The Sexes: Madam Executive

With a crisp manner and hearty handshake, the ambitious businesswoman often courts success by acting like a man. As one has explained, when she was in her mid-20s and determined to get ahead at the office, she took her femininity and "stored it away for future consideration." Up to a point, perhaps to middle-management levels, this tactic may prove effective. But to reach the highest levels of business, a woman must clearly and comfortably accept the fact that she is a woman, according to two alumnae of the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration: Margaret Hennig, 33, and Anne Jardim, 37. They are so convinced that women must take their own route to the executive suite that they have set up at Simmons College in Boston the nation's first graduate program in management at a woman's school. Beginning next September, they will train some of the female executives needed as a result of recent legal assaults on sex discrimination in business. (Although 40% of the work force is female, less than 2% of managers earning over $25,000 per year are women.)

Vicious Circle. The shortage of women managers is only partly due to discrimination, Hennig and Jardim believe. On the basis of their experience as consultants to such corporations as New England Bell Telephone & Telegraph and the Columbia Broadcasting System, they have discovered that women are held back partly by their own passivity, partly by a vicious circle of misunderstandings. Men tend to assume that women are more interested in marriage or their children than in careers. Women, on the other hand, assume that they will be tolerated only if they are superefficient. So they become experts at one particular job, then hesitate to venture out into something better but more risky. By thus hanging back, they confirm the assumption that they are not really committed to a career.

Moreover, even if they feel they could easily take on more responsibilities, women tend not to demand them, as men often do, but hope to be invited to accept them. Using a dancing school analogy, Hennig notes that women in business management "are all dolled up against the wall, waiting to be chosen."

One female bank vice president, for example, served as acting president for several months, yet was not considered permanently for the job simply because of her sex. She also suspected that her salary was lower than that paid to male vice presidents. Bitterly, she accepted these inequities for years till she consulted with Hennig and Jardim. They told her to add up her assets and make a case for herself. "That was a blinding insight to her," notes Jardim. "My God," responded her boss when the woman finally mustered the courage to show him that she was managing some $25 million in loans, whereas her four male bank colleagues together were handling only $10 million. Shortly afterward, she got a big raise.