Tough Times, Tougher Women

Joanne Cleaver

Here is an article written by Joanne Cleaver for BNET, The CBS Interactive Business Network. To check out an abundance of valuable resources and obtain a free subscription to one or more of the BNET newsletters, please click here.

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Girlfriend, your business is not about you. It’s about your customers.

That’s the hard lesson that a lot of women business owners are learning as the recovery sputters.  The Center for Women’s Business Research just released its biennial survey of what’s going on in the heads of women business owners. (To be fair, the survey is sponsored by Key Bank.)

Turns out that women business owners are hoping for cheerier times, just like most small business owners.
http://www.nfib.com/Portals/0/PDF/sbet/sbet201011.pdfThey’re feeling better about next year because they are seeing the results of tough decisions made this year. Over half either have just raised prices or are about to.  Meanwhile, 41% drove a sales increase. But just as many – 38% -  reaped a gain in net earnings, as saw a drop – 39%.

My conclusion: the recession has sobered up  many women who started their own companies giddy with the prospect of having a lifestyle business. Their initial ambition was personal self-direction and to get away from The Man.  But then they discovered that there’s always a Man. He’s the customer. You are not in business unless you work for him. In fact, if you’re a successful entrepreneur, you replace one Man with lots of Men. (Yes, yes, of course I know that women are clients and customers too. Just stick with the metaphor, ok?)  That means you have to sharpen your pencil and fine-tune your returns.

Easy growth can mask sloppy management. The low tide of a recession exposes that.
A separate survey, conducted earlier this year by Guardian Life,  found that in companies of up to nine employees, everything revolves around the owner.

That is not a recipe for growth.  The Guardian survey found that at companies with fewer than 10 employees, the focus was ‘just trying to maintain business as usual.”  If your vision is limited to your immediate circle, and if your ideas are so big that you can continue to raise your own roof and do it all yourself, then you might achieve a tidy income being the sun in your own little solar system.

But if you are looking to build a bigger solar system, you will quickly find that your staff must take on roles that do more than support you. At companies with 50 to 99 employees, half of the owners in the Guardian survey reported that their main focus was growth.  Which explains why surviving a recession separates the women from the girls.

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Since 1981, Joanne Cleaver has been reporting on all aspects of business for national and regional newspapers, magazines and websites. Numerous magazine and industry “best employers for women” lists use the equity index she developed to rank companies according to the presence (or not) of women in their executive ranks. She also leads the research firm Wilson-Taylor Associates, Inc., where her team measures and supports the advancement of women in accounting, cable, finance and other industries. Yes, she has an opinion: that when women fully engage in all business operations, companies will make more money in more ways.

How to Engineer Bridges for Women

Joanne Cleaver

Here is an article written by Joanne Cleaver for BNET, The CBS Interactive Business Network. To check out an abundance of valuable resources and obtain a free subscription to one or more of the BNET newsletters, please click here.

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In most doctoral programs in engineering and the physical sciences, you can count the number of women on one hand. With one finger, even.

While the National Science Foundation and its cohorts labor mightily on big-picture solutions, one breakout project has just delivered a set of tools useful for all women in male-dominated fields.

CareerWise aims to equip women with context and practical strategies for dealing with everyday annoyances, says Bianca Bernstein, the Principal Investigator for the Careerwise Research Program. (She’s also a psychologist, for for purposes of this project, gets a CSI-like title.)

It will take a long, long, long time for programs to change the embedded cultures that not only channel more men into these categories but perpetuate the cultures that many women find inhospitable.  Officially, everybody wants more women in these programs. But then they run into situations like that faced by one working mom: she walked into an evening classroom only to be asked by the professor, in front of the group, if she shouldn’t be home feeding dinner to her kids.

“My interest as a psychologist is that, while the big picture changes, things still happen to individual women that create obstacles on a moment by moment basis,” Bernstein told me in an interview yesterday. “We wanted to see if we could develop something that would provide a resource to women so they can learn how to react better in the moment and also to prepare them for the future, given that the assumption that whatever is unpleasant will likely follow them into the future. ”

Here’s what she figured out that is useful for most workplaces:  the stories of women’s experiences help women currently facing career challenges and their bosses.

