Marilyn Helms, a professor of management with the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and director of the Institute for Women as Entrepreneurs, says the glass ceiling is still shatterproof for many women. In Tennessee, where Helms has conducted her own studies, a few of the women on boards are spouses of CEOs and friends. While men are more likely to cite job dissatisfaction as a reason for leaving their jobs, women will leave if they are precluded from a career path to senior management, said Catalyst vice president Jo Maitland Weiss. Boards with multiple women directors make sense, particularly as we find ourselves in a primarily knowledge-based economy, where women are as capable as men. It's time for companies to take the necessary measures to ensure that women's board representation occurs at a significantly faster rate.
Women still have a way to go when they reach that upper echelon, however.
Catalyst reported virtually no change in the representation of women among officers of a corporation who also serve on its board, known as inside directors, since 1995, when it began examining this benchmark. But numbers alone should not dictate women's progress, said Vicki A. O'Meara, executive vice president and general counsel for Miami-based Ryder Systems. The No. 1 criteria for a woman executive, or any executive she said, is that they be qualified. They have to be qualified, and like anyone else, attain goals through hard work, good performance and experience. Slowly but surely, women as a group are attaining those higher levels of expertise.