Colorless at the top
Puget Sound Business Journal (Seattle) - by Nancy J. Kim Staff Writer
Sharon Elliott's career began at a small division of Macy's in 1975. It was an era when business advancement was tough for women. It was tough for minorities, too.
As a black woman, Elliott was a statistical anomaly in any census of corporate managers, and not the most likely candidate to ride a fast track to the top. She remembers the bromide back then: "White women had the glass ceiling. Women of color had the cement ceiling."
Today, Elliott is senior vice president of human resources and a corporate officer at Starbucks Coffee Co., but still a rarity in the upper echelons of corporate America nearly a quarter of a century later.
The first data quantifying that slim representation lends statistical credence to the opinions of many women of color in Seattle: Companies pay lip service to diversity hiring and promoting initiatives, but few of them have executed.
A New York-based research group, Catalyst, recently unveiled the findings of the first ever study on women of color in corporate management. The three-year survey showed that the progress of women in business has largely been the story of white women, despite increasing diversity in the general labor pool.
Caucasian women make up nearly 78 percent of the overall female work force. Of the women who hold managerial and administrative positions in the private sector, 86 percent are white, according to the Catalyst study.
Black, Latina and Asian women concur that diversity cannot simply be mandated by policy. The Catalyst report states that about 75 percent of U.S. Fortune 500 companies have some policies relating to employee diversity, but female minorities remain a sliver of the managerial work force, and earn significantly less than white males in similar positions. For each dollar earned by a white man, Asian women averaged 67 cents, African-American women 58 cents, and Hispanic women 48 cents.
Elliott maintains that a diversity policy is meaningless without the support of the top brass.
"Chief executives really have to decide what this whole concept of diversity means to them. With Howard (Schultz) and Orin (Smith), it's part of their value system, and the transition of that personal value system into the company is seamless," said Elliott, referring to the Starbucks CEO and president, respectively.
Corporate culture filters down from the top and that culture plays a critical role determining the potential success for a woman of color in business, says Mary Pugh, founder of Pugh Capital Management in Seattle. She recognized the culture of Washington Mutual Inc., the place where she rose quickly before striking out on her own, as a good complement to her acumen, and perhaps more importantly, to her quietly confident style.
"WaMu was a fairly diverse place. ... Lou Pepper, the president when I was there, was also a very strong supporter of women," said Pugh, who became a senior vice president at WaMu by age 29.
While she was first hired by another African-American, it was an Anglo-American, chief financial officer Bill Longbrake, who took special interest in Pugh's career and charged her with responsibility in the high-profile area of risk management. She left in 1991 to start Pugh Capital Management, but now serves on the WaMu board of directors.
Opponents of diversity hiring and promoting initiatives label the practices "preferential hiring" that put whites at a disadvantage.
But Mechas McCrary, creative manager for sportswear at Eddie Bauer Inc. in Redmond does not feel she holds any advantage in the competition for a job or promotion. Rather, as a women of color, "you have to work a lot harder to get there," says McCrary, who is Colombian. McCrary left J.C. Penney Co. Inc. in Plano, Texas, a retail giant she saw entrenched in "the good ole boys club" mentality.
Prior to joining Starbucks, Elliott spent a 13-year stint at a large company where the environment was not so comfortable for a black woman. That's when she realized that diversity is not proportionate to the size or profitability of an organization.
"There was a lot of covert undermining," said Elliott. "I experienced a lot of overt agreement over strategy at meetings only to find out I was running into all sorts of roadblocks in implementation," she recounted.
Katherine Giscombe, director or research for Catalyst's study, said the statistical and anecdotal findings in the survey suggest that Elliott's previous experience is not exceptional: "Barriers still exist, though the level of discrimination is subtle."
Judging from the data in an earlier Catalyst report, the 1998 Census of Women Corporate Officers and Top Earners, Washington state's largest companies don't boast a very strong representation of women, making it easy to deduce that the number of high-ranking minority women is tiny or nil. Costco Cos. Inc., the Issaquah-based warehouse club, has 10 corporate officers, all men. Seattle-based Airborne Freight Corp. has seven officers, all men. In Redmond, Microsoft Corp. has 49 officers, four of whom are women.
That Phyllis Campbell, an Asian-American and president of U.S. Bank of Washington, stands out so prominently in local business circles speaks to the point. Along with Constance Rice, deputy director of the Experience Music Project, and United Way of King County president Joanne Harrell, Campbell is among the best-known minority woman executives locally.
Companies may dispute the validity of statistical benchmarking for diversity, particularly those companies with low marks that may not reflect their hiring efforts. Pugh knows there are business leaders sold on the case for diversity, that increased competition for talent and the rapidly growing numbers of minority workers make it critical for businesses to be more inclusive, and that in many sectors, it's a bottom-line issue. But in some cases, those leaders have not been able to implement their desires.
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