Women’s stories, told through first-person videos, are a central component of CareerWise. The intention is that women entering the sciences, or wondering if it is worthwhile to hang in there in an uncomfortable, tiresome environment, will glean useful strategies and also absorb the message that they are not alone – present circumstances notwithstanding.

But Bernstein has found that professors, program leaders and department heads find these videos an eye-opener, too.  They often don’t know what they don’t know. When they hear the first-hand stories of women in programs like theirs, and recognize the culture and characteristics of their own departments in those stories, they suddenly get it.

This is a new twist on the very tired concept of diversity training, which is so hackneyed it has become a self-parody. Why not let women speak for themselves? Their experiences are powerful in the first person.

Narrative documentary is more powerful than a lecture. Personal testimony is always more compelling than yet another set of rules.

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Since 1981, Joanne Cleaver has been reporting on all aspects of business for national and regional newspapers, magazines and websites. Numerous magazine and industry “best employers for women” lists use the equity index she developed to rank companies according to the presence (or not) of women in their executive ranks. She also leads the research firm Wilson-Taylor Associates, Inc., where her team measures and supports the advancement of women in accounting, cable, finance and other industries. Yes, she has an opinion: that when women fully engage in all business operations, companies will make more money in more ways.

Joanne Cleaver asks, “Is your company this honest about its women?”

 

Joanne Cleaver

 

Here is an article written by Joanne Cleaver for BNET, The CBS Interactive Business Network. To obtain a free subscription to one or more of the BNET newsletters, please click here.

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There’s truth in numbers — if you can find them.

We’ve got lots of statistics about women in management overall. But as much as individual employers love to collect awards for being wonderful to work for, not very many have the courage to publicly report how many women they have at each level of management and how much headway those women are making.

That’s because saying it out loud sets up expectations — expectations that if the numbers are lousy, the company is doing something about it, and if those numbers don’t improve, somebody’s going to pay.  Better to clam up and drop the occasional statistical crumb to support your claim that you’re working womens’ nirvana and have those painful discussions behind closed doors.

Moss Adams is a Seattle-based public accounting firm that does not subscribe to that Hansel & Gretel philosophy. For the second year, MA has just published, on its web site, the annual report of its Forum W  women’s initiative.  (This kind of disclosure is one reason why Moss Adams supports the Accounting MOVE Project , in partnership with my firm and the American Woman’s Society of CPAs and the American Society of Women Accountants.)

Wouldn’t you think that public accounting firms would be all over putting their numbers out there? I scratched around the websites of the award-collecting Big Four and came up with only one report that even comes close to what Moss Adams is doing…. but still manages to obfuscate any sense of actual progress.

Moss Adams spells it out, right there on page 13 and in a no-nonsense bar chart, thank you, not fuzzed up by fancy graphics. Women at the firm account for:

21% of partners, up one point from the 20% where they’d been stuck for years
45% of senior managers, a two-point drop from last year
58% of managers, up three points
52% of senior associates, down three points
42% of staff, down six points

Moss Adams has put in place a spectrum of development programs for women at all levels. It’s ramping up individual career guidance for everyone. It’s coaching younger women in the nuances of strategic volunteering so they become fluent in business development skills.  Will all this work?  I think it will, but the point is: we’ll know. At most workplaces, your only inkling about how women are progressing is the earnest announcement, slow fade, and enthusiastic re-launch of the same old women’s programs in a perpetual cycle of ambition and disappointment.

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Since 1981, Joanne Cleaver has been reporting on all aspects of business for national and regional newspapers, magazines and websites. Numerous magazine and industry “best employers for women” lists use the equity index she developed to rank companies according to the presence (or not) of women in their executive ranks. She also leads the research firm Wilson-Taylor Associates, Inc., where her team measures and supports the advancement of women in accounting, cable, finance and other industries. Yes, she has an opinion: that when women fully engage in all business operations, companies will make more money in more ways.