As Maureen Dwyer Smith took her seat for opening night at the Joffrey Ballet almost a decade ago, her heart sank at the sight of “a big hole” of empty seats. Smith vowed to build the ballet’s following and began enlisting the help of other prominent Chicago women.
“At that time, I thought we’ve got a fabulous ballet, and people don’t really know about it,” Smith said. “Given the set of circumstances, I suggested perhaps a group of powerful women in the city could make some of this happen.”
Today, the Joffrey Ballet’s women’s board, which Smith founded, has 145 members and supplies one-quarter of the company’s donations, about $1.5 million annually, through its events and projects. Opening nights now sell out, the ballet’s overall budget has grown by 40 percent, a full production has been added, a dance school has opened and a 34-story tower built.
Unlike other major cities, where women’s boards, traditionally made up of the wives of prominent businessmen, never came into vogue, Chicago’s are thriving. Their influence has grown significantly in the last decade as they’ve recruited a new generation of women with successful careers and exceptional academic credentials who tend to think big and deploy corporate strategies that go beyond galas.
With so much attention being paid to gender equality, particularly in the corporate world, the resilience of women’s boards in Chicago seems surprising, an apparent reflection of local tradition that is questioned by some but not very many people. Women’s boards may have an old-fashioned name, but observers note they are so well-established and entrenched — “a magnet for powerful people,” noted one — that very few participants want to see them go.
“At the height of the women’s movement they were in decline, but that’s not true anymore,” said Marjorie Benton, one of the city’s most prominent philanthropists. “And I think that’s because it’s a chance to network and it’s a training ground, where you learn the subject matter, how to fundraise, how to organize and how to run benefits.”
While most major cultural institutions in New York and Los Angeles never had women’s boards — the New York Philharmonic’s dissolved in about 1980 — Chicago boasts at least 30 of them, ranging in size from 30 to 200 members. They are raising money for cancer research, a new heart center, health care for homeless children and literacy programs.
“Organizations are now beginning to take their women’s boards very seriously and really count on them. They see them as a force to be reckoned with,” said Mary Ellen Connellan, executive director of the University of Chicago Cancer Research Foundation, which has a women’s board. She also notes that “the stakes are a lot higher, with government cutbacks.”
Despite their success, some women think women’s boards are relics that keep their members sidelined, throwing frivolous parties rather than setting policy or hiring executives. Critics, even some participants themselves, bemoan their lack of diversity and some of their conventions. A few still list members under their husband’s names on rosters.
“It’s Neanderthal,” said Hedy Ratner, co-founder of the Women’s Business Development Center. “It is women as second-class citizens, as wives of, instead of as equal participants in society. ‘Wives-of’ need to be recognized for their strengths, and the most appropriate way to do that is to make them part of the regular board.”
Disagreement over whether women should have separate organizations or infiltrate male-dominated institutions goes back more than a century. It surfaced in connection with the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, said Adele Hast, one of two editors of the book “Women Building Chicago 1790-1990.”
Hast said the Queen Isabella Association, a pro-suffrage group of professional women, tried to have women’s wares displayed alongside men’s at the fair. But the powerful Board of Lady Managers, chiefly composed of wives of prominent businessmen, pushed them aside. Bertha Palmer, chief of the Lady Managers, even considered banishing any reference to Queen Isabella from the event.
For years, women’s boards served as the social arms of charities, said Ellen O’Connor, who first joined a women’s board in 1977 and whose husband led Commonwealth Edison for nearly 20 years. “But when it became apparent we were able to raise a little money, they took on a life of their own,” she said.
A turning point came in 1986. That’s when the Ravinia Women’s Board published “Noteworthy,” a cookbook. At that time, the women’s board first sought the approval of the musical festival’s trustees, commonly called “the big board.”
“The big board said to us, ‘Well, just don’t lose any money,'” said Gloria Gottlieb, who ran the test kitchen and whose late husband was a diamond importer.
