Twenty-one years ago, Marsha Serlin was raising two small children and steering through a crumbling marriage with a husband who was out of work. With $200 cash and her only credit card, she rented a truck and started her own scrap metal company. The husband, who “didn’t want to get his hands dirty,” is now an “ex.” But Serlin and her company, United Scrap Metal of Cicero, are thriving. The firm employs more than 100 people and pulls in annual revenues of more than $42 million.
Two years ago, Serlin became the first woman ever to receive the Small Business Administration’s National Subcontractor of the Year Award, bestowed in Washington, D.C. She recently was invited to serve on a 13-member delegation convened in Paris to discuss women’s issues in the United States. In July, Forbes magazine called for an interview.
A couple of months before that, though, Serlin’s success and influence in her industry earned her an invitation to join an exclusive organization of the city’s most prestigious women, The Chicago Network.
“I don’t have very much connection with anyone in the group,” says Serlin. “I’m really a virgin.” But friends who don’t belong have let Serlin know that she’s gained admittance into a very select group of women. Serlin says she was “very impressed with the quality of females at (her) first meeting.”
The Network is a not-for-profit organization of women from Chicago’s upper echelons of business, not-for-profit organizations, medicine, law, education, government and the arts. Now celebrating its 20th year, the group includes 290 women. Membership is by invitation only. Virtually all members have in common a higher education, high income, a distinct pluckiness and tolerance for risk-taking. But similarities end there.
“There’s diversity of membership on any scale you want to assess: opinions, political persuasions, careers,” says executive director Amy Osler. In fact, the Network makes a point of not taking stands on issues precisely because its members come from disparate backgrounds and hold widely varying opinions on virtually all subjects, she says.
Members include Hannah Gray, the first woman to serve as president of the University of Chicago; Carol Moseley-Braun, the first African-American woman senator; Abby Mandel, syndicated columnist and widely published author; Julia Stasch, Mayor Richard Daley’s chief of staff; Judy Sprieser, executive vice president and chief financial officer of Sara Lee Corp.; Paula Jaudis, president and CEO of LaRabida Children’s Hospital; Alene Valkanas, executive director of the Illinois Arts Alliance; Susan Crown, vice president of Robert Crown & Company; Wilma Smelcer, chairman of Bank of America’s Illinois operations; and Loleta Didrickson, former state comptroller.
Women in the Network meet regularly, usually at downtown restaurants, for friendship, support and counsel on careers and personal interests, and according to the mission statement, “to advance and celebrate our successes,” and “to raise awareness of broad professional and social issues facing women today.” There is only one rule: Return each others’ phone calls within 24 hours.
The Network’s membership committee studies lists and news reports of local women who fit the “mover and shaker” profile.
“We try to cast our net wide,” says Osler, who, as the Network’s only staff person, guides and facilitates the organization. “We don’t assume that we know everyone. Sometimes prospective members initiate a contact themselves. Very often,” she says, “it’s someone who isn’t quite up to the level of this group, and they know that.”
In that case, the woman is referred to other networking opportunities.
If a candidate passes scrutiny, the Network extends an invitation. The process can take two months to two years. Usually about 20 women are invited every year, but in the past year, 30 came aboard.
Although today the Network’s binding purpose is for making and maintaining social and professional contacts, the organization is actually an offshoot from a separate intent. In the mid-’70s, Colleen Dishon, who was then an editor at the Chicago Tribune, and Toni Dewey, a senior officer at Motorola, envisioned a new magazine that would be “interesting to, sensitive to and important to women,” says Network member Sheli Rosenberg, president and CEO of Equity Group Investments. Dewey and Dishon pulled together a handful of influential local women they knew and tapped them for ideas and advice.
The magazine never got off the ground, but discussions did. Germinating the idea of a formal women’s network and planning its structure and function took a couple of years. In the summer of 1979, invitation letters went out to 113 women in Chicago’s loftiest ranks. Virtually every one accepted membership. Gatherings were immediately meaningful and exciting, says Rosenberg, one of eight founding members.
Using the Network “mitigates against the isolation one can feel at the top of an organization,” says Sandra Guthman, president and CEO of Polk Brothers Foundation and immediate past chair of the Network.
