WOMEN EXECUTIVES: Plenty in Tchambuli -- Few in the U. S.

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WOMEN EXECUTIVES

WHEN the U.S. male catches the 8:05 to the office, he escapes from a world in which he has long ceased to be undisputed master, and into a region where he is still very much the boss. Outwardly, but only outwardly, American business has become strongly feminized. Industrial giants get down on their knees before the woman shopper, promising to love, honor and obey. The U.S. office landscape is full of wire bras, pancake makeup, and clouds of Chanel No. 5 rising from filing cabinets. Of the total U.S. labor force of 63 million, nearly one-third are women, twice as big a proportion as 60 years ago. Nevertheless, there are not enough top women executives in the U.S. today to form a medium-sized chorus line.

The basic reason is that the U.S. is not Tchambuli. Tchambuli is an idyllic community in New Guinea in which the men go in for curls, bright ornaments and music, while the women attend to business. Despite (or perhaps because of) the pioneer days, which helped make the American female more independent than any other female this side of New Guinea, American sentiment is strongly anti-Tchambuli. U.S. men feel uneasy working for women. U.S. women, for that matter, feel equally uneasy working for women.

A handful of outstanding women hold important corporate jobs; e.g., Mrs. Mildred McAfee Horton, 53, former president of Wellesley and wartime boss of the WAVES, is a director of NBC, RCA and the New York Life Insurance Co. Women have become leaders in obviously feminine lines, such as fashions, cosmetics and, increasingly, department stores, e.g., Dorothy Shaver, 56, president of Manhattan's Lord & Taylor. Women have done well in lines where their eye for detail is useful, e.g., banking (there are 8,105 female bank officers in the U.S., 9% of the total). But how rare women executives still are is shown by the fact that only one-half of one percent of employed women make more than $5,000, compared to 12% of men.

U.S. businessmen rarely allow themselves to think about this situation. When they do, they give a lot of excellent reasons for it. Women lack technical aptitude and muscle power, which keeps them out of the rougher side of industry, where many top executives get their start. The career they are really interested in is marriage. "By the time you have spent a lot of time and money training them for executive jobs," says a Seattle department-store man, "some guy grabs them off, or they get pregnant, or something." Says Charles Percy, president of Bell & Howell (cameras): "Sometimes they permit themselves to be distracted by husbands and families. This is hard for businessmen to understand, since no man ever takes more than a day away from work to have a baby." But, complain a lot of businessmen, while the married women are too busy with their homes, the unmarried are too busy with their frustrations. Women in general get too deeply involved in their jobs. They are too emotional. (Says one baffled male executive: "You can't talk to women the way you do to men. You hate to have them cry.") They are more jealous and gossipy than men. They are not tough enough. They dislike making decisions.

To which a lot of women reply that women merely try to be what men want; when women try to be tough and decisive—in other words, when they display executive qualities—the men run for the elevators.