Women’s Advancement Study Disputed

In a hotly disputed study, the nation’s biggest executive recruiting firm declared Thursday that barriers to women’s advancement in the workplace have fallen to the point where “there isn’t any job that’s closed to women today.”

The study, by Korn/Ferry International, comes nearly seven months after the U.S. Labor Department suggested that executive recruiters help foster a “glass ceiling” in corporate life that prevents women and minorities from landing top-level jobs.

But officials at Korn/Ferry’s headquarters in Los Angeles and New York contend that the search firm’s experience over the past decade shows women making significant gains.

The firm said women accounted for 16% of the 750 to 800 executives it placed into senior-level positions in the United States and Canada in 1991, up from 9% in 1986 and 5% in 1981.

Pay for women placed by Korn/Ferry into senior positions--jobs with the rank of vice president and above--averaged $106,000 in 1991, up from $44,000 in 1981. No pay comparison was available for male executives.

Korn/Ferry officials and critics of the study agreed that the number of women gaining top jobs still is held down by past discrimination that narrowed the pool of bona fide executive candidates now in mid-level jobs.

But they differed on how far women have already advanced and what lies ahead.

“With women today accounting for half of the graduates of our nation’s graduate business schools, we . . . expect the number of women placements into senior executive positions to increase dramatically over the next 10 years,” Richard M. Ferry, Korn/Ferry’s president, said in a release.

“There isn’t any job that’s closed to women today--the ‘glass ceiling’ has cracked.”

Another company official elaborated on Ferry’s remark, saying that while discrimination against women exists at some companies, no longer are entire industries off limits to women executives.

But Mary Mattis of Catalyst, a nonprofit group that researches women’s issues, countered that women have made few inroads in areas such as heavy industry and high technology.

Mattis, Catalyst’s research vice president, noted that only two chief executives of Fortune 500 companies are women.

Critics of the study added that many of the women placed by Korn/Ferry went into traditionally low-paying fields.

Joyce P. Jacobsen, an economist specializing in gender issues, said many firms may have promoted women in recent years as a token gesture and now aren’t committed to opening the door wider.

Other executive recruiters differed with Korn/Ferry’s finding.

“More people are paying lip service to it but, quite frankly, I’m not seeing them hiring women,” said Jay Berger, a partner in the Pasadena firm Morris & Berger.