The most powerful women in business
Then and now
The Washington Post’s Katherine Graham (1969)
FORTUNE — The year was 1973. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique had been out for a decade; Ms. magazine had published its first issue. Women were pouring into the workforce, hitting 40% of the total working population that year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Over half of married women with school-age kids held a paying job.
And yet, as Fortune’s Wyndham Robertson surveyed the world of big business in an April 1973 story, she had a question about this supposed female surge: “Where in blazes are they?”
A mere 3% of women in the workforce were “managers and administrators,” according to the BLS, and, as Robertson wrote, “in jobs where visibility is greatest — i.e. in corporate management — women are seldom seen.”
How seldom seen? Fortune looked at its list of the 1,000 largest industrial companies, plus the 50 largest companies in six non-industrial businesses. From this list of 1,300 firms, 1,220 had to file proxies with the SEC that provided information on the top three paid officers, and any director earning over $30,000 (equivalent to just shy of $160,000 today). Of the 6,500 names generated that way, a mere 11 turned out to be women. After subtracting a woman who appeared not to be closely involved in running her company, Robertson profiled the others in a piece called “The Ten Highest-Ranking Women in Big Business” that is notable both for showing what has changed in 40 years and, as importantly, what has not.
In 1973, it was almost impossible for a woman to work her way up the ranks to a leadership role. Robertson wrote that while the women on the list — which included names such as the Washington Post’s WPO Katharine Graham and Barbie creator Ruth Handler — were “highly capable and hard-working executives,” they also, with only two exceptions, “were helped along by a family connection, by marriage, or by the fact that they helped to create the organizations they now preside over. In short, most of them did not have to deal with at least two problems that have over the years held back even the most able and qualified women: They did not start out in their companies in jobs with limited futures, and they did not have to work their way through a corporate hierarchy that discriminated against them.”
The irony of this was that “none of these women, obviously, has to work, and in fact some of them wouldn’t have — or wouldn’t have had careers — without the family tie-in.” Dorothy Chandler of the Times Mirror Co., reported in her profile that, “If I had not been Mrs. Norman Chandler, I would not have had the opportunities I’ve had.”
But, as Robertson wrote, “Each of them plays an effective and important role within her corporation — an impressive bit of evidence that other female executive talent is going to waste.”
Forty years later, this seems pretty apparent. Fortune’s annual Most Powerful Women in Business list can easily rank 50 women vs. the 10 on the 1973 proto-list, and as Fortune noted in its October 2012 rankings, “While there are currently 19 female Fortune 500 CEOs … the talent pool was so deep that two of them didn’t make the cut.”
Read the full article at: http://fortune.com/2013/05/28/the-most-powerful-women-in-business-then-and-now/
Patty Block, President and Founder of The Block Group, established her company to advocate for women-owned businesses, helping them position their companies for strategic growth. Charting the course for impactful, sustainable, profitable businesses, the beacon is control: of your strategic direction, your money, your time, your staffing, and your ability to bring in business. The Block Group brings together the people, resources and ideas that build results.
Business consulting for women entrepreneurs in Houston.
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