Inclusion

Wall Street needs women, younger clients to compete: Krawcheck

Teaser:

Sallie Krawcheck, the former head of Bank of America's wealth management unit, says Wall Street must raise its appeal to the next generation of investors and female professionals to remain competitive in the wealth management industry.

Editorial:

From the article:

Wall Street must raise its appeal to the next generation of investors and female professionals to remain competitive in the wealth management industry, the former head of Bank of America's wealth management unit said on Monday.

The securities industry "doesn't do a great job for women or being appropriate" for the next generation, said Sallie Krawcheck, who was ousted as head of Bank of America's global wealth and investment management unit in September.

"We talk about stock market returns. We're not talking as an industry about protecting the downside," said Krawcheck, speaking at the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association annual meeting in New York.

More conversations need to focus on planning and asset allocation, she said.

Indeed, becoming more relevant to a younger generation of prospective clients and building more diverse teams of advisers are among the changes Wall Street will have to make to compete in the future, Krawcheck said during an interview at the conference with PBS host Charlie Rose.

Younger prospective clients have become skeptical of the industry through press images of advisers being untrustworthy and repeated messages to avoid the markets, she said.

"They typically think that these organizations don't add value," she said.

The average wealth management client is about 63 years old, said Krawcheck, higher than the mid-50s average age of clients when Krawcheck started in the field during the 1990s.

Still, strategies for attracting the next generation of investors are fairly straightforward.

"The number one thing is 'Return my phone call,'" said Krawcheck. Other tools the industry can provide to clients, such as liquidity management, rank lower in priority.

"Clients typically say investment performance is important, but it's usually about 8th on the list," she said.

Often described as one of the most powerful women on Wall Street, Krawcheck said the dearth of female advisers posed one of the biggest challenges for the wealth management industry.

Women make up 16 to 17 percent of advisers in the industry today, she said. In senior management positions, that number is smaller - about 15 percent.

"Our industry does not do a great job for women," she said at the conference. "We do have large groups of people - women - who are underserved by our business."

Krawcheck said she visited the Harvard Business School last week, where she spoke to a group of young women interested in pursuing careers in the field, and felt apologetic about how the advancement of women advisers had been slow over the past decades.

"I kept wanting to say, 'I'm sorry - I feel sort of sad that, when I was your age I really wouldn't have thought that 25 years on, that we wouldn't have made more progress than we've made'," she said.

Indeed, the diversification of people working in the wealth management industry is key to tackling the challenges of a complex economy, Krawcheck said.

"You need a broad range of perspectives in order to navigate through."

Source:

Reuters

URL:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/07/us-krawcheck-sifma-idUSTRE7A649020111107

Date:

November 9, 2011

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Why Mentoring Is Not an Option at IBM

Teaser:

Mentoring isn’t an option at IBM (No. 7 in The 2011 DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity). It’s a heavily weighted performance metric that is critical to the company’s talent pipeline, especially when it comes to senior management. Specific mentoring goals, in particular those with a cross-cultural and cross-gender component, must be met by managers. This expectation is conveyed to all employees from day one as part of the corporate culture.

Editorial:

From the article:

Ron Glover, IBM’s vice president, diversity and workforce policy, human resources, started nine years ago with the company. He was told flat-out that he needed to not only get a mentor but also become a mentor to at least three employees. The success of his job depended on it. “[Executives and leadership potentials] are assessed annually against a set of competencies through the Business and Technical Leader Process, and one of the competencies has to do with this ability to manage cross-culturally and globally,” he says.

...

Source:

Diversity Inc

URL:

http://diversityinc.com/generaldiversityinformation/why-mentoring-is-not-an-option-at-ibm/?mgs1=ad39679VZp

Date:

November 9, 2011

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Associated Issues & Expertise:

Women on Boards: Review and Outlook

Submitted by asklar on Tue, 11/08/2011 - 12:08pm

"Women on Boards: Review and Outlook" includes statistics on the status of women on Fortune 1000 boards by company, industry, functional background, board leadership positions and other categories. The data was researched by CTPartners and supplemented by interviews with 50 directors, CEOs, CHROs and governance experts. The report includes suggestions to help boards add more women, tips for women interested in serving on boards, and steps for women serving on boards to strengthen their roles.

