woman
holding 18 directorship, which is excessive. But other countries in
Europe have followed that example. Spain passed a law without any
teeth, though. It's aspirational but they will have 40% women directors
on Spanish public companies by 2016. That's up from a very low base of
5%. The French National Assembly resisted.
Sarkozy's government
was proposing a 20% quota but about three weeks ago the national
assembly passed a law that sets an ultimate goal of 40% with an
intermediate goal of 20%. The Scandinavian countries, the Norwegian
professor that was on this panel with me, she described it as part of
the social fabric in Scandinavia is this equality of gender and that it
is something that people grow up with and they assume...
Now in
Europe though, the low countries, Germany, I mean, right there next
door, 2% at least the managing boards. Portugal one of the pig nations,
Portugal, Iceland, Ireland and Greece (I had to put that in there. it
has nothing to do with this.) but those are the countries almost unable
to manage anything is the lowest.
Here you have the other
numbers, US numbers reported as 15.3% by Catalyst. Catalyst is a very
Brahman organization, funded by the Fortune 100 essentially: Microsoft,
General Motors. It has offices in New York, Toronto, San Jose and
London. They fudged the numbers. They count consistently the number of
women of directorships held by women as the number of women directors.
And there's a big different because in this country we have an
excessive number of trophy directors, women who hold five, six, seven
and eight board seats.
So the number of female bodies is far
less. It's probably about 11 or 11.5% as near as my calculations are
2006. the etymology of this project was a movement in 1999, 2000 in the
US Academy that there was taking place a global convergence in
corporate governance that because of email, the Internet, ease of jet
travel, people in Australia knew about what Switzerland were doing.
People in Switzerland knew about a Canadian developments and the like.
Undoubtedly
to a great extent that has taken place. But the second half of the
thesis was that the convergence would be on guess what? The United
States model of co4porat3 governance. And this model consists of
majority, indeed a super majority of directors who are independent. It
consists of derivative actions by shareholders. It consists of
two-fisted directors who will remove under-performing CEOs.
And
of course I had just come back from four State Department contracts in
Indonesia. I did the last one with John Eddy of this faculty. I knew
that in most countries on the Pacific Rim where post-Confucian values
rain supreme, the US model would never work. In Indonesia in the
economic crisis of 1998, 38 banks failed. It's a little loss by US
standards, $95 billion.
Indonesian law clearly provides for a
derivative action. Not one single suit was ever filed. So this was
probably the most arrogant, Crackman is at Harvard. Hansman is at Yale.
And they simply posited the end of history.
Now I have a
quotation from Pogo, most of you are too young to know who Pogo was.
But the comic character and one of the famous lines is, "We have met
the enemy and he is us." And I corrupted that. We have met perfection
and it is us.
So I began researching and I began looking at all
of the books, many of which are how0to books, advice books for women.
And they all have a message which is wrong or largely stale. It is be
aggressive. Be assertive. Some of them even go so far as to say watch
Monday night football or take up golf. Wear power suits and the like.
You can tell by the titles. They have a lot of male testosterone-laden
athleticism. Throw the knockout punch. Shoot the three. Score the
touchdown.
The latest ones "Skirt Rules, Seducing the Boy's
Club." Those are 2008 early 2009, they actually advocate that women
should use sexual wiles to get promotions in the workplace.
Unbelievable to me!
So I decided to study this problem. You know
here we're saying perfection has been achieved by the US and then
within a year Enron happens, WorldCom happened. Tyco Communication
happened. Tyco happened. Qwest Communications happened. The year of our
corporate discontent all kind of corporate imbroglios.
To fast
forward the message of my first book is: the numbers lag very far
behind the reality behind the expectations. And the reality lies
further behind the numbers yet. It's not totally disappointing. There
has been some progress, but far less than we would expect. I began law
school in 1967 at Northwestern in Chicago and my class was one of the
first breakthroughs.
We had 160 in the class. We had 17 women.
The class before me had one woman. The third year class when I was a
first year law student had Jerry Springer. He's a very smart guy,
actually. But maybe some of you don't know who Jerry Springer is and it
had two women. A lot of schools were a year behind us. But by the early
'70s the numbers of women in law schools were into the 20 somethings.
