FIRST THERE WERE 25. NOW THERE ARE 30.

Back in 1998 when Working Woman magazine pioneered the Top 25 Companies for Executive Women, the stringent requirements meant that dozens and dozens of companies that considered themselves shoo-ins didn’t have a chance. Some had plenty of women in management but lacked the requisite two women board members. Others had a handful of highly placed women but few in the pipeline. Still others had large numbers of women clustered in lower management, but only a token woman in the executive suite.
Midway through the research and selection process, the Working Woman staff held concerned phone discussions: would they find enough qualified companies for a list?

What a difference five years makes.

This year, the NAFE editorial staff—which inherited the Top 25 project in late 2001 after Working Woman closed—reviewed the candidates and realized that, for the first time, so many companies qualified that 25 slots left out a few organizations with noteworthy numbers of successful women and progressive programs. Leadership development programs, work-life balance efforts, and supplier diversity outreaches have gained footholds in more and more places—and show greater innovation and efficacy than five years ago. Even more important, women are no longer simply tokens on executive committees. At press time, only 11 of the Fortune 1000 had women CEOs, but several recent waves of promotions have placed a number of women in other key “C-suite” spots—as CFO, CIO, COO, and president.

Five years ago, it was laughable to ask candidates how many women they had among their top five earners. (The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission [SEC] requires publicly held companies to list their top five compensated executives and those employees’ compensation in the publicly available proxy statement that precedes the annual shareholders’ meeting.) We asked anyway. As of the most recent proxy statements, 16 companies on the list have women in that rarified group. Moreover, five have two or more women in the top-paid ranks. And three out of this year’s Top 30 boast women CEOs: Avon, Golden West, and Hewlett-Packard.

“At more and more organizations over the past decade, doors have opened to women—thanks largely to the efforts of pioneering women who’ve challenged the status quo,” says NAFE President Dr. Betty Spence. And, she adds, “Our Top 30 Companies have been learning how to keep their talented women with opportunities to grow and advance and a work culture where they can prosper—and have a life. But we still have a long way to go. According to Catalyst, in America’s biggest firms, women still hold under 10 percent of profit-and-loss responsibility, the line jobs that lead to the top.”

WOMEN HELP WOMEN MOVE UP
Critical mass is starting to gather at the top, according to Susan Kropf, president and COO of Avon. Avon debuted at the top of the first list and hasn’t budged, staying ahead of ever more voracious competition. “As more of us advance to senior levels, it accelerates the pace of our pulling other women up,” she says. “Women tend to reach out to other women because there’s a comfort level. There’s no doubt in my mind that a woman can run divisions, whereas if the other gender is making that consideration, there would be an additional screen that the candidate would have to go through.”

Senior women at the Top 30 companies concur. They say that they are more determined than ever to use their status and power to ask the tough questions of managers who report to them: why wasn’t this particular woman considered for this spot? What are we assuming about this female candidate—her family situation, her attitude, her demonstrated skills, and perhaps-overlooked aptitude—that may sidetrack her? What barriers can’t we see that prevent women from sticking it out through the sometimes tedious middle-management years?

What’s more, an important shift in the philosophy that drives the advancement of women has occurred. Five years ago, companies reported that their diversity efforts were “the right thing to do.” Hard-headed pragmatism has replaced that somewhat fuzzy mantra: advancing women isn’t just the right thing to do, but is the right way to get things done.

That’s never more the case than when companies seek market share among segments dominated by women. After all, according to Competitive Edge magazine, women are the primary consumers in the U.S.
“Reality has hit a lot of companies’ understandings that women have strong purchasing power,” says Bette Price, president of business consultancy The Price Group and co-author of True Leaders. “In the past, companies would say, ‘Oh, we love women,’ but they had the mentality that they were filling a quota [of internal positions]. Then they woke up one day and said, ‘Gee, women are a market, but we don’t know how they think.’ When you have women on your leadership team, you’ll have a much more balanced perspective.”

Top 30 companies like Avon, Scholastic, Liz Claiborne, Federated, Procter & Gamble, and Target understand their female markets from the inside out. Now other companies are getting religion, thanks to the increasing economic clout of the country’s women-owned businesses—6.2 million strong according to the Center for Women’s Business Research—and to the recession, which has made big companies work harder to gain and retain customers. In recent years, Office Depot, Hewlett-Packard, and a slew of financial services firms have started or dramatically sharpened their efforts to market to women.

The end result? Women beginning to break barriers in industries usually dominated by men. “I see women at the top of companies that are not traditionally women’s businesses,” says Rosemary Maniscalco, vice chair of the board of directors at Comforce Corp., a global staffing company.
THE PIPELINE PLUMBED
In the process of researching this year’s list, NAFE found companies characterized by a commitment to continual improvement. We dug deeper to pry out details about candidate companies’ cultures, programs, and statistical success in advancing women.
One important question asked this year for the first time: what percentage of managers at the senior and upper middle management ranks have profit-and-loss (P&L) responsibility? This number serves as a key indicator as to which companies truly provide opportunities for senior women to run lines of business and break from the confines of traditional women’s tracks like human resources, communications, and more recently, corporate law and finance.
The best companies position women to make money for them. At Liz Claiborne, No. 3 on the Top 30 list, women account for four of the top seven operating executives; and at Scholastic, No. 2, women account for 10 of the 25 top executives, all with P & L.
Overall, the average percentage of women with line responsibility at EF’s top 10 landed at 35 percent. That means that currently, only a little more than a third of all top women executives are getting critical business experience at these, the best companies for women. “That’s much better than the average and a good benchmark for other companies, but I hope the Top 30 won’t rest on their laurels until women reach parity in P&L spots,” says Spence. NAFE will be watching.

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