Kay Koplovitz, founder of USA Networks (USAI
), wants women to have equal access to venture capital because she didn't. Nina McLemore, founder of Liz Claiborne Accessories, hopes to help the next generation of businesswomen avoid being passed over for a well-deserved promotion, as she was in 1980. Heidi Miller, chief financial officer of Bank One (ONE
), is frustrated that 30 years after women hit the workplace in droves, so few are in executive suites. Ann Kaplan, one of the first female partners at Goldman Sachs (GS
), is tired of seeing thousands of financially illiterate women and believes they will never achieve economic parity with men unless that changes.
Although each woman's motivation is different, the difficulties of often being a company's only senior female executive binds them together. To that end, this growing cadre of influential women is working to create and connect women into a new girls' network. "If successful women don't try to create an open path for other women, who will?" asks McLemore, who runs an equity fund and is vice-chair of the nonprofit Center for Women's Business Research in Washington.
Most of these women you've probably never heard of (table). They give their time through mentoring programs, among others. They've also helped raise $2.5 billion in venture capital for women-owned businesses and other projects. For example, Koplovitz created Springboard Enterprises, a venture-capital forum that has raised more than $750 million. Denise Brousseau, formerly a Motorola (MOT
) vice-president, co-founded the Forum for Women Entrepreneurs, which has directed more than $1.1 billion to women's high-tech ventures.
The very roadblocks these women experienced may have given them the incentive to start networks. If they were CEOs, like Carly Fiorina of Hewlett-Packard (HPQ
), they might not have been able to champion women in the same way. That's the theory of Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and author of Beyond the Double Bind: Women and Leadership (Oxford University Press; $17.95). As CEO of a public company, a woman can't be seen as favoring one gender or she'll be vulnerable to criticism that she places gender concerns above productivity.
Consequently, the construction of a far-reaching women's network is left to those who aren't high-profile CEOs. Take Myra Hart, a professor at Harvard Business School and co-founder of Staples. She has created 65 Harvard B-school case studies involving women managers, with another 200 in the works. The cases are distributed to more than 300 business schools, reaching more than 400,000 of the coming crop of MBAs. "These case studies are helping to change the perception of women [leaders] in the workplace," says Hart, who earned her PhD in business from Harvard after raising three children. She understands such perceptions. Thank goodness she's not alone.
Copyright 2002, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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