They
quickly escalated. There are over 50% at a lot of schools today. The
business schools have lagged behind about 10%. So the metriculance at
the business schools today are about 40% women. But the numbers have
been up there since the late '70s. So that means women in great numbers
have been moving into management positions for over 30 years now.
Jean
Kirkpatrick was our first woman ambassador appointed as ambassador to
the United Nations. Sandra Day-O'Connor was the 109 Justice of the
United States Supreme Court and the first woman. We now have Justice
Ginsberg, Justice Sotomayor, and now retired Justice O'Connor. So I
think we have three women out of 116 or 117 justices. But these
appointments brought with them high expectations, that there were
cracks developing in the glass ceiling and a number of women would be
succeeding in positions. Well, they haven't.
Those are some
numbers. I have a tendency to put too many numbers in my PowerPoint but
I kind of like numbers. They give me something to grasp onto. You can
view the cup as half full, there were no women CEOs in 1997. There
were, Jill Barratt at Mattel, then Carlton Theorina at Hewlett Packard
and then Andrea Young at Avon Products but there were a couple
dismissals. We fell down to only two women CEOs as of 2002.
Of 15
today, 3%. So view it against none, cup is half full. View it against
parity-well, nobody expects parity, but something significant-the cup
is half or more than half empty.
Women have gone over 50 % in the
work force. They are 50 % of the middle managers in corporate America.
They are only four % of the bylaw officers. This would be the "C"
suite, Chief Executive Officer, Chief Financial Officer, Chief Legal
Officer, Chief Marketing Officer. It indicates, been in the work force
30-some years, it's indirect evidence there's a glass ceiling still in
place.
I talked about Catalyst, and how their numbers are not
accurate. A conference board reports that 36 % of the manufacturers and
31 % of the publicly-held service firms have no women directors. Now,
boards are getting smaller. The average board was 13 directors. It's
down to 10.6 today. They take ten directors, and then their 11th
director they cut her arms off and part of her leg, and they come up
with 10.6.
So you see, the number of directors has gone down from
5821 to 5161. There are a lot of Fortune 500 boards with seven and nine
directors. Very few with five or six. Apple is one. But as of 2005,
51.2 % of our 500 largest corporations either had no director or one
female director. Does the glass ceiling exist? Early on in those books
I listed The Labyrinth of Leadership, which is by a professor at
Wellsley and a professor at Northwestern. And it was excerpted in the
Harvard Business Review and much ballyhooed. And its thesis was that
the glass ceiling doesn't exist any longer.
And they pointed to
the progress that women have made in academe. 25 % of the university
chancellors or presidents are women. In the Ivy League, 50 % of the
presidents are women. In the US Senate we have 18 women senators. In
many of the parliaments and national assemblies of the world, women are
at 40 %. Actually, the leader is Rwanda with 52 % and Costa Rica with
over 50 %.
But in contradistinction, when you have just three %
of the CEOs that are women, that's evidence that the glass ceiling
which primarily refers to business is still there. Another piece of
evidence is the growing number of women trophy directors. A lot of
corporations are forbidding their CEO from serving on any other board,
or they're limiting their CEO to one other board. So the number of male
trophy directors has decreased very rapidly in the last ten years.
The
number of women trophy directors has increased very rapidly. I can't
remember, 80 was the number in my 2005 study, up from 17 or 19 in 2001.
A lot of women directors serve on five, six, seven, eight boards of
directors. Our latest study that one of the leaders was Sarah Bayh. Her
husband happens to be Evan Bayh, the recently resigned senator from
Indiana.
Now, she may be a very capable woman. But for one person
to serve on eight publicly-held boards of directors when the average
director on a publicly-held corporation spends about 300 hours a year
on the affairs of that company, when she's acting on eight boards, this
must be one of those "It's Tuesday, it Must Be Belgium" kind of deals.
So
the number of trophy directors gives us indirect evidence that there
are not enough women percolating up through the system. We have 50 %
middle managers who are women, and only 11 or 12 % are the directors,
and so a lot of people are bumping up against something on their way
up. Third piece of indirect evidence that a glass ceiling may exist is
the sidestepping. 68 % of the women on corporate boards sidestep. From
academe, from government, from not-for-profits, from consulting
organizations. Not many from law. I hate to tell you this, but a lot of
businesspeople don't like lawyers. Lawyers tend to be, to quote Spiro
Agnew, "nattering nabobs of negativism."
