Procter & Gamble now model for recruiting, promoting women
By Cliff Peale
Cincinnati Enquirer
CINCINNATI — Susan Arnold took her early cues from the men: Trust your gut instincts, and bond with others. Today, she runs Procter & Gamble Co.'s $4.5-billion-a-year personal beauty care business.
Gannett News Service
Deb Henretta draws on skills she has perfected with business and babies. A three-time mom, she's the first woman to run Procter's $5.5-billion-a-year diaper division.
Deb Henretta says she draws on her business skills from being a mom to head Procter & Gamble's $5.5-billion-a-year diaper division.
Gina Drosos personally tested every prototype of Olay Total Effects face cream. Only 39, she's in charge of Procter's fast-growing skin-care business.
"I've never for one day felt a glass ceiling here," Drosos says. "I think we're very ready. To have a company like P&G with a woman CEO, that would be great for women everywhere."
Shedding a reputation as a place dominated by men, Procter today is a national model for recruiting, training, promoting and retaining women, a priority for corporate America for more than 20 years.
Chairman and chief executive A.G. Lafley has no plans to retire anytime soon, but if he did, Arnold and Henretta would be possible successors, the first women to rise that high in P&G's 165-year history. Fortune magazine recently ranked them No. 32 and No. 34 on its list of America's 50 most powerful women in business.
Two decades after it first started heavily recruiting women from business schools, Procter has filled 19 percent of vice president spots with women. Women fill 46 percent of coveted brand manager spots, with twice as many in that position as five years ago.
To be sure, women remain a minority in the Global Leadership Council that runs P&G. Men fill 31 of 34 positions, including chairman, chief executive officer, chief financial officer and chief marketing officer.
The promotion of women is acknowledged as good business strategy, especially for companies like P&G that sell most of their products to women. "You do something like that for two, three, four years, you may not see much," says Valerie Newell, managing director of RiverPoint Capital Management, a money-management firm. "But right now, you see women like Susan Arnold and Deb Henretta, and you start to see the payoff of what a few enlightened men started to do 25 years ago."
Just 25 years ago, men held virtually all the top management jobs. Women were mostly assistants or lower-level marketing managers, and there were even fewer women in technical fields like finance, plant management and research and development.
That started to change in the early 1980s, when P&G started recruiting women in earnest from business schools under CEO John Smale.
Still, it was 1991 before Procter appointed a woman vice president, and 1996 before one became a corporate officer. "A more diverse team will outperform a more homogenous team every time," Lafley says. "The more diverse team will be more innovative. The more diverse team will solve problems better."
One factor slowing P&G is its century-old policy of only promoting from within. The company doesn't hire senior executives from outside, meaning it can't recruit women executives, or any executives, from other companies.
But after trying to nurture its base of female executives for 20 years, the women in their 30s and 40s that help run some of Procter's most prominent businesses mean that women will be able to compete for future promotions on an equal footing, P&G officials say.
