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Working Women Have Come a Long Way
I own a tattered blue sweatshirt that is one of my favorite items of clothing. In bright gold letters, the shirt says, âYouâve come a long way Lublin.â It reminds me that I was among the women who helped crack the glass ceiling at the Wall Street Journal.
Colleagues gave me the sweatshirt as a farewell gift in 1987 when I entered the ranks of management. I left the Journalâs Washington, D.C., office, where I had worked as a reporter covering health care, labor unions, housing, and urban affairs. I became second in command to Kathryn Christensen, chief of the Journalâs important London bureau. Ours was the first Journal bureau led solely by women. Kathryn already had broken the gender barrier as the paperâs first female bureau chief in 1982, running the Boston office.
But my small step pales beside the trailblazing strides taken by the fifty-two high-level corporate executives I interviewed for this book. More than half of the thirty-four who currently or previously led a public company were its first female chief executive. Several repeated the feat at their next employer.
Statistically, the status of women in corporate America at all levels has improved dramatically over the years. The ranks of women heading Americaâs biggest businesses hit a record in October 2014, when twenty-six steered such companies. Eight of those experienced CEOs talked to me about their strategies for career success.
That high point for women at the top of management came forty-two years after Katharine Graham, leader of Washington Post Co., punctured the roster of men commanding Fortune 500 firms in 1972. Between 1972 and 2001, no more than four women a year had been members of this exclusive club.1
In 2014, women represented nearly 39 percent of U.S. managers, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Thirty-five years earlier, they held only 25 percent of manager and administrator jobs.
When women reach the executive suite, businesses and their investors reap tangible and measurable rewards. Call it the diversity dividend.
The eighty women who steered Fortune 1000 concerns between 2002 and 2014 delivered shareholder returns, a measure of stock price changes and reinvested dividends, that were three times better than the Standard & Poorâs 500 Index, concluded a 2015 simulation by Quantopian, a Boston research firm that provides an investment trading platform.2
Businesses with the most gender-diverse leadership were also 15 percent more likely to generate earnings before interest and tax that outpaced their industry, according to a 2014 study of 366 public companies in six countries by McKinsey & Co. The management consultancy tracked women and people of color in both senior management and boardrooms. Women make up about 16 percent of executive teams at the U.S. companies analyzed. Those businesses scored a financial payoff from gender diversity only when âwomen constitute at least 22 percent of a senior executive team,â McKinsey researchers concluded.3
A study released in 2016 covering 21,980 public companies in 91 countries found the same strong connection between the presence of female corporate leaders and firmsâ increased profitability. And a similar McKinsey report in 2007 uncovered what it described as a positive link âbetween corporate performance and elevated presence of women in the workplace in several Western European countries.â4
In the United States, the overall economy has benefited from fewer obstacles to women in the workplace. A significant chunk of the growth in worker productivity between 1960 and 2008 resulted from the removal of barriers that kept many white women from realizing their economic potential, economists at Stanford University and the University of Chicago estimate.5
Because female pioneers paved the way, businesswomen now standing on their shoulders are having a meaningful impact on management practices. Companies increasingly prefer leaders who can be empathetic and work collaboratively because the businesses compete in an increasingly complex, stressful, and diverse global economy. Such qualities are more common in women, management experts and executive recruiters say.
Female managers are also considered stronger than male ones in terms of âflexibility and adaptability to change or hardship, and teamwork and cooperation,â said a 2014 global study by Mercer, another consulting firm that tracks employment issues.
At workplaces that highly value womenâs unique strengths, âthere tends also to be higher female representation at the higher levels,â added the Mercer study, which examined workforce data covering 1.7 million employees in twenty-eight countries.6
A Different Work World Greeted Me
The contemporary workplace barely resembles the one I entered during the 1970s.
In the years following World War II, less than a third of U.S. women held jobs or sought work outside the home. That was partly because many women who had held such jobs during the war faced social pressure to relinquish them to returning soldiers. The picture for women brightened during the 1960s; their participation in the labor force exceeded 40 percent in 1966, a postwar high.
The 1960s saw the publication of The Feminine Mystique, a groundbreaking book by Betty Friedan that launched the modern womenâs movement. Perhaps even more important, the book appeared soon after the 1960 introduction of the birth control pill. Both spurred a surge in female college graduates and the expanded presence of women in professional and business roles.
Landmark federal legislation, such as the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, also had an extensive impact on womenâs fortunes in the workplace. Title VII outlawed sex discrimination in hiring, promotion, and compensation.
But working women continued to confront sexism and other obstacles. They usually lacked corporate mentoring programs, paid maternity leaves, high-level female bosses, or even a perquisite as simple as office lactation rooms, where new mothers can pump breast milk privately.
A significant portion of the 152 U.S. newspaperwomen I surveyed for my 1971 masterâs degree thesis on sex discrimination against female journalists perceived bias in their hiring, job status, and prospects for promotion. Nearly half, for instance, said that they lacked the same chance to be promoted as a similarly qualified newspaperman.
I also uncovered numerous newsroom jobs still linked to traditional sex roles. Jobs generally off-limits to women included reporters who worked nights, sports reporters, crime reporters, photographers, editorial columnists, and senior management.7 Newspaperwomen in those days typically got assigned to so-called womenâs pages, covering food, fashion, home furnishings, families, and parties.
I joined a workforce with few female sports announcers, truck drivers, or construction workers. Newspapersâ help-wanted ads were segregated by gender. If you wanted the highest-paying jobs, you looked under âHelp Wanted: Men.â It took several years before court rulings and additional legislation started to turn the tide.
When I arrived at the Wall Street Journal, the paper employed 11 women on its 150-person reporting and editing staff. The highest ranked woman held the unglamorous position of copy editor in New York.
As the sole female reporter in the Journalâs San Francisco bureau, I sat in an open newsroom surrounded by several men with âgirlieâ calendars mounted above their desks. To retaliate, I put up a calendar with splashy photos of handsome male nudes. My calendar quickly disappeared. I suspected that one of the guys in my new office took it.8
On out-of-town reporting trips, I often had trouble checking into a hotel if I lined up behind a male guest at the reception area. Check-in clerks routinely assumed I was the manâs wife!
Other women traveling for work fared far worse. For example, an investment banker for a major New York bank during the 1970s visited distant clients at least one week every month. She flew first class, dressed in a gray suit, a blouse with a bow, and high heels. Prior to one takeoff in New York, she was stowing her bag in the overhead compartment when a male passenger tried to hand her his coat.
âI want you to hang it up,â the man insisted. âPlease?â
She didnât respond. The man finally understood why. âYouâre not a stewardess, are you?â he asked.
The woman explained that she was a fellow passenger, not a member of the flight staff.
âWell, you looked like a person in authority,â the man replied.
During the 1980s, certain sectors of the economy, notably retailers, makers of consumer goods, and the media, accelerated their progress toward greater gender balance in the workforce, and their efforts opened the executive suite to more women in the years ahead.
Gannett Co., a chain of newspapers and TV stations, offered veteran banker Gracia Martore the job of assistant treasurer in 1985. But she closely scrutinized its management team before accepting. âCathie Black was running USA Today,â Martore recalled. âThere were other women who were clearly in key operational roles. So I said, âWow, it looks like they are not just putting women in a jar.ââ In her mind, she continued, âthose people had the opportunity to rise in the organization.â
Gannett turned out to be a smart move for Martore. She ascended to CEO of the media powerhouse in 2011 and by spring of 2015, women comprised about 29 percent of the companyâs senior leadership. When Gannett split into two businesses that June, Martore took charge of TEGNA Inc., the separate broadcasting and d...
