A Good Woman Is Easier to Find

And a little self-promotion never hurts

In these tunes of unfriendly takeover attempts and vexing shareholder suits, the corporate board room is no longer the snug, overstuffed haven it used to be. Still, a directorship remains a sure sign of having made it in the business world. Few women have broken through the well-guarded boardroom door: only 276 women sit on boards of the nation's biggest 1,300 corporations. They tend to be concentrated in packaged-goods and other consumer-related companies.

Last week at a breakfast in Manhattan, ten members of the Financial Women's Association, a group of successful managers, introduced themselves as qualified candidates for board membership to the heads of 30 major corporations, including General Motors, Pfizer, Kennecott Copper, Uniroyal and Mobil. Said one of the aspirants, Paula Hughes, 47, a vice president and director of Thomson McKinnon Securities: "Being on a board is the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. Women get on boards because they have already been on boards." Added another candidate, Ellen Berland Sachar, 37, a vice president and security analyst with Paine Webber Mitchell Hutchins: "People complain that there is not a large enough pool of available women. We are saying that there is another generation of women coming up that corporate executives should be aware of."

Eighteen months ago the F.W.A. set out to select those members with appropriate work experience to be considered for directorships. The purpose of the breakfast was to acquaint the corporate chiefs with some of them. Says Marilyn Brown, 41, also a candidate and president of her own consulting firm: "Our approach is to make ourselves available." The "available" group also included Lynn Salvage, 32, president of the First Women's Bank of New York; Julia M. Walsh, 55, chairman of Julia Walsh & Sons, a Washington brokerage firm; Suzanne Jane, 35, a partner at Century Capital Associates, an investment advisory firm; and Rosalie Wolf, 37, a vice president of Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, investment bankers.

Once corporations have a woman director, says Janet Jones-Parker, an executive recruiter who is chairman of Management Woman, Inc., "there is a certain comfort level of 'Well, we have our woman now.' " Indeed, one of the chief executives at the breakfast was heard to wonder aloud: "I don't know why I was invited. We already have a woman on our board." Another problem for women is that most of them do not yet have jobs as senior as those of the men who get on boards. Says Rosalie Wolf: "Much of the job market was closed to us until ten years ago. We are still building the credentials that we need."

Corporate policy is changing fast to give women the line responsibilities that they must have to rise high enough to become directors. Said General Motors Chairman Thomas Aquinas Murphy, who was a speaker at the breakfast: "Our constant challenge is to find the unconventional woman, the woman with a strong educational background in engineering, who can approach a job as a first-line supervisor with enthusiasm."

None of the F.W.A. women, as Ellen Sachar put it, was "so naive as to think if she sat next to [Mobil Chairman] Rawleigh Warner at breakfast, he would invite her on the Mobil board at lunch." But what these women are telling corporate executives is that it is no longer valid to contend that there are not many qualified women for boards.

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