Female CEOs thankful for supportive dads
NEW YORK — As a girl growing up in Elberon, N.J., Denise Morrison, future CEO of Campbell Soup Company, got a business education from her father.
An executive at AT&T, Dennis Sullivan brought home models of the Princess Trimline phone and talked to Denise and her three younger sisters at dinner about product development and marketing. He described new assignments and taught them to write business plans when they wanted something new, like a bicycle, that included the costs of different models.
“He was educating us about so many things, from pay for performance to the importance of changing jobs often to gain broad experience,” says Morrison, 61, who worked at half a dozen companies, including PepsiCo Inc. and Nestlé SA, before joining Campbell in 2003. “He said he saw the world opening up for women and wanted us to be prepared.”
( Morrison’s younger sister Maggie Wilderotter is chairman and former CEO of Frontier Communications.)
Father’s Day, celebrated Sunday, gives businesswomen like Morrison and General Motors CEO Mary Barra an occasion to remember and salute their dads for teaching them important lessons about how to succeed in a world where females still hold only about 14 per cent of senior executive jobs and are CEOs at just 23 companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index.
All children are shaped by their parents, but a father can have a particularly weighty influence on a daughter’s career path, says Gail Saltz, associate professor of psychiatry at New York Presbyterian Hospital.
“For girls who have interests and aspirations in areas that are traditionally male, a father’s confidence in them can be very helpful” and counters the bias that “if you’re an assertive female you’re somehow too aggressive,” she says.
Barra says her father encouraged her interest in cars and science and her decision to work at GM. Her father, Ray Makela, worked for 39 years as a die maker at GM’s plant in Pontiac, Mich., retiring just as Barra joined the company as an 18-year-old intern.
Makela had a workshop in his basement where he fixed appliances and tinkered. Barra had to help her mother around the house, but was allowed to join her father in the workshop once she finished her chores.
“I got to work next to him on the workbench,” she said in an interview last year.
Whenever her father brought home a vehicle from his plant, Barra, 53, spent hours exploring it.
Male executives who have daughters are more likely to treat the women they work with better, studies have found. When a male CEO has a daughter, especially if she’s his first child, he’s more apt to close the gender pay gap at his company, according to a study of more than 10,000 private companies in Denmark from 1995 through 2006. Salaries of female employees grew by 1.1 per cent, compared with a 0.6 per cent gain for male employees, if the CEO’s first child was a daughter, the study found.
Daughters whose fathers were themselves raised by successful women may be especially lucky. Ashley Fina is president of Michael C. Fina, a third-generation family-owned retailer and employee recognition company. Her father inherited it from his parents who ran it jointly.
Fina, 30, joined the company in 2009 and soon after her father passed the president’s job to her, although he’s still giving strategic advice.
“My father’s mother was a strong entrepreneur, so he’s used to women being in charge.”