Quarterly Journal on Management
From the publishers of THE HINDU BUSINESS LINE
Vol. 2 :: Iss. 4 :: November 1999
Beyond the wall
On burning issues and the latest trends
Rasheeda Bhagat
GLASS ceiling, sexual harassment, mommy track, double bind.. these are some of the words and phrases which are freely dropped when the talk is about women managers. Women in management... put these three words on the search engine Google on the Net and you'll be swamped with 11,280 results.
The debate on women managers is no longer confined to the glass ceiling or their ability to keep long working hours due to family pressures. It has gone beyond that. Women have made it to top managerial posts all over the world. Forcing a magazine like Fortune for the first time last year to evaluate and rank America's 50 most powerful women. It repeated the exercise this year too, publishing the results in its October 25 issue. Hewlett-Packard's new CEO and president, Carly Fiorina, heads the list for the second time. At 45, she is the first female CEO of one of America's largest corporations. For the power she wields, the responsibility she takes on, the challenges she faces, the innovations she brings to the workplace and the work she puts in, her pay packet is close to a whopping US$100 million!
Good enough, you find, for her husband to hang up his boots at AT&T, where he had met her 16 years ago. "Last year the couple decided that life is too short - and too chaotic - for dual careers." And so he and not she quit his job. And there are a couple of other husbands in the Fortune Top 50 list, who have given up their careers to either manage their wives' careers or take care of the home and the kids.
Enough evidence to show that women managers have arrived. What makes a woman manager tick? Does she have the required leadership qualities? Communication skills? Are they good listeners? What about their negotiating skills which are so crucial in any enterprise? Can they motivate their colleagues and resolve conflicts without creating earthquakes or shedding blood?
Obviously these are traits which cut across gender, and if given proper training, the right work environment, support systems at home if they have a family, and most of all, a fair opportunity to compete, women managers have shown that they can deliver, and excel too. Right at the very top.
To the level of an Indira Gandhi or a Margaret Thatcher. To find out what Thatcher brought to her job, let us look at what Dame Sheila Masters, whose credentials are as impressive - a Partner at KPMG, President of the UK Institute of Chartered Accountants, and a non-executive Director of the Court of the Bank of England - has to say about the former British prime minister.
Describing Thatcher as her role model, she says in the Financial Times, "What I admire about her is that she came through on sheer ability, guts, and political tenacity. She held on to power and ruled innovatively. Her certainty was one of her great qualities; she was always convinced of what she was doing. She never relied on her feminity, but she always looked immaculate. Even if you didn't like her style, she never seemed to have bad hair days like the rest of us".
Masters then goes on to describe her only meeting with Thatcher "where she frightened the life out of me... She was very aggressive. It was so terrible a meeting we all had to go to the pub afterwards, but she completely energised us."
What about Masters herself.. what kind of a manager is she? In her own words, she has a fierce reputation and cannot "tolerate fools... I have a huge workload, so I'm very ruthless with my time. I'm driven by the need for results and I'm a perfectionist, so I can't stand people prepared to work below their ability".
So what, one may well ask, these are not necessarily the traits of a woman manager. They could belong to any good and successful manager, and gender should have nothing to do with it. Precisely. Management, good management, is no longer the exclusive preserve of the male of the species. Though it used to be. Once upon a time.
And hence, the glass ceiling or the invisible and artificial barriers created by attitudinal and organisational prejudices, which are often put up to prevent women from reaching top management positions. The term itself was coined in the US in the 1970s, and despite the Masters of this world shattering it to reach where they are today, more and more women find themselves struggling to get over this invisible barrier in offices and enterprises across nations and cultures.
In one survey conducted on the glass ceiling by the popular 'Ask Annie' column of Fortune magazine, one junior woman manager wrote, "Is there a glass ceiling in my company? You bet, and my boss insists it is my job to keep it clean and shiny! No wonder so many women start their own businesses".
