For women executives, has the business world turned into the Misfortune 500?
One after another, women in top leadership positions at major corporations have bitten the corporate dust recently.
Linda Wachner was fired as chief executive officer of the Warnaco Group in November. Lucent Technologies’ Chief Financial Officer Deborah Hopkins was replaced in May after just a year on the job. Jill Barad resigned as Mattel CEO two years ago.
Carly Fiorina remains CEO of Hewlett-Packard Co., but is fighting for her corporate life, trying to rally stockholder support for a controversial merger with Compaq Computer Corp.
Outside the business world, several high-profile women have come under fire. Dr. Bernadine Healy resigned as head of the American Red Cross in October after a bruising battle with the board. In government, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman has been attacked in withering terms by farm-state lawmakers.
Are women who crack the glass ceiling now hitting brick walls? What does it all mean?
That things are looking better than ever for women, said Charles Elson, director of the Center for Governance at the University of Delaware.
“It’s actually a sign of progressiveness in the women’s movement that male and female CEOs are attacked with equal opportunity,” he said. “If you look at the results that some of them posted, if you hadn’t had consequences, you’d have gender discrimination going on.”
The phenomenon is a victory for women’s equality, said Rita Simon, founder and president of the Women’s Freedom Network, a conservative feminist organization.
“I think to treat women by the same standards as men is what we’re all about,” she said. “From my point of view, it’s a good thing. We can make it on our own. We don’t need lower standards or special privileges.”
It is hard to imagine a male CEO not being ousted in some of these women’s circumstances. Barad left Mattel after the company lost $82.3 million in 1999, the first time in a decade the company incurred a loss. Wachner, who transformed Warnaco into a major jeans and lingerie company, was ousted without severance after the company filed for Chapter 11 protection. The stock price had dropped from a high of $44.38 in 1998 to 13 cents when she left in November.
The only difference is that people are asking whether it mattered that they are women, said Rosabeth Moss Kanter, professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School and an expert on corporate leadership.
“With a male CEO, you would just take [a resignation or termination] for granted,” she said.
But there is a difference for women leaders. They are still so rare that they operate under a high-beam spotlight men never face.
“There are men every day who fail as CEOs, but their departure is not as noticed,” said Victoria Medvec, executive director of the new Center for Executive Women at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University.
That kind of attention can harm a woman’s career, said Janice Reals Ellig, co-author of “What Every Successful Woman Knows” (McGraw-Hill, $21.95). “You’re going to be criticized much more heavily than men,” she said.
Kanter doesn’t think the attention is necessarily bad. “I don’t think it’s necessarily harsher, the spotlight; it’s different,” she said. “You’re looked at in terms of the fact that you’re a woman. You may get advantages as well as disadvantages.”
The way to eliminate the spotlight is to increase the number of women leaders, she said. “When you get those numbers up, you don’t stand out so much,” she said. “When there’s only one or two, it’s like you’re carrying the whole burden of your gender.”
Kanter doesn’t think the attention had anything to do with the recent departures. These are hard economic times for all top executives, she said: “The half-life of CEOs is getting shorter and shorter.”
On the other hand, she said, male leaders’ woes are not interpreted as a trend. “There’s [Kenneth] Lay at [recently collapsed] Enron [Corp.], but no one is saying, ‘Oh, well, what’s this with men? They can’t hold a job.’ “
It is statistically preposterous to draw conclusions from such a tiny number of cases, said Sheila Wellington, president of Catalyst, an organization that promotes the advancement of women in business.
“[There are] five women CEOs in the Fortune 500. So we are now at a robust 1 percent,” she said dryly. “There is just not enough data to generalize about gender, except to say that women are scarce.”
And when women leaders become controversial, it may simply be that their policies engendered legitimate debate, said Simon, of the Women’s Freedom Network. “If Bernadine Healy were Bernard Healy . . . she would be attacked just the same,” she said.
Healy, a cardiologist who was the first woman to direct the National Institutes of Health, resigned from the American Red Cross in October after clashing with the board, saying she had no choice but to leave.
The disagreements were over Healy’s decision to keep Sept. 11 relief funds separate from other Red Cross contributions, and her decision to cut off dues to the International Red Cross over its refusal to accept the Israeli version of the Red Cross.
Her departure was about issues, not gender, Healy said. However, she said, she believes there is a double standard at work in the way she has been portrayed. Accounts of her departure have invariably quoted critics–and sometimes supporters–describing her as domineering and needlessly confrontational. She is being judged on the basis of her style, she said, where a man would be judged on his results. Moreover, such criticisms reflect misinterpretation of a strong-minded woman, she said.
`Women perceived differently’
“I tend to be fairly passionate about things. But I don’t yell at people,” she said. “I believe that women are perceived differently. People aren’t used to a woman saying, `We must do this, and it has to be done by 11 a.m. tomorrow and this is why.’
” `Tough’ is a badge of courage for a man, but a terrible word for a woman,” she said.
Gender was a factor in Healy’s departure, says Lawrence Eagleburger, the former secretary of state whom Healy brought into the Red Cross to support the cause of the Israeli Red Shield of David, or Magen David Adom.
“She’s tough, and a lot of men don’t like that,” he said.
Gender had nothing to do with it, countered Paul Clolery, editor in chief of The NonProfit Times, a trade publication that has written extensively and critically about the American Red Cross’ accounting and blood collection practices.
