by Elizabeth Harrin (London)

The perfect job appears on the company intranet. You know you could do the job; it would be just the stretch you need to shake yourself out of your rut and make the next career move. But it comes with line management responsibilities. Is that too long a leap?

Professional women are often very good at making a name for themselves as market specialists. Many are happy to stay in the specialist role, taking on leadership positions within their company that play to their strengths without having to manage a team. However, companies need fewer thought leaders than middle managers, and that means the route of career progress is paved with people management.

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This Sunday, I opened up my New York Times, and was excited when I spied the headline “Becoming the Boss,” which appeared to be an article about women entrepreneurs starting their own businesses.

The article opened by reporting that, in New York City, more than a half million businesses are owned by women, and these businesses employ 533,437 people. The article quoted a study by the Center for Women’s Business Research which found that these businesses have brought in $93 million so far in 2008.

I read on, hoping to find some inspiring stories about women who had branched out to start their own financial services firms, law firms, and businesses in growing sectors like energy, technology, communications and health care. I was hoping to learn a thing or two about the new female movers and shakers running companies in New York City.

However, upon closer inspection, I realized that most of the “successful women business leaders” described in this article clearly fell into the dreaded “pink ghetto” of decidedly women’s work. They were from industries that are universally acknowledged to be the province of women, and the kind of jobs that high achieving men would more than willingly cede entirely to the other gender.
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By: Bailey McCann

Recently I spoke with Charlene Li co-author of Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technology and analyst at Forrester Research. She spoke to me about how women can utilize the strategies in her book and the power of social media to leverage their networks and engage customers. Li presents five core strategies for using the power of social media, they are:

1. Listening
2. Talking
3. Energizing
4. Supporting
5. Embracing

Each of these strategies are outlined in detail in the book. In our interview, Li focused specifically on listening, “listening can help market research by engaging the audience and finding what people are saying.” She also went on to point out that by listening to what people are saying, you can avoid social media fatigue by presenting only the most highly relevant content.

“Connecting customers to other customers,” and being a “one stop shop,” for all the information in your business, including information on your competitors can put you ahead in the marketplace.
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Contributed By: Sue Kaye

Go to any top-level business meeting and you’ll find two languages spoken or, to be more precise, unspoken. There’s power talk – direct,muscular and sure. And there’s the gentler give-and-take of conciliatory, careful conversation. Guess which approach gets the job done in a tough situation.

“We spend so much time thinking about what’s going into our mouths and so little time thinking about what comes out “ complains Laurie Puhn, a Harvard family and divorce attorney/mediator, and best-selling author of Instant Persuasion: How to Change Your Words to Change Your Life. Differences in language and style can put women at such an inadvertent disadvantage that Lois Frankel, author of See Jane Lead: 99 Ways for Women to Take Charge at Work , has made a career of building awareness among her female colleagues.
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By Bailey McCann

Recently, the Wall Street Journal released its ranking of top business gurus, compiled by Babson College professor Thomas H. Davenport. The top 20 included household names like Bill Gates, as well as several authors currently featured the business section at your local bookstore. The one thing missing was women. Only one woman made it onto the list in 2003 and this year’s update saw none get added to the list. We weren’t the only ones to notice – several other sources including New York Magazine and Independent Street, one of the Wall Street Journal’s own blogs, have commented on the dearth of female gurus in business. The lack of women on this list begs the obvious question, where are we?

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