Marie E. Kelly, co-author of the report and Partner in the CEO and Board Practice at CTPartners, commented, "Our research uncovered pockets of improvement in the participation of women on boards as well as areas of concern.

URL:

http://www.ctnet.com/uploadedFiles/Women-On-Boards_2012.pdf

US Career Women Thrive but Working Mothers Struggle

Teaser:

The United States doubles as one of the best places in the world for career women looking to excel in male-dominated jobs, but one of the more difficult industrialized countries for working mothers.

Editorial:

The United States doubles as one of the best places in the world for career women looking to excel in male-dominated jobs, but one of the more difficult industrialized countries for working mothers.

In becoming a successful financial consultant, Veronica Campbell had to make some tough choices. She said she could not have advanced this far in her career had she started out married with young children and frequent travel even made dating too difficult.

When she started working in the 1970s, Campbell found it was more difficult to compete for positions and succeed. When she was turned down for a position, she was told the woman who had the position before did not work out and that no other woman would be hired in her place.

Campbell said things have changed since then and women are no longer regarded as being less capable than men in her profession. Anti-discrimination laws have allowed women to enter any profession they like, and advance in the ranks.
But working mothers often experience a different situation. Lisa Maatz, Director of Public Policy and Government at the American Association of University Women (AAUW), said there are many people who still assume that the woman should be the one to stay home to look after kids and that a working mother "won't be as loyal an employee” or that “she'll take more time off, she won't be free to travel."

The University of California’s Joan C. Williams, Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Worklife Law, said working mothers face greater workplace discrimination than that directed against women in general. And when doing the same job as men, working mothers are sometimes forced to choose between work and family needs.

"It's very hard to combine motherhood with employment because there [are] so few work-family support [systems,]" said Arian Hegewisch of the Institute for Women's Policy Research. "And the assumption is that that's all up to you. It's a private choice to have children, and so you have to make the arrangements and there's no real support from society."

Mothers like Renee Lewis, CEO and President of the Maryland-based Pensare Group, which advises businesses, struggle to manage their work and family schedules.

“You end up with very strong and compelling competitive demands on time. You’re always having to choose, and admittedly, I end up choosing many personal things out of the day. I see that as a huge risk," Lewis said. "I didn’t sign up to be Superwoman/mom/wife.”

These roles frequently interchange, said Lewis, and often include creative solutions such as assigning her kids tasks to help her through the day.

“I’ve had to create a “call-out” plan so the kids know the order they call others to get a ride or some help under what circumstances,” Lewis explained. “The kids also schedule their own appointments with the orthodontist, for example, and put those dates on the calendar.”

Forty percent of all children live in single-parent households, the majority of which are headed by women who can have a tough time finding affordable childcare, said Hegewisch.

"You might lose your job because of that. You might not be able to find work that fits in around the time when you need to be with your kids," said Hegewisch. "And while men are increasingly doing more at home, Hegewisch said they typically work longer paid hours, whereas women do the majority of unpaid care work.

Both childcare and eldercare can interrupt a woman's career if she is unable to juggle her time between them, as Campbell found out. She said caring for her mother was "part of the reason ... for stepping out of the career that I was in."

"I was the senior manager at the time and decided that I really couldn’t afford to give my mother the amount of time that I knew that she needed and also give my career the amount of time that it needed," Campbell explained. "And so I stepped back and … started a separate career in independent consulting."

