Group wields power of purse
Executive coach Donna Miller says she is frustrated so few companies are led by women, either as their chief executives or as board members. Now, she’s doing something about it.
Miller, of Edmond, has created a company called Purse Power.
The mission it seeks to accomplish through its website, pursepower.com, is to create positive, equitable and sustainable changes in two major ways to improve the lives of women and girls.
First, it will encourage women and men to shop at companies that either already have or are working toward having an equitable number of women on their boards of directors and in their executive positions.
Second, it will use a portion of the proceeds it makes from its activities to support shelters for battered women and their children and to help programs seeking to reduce domestic violence.
Miller has decades of experience working as a top executive at varying companies, including working as a human resources vice president at one area company for a number of years.
In 2007, she started the Executive Resource Center, which specializes in executive coaching, leadership development, strategic planning, change management, team building, organizational development and talent management consulting.
She also organized the Women Presidents’ Organization chapter in Oklahoma, and is an organizer of the annual Women Leadership Conference, which is holding its eighth-annual event April 13 at the Cox Convention Center in Oklahoma City.
Through her experiences as a corporate executive, Miller said she gradually realized there aren’t as many women corporate leaders as there ought to be, especially given the various diversity initiatives that have been tried for past 40 years.
So, Miller figured something like Purse Power might make a difference.
Numerous scholarly works have reported that women in the U.S. control or influence at least 73 percent of overall consumer spending, hold 51 percent of private wealth and hold 50 percent of stocks.
Research also shows women comprise 45 percent of the labor force for Standard & Poor’s 500 companies and that they represent a growth market greater than China and India combined.
The problem
Despite the power women hold financially, Miller maintains they don’t enjoy a proportional representation on the boards or in the corporate offices of many of the nation’s largest companies.
When it comes to companies represented in the Standard & Poor’s 500, women hold less than 6 percent of CEO positions, less than 20 percent of board seats and less than 26 percent of executive officer positions among those firms, her website states.
Through her business, the Executive Resource Center, Miller said she often encourages clients to use “appreciative inquiry,” which asks people to focus on what they want and what works instead of problems and what’s getting in the way.
She used that same concept to analyze inequality in the workplace for women, Miller continued.
“When you focus on problems, you just have more problems,” Miller said. “But when you focus on solutions, you get solutions. People are a lot more creative; there’s a lot more energy when you focus on what could be, rather than what’s getting in the way.”
In a profile she wrote for the website, she noted she believes money could make a difference.
“When I started to think about what would work, I concluded that money talks and it does so in a clear, unmistakable and indisputable voice,” Miller wrote.
“Corporate America cares about one thing — revenue. Women ... control the purse strings in the United States. I reasoned that if we would act collectively and buy products and services from companies that support women and girls, glass ceilings would shatter and lives would be changed.
“We could create a more equitable future. Faster,” she wrote.
The solution
The idea behind the Purse Power site is to feature both web and mobile device platforms that can help consumers determine if a company treats women equitably.
Companies with boards of directors where at least 20 percent of those directors are women are featured on the site, as are companies that have women chief executives.
In a business plan, Miller said companies that treat women fairly and inclusively can expect to see rewards via Purse Power’s website through increased revenues, brand loyalty, favorable public opinion, employee satisfaction, innovation and superior talent acquisition.
”Our goal is to encourage women and thoughtful men consumers to spend their money with companies that support bringing about change,” Miller said. “The things we’ve tried before haven’t been effective, so it’s time to try something new.”
She said the company could capture revenue from various sources, including charging site users a small fee to access a list of companies meeting its criteria, through the advertising of businesses that either are owned or operated by women, by selling captured data, and by providing consulting services to companies to help them build pipelines of future women leaders.
Public reveal
Miller said she’s been working on the idea for Purse Power for several years. She effectively took it public early this year at Women’s marches in Washington, D.C., and Denver, where she and other volunteers distributed some 30,000 pins promoting the website.
Miller said she also plans to promote the site and its mission at Thursday’s women’s leadership conference, which runs from 7:30 a.m. to about 5 p.m. at the Cox Convention Center in Oklahoma City.
Miller said she doesn’t want anyone to believe her idea to create the company and its website either was based in politics or any other type of radical agenda.
Miller, who has three 17-year-old children, said, “My son calls me an equalist. I am not a feminist. I just want everyone to have an equal opportunity.
“I have two boys and a girl. I am trying to raise them as equals, and I would like for all of them to be successful. That’s what it is about, to me.”