So your best chance of
being a female director is to be a tenured professor in business or the
health sciences at an Ivy League institution. I say that only somewhat
jokingly.
In my first study in 2001, 14 women professors at
Harvard held 23 directorships in Fortune 500 companies. Some of these
women presidents of large universities, Judith Rodin, who was the
president of Penn, and Ruth Simmons, who's the president of Brown, they
have annual compensation of over a million dollars.
And then they
sit on four or five elite boards which will pay them two to three
hundred thousand dollars per board. So the picture that begins to
emerge is that if you can have a good position, good salary, and then
become a trophy director of sorts, you can even approach CEO-type
salaries.
How-to advice I say is dead wrong. How-to advice is be
patient but not passive, or be somewhat aggressive, stay in one
organization, work your way up...that's the worst way to get on a
corporate board so far. It shouldn't be, but so far that I've
discovered.Only nine women in my sample worked their way up and became
what I would call an inside director at the company at which they had
spent most of their career. If you want to be a corporate director,
become a tenured professor or a dean. The provost of this institution
just became the second woman director at Nike. Bernadette Healy that
I'll talk about in a minute, she triple-sidestepped, and you'll find
that a lot.
She was a young doctor. She went on the faculty at
Johns Hopkins, she got appointed the Director of the National
Institutes of Health by President Clinton. She became the Dean of the
Ohio State Medical School, and then she became the President of the
American Red Cross, where she only lasted a couple of years, but she's
on about five very nice boards of directors.
That's a triple
sidestep. It proves that there may be a glass ceiling in place. That's
something we can talk about, which can't be proved, can't be disproven.
And even if it is, it's not a solution, so we have to ask ourselves,
why is this happening?
We have high expectations. We have over
40% of people going to business school are women. Over 50% of people
going to law school are women and thirty years later, out of this pipe,
there is only a trickle. Why do we have this leaky pipe? Richard
Parsons who is the African-American CEO of AOL Time Warner was asked on
CNBC or I get those all mixed up but he say, "Well, women and
minorities have been on the pipe line for a long time. It is only a
matter of years before it happens. "It didn't happen. It hasn't happen.
And so we have to ask ourselves why.
I should talk a little bit
about African American directors and officers and persons of color.
Over 4% of directors in the Fortune 500 are persons of color. About 125
are black, about 80 are Hispanic. We had three African American CEOs,
Richard Parsons at AOL Time Warner, Kenneth Chenault at American
Express, Stan O'Neal at Merrill Lynch. But in the meltdown of 2008, two
of those people were dismissed by their boards, Parsons at AOL Time
Warner and Stan O'Neal at Merrill Lynch. But last summer, we had our
first female African-American CEO Ursula Burns who is a masters in
electrical engineering from Columbia succeeded Anne Mulcahy as the
chairperson of Xerox. So, went from three to two but one of the silver
linings in that is we have our first African American female CEO.
Outright
discrimination. There are 25...Before as many of you know I am not an
employment discrimination expert but before you can file in a federal
district court, you have to get a letter to sue from the EEOC. So, that
is a very good handle on what the numbers are. The number is about
25000 complaints a year. It has been pretty constant. But very few of
those complaints are by women who feel they have been discriminated
against and seeking positions in the lower levels of senior management.
And the reason is simple. It would be a kiss of death to file that
complaint. But nonetheless, I read a lot of the cases and you see some
of the tactics that are used. Sand bagging upwardly mobile women.
One
of these cases comes from Spokane, Tidy Anns, such as regional grocery
chain and there were two women who applied for positions on the lower
level of senior management. Some of the things they have encountered
that took the form of sand bagging would be...They would set up a
meeting and all their male peers with RSVP and when the meeting
actually took place, they wouldn't show up. Sand bagging. Men
plagiarizing women's ideas, meetings. Vice spoke says that antidote to
that is that you should have an ally or a close eye ally that in the
next few minutes would repeat the substance of what you said and make
much harder for somebody to plagiarize your idea and make it their own.