But recent studies show that women holding the same degree and the same job as male counterparts get less pay. Citing an AAUW study that compared the pay gap between male and female graduates holding the same degree and the same job, Maatz notes that "one year out of college, there's already a five percent gap." And the shortfall increases over time as retirement benefits and pay raises are taken into account to as much as 12 percent over a period of 10 years, according to the study.

Shannon Lynberg, an advocate with Empowered Women International, says some of the young women she talks to often tell her they feel ready for the job market with the best education when they graduate. But once they get a job, they feel they are not receiving proper compensation or being treated fairly.

Recent statistics show American women are less likely than men to drop out of school and more likely to pursue higher education. And both Hegewisch and Lynberg suggest that higher education affords women a chance to get better jobs and higher pay.

"If you start working as a young woman, in your teens maybe or your early 20s and you are consistently being paid under what you're worth and you're not getting into higher-paid jobs or not putting away money in your savings ...that really adds up over a lifetime," said Lynberg.

Less pay means lower benefits and a lower pension, which makes it hard for older women to make ends meet. Hegewisch said women typically have higher rates of poverty at all stages of their lives, and a lot of the poverty among older women is due to their having earned less when they were younger.

Women's earnings and the jobs they choose to work are closely linked. Their wages are likely to increase in the fields they dominate - financial services, healthcare, or education - and decrease where they are underrepresented, such as mining. Hegewisch said this is due in part to a stubborn gender division in some professions.

In states like North and South Dakota, she said there is "such occupational segregation in the labor market" that women are more likely to work in education, retail, the care industry, and men are more likely to work in mining, forestry and manufacturing.

But when men working in manufacturing and construction began to lose their jobs at the beginning of the recent economic recession, many women become the primary breadwinners. And what that meant, said Maatz, is that the woman, "who was being paid less than the man to start with, became "the primary breadwinner and not ... bringing home enough bacon ... to pay the bills and feed the kids."

Despite the fact that women constitute up to 52 percent of the nation's population and are more likely to vote than men, they claim less than 17 percent of congressional seats and have lost 80 seats in state legislatures in the past year.

...

Source:

voice of America

URL:

http://www.voanews.com/english/news/usa/US-Career-Women-Thrive-Working-Mothers-Struggle-131233569.html

Date:

November 8, 2011

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Despite Combat Ban, More Women Are Fighting and Dying in America's Wars

Teaser:

The United States formally bars women from ground combat--a prohibition in place for decades because the Pentagon believed that they lacked the requisite physical strength and that Americans weren't ready to see female troops come home in coffins. But that ban is breaking down. Women who pass a rigorous selection process are now being deployed to Afghanistan to serve with Rangers and Special Forces teams. Later this month, female sailors will begin bunking on submarines. Navy Secretary Ray Mabus says that women should be allowed to try out for elite Navy SEAL units, and former Defense Secretary Robert Gates told a crowd of ROTC cadets last year that he expected female troops to move increasingly into other Special Operations detachments.

Editorial:

From the article:

In late October, a bomb tore through a team of American Special Operations troops on a raid against an enemy target in Kandahar province. The blast killed three, including a young female officer, Lt. Ashley White, who was attached to the elite troops during the strike and died at their side.

The result? Women are fighting the nation's wars like never before--and paying the highest price for doing so. More than 150 female troops have died in Iraq and Afghanistan, roughly 100 of them killed in combat. Those numbers are almost certain to rise as more women take part in dangerous missions. During the Vietnam War, by contrast, just eight female troops died, most of them in helicopter crashes. "This is a kind of wave where we're seeing a clear and significant expansion of women's roles in the military," said Nancy Duff Campbell, the copresident of the National Women's Law Center.

The military is still far from gender-blind. A 1993 rule cleared the way for women to fly attack helicopters and warplanes and to serve on Navy combat vessels. But the major war-fighting vessels--aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines, for instance--are still commanded exclusively by male officers. Female troops serve alongside elite Rangers and Special Forces, but it's not clear when (or whether) women will be allowed to join their ranks. Legislative attempts to overturn the ban on women serving in infantry, armor, and other ground combat units have consistently failed. Because combat experience typically dictates an officer's career prospects, women have little chance to run a service branch or chair the Joint Chiefs of Staff any time soon.

