Wretched year for female CEOs
By DEL JONES
USA Today
This is going to go down as a miserable year for women CEOs of Fortune 500 companies.
Granted, women run fewer than 2 percent of Fortune 500 companies, which makes any analysis little more than a curiosity. And although this is the second straight year that women-led companies have trailed the market, women CEOs did very well for their shareholders in 2003, when their stocks on average outpaced the benchmark Standard & Poor's 500 index.
But that was then, this is now, and 2005 can't end soon enough for women who are at the helms of large companies. Consider:
Sara Lee named as CEO Brenda Barnes, who heartened stay-at-home moms by rekindling her career to rise to the top of a food giant with $19 billion in revenue.
But three other women are gone, the most prominent being Carly Fiorina at Hewlett-Packard, which had been the largest company ever run by a woman. Also gone: Pathmark Stores CEO Eileen Scott and Marce Fuller of energy firm Mirant.
Marion O. Sandler's Golden West Financial is again beating the S&P, up 10 percent, while Reynolds American, parent of tobacco company RJR, is up 21 percent under CEO Susan Ivey. Reynolds American also has women as chief operating officer and chief financial officer. On average, the seven stocks are down 8.0 percent.
Proponents for the advancement of women pooh-pooh drawing any conclusions. Betty Spence, president of the National Association for Female Executives, says it's no different than a stretch when the majority of baseball managers were fired within three years after being named American League Manager of the Year. "The only thing they had in common was that they're men," Spence says. "The only logical conclusion is that men don't make good baseball managers."
But even if the numbers are statistically meaningless, Spence acknowledges that another year or two like 2004 and 2005 could feed perceptions and biases, and impede women's progress to the top.
"It's very damaging to women," says Judy Rosener of the University of California-Irvine Graduate School of Management, adding that it is unfair to compare the performance of the seven women against the S&P 500. "You could pick out 30 men from that list who have the same story. Look at General Motors and Ford."
Rosener says there is a drain at large corporations as women get fed up and leave to start their own firms. The Women's Leadership Exchange says women own 10.6 million businesses, only 279,000 of which gross more than $1 million a year.