Some members say the concept is a formalization and feminization of the traditional “old boys network.” But diversity is key to the Network’s strength, says Osler. “There aren’t very many places you can go where you can meet a peer group of extraordinary people doing very different things. If you go to an engineering society meeting, you meet engineers. If you’re in higher education, you meet with your professional academic peers.” At Network meetings, “you meet bankers, lawyers, college presidents, artists, all in the same room,” she says.
But does that help women who aren’t among the 290 members of this elite group?
In several, indirect ways, yes it does, according to Network leaders.
The organization, along with the national research group Catalyst, last year launched The Chicago Network Census, a survey of Chicago’s top 50 companies assessing the proportion of executive women to executive men, and comparing their salaries. The first report, published in December 1998, was bleak. Women hold far fewer board directorships, very few work in executive positions and those who do wield less power and are paid dramatically less than their male counterparts.
But gradually, the balance is improving. Network members believe the report, which will be updated annually, calls attention to the imbalance, and puts appropriate pressure on companies to consider women for executive positions.
There are other indirect benefits as well, Osler notes. When a woman takes a top post, her presence helps smooth the way for other women to ascend within the same organization and probably in competing organizations, too, she says.
“Not every individual will get a benefit from the fact that this organization exists,” says Rosenberg. “I don’t get a direct benefit from the fact that there is a women’s U.S. world soccer team. But the psychic rewards I’ve gotten from that are enormous.”
Even though the Network as yet has no formal mentoring program, informal mentoring relationships form among members and from them to non-members, she says.
The Network also is searching for ways to forge alliances with business schools or universities “to help make a difference for each other, women in general and the women that follow us,” says Jane Thompson, former president of Sears Direct and current chair of The Chicago Network.
“It’s about reach and relevancy,” says Thompson. She says the new board is exploring how to maximize the Network’s usefulness among members and beyond the membership list. “We try to focus on `Where can we help the most?’ ” she says. “It’s not just an old girls network.”
Reach and relevancy are key for individual members too. Marsha Serlin, one of the Network’s newest members, says propelling her business–and herself–depends on discerning what’s important, focusing on it and pursuing it relentlessly.
“A lot of women think there’s a ceiling. There isn’t,” she says. “I don’t see any limit.”
IN THEIR OWN WORDS: SECRETS OF SUCCESS
Dr. Gloria Jackson Bacon
Founder, Altgeld Health Center
Comment: Have a purpose, prepare to achieve, participate and persevere. In 1969 I set out to do what I have done. Someone said then that it would take a lifetime. I scoffed. But it has taken most of my lifetime. You have to have patience and keep focused. . . . Remember, success is not the only thing. Don’t lose sight of family and friends, right and wrong.
Stephanie Pace
Marshall, Ph.D.
Founder, president,
Illinois Mathematics and Science
Academy, Aurora
Comment: Pay attention to context so you’re able to focus on issues of consequence. Learn to see everything as an ecosystem, then you can focus on what matters. . . Leadership is about relationships, creating conditions for other people to imagine and create.
Barbara Molotsky
President, BSMG Worldwide/Midwest,
public relations firm
Advice: Never lose sight of your femininity; it’s a key to success. Don’t wear navy blue suits. Don’t believe in the glass ceiling. Use your mentors. If you’re smart and you work well with people — and you wear a nice suit, you can do anything. Never be afraid to take on new challenges. Just close your eyes and jump.
Dawn Clark Netsch
Professor emeritus, Northwestern University School of Law
Comment: Do something you care about and that interests you. Be prepared to put a lot of yourself into it and work hard. Success requires commitments of time, energy and emotion. Keep your ego in check. Don’t feel that every time somebody disagrees with you or puts you down that it’s solely a gender issue. It may be that they just disagree with you. Keep a sense of perspective.
Wilma Smelcer
Chairman, Bank of America, Illinois
Comment: It’s important to understand the other person’s point of view and what motivates them. If you can do that, you can forge teamwork and collaboration in getting things done. Play off your own strengths. Don’t try to be a guy.
