Black Panel Warns of Corporate Biases : 3 Women Executives Tell UCI Students to Expect Sexism and Racism in Business
The three successful executive women had one basic warning for their audience of UC Irvine students: Expect sexism and racism at all levels in the corporate structure.
“Black women are still the most marginal group in the work force” in terms of numbers, pay and opportunities for advancement, said Rita Walters, 55, president of the Los Angeles Board of Education.
Walters shared the platform in a panel discussion at UCI last week with Joyce Owens-Smith, president of the Orange County Urban League, and Dorcas Eaves-Hill, an attending surgeon at UCI Medical Center. The struggle facing black women entering the business world today was the topic of the event sponsored by Ms. Ebony, a campus support group for black women, as part of UCI’s observance of Black History Month.
Walters offered an example of prejudice at the corporate level.
“A few years ago, as a member of the California State Teachers Retirement Board,” she said, “I, along with four other board members, visited financial managers in the United States. We were searching for companies that could most effectively manage and invest the Teachers Retirement Fund’s $15 million.
“We also always asked the questions: ‘Do you have women in the firm? Do you have minorities in the firm?’
“When we asked a CEO (chief executive officer) introducing us to the staff at a highly reputable Philadelphia financial firm those questions, he pointed to two women, one Anglo and one black, and said, ‘Well, here’s these two fine young women. They’re in our training program. They came to us straight out of college and started at the reception desk--a fine opportunity. They learn the business from the ground up.’
“So one of the women with us said, ‘And do those same fine opportunities extend to the men in your company? Do they also start at the reception desk?’
“He was shocked at the suggestion. And those are the kinds of things that you are going to face,” Walters cautioned, smiling wryly at her audience.
Owens-Smith, 36, one of the few women in the executive ranks of the 90% male-dominated National Urban League, also has “war” stories of her climb up the corporate ladder. As a planner for the Human Resources Department in Portland, Ore., six years ago, the Anaheim resident was the only woman and the only black in the department. “The people with whom I was interacting, mainly supervisors and upper managers, didn’t quite know what to do with me--those were their words, not mine.
“That is one of the main problems black women have,” she stressed. “They tend to get left out, not always because of hostility or because people try to exclude them, but because people don’t know how to involve them.”
So women have to involve themselves, Owens-Smith said.
Later, as community services director for the Urban League in Portland, Owens-Smith discovered additional obstacles. “Since the other black females in the organization were clerical staff, when socializing I found myself spending time with them as opposed to the managers.” So she was unaware of or excluded from whatever decisions were made informally, she said.
As vice president of the Portland Urban League, Owens-Smith had two men in their 40s reporting to her. “I had enormous problems with what they considered minor things. For example, I was introduced to a company representative as, ‘This pretty little girl.’ Or they would say they didn’t want to bother me with anything, so I had no idea of what was going on.”
Now, six years after beginning her executive climb, Owens-Smith doesn’t feel that attitudes in the workplace have changed, she said. “My needs for recognition have changed and (so have) the ways that I go about asking for recognition. If I want to be included, then I make a point of being included.”
Owens-Smith also stressed that the way she was treated didn’t change when she went from working in a predominantly white male business to the Urban League, which is largely black. “You will get into situations where you will expect to be accepted and your opinions given weight because you are in a predominantly black group,” she told the audience, “but that is not how it is. What I was experiencing had nothing to do with color; it was because I was female.”
Walters, a member of the Los Angeles Board of Education since 1979, had a similar observation concerning black women in today’s political arena. “Men with whom I was involved in the ‘60s, in the great struggle, are suddenly saying in the late ‘70s and ‘80s that we have enough black female elected officials--that it’s a man’s job.”
Eaves-Hill, 39, an attending surgeon at Veterans Administration Medical Center in Long Beach as well as UCI Medical Center, expressed concern over the lack of black women in medicine.
She believes one of the basic problems facing women in medicine is the lack of networking. “This is probably the problem in most of the businesses where women are concerned,” she said. “Women refuse to refer to women; they will refer to a man before they will go to a woman, even when women are as qualified if not more so than the men. What I would hope to see emerging within the latter part of the 1980s and into the 1990s is a good network system.”
Owens-Smith agreed. “I think that creating or finding opportunities for yourselves to interact with professional women, black and otherwise, can add to your strengths.
“For a woman trying to raise children on her own and trying to achieve something,” she added, “I think a support network is extremely important and necessary.”
Eaves-Hill, Owens-Smith and Walters are black, single mothers, representing one of the bleaker realities facing today’s black female community: Two-thirds of black women age 15 and older are single, divorced, widowed or separated, according to the 1980 U.S. Census, and a large number of these women are single parents.
Several audience members asked the three panelists if being a single, working parent had interfered with their effectiveness as mothers.
Owens-Smith, who has two teen-agers, said that had not happened in her case. “At 21--soon to be divorced and with no high school education--I started back to school. When I started my BA, my two children were 7 and 3. My daughter literally went through my BA with me because I couldn’t afford day care for her.
“I think it’s ideal to have the education first and then the children. But black women usually have not had the luxury of being able to do it the ideal way.”
Owens-Smith told the audience that managerial techniques helped her in dealing with her children. “I had to schedule them just like I scheduled other meetings because I had school and work. They knew there were certain times that were theirs. So if I scheduled a Saturday morning from 9 to noon as my son’s time, then it was his.
“It has helped. I can now see the results of that--my children do not expect all of my time. They also recognize and accept when my time is mine.”
Eaves-Hill, who has a 15-year-old daughter, said: “My daughter was born in my second year of undergraduate school, so when I went to medical school she was on my hip or sitting down in front of the classroom while I took notes in class.
“When I came to California (from Boston), she was just going into first grade. I had to decide that year whether I really wanted to do my residency in surgery, which has always been my first love. It would take five years of demanding time, but I decided to make the sacrifice. It can be done. It’s just your attitude.”
Before Walters was divorced, she was able to stay home with her three children, she said. “But I see similarities between myself and the other two ladies,” she added. “I used to take my children to civil rights meetings. I was one of these activist parents in the board of education and I would take the three of them with me down to the board. They learned to sit quietly and read or color. . . .
“They grew up going on marches with me and helping in the precincts alongside me. They developed a public behavior and presence, understanding that there were things out there more important than wanting to sit home and play in the backyard . . . that there was a time when you had to devote yourself to a greater goal.”
The three womenb list education as the top priority--for other black women, themselves and their children.
“Don’t let fear of failure keep you from getting that education,” Eaves-Hill urged the audience.
Walters, who returned to college at 52 to earn a master’s in business administration from UCLA, also stressed the importance of higher education. “I wanted to do something for me. Even if I never do a thing, it’s mine, and no one can take it away from me.”
All three women expressed a strong desire to see their children achieve higher education, to rise above the statistics. “The thing I told my children is ‘don’t make your life harder, do it right,’ ” Walters said. “My daughter was going to college--that was understood. I told her, ‘The other things can come after. I don’t care if you get married--just get married the day after you graduate.’ ”
Eaves-Hill nodded in agreement. “I told my daughter she will go to college; where she chooses to go is up to her, but she will go. It’s hard enough now to raise a family in a single-parent household, (even) with the education I have. You’re talking about a lot of years to be able to provide for a decent living to take care of your responsibilities. You can’t do it scrubbing somebody’s floors.”
