Few women make CEO in Arizona
Men still hold top 5 positions at majority of companies in state
Top leadership at Arizona’s publicly traded companies remains largely an all-male club, even after a year marked by notable advances by female executives.
Female CEOs now run two Arizona-based public companies, up from one, and more women are joining the ranks of the state’s highest-paid business leaders.
About 60 percent of Arizona corporations report that their five or so highest-paid positions are filled by men, although larger public companies are more likely to have a senior woman in their executive ranks.
Overall,12 percent of the highest-paid senior managers at Arizona’s 45 public corporations were women last year. That was up from 6 percent in 2011. The107 leaders in this group each took home $750,000 or more in compensation, including stock awards and options, in 2012.
The recent increase in the
number of female corporate leaders isn’t primarily the result of women getting promoted at Arizona’s legacy public companies. Rather, a few companies with highly ranked female executives have relocated here or have gone public over the past year by issuing stock for the first time.
The higher profile for women in Arizona corporations comes after a year in which gender roles in the executive suite have emerged again as a hot topic.
Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, recently weighed in with a best-selling book that urges women to become more assertive in seeking top corporate roles.
Marissa Mayer, the much-scrutinized president and CEO of Yahoo!, banned telecommuting for workers around the time she built a nursery next to her executive suite so she could spend more time with her new son.
And a former top State Department official, AnneMarie Slaughter, basically gave up her job after concluding that “juggling high-level government work with the needs of two teenage boys was not possible,” as she recounted last year in an oft-quoted article in the Atlantic magazine.
Change in male-dominated corporate executive suites might be coming gradually, but many longtime observers of the glass ceiling take it with a grain of salt.
“I used to say we’d have parity (with male executives and directors) by 2026, but we won’t at this pace,” said Susan Shultz, who heads a Phoenix executive-search firm that specializes in recruiting for boards of directors. “I don’t think we’re making progress that’s meaningful.”
Suzanne Peterson, an assistant professor at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, cites statistics showing that at the United States’ 1,000 largest companies by revenue, only about 4 percent of CEOs are women.
“The general feeling is that while these numbers represent an improvement from years past, it is a very slow trend and is still a pretty small percentage,” she said in a statement. “Women now represent about half of the total workforce, so in some cases, it may just be sheer numbers that are getting women in (more executive) seats.”
Public companies are required to disclose the compensation of their highest-paid executives, typically five per company. Details for all senior corporate leaders are presented in the The Arizona Repub
lic’s special report on executive pay, which appears today in the Az Economy section.
Hot topic
Minorities also tend to be underrepresented in executive suites, but female leadership has remained a hot topic of debate for months.
Globally, 5 percent of CEOs hired in 2012 were women, up from an average of 3 percent over the previous three years, according to a recent study by Booz & Co., a global management-consulting firm.
Contrast that with data from other walks of life: Four of Arizona’s latest five governors have been women, and women today earn almost three of every five college degrees nationally.
Companies are feeling pressure to become more diverse, and many of their employees, customers and suppliers look at such indicators. But Dale Kalika, a senior lecturer at the W.P. Carey School who teaches a class on women and leadership in business, isn’t convinced that women are making serious inroads.
Even the steady increase in the proportion of women earning college degrees “doesn’t mean there won’t be obstacles for women as they move into higher positions,” she said.
Kalika said she agrees with Sandberg’s premise that young women shouldn’t compromise their career ambitions at an early age but said taking an assertive, ambitious stance isn’t enough.
They also need to use their voices to influence how companies recruit, develop and promote women, and companies need to more aggressively promote women for management roles, Kalika said.
As for Mayer’s decision to ban telecommuting, Kalika called that a “major step back to facilitating work-life balance,” for both women and men.
A new mix
Arizona has added seven public corporations over roughly the past year, mostly as existing companies issued stock for the first time and began reporting pay figures for top executives.
A couple of prominent companies were acquired and no longer disclose compensation results — namely Medicis Pharmaceutical and P.F. Chang’s China Bistro.
Some of the newly public Arizona-headquartered companies operate in the real-estate industry.
Taylor Morrison Home Corp. has two senior women. One is the CEO, Sheryl Palmer. Palmer joins CEO Kimberly McWaters of vocational-school parent Universal Technical Institute as only the second woman to head an Arizona public corporation.
Palmer downplayed gender differences in an e-mail to The Republic. “Our team members are very evenly split between men and women, all of whom do a great job for our customers across the U.S. and Canada.”
She added that one of her responsibilities as CEO is making sure the company attracts and retains top talent, “focusing strictly on their abilities to help advance our customer and company needs.”
AV Homes, a developer that moved its headquar- ters here from Florida, has a senior female executive. Another newly public Arizona firm, American Residential Properties, listed two women among its most highly compensated executives, as did Healthcare Trust of America, a real-estate firm that owns medical office buildings.
Does it matter whether more women move into senior executive roles?
Shultz believes it does. Because so many customers, employees and shareholders are women, female decision makers can help a firm understand these segments better, she said.
They can change a company’s marketing approach to attract more or different consumers, for example, or make the workplace more appealing to female (and male) employees by encouraging telecommuting, flextime and other work-life balance policies.
“It’s really time to have more representation at the top,” she said.
In a 2007 study, Catalyst, a New York-based nonprofit that seeks to expand business opportunities for women, found that public companies with female board members generated higher returns on sales, investment and equity than larger firms in general.
Some Arizona-based companies do have formal policies to boost the number of female executives. Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold, for example, reports that 11 percent of its managers are women, with a goal of increasing that to 15 percent.
“Women have traditionally been underrepresented in the mining sector, and we continue to seek ways to recruit and foster career development for females,” the mining company said in a recent report on its website.
Freeport-McMoRan’s executive vice president and chief financial officer, Kathleen Quirk, was the highest-paid woman at an Arizona public company last year, earning $3.2 million.
Obstacles to the top
Despite widespread corporate efforts to promote diversity, they don’t always pan out when picking a top corporate leader. Gender is just one of many factors that enter the mix and usually isn’t a dominant consideration.
“I don’t think it’s done on purpose or intentionally,” Shultz said. “But we tend to clone ourselves in that we want people around us who are just like us.”
Though blatant discrimination is illegal, subtle stereotyping still occurs, many contend. “When women try to be assertive or direct, men look at it as being aggressive,” Kalika said.
Another factor that she feels is holding back women is their reluctance to negotiate effectively and to ask for what they want — something that Sandberg stressed in her book.
And there are other factors. For instance, many women work in human resources, accounting and other fields that — while important — often aren’t directly related to boosting a firm’s revenue or controlling costs, meaning they aren’t the areas from which CEOs typically are plucked.
By contrast, “line” positions, such as those connected to sales and production, tend to be CEO incubators and male-dominated, Kalika said.
The Booz study found that while most new CEOs lack MBAs, they know their firms and industries well. Most were insiders who worked their way up and often spent their whole careers at the company.
To the extent women have careers interrupted by kids, caring for parents and other work-life issues, it can be a serious handicap to advancement.
Yet McWaters of Universal Technical Institute, who for years was Arizona’s lone female CEO, believes some typically feminine qualities can be an asset.
“Caring for others comes naturally to women, and is a leadership trait that can help them achieve success in all areas of their lives,” she said. “Be a servant leader to those around you and place priority on their growth and development. As you support them in achieving success, you will be successful.”