The nearly 500-page volume spent 10 weeks on the Chicago Tribune’s best-seller list and, combined with its sequel, raised more than $1 million for an endowed chair at the music festival. It is still sold today.
“Until then, most women’s boards were just pretty; they didn’t do anything,” Gottlieb said. “And the Ravinia board had no expectation women could really do anything of this significance.”
If anything, women’s boards have transformed from social organizations to cash-producing engines. To illustrate how quickly that change has occurred: Of the $13 million raised by the University of Chicago’s Cancer Research Foundation’s women’s board, founded in 1947, about $10 million came in the last decade, Connellan said.
The Lyric Opera’s women’s board raised $4.1 million in 2008 from individual gifts, an opening night gala and a wine auction. The Woman’s Board of Rush University Medical Center expects to raise more than $10 million by the end of 2010 to construct a heart center. The board also contributes $75,000 annually to the hospital’s social services department and pays for health care for homeless children at eight area shelters.
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is almost finished assembling its women’s board. The board replaces a women’s association, whose members ranged from volunteer docents to experienced fundraisers. Every member of the new group is expected to contribute to the bottom line, in addition to throwing a ball this fall to welcome a new music director and launching a fundraiser in 2011.
With about 40 members, “it will be small but mighty,” said Karen Goodyear, who is leading the effort. Her husband, William, is the CEO of Navigant Consulting. “I’ve served on boards, where the women’s board is definitely stronger than the board of trustees.”
Some organizations now use women’s boards as training grounds for membership on their board of trustees. The Goodman Theatre is a case in point. Two of the Goodman’s past women’s board presidents, Sondra Healy and Carol Prins, have gone on to lead the trustees.
In 1978, Prins, then new to Chicago, said she joined the women’s board in part to make friends.
“I started doing a lot of day-to-day worker-bee-type work,” said Prins.
She went on to serve on 15 to 20 committees, chair galas, lead the women’s board and, more than two decades later, the entire organization.
“And given I didn’t have corporate or legal experience, learning the ropes (over several decades) was necessary,” she said.
Alice Sabl, the immediate past president of the Goodman’s women’s board, is a big proponent of them.
“I’d say that a major institution that lacks a women’s board is soulless,” said Sabl, who has her Ph.D. from Stanford University. She explained that women generate more exposure for the service or product and build more social ties. “They are powerful advocates.”
One of the few large Chicago nonprofits that does not have a women’s board is the Museum of Science and Industry. It maintains coed advisory boards, similar to New York’s largest cultural institutions, that focus on specialty areas, such as education. Couples chair the annual gala.
“Our focus has been mostly on these advisory groups and making sure we are getting the most out of our volunteer leadership,” said Shannon Alexander, the museum’s vice president of external affairs. “We’re happy with what we have.”
Elizabeth O’Connor Cole, a former executive at Chicago Tribune owner Tribune Co., said she volunteers on women’s boards to give herself something to do outside of raising her four children. But she also does all of the juggling for them.
“These [organizations] are our backyards,” Cole said. “We think nothing of zipping down to the Field (Museum) or the Shedd (Aquarium). … I want these institutions to thrive and survive and have the latest, coolest fish show. I want my kids to be able to see dolphins and not have to fly to Miami to do it.”
Marletta Darnall, whose husband is the retired CEO of Inland Steel, said top executives usually aren’t asked to join women’s boards because they don’t have time to host functions.
“If a woman is in a leadership role in her company, and that company is known to be very philanthropic and they have a budget for being philanthropic, and that woman is very organized, that woman would be asked to be on the board of trustees,” Darnall said.
Linda Chaplik Harris, a lawyer and member of the Joffrey’s Board of Trustees, initially resisted the idea of forming one.
“My original thought was, ‘This isn’t 1956,'” Harris said. “But once I saw what they could do in terms of raising money, what they were capable of doing for this organization, I not only realized the stereotype was wrong but realized they were the most effective organization I had ever seen in action.”
