Where and how can women get ahead in corporations? It was Facebook COO and Lean In author Sheryl Sandbergs 2012 graduation speeches at Barnard College and Harvard Business School that sparked a national conversation on womens advancement in the workplace. Now, just ahead of this years commencements, three new publications spotlight inroads women are making as general counsel, risk managers, and corporate board directors.
General Counsel
A topic near and dear to us at CorpCounsel.com gets a fresh eye this week in a Crains New York Business story, Wanted: women general counsels. Featuring interviews with several top in-house lawyers (including Sara Moss of Estée Lauder) and recruiters from prominent search firms, the article notes the steady increase of women GCs in the Fortune 500a figure thats nearly doubled to 108 female chief legal officers in the past decade.
But heres the twist: with lower gains for women in other executive positions, reporter Judith Messina asks, has the general counsel post essentially become the C-suite diversity slot? While women make up slightly more than 20 percent of Fortune 500 GCs, by comparison, they constitute 4.2 percent of the CEOs and 11.5 percent of CFOs.
One reason legal executive recruiters say they can deliver on women GCs owes to a deep talent poolhalf of law school graduates are women. "When I started in the business over 20 years ago, it was difficult to find qualified females," Catherine Nathan, a consultant at executive search firm Spencer Stuart, tells Messina. "Today, it’s not hard."
Still, Michele Coleman Mayes, general counsel of the New York Public Library (and previously of Allstate Insurance) demurs from the idea that its somehow easier to fill the GC office with a woman. It is too big a job to be going through the motions, saying this will be your token woman, she says in the Crains story. You’d better have someone whose judgment you trust.
