Third of five articles

By Kirstin Downey Grimsley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 24, 1998; Page A1

Sitting in an upscale restaurant in Palo Alto, high-tech executive Catherine S. Muther had a startling realization.

Fifteen women had gathered to honor a female business professor at Stanford University, and all had received master's degrees in business administration in the 1970s, the first years large numbers of women had attended the program. Most had left school with dreams of heading large companies.

But as she looked around the table at women old enough to have top executive positions within reach, Muther said, she suddenly realized all of the others had walked away from the corporate world. "I was the only one who was still employed at a corporation job, other than one woman who was being downsized."

That night in 1993 "was a defining moment for me" that caused her to reexamine her life and career, said Muther, then 46 and vice president of marketing at San Jose-based Cisco Systems, a computer networking company.

Twenty years ago, the question of why no women headed large corporations had a standard answer: Too few were in the pipeline with the right combination of training, education and seasoning. That was expected to change when the women entering leading business schools arrived in the work force in the 1970s.

But today, though thousands of women have passed through business schools and into middle management, women hold only 3 percent of the top six executive positions at large Fortune 500 companies, or about 90 of 3,000 positions. Only a handful have been named a chief executive officer.

The slow ascent is a result of many factors, but few people believe it stems from women not wanting the top spots, according to a new nationwide survey by The Washington Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University. About 65 percent of Americans think women are discriminated against in getting top positions, but women are more likely to believe it – with 71 percent saying so, compared with 59 percent of men.

Even now, slightly more than half of men say a major reason women aren't getting top slots is that "the doors haven't been open long enough." Fifty-seven percent of women share that view, and 60 percent also believe women are not getting there because "men don't want them to get ahead." Only 43 percent of men hold that opinion.

The women surveyed also cited family responsibilities as a major career impediment, with 55 percent saying they kept women from working as many hours as men do.

To explore why so few women complete the race to the top, The Washington Post sought out women who have reached for those jobs, interviewing 20 from across the country who received MBA degrees at three elite business schools – Stanford, Harvard and Wharton – from 1969 to 1979. The women were located through referrals from the schools' alumni departments and through published alumni directories.

Career Track
These women were unusually committed to the career track, moving cross-country in pursuit of good jobs, investing years in professional development, spending tens of thousands of dollars on their educations.

Now ages 43 to 60, most began careers with big companies or international management consulting firms, but of the 15 who still work full time, only two remain with large, publicly traded corporations, with one other working for a large, privately owned firm.

Three others work for small companies with fewer than 50 employees; six are entrepreneurs, including two running businesses from home; five work for nonprofit organizations; one is disabled; one is retired; and one is a full-time at-home mother.

The drop-off is "the corporations' loss," said Kathleen A. Meyer, who received her degree from Stanford in 1976 and now is executive director of the Business Enterprise Trust, based in Stanford, Calif., which promotes corporate responsibility. "These are bright, motivated, honest people with integrity who got out."

Myra Strober, a professor in the Education Department at Stanford who taught in the business school during the 1970s, has monitored many of the early female graduates' careers. She said many who stepped off the career track tend to attribute the shift to individual circumstances, rather than recognizing it as part of a pattern of amorphous, institutionalized discrimination that sapped their energy for driving to CEO.

Being Ignored
"If you think about discrimination as doing something 'bad' to women, that's not what happened so much," Strober said. Instead, "men are being favored, and women are being ignored. If a woman doesn't experience egregious harassment and she is asked if she faced discrimination, she will say no. You don't want to go around all the time thinking there is something wrong with you, and you don't want to be angry all the time. After all, it's not like men are treated so marvelously. Men and women are both treated poorly at times, but he gets some mentoring, and she gets none."

In a century that opened with women banned by law or practice from many occupations, the female MBAs pioneered a generational shift in which they combined education, marriage, family and career.

Most are in long-term marriages, with about one-fourth divorced. Nineteen have at least one child, and most have two or three. Almost all have been employed outside the home for most of their lives, and about two-thirds are the primary breadwinners in their families.

