Women at the Top: Alumnae Share the View from the Executive Suite
By Julie L. Sell ’83
This article originally appeared in the winter 2006 Quarterly.
She may be only five-foot-one and 105 pounds, but Janet V. Lustgarten ’82 holds her own in the male-dominated world of financial traders and computer engineers. As chief executive officer of Kx Systems, a California technology firm that sells database products to corporate and government clients, Lustgarten has closed business deals with some of the world’s top financial brokerages.
“In twelve years, I’ve only interacted with two women [clients] who were the decisionmakers on this sort of technology,” says Lustgarten. She contends that her gender softens the impact of her direct business style, which she attributes to years spent in New York. “Because I’m a woman, people hear it differently,” she says. “It doesn’t become an ego battle.”
Ten years after the US government’s “glass ceiling commission” published a report on the challenges facing women in attaining senior executive positions in the private sector, the numbers reveal that women like Lustgarten are still vastly outnumbered by their male counterparts. Women account for more than 46 percent of the American workforce but hold less than 8 percent of top management positions. Among women managers, average earnings are less than three-quarters those of their male colleagues. (More)
