‘Glass Ceiling’ Over Women Still Intact in Workplace
Despite gains over the past year, only one out of every 50 of the top-paid executives at the nation’s biggest companies is a woman, according to a first-of-a-kind study released Thursday.
Yet the study also showed that a larger, albeit modest, number of women has landed high-ranking corporate officer jobs that eventually could be springboards into the top echelons of America’s Fortune 500 businesses.
Although there is “some reason for encouragement, the numbers are very small, pitifully small,” said Sheila W. Wellington, president of Catalyst, a nonprofit group that carried out the research. The group also regularly reports on women in the workplace.
The study was billed as the first comprehensive tally of top earners and other corporate officers--the senior executives who make policy decisions--at Fortune 500 companies. Earlier reports by New York-based Catalyst and other well-known research groups mainly have been spot surveys focusing on women serving on corporate boards and in management generally.
Experts attributed Catalyst’s findings to two main factors. Women, they said, still face subtle “glass ceiling” barriers that prevent them from moving into traditionally male-held jobs leading to the executive suite. For example, they cited assumptions by bosses that women with children are reluctant to go on business trips or that married women are unwilling to relocate.
In addition, many observers said that many of the women with the ability to become top executives have been in the labor force too few years to have reached the top of Fortune 500 companies, the nation’s biggest in terms of annual sales.
The handful of women reaching the pinnacle today “aren’t people coming right out of college. These women made decisions 20 years ago or 30 years as to what kind of career path they’d want to follow,” said Howard V. Hayghe, an economist with the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics who tracks data on women in the workplace.
At the same time, Hayghe pointed out that the number of women in management throughout all American workplaces skyrocketed over the last 20 years, suggesting that a future generation of female executives is being groomed. The government figures on management jobs--a broad category that includes everyone from chief executives to assistant bank branch managers--show that women held 42.7% of such positions last year, up from 21.9% in 1975.
Wellington countered, however, that her group’s research shows that the changing gender balance in America’s management ranks doesn’t automatically mean that women will garner a similar percentage of the top jobs at Fortune 500 companies.
One of the main reasons, she said, is that even the most successful female executives too often are in staff areas--including human resources, government affairs and public relations. Too few women, Wellington said, are division managers or in other line management jobs that frequently lead to the top.
“Time alone won’t do it,” Wellington said. “The majority of women are in the wrong place in the pipeline.”
Relying on public records known as proxy statements that list the five highest-paid corporate officers at each of the Fortune 500 companies, Catalyst found that in 1995 only 50 of the 2,500 executives in that category, or 2%, were women. That was up from 29 women, or 1.2% of the total, in 1994.
To get a broader picture of the situation in the Fortune 500 firms, Catalyst also tallied the number of women holding any corporate officer position--generally speaking, any executive position carrying the authority to make legally binding decisions for the company, typically including the likes of senior vice presidents and controllers on up to the chief executive.
The findings: Last year, women held 10%, or 1,303, of the 12,997 officer positions. That was up from 8.7%, or 979, of the 11,241 officer jobs at Fortune 500 companies in 1994. (Catalyst officials said the increasing number of officer positions overall in the Fortune 500 appeared to reflect “title inflation” but did not alter the general picture for women.)
Included on the list of women who are Fortune 500 corporate officers was Wanda A. Lee, senior vice president for human resources at Cypress-based PacifiCare Health Systems.
Lee, also a former national chair of the Society of Human Resources Management, called Catalyst’s findings encouraging, saying they show that a “feeder system” that will send women into the top executive jobs has begun to emerge.
“There’s going to be a time lag from when women enter the work force until they reach the upper ranks,” she said, but now “there are more women who have been out there for a longer period of time.”
Another female executive from Southern California on the Catalyst list was Sue Klug, senior vice president of marketing for the Arcadia-based Vons supermarket chain. She also expressed optimism and said that good business sense will dictate that more women familiar with the needs of female customers will follow her footsteps into top management.
Klug, 37, who lives with her husband and year-old son, said that at the end of the working day--when she gets home--”there’s no dinner on the table, and I have to make it happen. That’s what many working women are coping with today, and I understand that.”
Joyce P. Jacobsen, a specialist in gender economics at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., said Catalyst’s overall findings were not surprising, given earlier research showing the slim number of women board members and chief executives at major companies. She said she was pleased, however, by the increase in the number of women officers during 1995.
Even so, Jacobsen said, “it’s still going to take an awfully long time at that rate to achieve proportionate representation. . . . I’d bet it’ll be at least 15 to 20 years before you get women being anything near 40%” of the Fortune 500’s top-paid corporate officers.
Catalyst officials, however, said they were not sure that the gains last year will be repeated, and they pledged to repeat the survey annually to track what happens at the Fortune 500 firms.
Still, by various other measures as well, the Catalyst results showed gains by women over the past year. For example, 395 of the Fortune 500 companies have at least one woman officer, up from 385 a year before. In addition, 246 of the Fortune 500 companies have two or more women officers, up from 220 in 1994.
For the most part, women fared best at services and retailing companies, which traditionally have been big employers of women. In contrast, among the 28 companies where women filled one-quarter or more of the corporate officer positions, only one is a manufacturing concern--Pitney Bowes.
