After ten years at the helm of eBay, President and CEO Meg Whitman announced that she intends to retire effective today, March 31, 2008. A visionary in the field of online commerce and a true leader, Ms. Whitman offers a Voice of Experience for young women in business. She will be succeeded by John Donahoe, 47, who has headed eBay’s auction and e-commerce businesses.Meg Whitman became President and CEO of eBay, the online auction website, in 1998. One of only 12 female CEOs in the Fortune 500, she has lead eBay with a vision and unique sense of direction that has enabled the company to grow from a small online trading website to the largest e-commerce site in the world. When she took the helm of eBay, Ms. Whitman focused on building the eBay brand into a household name, and improving consumer trust and confidence in the online commerce experience. Read more
Contributed by Heather Cassell
California has a reputation for its progressive politics as well as being a well of innovative inventions and opportunities, but the golden state doesn’t have a sunny disposition when it comes to women’s leadership.
Nearly half, 49.8 percent, of California’s 400 publicly held companies have no women executive officers, according to a University of California at Davis Graduate School of Management report revealed last October, and only 34.3 percent of the state’s public companies have only one woman on its board of directors. This means that in such a trend setting, policy establishing progressive state women make up only 27 percent of the active directors and executive officers of California’s 400 largest public companies. But for the largest publicly held companies headquartered in California the number of women who comprise directors’ and executives’ chairs in 2007 drops to 10.4 percent and this is a slight increase from 10.2 percent in 2006, according to the report.
The first time you are made redundant is the worst. Sort of like losing your virginity, your expectations of the event bear very little relation to the experience. When it does happen, the reality can be both comic and tragic at the same time. But it is nearly always hard to cope with when it happens. However competent and successful you may be, you are now no longer wanted, and that hurts, especially if you’ve put your heart and soul into your work.
Unfortunately, recent financial market woes mean that more financial professionals are going to be dealing with layoffs in the near future, as discussed in this Times Online article.
The Working Mothers Committee is proud to host the Spring Luncheon at the Science, Industry and Business Library (SIBL) branch of the New York Public Library.
Contributed by Pamela Capalad
Women are a driving force in the workplace and equal opportunity employment is no longer simply lip service, as smart CEOs realize the power of recruiting and retaining female employees
. Companies are not only targeting women and women of color in their hiring practices; many recognize the importance of catering to women’s unique needs to ensure their productivity and well-being. Many companies are implementing formal mentoring and education programs, networking and support systems, and progressive flex-time, maternity leave and on-ramp programs to accommodate this trend.
The companies who made the Glass Hammer’s Top 10 List are industry leaders who actively implement programs that create a balance between increasing diversity in the workplace, juggling family and professional life, and consciously creating programs that contribute to a measurable advancement of women in leadership positions.
Contributed by Caroline Ceniza-Levine of SixFigureStart
The following question came up at a recent workshop that I led about career management during a down market:
“My company is downsizing in waves. People are telling me to grab a buyout if I can because future severance packages will probably be less generous. Should I try to hang on or leave as soon as possible?”
There is no one answer to this question. You might welcome a downsizing an opportunity to start fresh somewhere else. On the other hand, many jobseekers are flooding the market at the same time, so looking for a job now may be extra challenging. Early buyout offers may be better than future ones if you think the company might run out of money or be unable to turn this situation around. On the other hand, staying put could give you a chance to prove yourself in a difficult, turnaround situation and be one of the few who survived and thrived.
Contributed by Caroline Ceniza-Levine of SixFigureStart
When looking for a new job, timing is everything. For a hiring company, matching candidates to jobs is as much about finding the right candidate as it is finding her at the right time (i.e., when there is an appropriate job available). If there is a great candidate but no job, there is no match. Maybe the hiring manager/ recruiter will remember that great candidate when a job comes up, but maybe not. Maybe the recruiter will ask if she’s still available, but maybe she’ll just assume she’s not.
The best piece of advice I ever received on developing my own career came from one of my law school professors, Lani Guinier. In my third year of law school, I took her capstone course on Practicing Public Interest Law. However, by that point, it had become apparent to me that, due in part to financial constraints created by my student loans, I might not in fact be practicing public interest law upon graduation. Despite my goal of becoming a lawyer to further my commitment to social justice and serve the public good, it looked pretty likely that I would end up accepting a job offer an a law firm (a great firm that had many partners who were committed to pro bono work, to be sure, but it wasn’t exactly Legal Aid).
A few years ago, I attended a luncheon at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City to honor women in communications and the author Samantha Power introduced one of the honorees. Someone asked me who she was. I told her that Ms. Power was a professor at Harvard and an author who had won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for her first book, “A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide.” I also told her that while a book about genocide didn’t sound like an easy read, Ms. Power’s writing made it a fascinating topic. I urged all eight women at my lunch table to buy her book.
How to make your reputation come before as well as after you. Whether you want to be a leading light in your field or understatedly reputable, this workshop will focus on how to build a reputation for all the right reasons, improve referrals and position yourself for positive PR.