Women Break Old-Boy Barriers on Boards, Bench

May 25 (Bloomberg) -- At commencements across America last week, from undergraduates at California State University, Monterey Bay, and Gettysburg College to doctors of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh and doctors of philosophy at Wake Forest University, there was a festive air, even with the bad economy, and lots of high heels and earrings.

In each, women graduates were in the majority. Higher education is a barometer of how far women are advancing in U.S. society over the past several generations.

Women comprise 58 percent of the college undergraduates finishing this year, and almost half of all law school and medical school graduates. Several decades ago, there were twice as many men as women in these professional schools. Business schools, at 43 percent female, are trying to catch up.

Across American politics, the judiciary, academia and business, women have made enormous strides.

“In the last 40 years, we’ve gone from almost no mothers of young children working to a majority of women working,” says Heidi Hartmann, president of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research in Washington.

For all the progress, she says, the U.S. still trails other industrialized nations in women’s professional achievements.

One reason is that in many other countries family-friendly options like child care and paid parental leave for a new child or a sick one have been institutionalized, Hartmann notes.

Political Gains

In politics, women are more present in Europe with its parliamentary forms of government than in countries with presidential systems.

Still, in the last generation women have come a long way in American politics. They make up 17 percent of the U.S. Congress; three of the last four secretaries of state have been women; seven governors are female as are a growing number of local officeholders, with more of them breaking into the fundraising networks necessary to advance in politics.

There was some blatant sexism in the coverage of Hillary Clinton’s presidential quest last year, especially on the cable-television channel MSNBC. That didn’t affect the outcome -- she was beaten by a better candidate with a better campaign -- and Clinton’s bid probably eliminated any lingering barriers to a woman becoming president. If a good candidate for president emerges from either party in the next few elections, gender won’t matter.

The third branch of the U.S. government, the judiciary, has seen a huge increase in women. More than a quarter of federal judges today are female, a better-than a three-fold increase from 1981.

Finding an Unknown

Back then, President Ronald Reagan had to search hard to find an unknown, Arizona state judge Sandra Day O’Connor, to become the first female Supreme Court Justice. Today, as President Barack Obama almost certainly will pick a woman to replace retiring Justice David Souter, there are a dozen prominent candidates from whom to choose.

In academia, women now head one in four American colleges and are disproportionately among the more prominent educational leaders.

These include four of the eight Ivy League schools -- the University of Pennsylvania, and Princeton, Brown and Harvard universities -- and other prominent institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Michigan and the University of Miami.

Narrowing Wage Gap

In the workforce, the gap between female and male wages has narrowed, yet women still only make 80 percent of what men do; it was less than 60 percent a half-century ago. The most prevalent occupations continue to be ones associated with women: secretaries, nurses, teachers.

The current recession, experts like Hartmann note, has hurt men more, as male-dominated manufacturing and construction jobs have been hardest hit. The 10 percent jobless rate among men is a quarter higher than the 7.6 percent rate for women. Still, lower-paid women, especially single heads of households, are the most adversely affected by job losses.

Women comprise about 47 percent of the American work force yet remain a distinct minority in the house of labor: Of the 42 members of the AFL-CIO executive council, only nine are women. The five largest labor unions are headed by men; number six is the American Federation of Teachers, whose president is Randi Weingarten.

There are even fewer women in corporate suites. Of the largest Fortune 500 companies, only 15 have women chief executive officers. There are no female CEOs among the 25 largest companies, and they’re absent in important industries like finance.

‘Unconscious Bias’

Managers that make personnel decisions and board rooms are overwhelmingly male. Some social scientists and plaintiffs in gender-discrimination suits say this produces an “unconscious bias,” where people negatively stereotype those unlike them.

“These decisions still are largely made by men,” says Dina Dublon, former chief financial officer of JPMorgan Chase & Co. “A culture that is homogeneous is more likely to reject differences.”

One expert who thinks corporate attitudes may be changing is Steve Reinemund, dean of the business school at Wake Forest in Winston-Salem, North Carolina: “Women earlier in their careers took time out to have children and that derailed them. Today, high-performance companies are creating an environment of diversity.”

Changing Times

Reinemund, former chairman of PepsiCo Inc., mentored the CEOs of two of the five largest companies headed by women -- Indra Nooyi, his successor at PepsiCo, and Irene Rosenfeld, the chairman and CEO of Kraft Foods Inc. In a sign of changing times, Xerox Corp. announced last week that Anne Mulcahy will be retiring as CEO and be replaced by Ursula Burns, an African- American woman.

Some studies and other management experts say the qualities often associated with women -- empathy and a more collaborative approach -- aren’t requisites for successful CEOs. Instead, it’s the single-minded toughness more associated with men.

There’s a rejoinder: American International Group Inc., Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns Cos., Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Countrywide Financial Corp., General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC. These firms share two characteristics: All are either extinct, bankrupt or wards of the state. And all were headed by men.

(Albert R. Hunt is the executive editor for Washington at Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)