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I wasn't disheartened to see that Indra K. Nooyi will be succeeding Steven S. Reinemund as the Chief Executive Officer of PepsiCo, but I wasn't very excited about it either. What kind of women's advocate am I?
I don't doubt Nooyi's capability of being a chief executive. As reported in The New York Times, Nooyi has been instrumental to her company's current success. Not only is she one of only ten women heading up a top corporation, she's an Indian woman, who received her undergrad and MBA in her native country. She wasn't born with a briefcase in her hand or with any pedigree that you'd expect a CEO to have. I'm inclined to believe that her intelligence and ability to execute landed her the job. But we already knew that women were capable of leading, right? This isn't news.
I don't feel excited that a woman has broken through the ranks of a predominantly male paradigm because, quite honestly, I don't respect the paradigm. I respect the intelligence and talent it takes to survive in the paradigm, but not the paradigm itself.
In her outstanding blog on women's growing (and stifled) prominence in corporate America, Laurel Delaney, of Escape from Corporate America Blog, points to an insightful editorial by Wall Street Journal Online writer Judith Dobrzynski (and reprinted by GayPASG.org) on women's still-abysmal place in the corporate world. Dobrzynski notes the usual, depressing numbers:
According to Catalyst, the women's research and advisory group that just issued its 10th census of women in Fortune 500 companies, women held 10.6% of line-officer positions in 2005. Many now run big divisions; for years, women have earned more than a third of the MBAs granted each year ...
Sure 10 female CEOs is better than three, which was the all-time high before the year 2000, but does this milestone constitute the corporate world's embrace of women in top spots? Yes, yes, things take time; I can't get pissy about a step in the right direction. But is this the right direction?
Note that Dobrzynski noted the increase in LINE officer positions. This little word "Line" means a lot in the business world. Corporate types often distinguish employees this way to determine their value to a company. And while human resources is an important function in a company, for all intents and purposes it's a cost center and typically not perceived as highly as revenue-driving ones. Line positions, on the other hand, are tied to bottom-line results. And if you are fully responsible for bringing in revenue (i.e. in a sales or business development capacity), then you really matter. Revenue-generating functions and line functions are typically the areas where CEO successors are scouted and areas that have historically been male-dominated. HR, marketing, and communications--which have historically attracted more women--are not typical CEO pools.
As a woman whose career has been androgynous in those terms (I've been a cost center and a revenue generator) I've consciously made a choice to not be pegged as cost-center only. I may make widgets, but I sell em too. But is this what I would recommend to all women who seek C-level visbility? To go against their natural inclinations so that their company will take them more seriously? Or would I prefer that companies see the human resource, or "people" side of managing a business as important as its revenue side? The answer is obvious to me: people are more valuable. This is no chicken-egg issue--great people lead to great ideas/production/revenue generation, not the other way around.
Dobrzynski cites another reason for the low percentages of women leaders in major corporations:
I believe it's all about risk: Male directors are simply afraid to take an unnecessary risk by selecting a woman. It's analogous to, years ago, the decision to purchase a mainframe computer: Word was that you would never have to justify your choice if you bought an IBM, even if something went wrong; you might if you purchased one from the so-called BUNCH (Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data, Honeywell). That's how IBM came to have a near-monopoly. It's true, of course, that many men make it to the No. 2 spot and fail to go higher. But their failures are generally not as public -- they lose to another man, and they are not viewed as indicative of the deficiencies of an entire gender, as women's failures are.I shared my opinion of the significance of women
