The last issue of FastCompany magazine torqued me off.  Usually I read FastCompany and am very pleased with and motivated by the content.  Unfortunately, the article, “Where are the Women?”, left me highly annoyed.  It makes the same mistake that other recent articles (like one last fall in NYT) make, claiming that women are simply choosing not to participate and are “opting out” of the paths to the board room and the upper echelons of corporate power.

They persistently blame women for a problem that is not women’s alone.

It's not this simple. The answers to why women aren't in the corner office are simply not that black-and-white.

And the more we push this back at women, more or less saying it's all their own fault, the longer the corner offices will be occupied not by the best candidate out of the entire field.

The answer lies in that very act of pushing back. It's not the women. It's the measures. We measure success in business by traditional standards based on male-oriented hierarchies and structures. Were society to allow business to become that which is female-oriented, this article would have been entirely unnecessary.

I recommend revisiting the The Second Shift -- when women are not harassed by society for being imperfect mothers, when fathers bear exactly the same burdens, when new support networks and resources replace those women have lost with societal changes, then perhaps women will be in the corner offices.

Think about it: a woman has to choose between putting in the extra hours a corporation demands as a ticket to success or taking care of her children. Why does she have to make this choice at all??

Mark from markzorro.blogspot.com doesn’t think there’s much that can be done about this, except continuing to raise consciousness.  I disagree:

…there is something that can be done, and women are doing it in droves. It's another problem with all the articles which push back at women, claiming they're "dropping out" or "opting out". (As if choosing between one's flesh-and-blood and corporate bullying is much of an option...) These articles simply don't take note of the sea change under way.

Women are starting their own businesses, building something completely different to achieve the same ends. Note this from SOHO in reference to the U.S. Census Bureau's Economic Census Survey of Women-Owned Business Enterprises: "Over the last two decades, the survey has revealed not only the dramatic growth of women-owned businesses, but also their economic power. From 1982 to 1999, the number of women-owned businesses increased by 250 percent - from 2.6 million to an estimated 9.1 million."

Note, too, the rate of growth, documented by the Center for Women's Business Research: "The growth of women’s entrepreneurship, driven by access to capital, markets, and networks has outpaced the growth of all businesses by 1.5 to 2 times"

Women aren't getting to the corner office not just because the glass ceiling expects them to make choices their male counterparts aren't required to make; they're making their own corner offices outside of the Fortune 1000.

The real FastCompanies may be newer, smaller, agile and owned-operated by women.

Every time I experience a product or service failure (like Microsoft’s blue-screen-of-death), I wonder to myself: Did they not have enough women on that design or marketing team to see the potential challenges from a different perspective?  Where’s the woman-owned business that’s going to kick this in the butt? 

And when can I buy stock in her firm?

4:26:32 PM    comment []

Sorry, gang, been tied up between campaign work and the Book Club yesterday.  No time for blogging!

It could be like this for the next week.  Or more, depending on how the chips fall on 03-FEB-04 and on 07-FEB-04.

Bear with me!  I’ll try throw out a tidbit now and then as time permits!

1:11:22 PM    comment []