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This week's Sunday New York Times included a piece on women in business entitled "How Suite it Isn't: A Dearth of Female Bosses." It's a strikingly candid look at the reason women, despite tying with or exceeding men in numbers of college and graduate degrees, still aren't making significant career breakthroughs in the highest corporate echelons. Author Julie Creswell gives a cursory mention to the explanations typically cited to explain the lack of female business stars - the necessity of taking time off for families, the lack of mentoring and fewer networking opportunities. But she isn't afraid to dig deeper, and even point a few accusatory fingers. The first is at men, who frequently still stonewall women at work and allow the "Good Old Boy" culture of corporate boardrooms to flourish. Women who've reached the top are also identified as potential culprits for brushing off mentoring opportunities, neglecting to support younger women looking to move up, and declining to keep their status as female chief executives in the forefront. Creswell also hits on the self-sabotage occurring among professional women who earn graduate degrees and/or high positions at a young age. One female executive is quoted as saying, "There is a whole lot of hand-wringing going on with women...They get the high-power degrees and then they drop back because they tell themselves they're not going to get very far anyway."
Creswell's candor is a refreshing dose of honesty about a sensitive topic. Finally, women are willing to admit that we ourselves are part of the problem, Still, we can't help but wonder, why didn't the Times mention these widespread factors when it addressed the near-identical issue at law firms in March?
Timothy O'Brien's "Why Do So Few Women Reach the Top of Big Law Firms?" which looked at similar situation in law firms, took a starkly contrasting approach to tackling the issue. Creswell profiled a range of women executives in different fields and different stages of their careers, offering views and perspectives both from women who had achieved success and women who had worked for them. O'Brien, meanwhile, opened with a detailed profile of one highly successful female partner at a top firm, and then offered quotes from hiring partners and HR managers at law firms and legal placement agencies, many of whom scratched their heads about the problem or offered tiptoeing statements like "Women aren't being adequately mentored" and "Women self-promote in a different way than men." Conspicuously absent were the voices of any attorney, male or female, not currently in the top class of the field.
The parallels between business executive and law firm partnership positions are strikingly similar; according to Sunday's piece, top business schools are "churning out an increasing number of female M.B.A.'s," while "only about 16 percent of corporate officers at Fortune 500 companies are women." Compare that to the stats cited in O'Brien's piece: "Although the nation's law schools for years have been graduating classes that are almost evenly split between men and women, and although firms are absorbing new associates in numbers that largely reflect that balance... only about 17 percent of the partners at major law firms nationwide were women in 2005, a figure that has risen only slightly since 1995, when about 13 percent of partners were women." Both sets of positions involve fierce competition, high levels of power and responsibility and hefty salaries. So isn't it safe to assume that women are facing the same problems in law firms that they do in software giants or investment banks? And if it is, shouldn't the issue be handled with frank, jargon-free reporting that doesn't skirt around the dirty details?
