Why Aren’t More Women Landing Board Seats?

Abercrombie & Fitch recently nominated four new independent director candidates to the company’s board—all of whom are women. Their election would make 33% of Abercrombie’s board female, which is around twice the national average. While an increasing number of corporate boards give lip service to diversifying their ranks, the latest Catalyst Census showed the U.S. weighing in below eight other countries, with only 16.9% of women on boards in corporate America. Less than one-fifth of organizations had one-quarter or more female directors in both 2012 and 2013. One-tenth of companies had zero women on their boards. What’s more, for the past two years, less than a quarter of companies had three or more women serving jointly on their boards.

Over the years that Catalyst has been charting these trends, there has been little to no increase in women’s board participation, making Abercrombie’s relatively high percentage of potential female board members stand out all the more. Could Abercrombie’s bold move put pressure on other organizations to do the same? From a business standpoint, every company in the nation would be smart to follow suit. A separate report from Catalyst that examines The Bottom Line revealed Fortune 500 companies that had three or more women board directors in at least four of five years significantly outperformed companies with zero female board directors. The former firms experienced an 84% better return on sales, 60% better return on invested capital, and 46% better return on equity compared to the latter.

Which Tech Companies Are Ahead of the Curve in Women’s Leadership?

As we’ve seen from a flurry of media reports over the past few months, tech companies are beginning to “out” themselves for lack of diversity. Facebook, Yahoo, Google, and LinkedIn are among a growing number of tech firms whose voluntary disclosures on demographic data reveal industry trends of a workforce that’s still primarily male and white—especially at the executive levels and in actual technology jobs. (See “The Genie Is Out of the Bottle for Silicon Valley: Lack of Diversity.”)

Based on SHAMBAUGH Leadership’s research, which includes working with a number of tech organizations as well as other industries, a number of identifiable factors lie behind these concerning trends. Outdated and non-inclusive cultures, poor relationships with managers, and a lack of mentors and sponsors have all contributed to the industry’s apparent failure to appropriately recruit, advance, and retain women and minorities.

The Genie Is Out of the Bottle for Silicon Valley: Lack of Diversity

As the U.S. technology sector has boomed, women and minorities have largely been left behind. This is what’s clear in the wake of recent disclosures on workforce demographics from a handful of tech companies.

On June 25, Facebook became the latest tech giant to publicly release its demographic data, which indicated that men represent nearly 70% of all global employees. Worse yet, of the 31% of women in the company, a mere 15% work in jobs that are actually technical. (Women hold 47% of non-technical jobs.) When it comes to the top of the pyramid, although Facebook boasts COO Sheryl Sandberg, more than three-quarters of senior-level jobs (77%) globally are held by men. Among these senior-level executives in the U.S., nearly three-quarters (74%) are white, leaving just a quarter of the pie for everyone else (19% are Asian, 4% Hispanic, 2% black, and 1% two or more races).

Your Deeper Dive Continues

In my last post, we discussed the importance of examining the mindsets and underlying issues within a corporate culture to understand “why” things are the way they are—particularly when you’re dissatisfied with the speed of transformation within your company. If you’ve made significant investments in diversity training and leadership development initiatives yet the results are still lackluster, you may need to take a “deeper dive” to find out what’s really happening beneath the surface.

Let’s revisit the conversation I had with a CEO who was concerned about these issues and wanted to have a better understanding of his organization’s “executive conscience.” While he’d had some breakthrough thinking about how bias toward traditionally male decision-making styles could be holding women back in his company, the CEO asked for another example of the influence that mindsets have on corporate culture.

Take a Deeper Dive – An Examination of Executive Conscience

After presenting at a recent conference, I found myself at lunch sitting next to a CEO who seemed anxious to talk to me. He shared that although his company had made significant investments over the past few years in diversity training, Lean Six Sigma initiatives, and team development, he still wasn’t satisfied with the speed of transformation within the company. Women leaders were advancing too slowly, silo mentality was rampant, and employees were disengaged. In short, though the CEO had dove into these important initiatives with both feet, the results were underwhelming, and he asked me what to do.