Reduction
in force. This is a very common tactic used against women in
minorities. If you have 14 sales directors and two of them are women,
you just announce that we are reorganizing. We are reducing to eleven
regions, we are eliminating three positions and you eliminate two of
the people who are women or other minority group members and
applications or stereotypes. Problem with stereotypes is they give you
a safety net. They prevent you from falling too far. On the other hand,
they limit the recognition of your upside potential. So, a person who's
given the appellation of the group mother or the class clown or the
mascot, after very quickly their actual accomplishments no matter how
good they are probably won't be recognized.
The secondary earner
bias. According to the AFLCIL, I have a little bit of problem with
these numbers but well over 50% of the primary wage earners are women
now. What it persists that among managers and company that you have to
promote the men because men are seen as primary wage earners and women
are seen as secondary earners and family units. It's a stereotype that
persists and holds women back. Adoption of stereotype. Jean Hollands
who is a social psychologist. She wrote a book with the infelicities
title called the "Bully Broad Syndrome" and it is about...She is a
counselor to a number of high tech companies, Cisco, Hewlett Packard,
Intel and she says that a number of women can't lose the aggressiveness
that got them their first promotion.
And it results in their
being side tracked. She also talks about the iron maiden. I think with
a number of women who came in to law practice, some are iron maidens.
They have adopted very strict press, adopted a very hard exterior. If
you got to know them, you know that it wasn't really them but they did
that to project the stereotype that would protect them from downside
losses. The queen bee is a woman or other minority group that relishes
being the token. So, once they achieved the promotion, they redouble
their efforts to keep anyone from their same gender or their same
minority group from being promoted as well.
Did I skip something?
Maybe you want me to skip something. The price of motherhood. Now this
is a big one. I mean the stereotypes are breaking down uneven. There is
a study, a center for the study of home life at University of Wisconsin
and they require family units to keep something like Nelson logs on
their home. Neilson logs. And they show that the women in the sixties
spent 21 hours and the males spent four hours. That gap has closed but
it is still significant. The women now record that they spent 16 hours,
17 hours and the men record that they spent a minor 10 hours in the
work place. But still, the women have all the trauma of...And time of
child bearing and significant amount of child rearing and of household
duties.
And so, what happens is a lot of promising women go on
what's called the Mommy Track. This is a book by a woman by Anne
Crittenden. And the Mommy Track is described as follows. If you are a
woman manger and you limit yourself to one child and you limit yourself
to the maternity leave allowed. If you get to senior management at age
40, you will make 99% of what a comparable male makes. But if you take
time off to go on a Mommy Track she calls it, have a second child,
extend your maternity leave, take a year off when your kids are
starting school, at age 40 you will make 60 % of what a comparable male
makes.
And these statistics show up all over the place. One study
of Stanford MBA graduates, I think Michigan 1979, Stanford 1981, at age
40, those who went on the mommy track, I think it was like 39 % in one
sample, 40 % in the other. A lot of women...I have a daughter who has a
master's degree. She worked for Simon & Schuster and now she's got
two babies, and she...I say, why don't you get a job, Claire?
And
she says, oh, but my children need me. And I think, part of the reason
that people like my daughter don't want to go back to the work force is
we work harder in this country than any country in the world. It's
called turbo-capitalism.
We are several hundred minutes a year
ahead of the next competitor. I have a couple of women friends who are
executives. One with Weyerhauser, she would have her teenage son save
all the pizza boxes and take them out in the morning when the trash men
were coming, because she didn't want her neighbors to find that her
family lived off Domino's pizza. I have another friend whose son said,
"Hey, Mom, do all families get dressed in front of the dryer in the
morning?" And my wife was an academic. She taught speech and hearing
here at the University of Washington. Even with two academic careers,
raising two children is very tough.
When people have two
eight-to-five careers that are expected to put in face time, be
available 24-7, be available for travel, I don't see how people do it.
So that's the price of motherhood. That's probably one of the biggest
reasons why we have so much opting out and there are so many leaks in
the pipe. This is from the linguists. Robin Lakoff, who teaches at Cal
Berkeley, and Deborah Tannen who teaches at Georgetown. And the idea is
that men ascribe to women all these attributes, like they're emotional,
they're not analytical. They're too intuitive.