In interviews, most of the women said they forsook the goal of top-ranking management at a big public firm because the grueling work hours expected of executives made it difficult to meet family obligations. Some cited sex discrimination as a major impediment, but most were reluctant to describe themselves as having suffered discrimination, because they did not want to see themselves as victims. Still, almost all said they came to feel increasingly isolated and alone at work as they rose in the ranks, excluded from what felt like a male-only club at the top.

Ultimately, however, the change in dreams was one they chose as they sought more happiness, fulfillment and family time.

Muther was one of those.

Within a year of that dinner party, she had quit her corporate job, which paid her $460,000 in salary and bonuses in 1992, plus stock options. With $3 million of her own, she created the Three Guineas Fund, named after a Virginia Woolf essay that focused on contributing money to improve society and urged better education and career opportunities for women. The foundation tries to help women launch high-tech businesses.

"Most women don't get to retire at age 46 and set up their own foundations," said Muther, now 50, acknowledging that she had reached a privileged station thanks to her success and her Stanford degree.

Meyer also left the fast lane when she turned down a job as marketing director for an international law firm, which required 12-hour days and much travel, and instead took the job at the Business Enterprise Trust, making less than half the salary. She agonized about the decision, because, as a divorced mother of two, she worried about saving for her children's college educations.

But a couple of weeks after her decision, she said, she felt vindicated. She was on a panel that was to have included the woman who had taken the marketing job. The woman never showed, and the moderator announced she had had an unexpected business trip.

"I sat and thought, 'Boy, did I make the right decision,'," Meyer said.

Long Hours
The long hours required of executive men and women make the prize not worth the price, said Elaine Chao, 43, former director of the Peace Corps and later of the national United Way organization, who received her Harvard MBA in 1979.

"Progress is being made, but a lot of women are realizing it is not what they envisioned," and they needn't hew to an old model, Chao said.

Chao said she left United Way in 1996 because she was "stressed out and tired all the time." She said she was flying around the country and deluged by 200 telephone calls a day. One Christmas, she said, she was so busy she had her secretary buy the presents Chao gave her parents – something she knows male executives often do, but that bothered her a lot.

Chao's marriage four years earlier to Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) also had added to her public duties.

Chao, the only childless woman in the group, is now a distinguished fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a job she enjoys but finds significantly less demanding. "Some people could say I'm a wimp, but for me this was the right thing to do."

Nancy Pindus, 47, of Bethesda, who received her business degree from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School in 1973, started in management consulting, including an early stint at Booz Allen & Hamilton, which she said she "absolutely hated," because of the way young consultants were "worked to the bone." One co-worker, for example, bragged that she had not had to buy soap or shampoo because she stayed so often in hotels, Pindus recalled.

Pindus quit after six months and went into management consulting on her own, and later for a small firm. At different points, depending on her family's needs, she has worked part time. She is now a full-time senior research associate at the Urban Institute.

She said many of her female friends from Wharton made the same choices.

"We joke we're the poorest Wharton MBAs," she said. "More than one time, I've turned down promotions. Those are choices I've made that other people would make differently. But having an MBA let me make those choices."

The path away from the top sometimes revealed itself only after harsh turns, said Lillian Lincoln, who in 1969 became the first black woman to receive an MBA from Harvard. Lincoln now owns a Landover-based building services firm that had $60 million in revenue last year and employs 900.

But when she graduated from Harvard, she said, she was neither interviewed nor recruited by corporate personnel departments, so she returned to the management consulting firm where she had worked before she went to graduate school.

In her years inside a corporation, Lincoln said, she learned "women need to fight for air time" or risk being ignored in meetings dominated by men. "As a woman, you can come up with suggestions, but it gets no credence until a man suggests it – and then it's a great idea."

Lincoln said such incidents are revelatory. "You get to a certain level, and you know that you'll never get to the positions men do, so you start your own company."

Among the women who remained and rose high in corporations, careful career planning is a hallmark.