Yet another woman, a former stockbroker says, "the only female and the highest producer in my office" endured blatant discrimination from her manager and co-workers. After sending her manager on many a free trip for her outstanding performance, she finally got smart, resigned and "filtered over US$100 millions out of my office to other firms where I networked and made other friends. Talk about ultimate revenge.. it felt great. I then joined a woman's company where the only glass ceiling that exists is in my own head. Yes, we do have a choice."
But while an overwhelming number of women executives and managers have talked about the hampering of their career advancement by the glass ceiling there are senior women managers who have denied its very existence. Reena Ramachandran, Chairman and Managing Director of the public sector Hindustan Organic Chemicals, who has had several stints in the public sector in India, says she was never confronted by a glass ceiling. "If there was a glass ceiling I should have felt it.. but I never felt any glass ceiling," she told Praxis in an interview.
Fiorina is another woman manager who had to take a lot of flak, especially from women, for saying, after she had got the coveted title of CEO at Hewlett-Packard, "I hope we're at a point that everyone has figured out that there is not a glass ceiling". Even after she had raised a storm over this statement, she stuck to her opinion. "Sure, there are barriers at companies that haven't woken up to competition. But at companies competing hard to win every day, there is not a glass ceiling."
But then Fiorina is different. Obviously she has gone beyond the gender divide in achieving. Small wonder then that she does not want to be a role model for women. She wants to be more than that. A role model for both women and men. Here's what the Fortune article says about her. "In her view, power flows to men and women alike who think of themselves as self-directed free agents."
Self directed... self motivated. These are among the crucial qualities which make a woman manager tick. Like Sulajja Motwani, the Joint Managaing Director of the Kinetic group, who likes to set goals for herself, whether it is in the number of jogging rounds she does in her morning workout, or the number of Kinetic vehicles the company sells during a given year.
But there are instances where all these qualities - ambition, motivation, long hours, dedication and excellence - are just not sufficient to see the woman through the glass ceiling. An International Labour Organisation study conducted in December 1997 on 'Women's progress in workforce' found that while women had made substantial progress in closing the gender gap in managerial and professional jobs, most female managers worldwide were still barred from the top positions, in both the private and public sectors and the government.
This study found that the hurdles that women aspiring to management jobs have to overcome can be "so formidable that they sometimes abandon efforts to make it to the top of large firms. Such women often take their energy and knowhow to smaller and more flexible companies, or set up their own businesses. In the United States a third of small and medium-sized companies are now run by women", says the report.
Many women on the 'mommy track' in the developed countries opt to take part-time or flexitime jobs. Others opt for shared jobs - two women doing the work of one and dividing the salary. But in countries such as India, where support services are still available within the home, the "mommy track" concept is yet to take off. Many women might be ready for it; but the employers are not.
There are no authentic figures available of women managers in India. But there is ample evidence to show that the scene is changing in India too, as it is in the rest of the world. The participation of 15 women executives at the southern region's contest for young managers conducted by the All-India Management Association in Bangalore in June exemplifies the transition.
But let's examine a source which does have firm statistics. Like a 1998 Fortune 500 survey, which found that while women hold 40 per cent of all management positions in America, (in Europe the figure is between 20 and 30 per cent), American women held only 11 per cent of board seats in the top 500 companies. In Britain, women held only five per cent of board seats in the top 200 companies.
Says the Fortune article, "Despite China's two decades of formal commitment to sexual equality, there are no female business leaders of note. In Japan, the rigidity of the corporate culture keeps women out of the executive suite. The famed salaryman style can only exist with a full-time homemaker for support".
As for attitudes of the rest of the workforce, they remain much the same all over the world. When Sari Baldauf took her first senior management position at Nokia, and she visited the company's German operations, she found workers looking at her and saying: 'Fine, the secretary has come. Where is the boss?'
But women all over the world are battling against such attitudes and emerging victorious. Even in a country such as Japan where, at the workplace, women in junior management positions are expected to serve tea, a research survey conducted in July 1999 found that, for the first time ever, the number of female company presidents had crossed the 60,000 mark. But despite this increase, women CEOs in Japan are still very rare. Women headed 60,593 firms in June 1999, just 5 per cent of the country's 1.14 million companies.