Now, where does
that come from? Well, Lakoff and Tannen says it comes from the speech
and behavior patterns of women in our society and that women speak and
act, or many of them, not all, in a different register. So that they
use a lot of modal verbs. A man will say, "Let's send two engineers to
Boise, " and a woman will say, "Well, should we send a couple of
engineers to Boise?"
Women will use a lot of hedges. They will
say, "Don't you agree?" or "Isn't that probably right?" Men don't tend
to use those. They just say, "That's right!" And the inference is,
"Because I said so!" Reminds me of a guy I knew at Columbia. But Lakoff
and Tannen go on to show that there's no necessary connection between
these behaviors and the inferences dominant males ascribe to them.
There may be a given connection in a given case, but generally speaking
and behaving in a different register carries no baggage whatsoever with
it.
But it persists, as some of the advice books-I mean, you
won't believe this-but they say to women in bold type, "LOWER YOUR
VOICE." This comes from the sociologists. Tokenism and skewed groups.
The great book by a woman sociologist who teaches at the Harvard
Business School, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, and she wrote a book in 1984
about a mythical corporation called Indisco, and it's been revised and
out in several editions since then.
It's kind of
counter-intuitive. You think that when there is one minority token, a
woman, an African-American, a Hispanic in a work group, that that's
good. But of course there can be a downside, because that one in the
work group will feel forced to retreat into a stereotype to protect
them-self. Then you have the addition of a second person, a woman, or a
person of color, and then you think, that's even better! Sociologists
say, no. That's what we call a skewed group.
And the dominance in
a work group will feel a threat, so they will engage in an exercise
called boundary heightening. They will engage in a divide-and-conquer
strategy. Her studies show that men, when the two members of the
minority were present would talk in macho terms about muscle cars and
professional football, and when the members of the minority, the
dominance would revert to very prosaic discussions of how their kids
were doing in school, about housework, about cooking, about all kinds
of things.
Coping strategies if you're a token. Become invisible.
Well, you can read them.There's a lot of feminist literature that seems
kind of facile, but it's called "Three is the Magic Number." Now I've
come to accept that. I gave a program at Drexel in Philadelphia and the
woman who wrote that article which was published in the Harvard
Business Review was on the panel with me.
And so, three in a work
group. Or three at a management level or more seems to be the stage at
which the boundary heightening is reduced and women feel or minorities
feel able to express themselves without fear of reprisal. And when I
did these interviews in Australia, that came through time and time
again. Now, many of these behaviors are going to be much more muted at
board level, because cordiality and consideration is the name of the
day at a publicly held company's board meetings.
But still, many
of these women said, oh, I was on this board. Oh, we had three. It was
so much more enjoyable. I had somebody...I mean, some of the women that
were joking, and they said, "I had somebody to go to the loo with and
we could talk about things in there and come out and discuss them in
the meeting."
This is Susan Stern, who teaches employment
discrimination at Columbia. She's coined the term "secondary sex
discrimination." I'm going to talk a little bit about CEOs in a minute,
and one of the things I've discovered is women who are progressing,
many of them are making it in industries and companies formerly
dominated by men.
It's a new century! The days of the naked pinups on the office wall, hopefully they're all gone, but they're mostly gone.
And
so the forms of discrimination that we're going to see and that will
hold women back from the pool from which directors might be chosen are
going to be much more subtle.
Insure that women don't do so well
in the half-hour job interview, the 20 minute job interview. One of the
things you see in HR literature is all of this stuff about the
promotion tournament. It's the law of inverse certainty. If you have 14
sales directors up for six positions, you can look at the numbers.
If
you have three finalists for the marketing office, chief marketing
office, it becomes much more subjective. The higher you go in an
organization, it's more subjective rather than objective, or it tends
to be that way. So that the device that is advocated are these
promotion tournaments. You take the three finalists, and you put them
one against one. Women don't fare so well, probably because they see
that it has no relationship to the job. It's just a device. Rank and
Yank systems. That's become very popular because Jack Welsh did it at
General Electric. You take the 10 lowest percent of lowest performers
and you fire them. It's pretty ruthless.
