By Zoe Cruz (New York City)

A study published in “The Psychology of Sales Call Reluctance: Earning What You’re Worth in Sales” by Shannon L. Goodson, made news last week. Ms. Goodson, co-founder and president of Behavioral Sciences Research Press, is a specialist in visibility management. She compared nearly 11,500 professional women with about 16, 700 men from 34 countries, and concluded, “Being able to draw attention to your contributions and competencies at work has become an important part of modern career management, and it is something most women are still unwilling or unable to do as consistently as their male counterparts.” Reuters printed the findings in an article entitled “Career women are their own worst enemies: study”.

According to the study, men get further ahead in the workplace because they feel little or no reluctance, uneasiness, guilt, or shame, in self-promotion. Men often climb up the corporate ladder with ease; women don’t because most women “still cling to the myth that self-promotion is “socially unacceptable”, “unlady-like” and “morally suspect” says Goodson.
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by Sima Matthes (New York City)

A recent study by Catalyst provides evidence that gender diversity at the top of major corporations leads to increased financial performance. Additionally, the report states that the more women a company has had on their board of directors in the past, the more female corporate officers it will have in the future.

The Catalyst study, Advancing Women Leaders: The Connection Between Women Board Directors and Women Corporate Officers, was released in July, and validates what many of us have suspected: that there is a clear and positive correlation between the percentage of women board directors in the past and the percentage of women corporate officers in the future. This report applies a mathematical formula to predict the proportion of women in staff roles based on the number of women in leadership.

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By: Alison Maitland

Senior business men offered their take on promoting women at an evening debate in Geneva on June 6 about our book, Why Women Mean Business: Understanding The Emergence Of Our Next Economic Revolution (previously featured on The Glass Hammer on February 5 and April 8).

The executives represented a great cross-section of global business: Gianni Ciserani is president of Procter & Gamble, in western Europe; Paolo Fellin head of marketing in Europe for Caterpillar, the heavy industrial group; and Peter Lorange recently retired as president of IMD, the Lausanne-based business school that educates executives of multinationals like P&G and Caterpillar.

It was also an interesting setting for the latest in a series of presentations that my co-author Avivah Wittenberg-Cox and I have done on the book. Switzerland is one of Europe’s most socially conservative countries: women represent just 6% of directors on major company boards and it’s predicted that it will take 70 years at current progress to reach gender parity in business leadership. Women often have to choose between career and family; 40% of university-educated women aged 40 are childless.

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Recently, New York’s women leaders in law sounded off to New York Magazine about what it takes to succeed as an attorney at the top firms and at the top of their practice areas in New York. The women, whose practice areas range from securities litigation to corporate law to immigration, seemed to have one piece of advice across the board, which was: “Be willing to work hard, and long. If you don’t love your job, you won’t make it through all the tough work it takes to succeed in this field.”

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One week after Zoe Cruz was let go as President of Morgan Stanley, Erin Callan was appointed CFO of Lehman Brothers. And thus, the torch was passed to the new highest ranking woman on Wall Street. She has since proved a force to be reckoned with, bringing her unconventional management style (and note-worthy sense of personal style) to corner office on Wall Street.

As documented in a recent profile in the Wall Street Journal, entitled “Lehman’s Straight Shooter,” Ms. Callan has eschewed the “fly below the radar” model of other Wall Street CFOs. She has made the most of her fashion-forward and outgoing image by appearing frequently on television and making bold predictions about the future direction of markets.

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