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To Lead or Not to Lead
Real Options for Women in Business
by Pam Losefsky
Business schools are chock full of female students. While not all
can boast the McCombs School’s numbers (women now account for 51
percent of the undergraduate student body), many of the school’s peers
(Arizona, Wharton, Michigan, Indiana) still
matriculate a healthy female minority of about 40 percent. Women make
it into these competitive programs not only because they perform well
academically in high school, they are also well-represented on
National Honor Society rolls and hold leadership positions in student
government and other extracurricular organizations.
It’s clear that girls rule at the high school level, and their performance in college is no less impressive.
But advocates for women in big business fear that the positive news stops right there. They contrast the rosy picture of eager young female professionals with some hard statistics.
Female enrollment in top-20 MBA programs, a stop along the pipeline to upper management, is already low and declining (ranging from about 25% to 30%). The number of top executives who are women and the number of women who sit on corporate boards still lag behind the number of men. Women, in fact, make up more than half of the managerial and professional labor pool, but account for just over 1% of all Fortune 500 chief executives, reports a Harvard Business Review article titled “What’s Holding Women Back?” (June 2003).
So, if there are so many competent women out there in the work force, researchers ask, what is happening in the years following graduation from a top-flight undergraduate program that may thwart promotion to corporate executive positions?
Certainly, most people will say that they agree that having more women in positions of power would be a good thing. Companies that can access more of the available talent pool (i.e. women and men as opposed to just men), as well as employ those people who represent a major consumer base, will benefit.
In support of this contention, earlier this year Catalyst released a study showing that Fortune 500 companies with more women in senior management positions do better financially than those with fewer women at the top. Specifically, “The Bottom Line: Connecting Corporate Performance and Gender Diversity,” indicates that “the group of companies with the highest representation of women on their senior management teams had a 35-percent higher ROE [return on equity] and a 34-percent higher TRS [total return to shareholders] than companies with the lowest women’s representation.” Catalyst is careful not to assume a cause-and-effect relationship, noting that the two are merely linked.
But despite the evidence in favor of their participation at the highest levels of business, women continue to cite the incompatibility of careers in business with work-life balance as a primary reason for not pursuing such a career, indeed, for not even pursuing an MBA degree. Business schools have banded together in groups like Forte, a consortium of schools and firms committed to increasing the numbers of women in management (McCombs is a founding member), to offer incentives for women to enter their programs; but these efforts are just beginning, so their effectiveness is yet to be determined.
Linda Abraham, founder of Accepted.com, one of the oldest admissions consultancies on the Web, shared an eye-opening experience that could explain why women are still unreceptive to careers in business. Not that long ago, she attended a recruiting event for prospective female MBAs that was sponsored by some top b-schools.
“During the Q&A that followed,” Abraham recalled, “One prospective MBA dared to raise a subject that had seemed like an unmentionable during the entire evening: pursuing a business career while raising children. I watched fascinated as most of the young women present nodded in agreement, and the room buzzed with relief that someone had finally brought up this issue, perhaps uppermost in many of their minds.” Abraham continued, “Unfortunately, none of the panel members had children, and not one could respond from personal experience.
“Inexplicably, the organizers of this event had not anticipated the need to address family-work balance while attempting to increase female MBA enrollment.”
The same might be said of most corporations. While people wring their hands about the dearth of female business leaders and bang the drum about women being excluded from networks, lacking proper mentoring, having limited opportunities for visibility, and not getting enough profit-and-loss experience, little or nothing is being done in most big companies to address the root of all these problems—that it is extremely difficult for a person to simultaneously raise children and pursue an executive career. Not only are these both fulltime jobs, they’re both all-consuming, mentally exhausting, life-time commitments.
For better or for worse, women still do the bulk of the child-rearing. “American mothers typically handle two-thirds of the childcare and housework,” according to Joan Williams, director of the American University Gender, Work & Family Project. And after a generation of trying to “have it all,” most women, I believe, have come to the conclusion that it’s just not possible.
Certainly, there are a handful of women who have accomplished this feat, but only with strong support in the child-rearing department. And despite all our societal advances, stay-at-home dads are still a tiny minority of the population.
So, how can business schools hope to attract more women or companies hope to have more women leaders without seriously acknowledging and addressing this fundamental obstacle to their advancement?
A handful of large companies, a May 6, 2004 Wall Street Journal article reports, are starting to develop programs to hold onto employees who have had to leave for family reasons. General Electric Company and Booz Allen Hamilton, for instance, offer contractual and part-time work to former female employees. And Deloitte is launching a program that will allow employees to take up to a five-year unpaid leave and have access to training and mentoring.
Clearly, Williams says, our work system in this society does not fit with our family system, a system that expects women to be the primary caregivers. And the tide won’ turn until a majority of big businesses begin to provide realistic options for their rising female stars, real flexibility in the career timetable that allows them to pace their advancement with their family commitments, and viable solutions to the issue of work-life balance.
Until then, it seems women will continue to abandon the corporate CEO track in droves. They’ll pursue other options that make sense for them and their families, like opening their own businesses in order to work on their own terms.
“Entrepreneurship frequently provides greater flexibility and richer work-life balance,” says Abraham of Accepted.com. “The ability to schedule my work times around my children’s school hours, limit hours initially, and ultimately increase them as my children (and business) grew was critical to me.”
Indeed, between 1997 and 2004, the growth rate in the number of women-owned firms was nearly twice that of all firms, according to the Center for Women’s Business Research—yet another indication of the competence of women, the competence that corporate America is missing out on.
For information on specific programs at the McCombs School, consult our contacts page. For media information, contact the Communications Director by phone at 512-471-3314 or by email at CommunicationsDirector@mccombs.utexas.edu.
