THE
BARNARD SUMMIT: WOMEN, LEADERSHIP AND THE FUTURE
The
Future of Women in Business Panel, October 26,
2001
The
guidance counselor at her high school told Deborah
Rosado Shaw that she should settle for a community
college. In fact, the counselor was so adamant,
she refused to send off any transcripts to four-year
colleges. So Shaw trooped down to the board
of education office herself to get those transcripts
out. A native of Spanish Harlem, Shaw wasn't
going to let anybody else's attitude get in
her way.
Her persistence paid off. Shaw got into Wellesley
College and ended up transferring to Barnard
College, the independent college for women in
New York City affiliated with Columbia University.
A few years later, still a course shy of graduating,
she was running her own company. Now Shaw heads
Umbrellas Plus, a multimillion dollar manufacturer
of outdoor furniture and fashion accessories
that supplies Wal-Mart, Costco and Toys-R-Us.
She founded Dream Big Enterprises, a company
that trains entrepreneurs, and was recently
named Businesswoman of the Year by the National
Hispanic Business Group.
"Every win along the way just became that
much more delicious," she said in
October. "It revealed so much more of life
that I needed to continue to go down that path. "
Shaw told her story as part of a panel discussion,
"The Future of Women in Business, "
held at Barnard in October, and part of the
Barnard Summit: Women, Leadership and the Future.
The Summit, hosted by Barnard President Judith
Shapiro drew more than 1,000 people to the College's
campus on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Shaw
ascribes her success to her luck, her pluck
and her ability to seize control of her environment
and make it work for her. For as much as women
in this country are the envy of their counterparts
the world over, they are still quite clearly
operating in a man's world.
So Shaw and the four other members of the panel
advised up-and-coming businesswomen not to settle
for an environment if it wasn't working for
them. That means that if you run into an old
boys' network, create an old girls' network
in return. Seek out companies that will let
you thrive and leave companies that won't. Look
for sympathetic superiors to show you the unwritten
rules of the workplace. And, in those cases
when you can't fit your life into the corporate
mold, follow the millions of other women who
have set up shop on their own.
You
Go, Girl
The
first step, though, starts with oneself. Society
may accept working moms. But moms who want the
corner office are another matter, said Francene
S. Rodgers, the CEO of the Boston-area consulting
firm WFD. It is hard for ambitious women not
to feel guilty about it, Rodgers says, but there's
nothing wrong with wanting it all.
"Most of the time when people see women
who are successful in business, they tell us
to slow down. There's no countervailing person
to tell us, maybe even today, 'You go, girl,'"
Rodgers said. "A lot of our internal conversations
are about coming to terms with wanting to be
successful and wanting to have a full life. "
Yet it is possible to be a mother and an executive,
and to be good at both. At a recent gathering
in Prague of women executives from some of the
country's largest companies, a survey showed
that 74 percent had children, and 69 percent
had children under 13, said Ellen Galinsky,
president of the nonprofit Families and Work
Institute based in New York City. A large proportion
of them were the top earner in the household,
according to her survey.
Nor does research show that children of working
mothers turn out any differently than children
of stay-at-home moms, Galinsky said. A job is
only detrimental, she said, if the mother returns
home so burnt out that she cannot pay attention
to her children. Instead, mothers need to make
sure they are focusing on their kids when they
do see them.
"When I talked to kids about what they
would most remember about this time in their
lives, most said the small rituals and traditions
that said they were a family, " Galinsky
said. "What's really important is that
you care about your kids, that you listen to
them, and that you do fun things, rituals and
traditions. "
That much said, businesswomen may need more
than men to take time off work to tend to their
children. But companies are realizing that they
need to give employees more power to set their
own schedules. "They need to know how important
it is to leave at the end of the day to watch
your son or daughter play soccer and return
to work and stay until 9 at night, " said
V. Sue Molina, partner and national director
of the retention and advancement of women program
at Deloitte & Touche. "It's a huge
motivator and will retain people when they think
they have that control over their work life. "
Old
Girls' Club
There
is still old-fashioned discrimination in the
workplace, but employers have good reason to
become a place where women want to work. And
if it isn't, the woman should take action--or
leave, Rodgers said. "It is the job of
everybody who works not to be a victim and to
speak up in cases where they feel unwelcome
or disrespected, " she said. And that starts
before you even walk in the door, when job candidates
are researching a prospective employer."
If you don't ask questions, if you don't make
sure you choose a place where you will thrive, "
Rodgers said, "then shame on us. "
Recent graduates just entering the workforce
may not notice any bias at all. The type of
male clubbiness that keeps women out of the
loop--and off the promotion ladder--becomes
more apparent the higher up in an organization
one goes, according to Rodgers. "When I
ask this of men, they often say, 'Old boys'
network? I'm not in one,' because they do not
experience it as such. They do not believe they
are leaving women out. The woman is just not
in the room when the big decisions are getting
made and they just don't notice. "
The lack of female superiors who can act as
mentors perpetuates the problem. "From
my personal experience one of the things I was
naive about was who my stakeholders were and
who I should align myself with in order to be
successful, " said Molina, the Deloitte
& Touche consultant. "You need someone
ahead of you who is going to be your champion,
someone telling you what you need to do, what
those unwritten rules are in making sure you'll
get promoted.
Janet Tiebout Hanson's response to the lack
of a network was to build her own. Several years
ago, the former Goldman Sachs & Co. manager
founded 85 Broads, an organization named after
the address for the investment bank's New York
headquarters. Using the Internet, Hanson's organization
links 1,300 present and former women Goldman
employees and provides mentors to aspiring bankers.
"We desperately need to hear from women
one to five years out ahead of us and to get
feedback from the field before we make mistakes
that are going to cost us our careers, "
says Hanson, whose 11-year career at Goldman
made her the firm's first female sales manager.
"One of the things that crushes me is to
see young women's careers derailed in their
20s. "
Virtues of Necessities
Sometimes,
corporate life is not worth the trade-offs,
and notably three out of the five panelists
at Barnard have started their own enterprises
and become their own bosses. Hanson, who founded
Milestone Capital Management in 1994, an asset
management business, discovered that her former
male colleagues were actually nicer to her when
she was no longer vying for the same promotions
as they were. The number of women leaving corporate
life to start their own companies is leading
to looser workplace schedules. "Sixteen
hundred women leave corporate America every
day to become entrepreneurs, and companies are
extremely concerned about this, " Shaw
said. "The No. 1 reason why women leave
is because they want more control over their
time. "
But the panelists also said women's trajectories
in the workplace are not all uphill. The very
scarcity of CEOs like Shaw among wholesalers--
a woman, Latina and a mother--makes her stand
out in a world of men.
"I'm probably in one of the most testosterone
driven businesses there is. Often I'm in a room
with 600 men and only 12 to 13 women. That's
actually a competitive advantage for me and
it's also a lot of fun, " Shaw said. "Often
I'm invited to the table because they want to
see who is the bearded lady.
'Who is this person anyways?'"
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