Nevertheless, because of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, women are taking part in combat in all but name. The military has faced persistent troop shortages in linguistics, intelligence, and bomb disposal--areas with disproportionate numbers of women. Senior generals, desperate for experts to help units in the field, have evaded the congressionally mandated prohibitions on women in combat by "attaching" female troops to combat groups rather than formally "assigning" them. But Iraq and Afghanistan feature guerrilla wars with no fixed front lines, so female troops driving supply trucks on ostensibly noncombat missions have regularly been attacked. In the summer of 2005, for instance, a car bomb rammed into a U.S. convoy in Falluja, killing three female Marines and wounding a dozen others.

Because of the local cultures, female troops have proved indispensible in Iraq and Afghanistan. Norms there make it impossible for male troops to frisk women--or even to converse at length with them. So commanders in Anbar province set up "Lionesses," small teams of female Marines who search women or question them about militants in their midst. An even larger effort is under way in Afghanistan, where female Cultural Support Teams operate alongside the Rangers and Special Forces to tap local women for usable intelligence. Two teams, 62 women in total, deployed to Afghanistan early this year; a third starts training soon; the Pentagon hopes to have roughly two dozen of the teams operating by 2016. "We're seeing the most significant changes since the opening of combat aviation and combat ships to women in the early 1990s," said Lory Manning, a retired Navy captain who runs the Women in the Military Project at the Women's Research and Education Institute.

That expanding role has attracted far less attention than the reversal of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy, but it will have a far greater impact on the future of the armed forces. Gay troops are thought to account for less than 10 percent of the military. Women account for at least 15 percent of the active-duty force and a higher proportion of Reserve and National Guard units; military demographers believe that women will account for at least 25 percent of the overall military within the next decade. Women also enjoy increasing prominence throughout the armed forces: The Army named its first female four-star general this year, and a female general commands the Marine Corps training base at South Carolina's Parris Island. Female generals and admirals hold an array of senior posts in the Air Force, Navy, and Coast Guard.

Ashley White, the 24-year-old lieutenant who was killed in Kandahar, belonged to a Cultural Support Team assigned to the 75th Ranger Regiment, a storied unit that has been in Afghanistan since 2001. It was her first overseas tour, and she left behind a husband, parents, a twin sister, and a brother. In a family statement read during a memorial service at a packed church in their native Ohio, the Whites said that their daughter's physical and mental fitness explained "why she was selected to work alongside the Rangers and why they welcomed her as one of their own."

Source:

The Atlantic

URL:

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/11/despite-combat-ban-more-women-are-fighting-and-dying-in-americas-wars/247936/

Date:

November 8, 2011

Affiliate:

Overcoming the Gender Gap: Women Entrepreneurs as Economic Drivers

Submitted by asklar on Fri, 11/04/2011 - 10:18am

Women who are capable of starting growth companies that serve global markets may be the nation's secret weapon for achieving sustained economic growth.

URL:

http://www.kauffman.org/newsroom/untapped-potential-for-expanding-womens-entrepreneurship-holds-promise-to-grow-us-economy.aspx

Would more women on boards lead to less excessive salaries?

Teaser:

In Britain, the Conservative prime minister David Cameron proposed that more women be placed on governing boards of financial firms as a way to reduce high salaries and bonuses.

Editorial:

From the article:

After weeks on the streets worldwide, the “Occupy” protesters – with their focus on corporate “greed” – may have achieved one thing so far.

In Britain, they likely pushed the Conservative prime minister to propose more women be placed on governing boards of financial firms as a way to reduce high salaries and bonuses.

Companies with more female directors, said David Cameron, would be less likely to practice “the usual sort of rotating list of men patting each other’s backs and increasing the level of remuneration.”