But the survey established that women find it nearly impossible to rise to the top of larger and well established Japanese corporations, while having an easier time making gains in many smaller companies.
"Unlike female leaders on the career track in western nations, a majority of Japanese women are heading family-type firms," a spokesman of the Teikoku Data Bank, Japan's largest credit research agency, said. Despite the advance, women still face major hurdles when trying to move up the Japanese corporate ladder. Many companies push women to quit when they marry or when they reach their mid-30s, said the report.
Discrimination against women in business cuts across international boundaries. Take the case of Renata McGriff, who while raising money for her New York-based Internet start-up, did what any self-respecting entrepreneur does. She made the rounds of venture capital firms. But nobody took her seriously as she lacked business school training, and experience in running a company.
A Reuters report quoted her saying, "I went to a venture capital firm in New York that's well known, and they told me I should start a restaurant because I have such a good personality. When I got to the elevator, I cried. I was so broken."
Ultimately, McGriff used her savings and raised loans from family and friends to start Times Square Media and launched TimesSquare2000 (http://www.timessquare2000.com). Despite the venture capital firms' no-confidence vote, McGriff's had no problem signing up partners. But the underlying tragedy of her success is that despite Internet companies attracting huge venture capital, women-owned businesses such as hers continue to get the wrong end of the stick from venture capital firms.
Move from venture capital to fishing and you find that discrimination against women takes various forms across careers. Like a royal decree handed down by King Jaime I, 750 years ago which gave exclusive fishing rights to men in the Spanish fishing village of El Palmar. After a five year period of judicial appeals and counter appeals, a group of women made history a couple of months ago when the Mayor, a woman of course - Rita Barbera - allowed them fishing rights.
But women are doing more than casting fishing nets. They are breaking rules and smashing barriers. And this is best demonstrated by an analysis of Fortune's Power 50 which found women managers storming the hitherto male bastion of finance and technology. More than half of the group turned out to be technology and finance wizards.
They include Joy Covey (No. 28 on the list), the finance-chief- cum-strategist at Amazon.com; marketer Jan Brandt (No. 39), "who built America Online into cyberspace's No. 1 brand"; and Dawn Lepore (No. 36), "the tech wizard behind the transformation of a bricks-and-mortar brokerage, Charles Schwab, into the category killer of online stock trading", says the magazine's cover story.
Other women who are flexing the financial muscle at top companies include the "straight talking and audacious" Debby Hopkins (No. 6), the new Chief Financial Officer (CFO) at Boeing and Dina Dublon who became the CFO of Chase Manhattan. "Now with Heidi Miller (No. 2) at Citigroup, two of the three largest US banks have female finance chiefs. At Barclays Global Investors, Patricia Dunn (No. 11) controls $675 billion in assets". Interestingly enough, a high powered career in management does not always require specialisation and qualifications from a B- school. In the Fortune list, only one out of three women had MBAs, and two had dropped out of high school! Flexibility is important, and, says the article, "many of these women inherited that trait from their mothers and developed it early on".
The survey also found that "the generalists win. In this volatile economy, the right stuff - for men and women - is versatility, not functional expertise or pedigree. Debbie Hopkins arrived at Boeing with neither an MBA nor any work experience in the aircraft industry. But her biggest asset was an ability to force change in change-resistant companies".
Combining kids and work is really tough, and one of the women is quoted as saying that half her friends from the Princeton and Harvard B-Schools where she picked up her MBAs, have quit the business world to become full time wives and mothers.
But times are changing. As Dame Masters said in the FT article, "Opting for a serious career, I didn't particularly want children. It would have been very difficult then, though now it's possible for women to have both".
Such positive sentiment gives the woman the best of options... to be a warm and caring family woman at home and the efficient and no-nonsense boss in the office.