Christine Grant, 50, of Princeton, N.J., received her MBA from Wharton in 1973 and later received a law degree. She is the sole female vice president at Pasteur Merrieux Connaught, the world's largest vaccine development and manufacturing firm. Through the years, Grant has moderated her work schedule, doing stints at nonprofit organizations and a state government agency, before joining Pasteur in 1994.

"I've paced myself so I would go slowly on my career path to keep from burning out," Grant said.

She said she believes many women have fallen by the corporate wayside because, unlike men she knows, they had no game plan, and without measurable goals, they became stymied. "We didn't have that blueprint laid out for us," she said.

Shirley Liu Clayton, 60, is the only female CEO of a medical instrument company in the United States. After 13 years as a chemist, she was home with her children for 13 years. She received an MBA from Stanford, then worked at Bank of America and Genentech before joining a start-up firm called TopoMetrix Corp., in Silicon Valley, Calif., where she was promoted to chief executive.

Clayton said she is puzzled why there aren't more female CEOs. "I hope it's just a matter of time." As managers rise in an organization, she noted, "the comfort factor with your peers becomes more and more important. Men are more comfortable dealing with men."

The points at which the other women left, rather than merely diverged from the CEO track, generally came late in their careers, they said, despite early situations that were belittling.

One woman hired as a strategic planner at a bank said she was ordered by a company lawyer to copy documents for him, in triplicate. A management consultant said a male client saw her jotting notes and asked her to type meeting minutes so he would have a record. A woman hired as controller for an orchestra was disregarded when she suggested investment managers.

Although those demeaning episodes made them uneasy at work, most said what ultimately deterred them from moving into top jobs were deep conflicts about how to achieve balance in their lives.

Julia Winton, 48, senior director of human resources at the University of Pennsylvania Health System in Philadelphia, got her degree from Wharton in 1976. After she married and had a son, she envied friends who were full-time homemakers.

Winton said she passed up promotions that would have required longer hours. At one point, she said, she was acting associate administrator at the hospital. She recalled that the pressures started at 7 a.m., with nurses showing up with broken gurneys and demanding that they be repaired immediately.

The job was "very intense, ongoing and relentless," Winton recalled, adding she had no interest in the permanent position, which traditionally is a career path to chief operating officer and chief executive officer.

For Linda Taylor, 51, of Bethesda, who received her MBA from Harvard in 1973, the responsibilities of caring for her children compelled her to quit a job in which she had already been frustrated by pay inequity and the discrimination she felt against women. Taylor left her position helping manage $3 billion in pension funds for retired coal miners a decade ago.

At the time, Taylor said her husband, a real estate developer, wasn't as attentive as she would have liked when supervising their three children. She added that although he supported her career, he also wanted to relax and have his dinner waiting when he got home.

"It plain got to be too much," Taylor said. The breaking point came when a delay on a business flight caused her to miss her daughter's birthday.

The man who replaced her was paid 50 percent more in the job, said Taylor, who now works from home, trying to raise venture capital for a retail business in Asia.

Maureen Scott, former director of finance at Marriott International Inc., also is at home, having quit in 1991 after tiring of a 40-hour workweek that was considered part time.

"When I was 50 or 60, did I want to feel I had given my best to my family or to my work? It was really no contest," said Scott, whose husband is a partner in a District law firm. "I've loved being home. There are probably men who would love it, too, if they could have it."

But for others, leaving the workplace felt like admitting defeat.

"I've spent 10 years mourning the fact I wouldn't be a CEO," said Alice N. Rogoff, 46, a Harvard graduate and former senior vice president, business manager and chief financial officer of U.S. News & World Report. "I felt I'd been promised that in getting my MBA."

Rogoff said that her husband, David Rubenstein, a founder of the Carlyle Group merchant banking firm, was absorbed in his work and that if she, too, had continued working, their three children, all younger than 10, would have been neglected. Last summer, she purchased an investment stake in a start-up company and recently left her outside job to work from home.

"My motivation is not to make a huge rate of return but to be part of something interesting," Rogoff said. "Being a CEO is no fun. One long, thankless job, and then you can be fired anyway. Money, professional recognition, I'm finding you can get all that without the big company. ... Wherever this road takes me will be fine."