Absence of alumni in
welcome back programs. That's changing. One of the reasons I think it's
very important because a woman may work 37 years and take time out for
the mommy track, and a man may work 38 1/2 years. Statistically the
difference is not significant. But yet the woman maybe unduly penalized
for that.
If she tries to come back to the workforce, there is a
lot of jealousy. But one of the things that cuts against that is if you
have a good welcome back program. Another thing that cuts against that
is the prevalence of team production and team planning approaches,
rather than rigid hierarchies in a lot of companies.
So that if
the workers who stay there are jealous of the alumnae coming back,
she'll move on. She'll move on to a different team.
So I finished
this book with a then relatively small sample of three CEOs who were
directors who failed. And they all had one characteristic. They were
aggressive-assertive to the end. Bernadette Healy I talked about. She
was the CEO of the American Red Cross when 2001 happened. And people
lined up as you remember for blocks to give blood.
I watched
that, I thought, "Oh my God, at least 50, 000 people had been killed."
It was very fortunate because New Yorkers don't come to work until
10:30 in the morning. So only 3, 000 people were killed. So Bernadette
Healy is interviewed on national television, and she says, "Oh well,
yeah, a lot of people gave blood, but everybody knows that whole blood
is only good for two weeks. So we had to throw it all away."
We
don't say that on national television. She also had removed a director
of a mid-sized American Red Cross chapter in New Jersey, and had him
prosecuted for a relatively minor embezzlement. And he got jail time.
And she didn't consult the board. So after two years, she was out of
there. Carly Fiorina was named CEO of then the 17th largest company in
America. In her first year in office she appeared on over 40 magazine
covers. It was the Carly buzz machine. Carly all of the time. They used
to have workaday corporate jets that would take engineers to Boise and
Corvallis where they got rid of them.
Got a new Gulfstream for
herself. Her first year in office, one week, she made seven calls in
the US, five in Asia, and five in Europe. In one week. But she
consistently made projections that she failed to meet. And the stock
went from the 50s down into the 20s, and it stayed there. The straw
that broke the camel's back was the board said, "You must get a chief
operating officer. You might be a good public face." She's wickedly
smart. Her father was Joseph Sneed, who was a judge of the ninth
circuit. Before that, dean of the Duke Law School. He was appointed by
Richard Nixon who was a Duke graduate. But she refused.
And every
organization that I know of is run by a number one and a number two,
not just a number one. She surrounded herself with young people who
figuratively all had to drink the Kool-Aid. And Jill Barad, the first
CEO, she used to show up at work wearing a purple mini-skirt and purple
boots. She went in after just a couple of years at Mattel, and said to
the then CEO, "What the F do I have to do to get a good job around
here?" She was made CEO after, I think, 11 years.
When she took
over the Barbie line, the average American girl had one Barbie. By the
time she left, the average American girl had nine Barbies. It is still
Mattel's biggest selling toy. I bought my daughters FAO Schwarz
anatomically correct dolls. I paid a lot of money. I brought them back
from New York. They looked at them. Threw them away. "Where are my
Barbies?" So, anyway, she made rosy projections again.
And this
leads to one of my findings about CEOs. They don't have the financial
grounding to realize the sensitivity of that subject: Making
projections. You better make your numbers. And you might be forgiven
once for missing your numbers. But these persons had no sensitivity.
People who survive, know when to duck once in awhile. They didn't. And
then I conclude that for women it's still much more difficult than for
men. A male can be aggressive, be assertive, go a long way in a career.
A woman maybe assertive at first, then has to be diplomatic, then a
different kind of assertiveness with more strategic use in
assertiveness as they progress towards the top. It's a different
paradigm. Maybe that's another book.
Terrible companies.
Airlines, financial services. No market reciprocity. It seems like a
lot of young parents buy soup for their kids, candy bars, running
shoes, and Happy Meals. But the people who would know about the
shopping tendencies of the primary purchasers, aren't on the boards.
SBC which is now part of AT&T, was the leader. Trickle downs. Those
are companies with female CEOs. And there is a direct correlation. If
you have a female CEO, eventually you will have, probably, more female
directors.
Although Carla Fiorina never did a thing for any woman
in the workplace, as far as I can tell. This is the other book...how
much time do I have left?