“Bernadine Healy was turning it around down there,” he said. “The problem was, she was doing it in a slash-and-burn method that didn’t endear her to the Red Cross lifers,” the insiders who dominate the organization.
“Ninety-nine and forty-four hundredths percent of the decisions she made were the right ones. . . . But she [angered] just about anybody she came in contact with.”
At least one observer sees sexism in the treatment of Ann Veneman, the first female agriculture secretary, who has been trying to redirect the government’s multibillion-dollar farm subsidies. She has met with furious opposition from lawmakers in farm states. It is partly because of her stand against powerful farm interests, said Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group, a non-profit organization that supports farm policy reform.
`A fraternity kind of world’
But beyond that, “I think she is being treated differently because she’s a woman,” he said. “She has been the recipient of harsher language, more personal language, than I can ever remember directed to an agriculture secretary. . . . Agriculture is still very much a fraternity kind of world.”
Mary Kay Thatcher, director of public policy of the American Farm Bureau Federation, said Veneman has been treated exactly the same as a man would have been.
“Secretary Veneman has encountered significant controversy because of the difficult economic times currently faced by farmers and ranchers,” she said. “Most secretaries of agriculture have taken similar hits when the farm economy is down.”
While still at Mattel, Barad suggested that a man would not have faced the kind of criticism leveled at her. “I’m a woman, and I’m going to be a poster child” for Mattel’s woes, she said when she announced 3,000 layoffs and a corporate restructuring. “I’m clearly going to be taking punches for quite some time.”
Elson, of the University of Delaware, thinks women take the same punches men do. “You’re judged by the results you deliver,” said Elson, who was a member of the Sunbeam Corp. board that fired CEO Albert Dunlap, the so-called “Chainsaw Al” known for massive downsizings.
`Numbers know no gender’
That reliance on figures makes the financial world an ideal setting for a talented woman, he said. “Numbers know no gender, no race, no ethnicity,” he said. “You rise and fall on the basis of a truly objective factor.”
If there are conclusions to be drawn from the cases of the departed women CEOs, said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, associate dean of the Yale School of Management and president of the Chief Executive Leadership Institute, one is that women do not necessarily make kinder, gentler executives.
“The notion that either gender has the monopoly on a certain sharing, caring leadership style is just bunk,” Sonnenfeld said. “Linda Wachner and Jill Barad are absolutely as tough, if not tougher, as Al Dunlap and Frank Lorenzo [the former airline executive known for battling unions].”
Wachner, for instance, was widely known as having an abrasive style that included frequent use of obscenities. In a lawsuit, Calvin Klein, a former business partner whose jeans were produced by Warnaco, called her “vile.”
In championing a daring merger, Sonnenfeld said, Fiorina is displaying “a swashbuckling, maverick style that is every bit as masculine, quote unquote, as any leadership style.” Rather than backing down under opposition to the Compaq merger, she is fiercely campaigning for it, trying to persuade major shareholders to support it in a vote, which probably will be in March.
Still, Sonnenfeld thinks women can be penalized for aggressive styles that would be more acceptable in men. “Sometimes we’re a little tougher on tough women,” he said. “Anybody who comes off as brutal doesn’t necessarily engender a lot of sympathy, but brutal guys seem to get extra credit for it.”
With other women CEOs on the rise, like Andrea Jung at Avon Products and Anne Mulcahy at Xerox Corp., the day is drawing closer when women executives will be seen for their accomplishments and not their gender, Kanter said.
“We’re starting to see some movement,” she said, “enough that it doesn’t all stand or fall on whether the Hewlett-Packard merger goes through and Carly Fiorina emerges as a heroine.”
The bold and the embattled: The past two years have provided a few case studies in women’s rise and fall–and the fight for survival in between.
Carly Fiorina
In a little over two years as CEO, Fiorina boldly restructured Hewlett-Packard. But she is now embroiled in a corporate battle over the company’s future, championing a mammoth, controversial merger with Compaq Computer Corp. against the opposition of the Hewlett and Packard heirs, who are major stockholders. If the merger fails, she’s likely to leave the company.
Linda Wachner
Wachner became the first woman to run a Fortune 500 company in 1986 when she became CEO of Warnaco Group Inc. She turned the company from a conventional bra manufacturer into a clothing empire that produced Calvin Klein jeans and Speedo swimsuits. She was fired without severance in November after the company went bankrupt.
Dr. Bernadine Healy
Healy quit as president of the American Red Cross in October. Though some saw her as a force for tighter accountability at the Red Cross, she clashed with the board over post-Sept. 11 fundraising and her campaign to get the International Red Cross to accept the Israeli version of the Red Cross.
Jill Barad
After 21 years at Mattel during which she helped propel Barbie from a $320 million domestic doll business in 1985 into a $2 billion global brand by 1998, Barad resigned two years ago after a disastrous year in which Mattel lost $7 billion in market value. The losses were largely the result of Mattel’s acquisition, promoted by Barad, of educational software developer Learning Co.
Deborah Hopkins
Hopkins was replaced as chief financial officer of Lucent Technologies Inc. in May, after just a year on the job. During her tenure, Lucent’s stock price reached an all-time low, the company announced 10,000 job cuts, and it was plagued by financial losses.
