Proud Member of The Moms Clean Air Force
Print This Post
Dec
18
I posted this on Facebook on December 12:
Jill is pondering super obnoxious question about the opposite sex, power & money hunger, and sinking industries.
This arrived in my inbox this morning:
Bad Corporate News Finds Few Women on Board
Date: 12/18/08
By Saabira Chaudhuri
WeNews correspondent
The outpouring of bad U.S. corporate news has produced a news gallery of mainly male faces. There’s a matching shortage of women on corporate boards, although Rupert Murdoch did tap opera singer Natalie Bancroft for News Corporation last year.
The obnoxious question I wanted to ask six days ago was: Anyone notice how all the allegations of malfeasance, poor management, general failure to get with it and ethical violations are primarily against wealthy or trying to be wealthy white men in nice suits?
More from the Women’s eNews article:
Women’s presence on the corporate boards of the Fortune 500–an annual ranking by the magazine of the country’s leading companies–inched up in the first four years of this decade.
But over the past three years that progress stagnated, with the composition of women in those influential and high-status posts reaching 14 percent and apparently refusing to budge, according to surveys conducted by Catalyst, the New York nonprofit research organization that focuses on women in business.
“The numbers are very low, but what I think is even more significant is that the increases have become trifling,” says Sheila Wellington, clinical professor of management at New York University’s Stern School of Business, and former president of Catalyst.
Wellington says that, as in the early 1990s, many companies began taking the view that “women’s advancement is a done deal; it’s taken care of.”
She points to the danger of tokenism. Many companies, she says, consider their boards diverse when they appoint a woman or two. For that reason it’s important to continue disseminating hard data about representation.
Wellington, who teaches a class on women in business leadership, also says the low level of women on boards reflects a general defection of women from the corporate work force, leaving far fewer at senior levels.
The tandem issue is: does it make a difference when women run or help run a corporate board? Is their absence from the boards of bad actors enough to say that women won’t or don’t err?
I haven’t done a search on that, though I’m sure that there is some information out there on that question and hopefully I’ll be able to take a few minutes to find some of it. But what would be even more probing to look at is the myth that women become or take on behaviors and attitudes similar to those of men behaving badly in order to compete, when they are on the field to compete. I’d like to know more about the women who are on the corporate boards of the men behaving badly boards and understand what if anything they did to encourage or impinge the decisions that led to their companies’ foibles.
Some possible research:
Women on Corporate Boards of Directors: a compendium of case studies, 2008
Women on Corporate Business Boards Make Good Sense: May 2003
And, from a May 2008 white paper by Sharon Allen, Chairman of the Board, Deloitte: The ABCs of Board Room Dynamics – Attiude, Behavior, Candor:
Catalyst Inc. found that Fortune 500 companies with the highest representation of women board members attained greater financial performance, on average, than those with the lowest representation of women board members — and the differences weren’t just significant. They were stunning. Returns were 42 percent higher on sales, 53 percent higher on equity, and 66 percent higher on invested capital.
Furthermore, the average returns at companies with three or more women on their boards were even higher — an additional 30 percent or more on sales and equity and an additional 70 percent on invested capital.
Depending on how you look at the numbers, however, it’s fair to ask if it’s the presence of women on boards that makes successful companies better — or, if it’s the fact that they are good companies to begin with and that’s why they added women to their boards. But with numbers like those discovered by Catalyst, why spend too much time debating which answer is right?
A rich area for research, if only we can get enough women on the boards to make the research statistically significant.
By Jill Miller Zimon at 8:48 am December 18th, 2008 in Business, Ethics, Gender, leadership, Sexism, Women
Comments
2 Responses to “Where the women aren’t: corporate boards behaving badly”
Voted into Top 25 Political Mom Blogs
Now on sale-WLST essay included!
Posts About Pepper Pike City Council2010 WE Magazine 101 Women Bloggers to Watch
Category Specific RSS
Pepper Pike Cleveland+ Politics Women Ohio Elections Law Jewish
So what about Carly Fiorina’s totally embarrassingly bad tenure at HP?
Jill, this is an excellent post that raises great questions. I’d like to include it in recommended reading for my upcoming class in Women, Power, and Leadership. However,though the link works, the print function does not. is that fixable so I can print a copy?
Thanks for your always interesting writing,
Gloria