A corporation’s methods of setting executive pay, he told Parliament Wednesday, should not be done by a “closed circle of people.” Women would bring more diverse views and a wider discussion of what is excessive pay.

He’s just guessing, of course, based simply on gender stereotypes. Women executives, in general, do ask less often for pay raises than men. But whether female board members would spread profits more evenly to company stakeholders remains unproven.

Other ideas may work better. Mr. Cameron, like many others, suggests companies release information on pay levels and give shareholders more authority over pay. Similar structural reforms would shake up corporate practices that have led to high income inequality. And attracting more women to boards will require more of them to earn MBAs and enter the business of high finance.

The task of defining “excessive” pay is difficult, but since the near-meltdown of Wall Street in 2008, it’s become a controversial topic. It would be less difficult with more transparency and accountability about a company’s compensation decisions.

Given the long history of pay discrimination, women serving on boards would bring a needed perspective on fair pay. Europe is already moving toward more women in the boardroom. In 2003, Norway began the trend by setting a quota of 40 percent for female directors and has already achieved it. While such a forced method may satisfy some, based on one study, the results were not so satisfying.

A University of Michigan study this year found an average 20 percent drop in the stock prices of Norwegian companies that brought in relatively inexperienced women as board members. “The quota led to younger and less experienced boards, increases in leverage and acquisitions, and deterioration in operating performance, consistent with less capable boards,” the study found.

That negative experience may change over time as more experienced women join boards. Britain is avoiding a strict quota system in favor of voluntary targets. Last February, the government asked the boards of the top 100 companies to be 25 percent female by 2015. So far, progress has been slow, with only a slight rise to 14 percent from 12.5 percent last year.

“Everyone, whether they are in public life or in private enterprise – they have got to be able to justify the decisions they make about pay,” says Cameron.

Perhaps reducing male “group think” in boardrooms about pay levels is one good start.

Source:

Christian Science Monitor

URL:

http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/the-monitors-view/2011/1103/Would-more-women-on-boards-lead-to-less-excessive-salaries

Date:

November 4, 2011

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Associated Issues & Expertise:

Girl Power: List of Companies With Female CEOs

Teaser:

Article compares the performance of the current fortune 500 companies with women CEOs to the S&P500 performance and their industry competitors from the start of the calendar year to present. Correlation and causation aside, the trend holds true: women have been ruling the stock market.

Editorial:

From the article:

Statistically, female CEO-led companies have been ruling the stock market, which may explain why more women are scheduled to take the reigns of Fortune 500 companies than ever before.

This is a change from the grand total of 12 female CEOs of Fortune 500 companies back in July. The number was a drop from the 15 in 2010, but a significant improvement over the single female CEO that made the list in 1996.

USA Today reports in the last few months alone, three other new female CEOs have emerged: Meg Whitman (pictured above) became Hewlett-Packard CEO in September, Denise Morrison took the CEO post at Campbell Soup in August, and Gracia Martore was named CEO of Gannett earlier this month.

Wednesday, pharmaceutical firm Mylan said Heather Bresch will succeed Robert Coury as CEO. Tuesday, IBM tapped Virginia “Ginni” Rometty to succeed Sam Palmisano, making her the first female CEO in the company’s 100-year history. Both appointments are effective Jan. 1st.

“If no women step down before the end of 2011, there will be 18 women running Fortune 500 companies in 2012. Previously, there haven’t been more than 16 female CEOs at Fortune 500 firms at the same time.”

Most females execs will be quick to claim their gender has little to do with their success as chief officer, but it would be hard to deny the studies that show overwhelmingly positive results for female-led companies. The trend is hard not to notice:

In July, USA Today reported “Fortune 500 companies that had a woman at the helm for all of 2009 were up an average 50%.” And according to Forbes: “as a group they outperformed the overall market–companies dominated by male chief executives–by 28%, on average, and topped their respective industries by 15% [in 2010].”

