‘75 Class Joins the Upward Nobility

“Making the cut” is the most masculine of expressions, the language of sportswriters and football players. Little boys learn the phrase the first time they try out for a team. It was a natural for the men who run corporations to co-opt the term to talk about which aspiring executives will remain in the group headed for top management of the company and who will be left behind on the second-string team.

A certain exclusive group of women have made the phrase their own. Liz Gallese’s conversation is seasoned heavily with references to “making the cut.” She “made the cut” herself, she says, from a 13-year Wall Street Journal reporter to book author, and most of the women in the new book she has written have spent the last several years thinking about whether they will “make the cut.”

Harvard Graduates

Her book is about the first large group of women who began their careers with tickets to upward mobility in business--the 88 women who received MBA’s from the Harvard Business School in 1975. “Women Like Us” is the title, but there are a great many ways in which they are not like the rest of us. That Gallese and her subjects are so comfortable with a phrase right out of the men’s locker room illustrates one of her major conclusions: Corporations are run by men and to advance in that world, women have to be like those men, at least while they are at work.

Gallese chose the class of ’75 because, while women had been accepted as degree candidates at the Harvard Business School in 1963, this was the first class that was fully 10% women and because she felt that this class would reflect the attitudes of the current generation of women.

She asked every member of the class for a confidential interview, and of the 88, only four declined--a remarkable response to a survey of this type. “I think they were so relieved to find somebody who would do nothing but listen, (with whom) they could remove the happy mask and say how they really felt,” Gallese said. “They have to keep up a front with their classmates--one wouldn’t go to the five-year reunion because she wasn’t a vice president. They have to keep up a front with colleagues, even their families, and with superiors. They don’t have shrinks to tell.” In fact, about a third of the women in the class said they had been in therapy, but many therapists do not understand what these women go through because they don’t understand the corporate hierarchy, Gallese said. The women talked to Gallese “as one who understood the system and was a player.”

Six Are Chosen

After interviewing all of the women, Gallese chose six who, she believed, represented different issues for businesswomen at this level, and interviewed them in depth. Their backgrounds ranged from low-income, working-class families to legacies of upper-middle-class expectations. They included single women, divorced and married women with children. Some were successful in corporate jobs and some were not.

Very Successful Group

By the standards of other working women, the group as a whole was very successful with the majority earning from $30,000 to $60,000. Notably left out of their vocabularies was the word discrimination. At entry-level jobs in business, there is no discrimination, Gallese said. “Prior to 1970, we were looking at a group of women who couldn’t get into the entry level let alone move up. Anyone who made it had to be extraordinary. She was usually spotted and mentored. Since 1970, the whole game plan has changed. By law women are allowed into the entry level. This group with the ticket, the premiere credential, found it easy going.”

But then women hit a “ceiling,” the place between upper-middle management and senior management. “It’s not discrimination, it’s more subtle--men’s lack of comfort with women,” Gallese said. As women move up, “they are journeying into levels where they are increasingly not wanted. Men are happy to have women drudge away at the lower levels and do all the work. A lot of people want to keep women down. It is sweet to have all three--upward mobility, money and power. I think people don’t want to let women have that.”

Degree Not the Key

What makes the difference and which women make the cut? The Harvard degree is not the key, Gallese said. An MBA is not important to many men in business. The women needed it for credibility.

Nor are the women’s personal lives much at issue. Having a family probably helps women fit in, Gallese said, because the senior men have families. However, it is style on the job, fitting into the corporate mold, that makes the difference (at these levels technical expertise is taken for granted). One successful single woman had an unorthodox apartment and friends that she kept strictly separate from her work life, and she was the one Gallese judged most likely to “make the cut” and remain on the track to senior management.

This woman Gallese calls “Suzanne” in the book had been a pediatric nurse before going to Harvard for her MBA. Suzanne grew up in rural Texas. “It was clear to me that she is one of the most ambitious, impersonal, hard-driving types I ever met,” Gallese said. “She had no business nursing sick babies. If she’d been a man, this side of her (impersonal, ambitious) would have flowered earlier.”

Two women that Gallese judged would not make the cut included one who had “a high degree of individuality, extraordinary personal style. I think it gets in the way. Creative, individual people tend to leave the corporate structure. For the upward climb, you give up your individuality or you never had much to begin with.”

Another woman who had floundered through three jobs and probably would not rise was one “who didn’t fit in--and this is a fundamental point--because she was a very personal woman,” Gallese said. “While not married and having no children, she would like very much to have those things, and she brings that nurturing, personal side of herself to business projects.” This woman, for example, brought through her project to great success and couldn’t understand why she was not lauded for it. The subtle messages from the top of the company had been that this project was not a priority. “Most executives would understand the messages and react impersonally,” Gallese said.

The qualities that women must have to make it preclude the possibility that the women who achieve power are going to change things much for other women, Gallese said. These women may be where they are partly because of the women’s movement, but they are not going to forward that movement for women colleagues on the job, nor are they going to somehow “feminize” or “humanize” American business, she said. “They are not part of the women’s movement. That is not the name of the game in corporate America. The ones who get that kind of power think and act like men on the job. It is highly unlikely that (when they get in powerful positions) they will pull a switch and say, ‘Maybe we ought to humanize this corporation.’

“There is a temperamental type who fits the corporation very well--the impersonal type,” Gallese said. “This type can be a man or a woman. It’s just that men are brought up more this way. As companies change, more women will see what it takes to be impersonal. They are not going to suddenly turn humanist when they get there.”

In certain ways, the “women like us” are like other working women. The women in the book are an elite in terms of their brains and ambitions, but like other working women, they experience the conflict between work and family life. They are the first generation of women in business management who believed they could have it all--husband, children and a top job, Gallese said.

Having it all comes more easily to women of this elite, Gallese said. Unlike the teacher or secretary exhausted by the logistics of juggling job, child care and housework, “in the segment I looked at, professional/managerial women, child care and home care are eased because they can throw money at it.” One of the women she chose to highlight in the book, whom she calls “Holly,” is a director of materials management at the headquarters of a large company and a mother of three children under 5. Holly earns $70,000 a year, and her husband earns more. Where the wife is at this level, this is a group with a typical combined household income of $100,000 or more. “A $15,000-a-year housekeeper is insignificant,” Gallese said.

“The trade-off is lack of time.” More than lower-income women, these women must disrupt family life with late hours, business travel and willingness to transfer. And, “these women are mentally more apt to always be there (at work). And there are the emotional problems that result from sheer ambition.

In their marriages, “the ties that bind are not economic, but emotional need. The most common cause of divorce in this group is that emotional needs are not met.”

The group as a whole showed what could be the price of ambition or perhaps just that money and position do not insulate women from the common run of problems and attitudes women experience in the larger society. In the group of 84, there were 13 divorces, 35 women in therapy, four battered wives, three victims of anorexia or bulimia. Most of the women had not assimilated in business to the degree necessary to make it past the “ceiling” to the top, and fully two-fifths had “pulled back” from the ultimate push for success, describing themselves as ambivalent about their careers.