skills Developments

Despite its heritage as a progressive state, California's corporations resemble the rest of the country when one looks at a board of directors photograph. It’s predominantly male.
A recent study undertaken by the University of California Davis revealed that inside large public organizations, gender equality is as far from reality as life on another planet. One half of California’s largest organizations have no women in executive positions and nearly one-half do not have a single female board member.
It’s not as if corporate boards are unchanging dinosaurs. As researchers found, between the summers of 2007 and 2008, 313 new directors were added to 173 companies, but only 15 percent were women.
Organizations need to make a concerted effort to locate female employees within the organization and foster their development. Leaders, especially female colleagues, need to act as mentors and discard the defensive, “let the fittest survive” mentality. Leadership consultants often remark how when discussions about potential women leaders occurs, the analysis becomes heated with excess scrutiny placed upon any candidate. Possibly this is a result of the inherent competition among females for the few spots at the senior level. Few women make it to the executive level, so the margin for error is small.
Aspiring female leaders need to manage their careers in a way that facilitates an eventual transition into management. That means specializing in strategic fields such as law, finance or IT that are essential for managing a business. Executives are rarely tapped from human resources, administration or other soft fields often dominated by women.
Obviously, women who want to raise children are asked to forgo their careers at least temporarily more than men who want the same. There really is no advice about this one as it is an entirely personal decision.
Again, prescriptions are easy. Enough experts have spoken and written about the problem that workable solutions already exist. But until a greater number of organizations take the next step, another decade will pass with little progress.