Madam Executive

With a crisp manner and hearty handshake, the ambitious businesswoman often courts success by acting like a man. As one has explained, when she was in her mid-20s and determined to get ahead at the office, she took her femininity and "stored it away for future consideration." Up to a point, perhaps to middle-management levels, this tactic may prove effective. But to reach the highest levels of business, a woman must clearly and comfortably accept the fact that she is a woman, according to two alumnae of the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration: Margaret Hennig, 33, and Anne Jardim, 37. They are so convinced that women must take their own route to the executive suite that they have set up at Simmons College in Boston the nation's first graduate program in management at a woman's school. Beginning next September, they will train some of the female executives needed as a result of recent legal assaults on sex discrimination in business. (Although 40% of the work force is female, less than 2% of managers earning over $25,000 per year are women.)

Vicious Circle. The shortage of women managers is only partly due to discrimination, Hennig and Jardim believe. On the basis of their experience as consultants to such corporations as New England Bell Telephone & Telegraph and the Columbia Broadcasting System, they have discovered that women are held back partly by their own passivity, partly by a vicious circle of misunderstandings. Men tend to assume that women are more interested in marriage or their children than in careers. Women, on the other hand, assume that they will be tolerated only if they are superefficient. So they become experts at one particular job, then hesitate to venture out into something better but more risky. By thus hanging back, they confirm the assumption that they are not really committed to a career.

Moreover, even if they feel they could easily take on more responsibilities, women tend not to demand them, as men often do, but hope to be invited to accept them. Using a dancing school analogy, Hennig notes that women in business management "are all dolled up against the wall, waiting to be chosen."

One female bank vice president, for example, served as acting president for several months, yet was not considered permanently for the job simply because of her sex. She also suspected that her salary was lower than that paid to male vice presidents. Bitterly, she accepted these inequities for years till she consulted with Hennig and Jardim. They told her to add up her assets and make a case for herself. "That was a blinding insight to her," notes Jardim. "My God," responded her boss when the woman finally mustered the courage to show him that she was managing some $25 million in loans, whereas her four male bank colleagues together were handling only $10 million. Shortly afterward, she got a big raise.

Business Bitches. Fearing to move upward into an unknown job where they might make mistakes and appear incompetent, resentful women hang back and grow more resentful with the years; they are often seen by other employees, notes Jardim, as "business bitches." Unlike their male coworkers, women have no "support system," revolving around the lunch hour and the locker room, where men share valuable business tips about moving up the ladder. Excluded from the male system, women must establish their own.*

Some of Hennig's notions stem in part from her 1970 Ph.D. thesis, expanded with the help of Jardim, which will be published this year by Anchor Press under the title Women Executives: Pioneers in Management. For the thesis, Hennig interviewed 25 top female executives to discover what characteristics they shared. All of them had in effect shelved their femininity for many years in favor of their jobs. But when they reached the middle-management stage of their careers, usually in their late 30s or early 40s, they all, in various ways, declared a moratorium on their blind striving for success. They began to devote more time to their personal lives. Some married, some did not; but all, in Hennig's words, "signified their willingness to be viewed as women." After a period of reassessment they managed, for the first tune, to blend their femininity with their careers. Their relationships at work became more open and effective, and it was then that they made the final leap upward to become presidents or vice presidents of their firms.

A similar group of women whom Hennig studied, by continuing through their 40s to act as much like men as possible, remained in the levels of middle-management and were "closed, bitter, defensive, unhappy." Exactly why one group re-examined and redirected their lives while the other did not remains a question. But Hennig's and Jardim's advice to the woman who wants a successful career in business is unequivocal: don't be a wallflower, don't fear failure, and above all, be your womanly self.

*Sociologist David Riesman defends women's colleges because they often help promote such a "support system." They give women an opportunity for managerial experience and for the "kind of give-and-take banter that enables American men to get along with each other in a kind of adverse joviality." Riesman also emphasizes the importance of sports for women, since he believes that "the road to the board room leads through the locker room."

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