I recommended a “deeper dive”—which I call an examination of executive conscience—to break below the surface of the issues. Here’s how it works. Say that you’re trying to understand why only around 14% of women in the Fortune 500 hold executive officer positions, as confirmed by the 2013 Catalyst Census. You could look at the behaviors of those who are doing succession planning and talent development—but this won’t tell you the whole story. You could examine company policies, practices, procedures, and controls—but you probably won’t find much wrong there, since these were put in place to drive equity and fairness in hiring.

Opting Back In: After the Choice Comes the Challenge!

Recent media coverage has stirred up a national conversation regarding women who opted out of the workforce for personal reasons and now want to opt back in. The reason most of these women left was to raise a family and many planned to eventually return to work. While the dialogue back then, about a decade ago, was all about the power of choice, the conversation now is about the challenge these “opted out” women are facing today. Unfortunately, it’s not been easy for these bright and competent women to return to the workforce and most have not been able to find positions anywhere close to the ones they left. A recent study indicated that 89% of those who “opted out” said they wanted to resume working but only 73% of them succeeded in finding jobs and only 40% got full-time work. On average, those returning to work made significantly less than they had been paid before they left and about 25% took jobs with lesser management responsibilities and a lower job title than they had in their last position.

Executive Insights on Integrated Leadership

At a recent event in Washington, D.C. for my latest book, Make Room for Her: Why Companies Need an Integrated Leadership Model to Achieve Extraordinary Results (McGraw-Hill), I was honored to have in attendance senior executives from such highly successful companies as Marriott, Merck, IBM and PPD. Several of these executives shared their insights and perspectives on leadership and what it’s going to take to lead effectively in the 21st century.

I opened the event by highlighting the dramatic shifts taking place in our work environments and across the world, as well as the business case for Integrated Leadership, which calls for embracing and leveraging the broader spectrum of human intelligence in our organizations and teams. Dottie Brienza, Chief Diversity Officer and Head of Talent Development for Merck, then shared some terrific thoughts on Integrated Leadership and the importance of having balanced leadership teams: “Numerous research studies show that organizations with a greater number of women in senior executive positions are more profitable, have greater market share and are better able to compete and grow. Businesses that have fewer women, frankly, are leaving money on the table. It simply doesn’t make good business sense to leave women out. This is not because women are better than men. It’s because women bring something fundamentally different to the table that allows businesses to operate more holistically.”

Could You Function With Only Half a Brain? What Organizations and Leaders Need to Do

Companies that ignore the broad spectrum of leadership thinking are destined to fail. The new leadership model for the 21st century is called Integrated Leadership, and it’s based on the full spectrum of human intelligence – balanced teams of men and women working together synergistically to create an overwhelming, undeniable competitive advantage. In my newest book, MAKE ROOM FOR HER: Why Companies Need an Integrated Leadership Model to Achieve Extraordinary Results (McGraw-Hill), I share how organizations can harness the collective strengths of both men and women to soar to new heights.

Can Your Current Leadership Model Drive Future Success

About a year ago, I sat down over coffee with the CEO of an IT company. The CEO – we’ll call him Robert – shared with me that his organization had been the market leader in their industry for the past five years and had enjoyed consistent growth and profitability. Their success to that point, he believed, was based on their leadership and their employees’ sheer drive and relentless focus on key results.

Yet despite their past success, Robert confided that he had deep concerns about the company’s future. A competitor with a creative, new technology had recently overtaken them as the market leader, and he had just learned that they had lost one of their key customers to this competitor. To make matters worse, the organization’s most recent employee survey revealed that morale was low, people were burned out, communication was lacking and employees had lost faith in leadership.

2012: Focus on the Future to Lead in the Present

By most accounts, 2012 is shaping up to be a year of change and renewal. We are at a very exciting and important point in time when business and economic forces as well as our global society will reach tipping points due to extreme complexity and challenge. Our current systems and processes are outdated, ineffective or ready to break, and they simply won’t carry us into the future.

But uncertainty always has another side. I believe that 2012 presents a prime opportunity to constructively evaluate where we are, consider new points of view and embrace the strategies that will be necessary to succeed in the future.