Don’t Drink Yet to New ‘Year of the Woman’: Barbara Kellerman
Commentary by Barbara Kellerman
June 10 (Bloomberg) -- How stunning! How seminal! How revolutionary the results in Tuesday’s primary elections!
Or were they?
Seems everyone who is anyone is commenting today on the success of women candidates from California (Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina) to South Carolina (Nikki Haley), from Arkansas (Blanche Lincoln) to Nevada (Sharron Angle). As someone who advocates, strongly, for more women in positions of leadership, I’m supposed, it’s assumed, to be celebrating. I’m not.
I’m not impressed by the still woefully small number of women who won on Tuesday, especially since it wasn’t a general election. Nor am I intrigued by the fact that California might be the first state to have a woman governor and two women senators at the same time.
I’m more struck that in order to defeat their opponents in Tuesday’s primaries, Whitman spent a whopping $81 million and Fiorina almost $7 million -- in both cases, a good chunk of it from their own money.
We’ve been on this particular high before, in 1992, touted as the Year of the Woman. Then in 2006, women candidates underperformed dramatically, even in an election that led to the accession of the first female speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi.
“There were about 10 races across the country where you could see that Democratic women lost by two to four points, races they thought they had a chance in,” political science professor Richard Fox of Loyola Marymount University later observed of the 2006 election map. “It looked like women did worse in close races than they usually do.”
Progress or Blip
So pardon me if I don’t break open the Champagne. Pardon me if I wait to find out what happens this November -- and then wait another decade or two to confirm that the trend line really is changing, or if it turns out that the events of this week are just another statistical blip, another miserable mirage.
There’s no doubt, obviously, that the role of women in society is changing, in some cases in important ways. Among the changes are those in education, where females are increasingly more educated, better educated and better credentialed than their male counterparts.
But so far as leadership roles are concerned, whether in government or industry, or for that matter in nonprofits and in the military, women in America still badly lag behind. Here are just a few of the figures:
-- 3 percent of Fortune 500 companies were headed by women as of 2009.
-- 15 percent of members of Fortune 500 boards were women as of 2009.
-- 6 percent of the 100 top information-technology companies had female chief executives in 2007.
-- 16.8 percent of seats in the U.S. Congress are held by women.
-- 14.5 percent of 249 mayors of U.S. cities with populations over 100,000 are women.
-- 21 percent of nonprofits with budgets of more than $25 million are headed by women.
-- 5 percent of generals in the U.S. Army were women as of 2008.
-- 8 percent of admirals in the U.S. Navy were women as of 2009.
-- 19 percent of senior faculty at the Harvard Business School are women in the 2009-2010 academic year.
U.S. Falling Behind
Attempts to improve the situation, to increase the number of women in leadership roles, have so far proved to be, if not downright futile, then not exactly spectacularly successful.
There continues to be an assortment of efforts across the U.S. to diversify those in top positions of leadership and management. However, as the numbers testify, these efforts -- unlike efforts in other countries, where quotas, voluntary or otherwise, are brought to bear -- have to date yielded results best described as puny.
So whatever the conversation today, don’t get all excited. Where women and leadership in America is concerned, we’ve come only a short way, with a long way yet to go.
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