A 2007 research report by Catalyst Inc showed that among Fortune 500 companies, those with the greatest number of women on their boards performed significantly better financially than companies with fewer female board members.

Shareholders, pay attention: We’ve compared the performance of the current fortune 500 companies with women CEOs to the S&P500 performance and their industry competitors from the start of the calendar year to present. Correlation and causation aside, the trend holds true: women have been ruling the stock market.

..
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Source:

NASDAQ

URL:

http://community.nasdaq.com/News/2011-11/girl-power-list-of-companies-with-female-ceos.aspx?storyid=101171

Date:

November 4, 2011

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Associated Issues & Expertise:

Faculty diversity means gains for female law students, according to study

Teaser:

Editorial:

From the article:

A study of law review membership indicates that gender and racial diversity on law school faculties may translate into more opportunities for female students.

Law schools with a high percentage of full-time women and minority faculty members on average had a larger percentage of female students on their flagship law reviews during the last academic year, according to New York Law School Law Review's 2010-11 Law Review Diversity Report.

"We know that law review membership has strong implications for postgraduation success in the legal field, and wanted to determine whether the composition of a school's faculty would have any impact on the success of female and minority students on law review," said Jamie Sinclair, a 3L at New York Law School who worked on the study with classmates Dana Brodsky, Maria Cheung, Kelly Garner, Jamie Sinclair and publisher Marcey Grigsby.

The study followed a 2010 report by Ms. JD, a nonprofit organization that seeks to advance women in the legal profession. The Ms. JD report looked at the law review membership and leadership at the top 50 law schools, as ranked by U.S. News & World Report. It found that on average, women accounted for 44 percent of law review membership at those top schools.

The New York Law School Law Review survey focused on law review membership at the 20 law schools with the highest percentages of full-time female faculty, and the 20 schools with the highest percentages of full-time minority faculty. Each of those schools fell outside U.S. News' top 50.

At schools with larger percentages of female faculty members, 52 percent of law review members were women. The figure was nearly 59 percent at the schools with high percentages of minority faculty. Whereas Ms. JD found that a mere 33 percent of law reviews at the top 50 law schools had a female editor in chief, that figure was 60 percent at the schools with many female faculty members and 46 percent at schools with high percentages of minority faculty.

"Getting into law school is only half the battle — for better or for worse, grades matter a lot, and law review membership is one of the most prominent indicators of academic achievement," said Brodsky. "Our survey shows a possible connection between the overall environment a school provides and the achievement of its women and minority students."

The study also indicated that law schools outside the top 50 provide women with a greater opportunity to obtain law review membership and serve in a leadership role, she said.

Contact Karen Sloan at ksloan@alm.com.

Source:

The National Law Journal

URL:

http://www.law.com/jsp/nlj/PubArticleNLJ.jsp?id=1202522297808&Faculty_diversity_means_gains_for_female_law_students_according_to_study&slreturn=1

Date:

November 3, 2011

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Associated Issues & Expertise:

New York Law School Law Review Law Review Diversity Report

Submitted by asklar on Thu, 11/03/2011 - 10:06am

In 2011, the New York Law School Law Review launched its Law Review Diversity research project examining gender and minority diversity among law review membership and leadership at ABA law schools nationwide. This research builds upon the 2010 survey conducted by Ms. JD, an organization dedicated to the success of women in law school and the legal profession.

URL:

http://www.nylslawreview.com/diversity-report/

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What We Do

NCRW is a network of leading university and community based research, policy, and advocacy centers with a growing global reach dedicated to advancing rights and opportunities for women and girls. We also have a Corporate Circle comprised of senior diversity professionals from leading U.S. and global member companies and a Presidents Circle of college and university leaders who share our commitment. NCRW harnesses the collective power of its network to provide knowledge, analysis, and thought leadership on issues ranging from reducing women’s poverty to building a critical mass of women’s leadership across sectors.

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