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.
“The situation is pretty dire,” says Vicky Medvec, executive director of the Center for Executive Women at Northwestern University’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management. “There are a lot of women at the beginning and middle of the pipeline in corporate America, but almost none at the top. These are missed opportunities for companies.”
Conversations with senior executive women among Mount Holyoke’s alumnae ranks reveal that there are challenges en route to the corner office, but there are also more paths for women seeking leadership roles than in the past.
“I was on the early curve of recruiting and hiring” women at Bank of America, says Barbara Dombkowski Desoer ’74, who joined B of A in 1977 after earning an undergraduate degree in math and an MBA. Women were relatively scarce at the bank then, she recalls. After nearly three decades at B of A, which is America’s second-largest bank, Desoer now holds one of its top executive positions as chief of technology, service, and fulfillment operations. Her departments are responsible for everything from check and cash handling to customer service and support, cash management, treasury operations, collections recovery, and fraud.
Although B of A has a significantly more diverse workforce than it did thirty years ago, Desoer sees an ongoing shortage of senior women running technical departments. “There are fewer women committed to engineering and in the technical space,” she says. “The challenge is the breadth and depth of the talent pool.”
Indeed, the lack of women with appropriate skills is one of the challenges highlighted by Medvec, of the Center for Executive Women. She contends that more women need to gain profit-and-loss responsibility in their careers. Those without such experience face “a huge barrier” in becoming chief executives. She also believes that there’s a dearth of female CEOs because many women don’t negotiate well for themselves in terms of promotions, titles, salaries, even the resources needed to succeed.
Barbara A. Cassani ’82, who has spent much of her career based in London, clearly has not fallen into those traps. After graduate school she joined the consulting firm of Coopers & Lybrand, and eventually moved to British Airways. When the head of BA decided to launch a no-frills airline in Britain in the late 1990s, he tapped Cassani—who was then a key executive in BA’s sales department—for the top job. During her tenure as chief executive, the budget airline Go recorded several years of double-digit growth and turned a profit ahead of expectations.
At the time, Cassani was one of the few women running a major British company. “I’ve worked in meritocratic companies where you’re judged on your results, not on how you look or what your sex is,” she told a BBC television interviewer several years ago. “I’ve obviously been lucky.”
When BA eventually decided to sell Go, Cassani put together a £110 million management buyout and stayed with the company. Go was later taken over by a rival low-cost airline in Britain, easyJet. The takeover made her a wealthy woman, but also left her without a job.
A past recipient of the prestigious Veuve Clicquot businesswoman of the year award, Cassani more recently was tapped to join the committee that organized Britain’s successful bid for the 2012 Olympic Games. She initially headed the committee, but eventually relinquished the top job once she realized that, as an American, the heavily political and “nationalistic” world of the Olympics meant London’s chances would improve with a Briton at the helm. The London committee’s success last summer—the winning city for 2012 was chosen in July—has left Cassani time to plan her next venture, which she hints may be in the hotel sector. “It’s a bit of a relief to be back in the business world,” she confides. “The Olympics is so political.”
Unconventional choices have been a hallmark of Cassani’s career, and she has rejected a number of overtures to work in another big company. “I’ve got nothing to prove to anybody,” she says. She sees other women opting out of the corporate race as well in favor of running their own businesses. “Fewer women want to play the game” at big corporations, she says, because they are fed up with internal politics, unimpressed with executive perks that appeal to many men, and seek more control over their careers. But, she admits, “you have to play the game to get to the top.”
Judy A. McComb ’90 left a major pharmaceutical firm after ten years to start her own company, PharmaLogika, in 2002. The firm, which offers consulting services in the biotechnology sector, helps clients secure financing and navigate the “regulatory landmines” to get products in the biotech pipeline to market, including overseas.
Reached by phone during a business trip to Puerto Rico, McComb says that despite working eighteen to twenty hours a day—“my staff would describe me as a crazed workaholic”—she has no regrets over becoming the chief executive of her own business. “It was the best decision,” she says. Nonetheless, there are additional challenges facing a woman in international business: she finds herself working extra hard to be taken seriously by clients in Asia and Latin America. All the international travel, long hours, and extended stays at client sites have also left her striving for a better work/life balance. “That’s something people can’t teach you,” she says.
Indeed, work/life balance is an issue for many executive women. Studies confirm that in dual-income executive households, women still spend more time dealing with family and household issues than their partners do.
“I think it is false to say women can have it all,” says Lustgarten, who works in partnership with her husband running Kx Systems (“He’s the genius behind it”) and has two teenage children. “You can do it in sequence, but not in parallel.” She contends that stamina and consistent work are more important in running a business than a brilliant idea.
Cassani sees more challenges of that sort for executive women in her adopted home of Britain than in America “Middle-class British culture puts more demands on women than upper middle-class America does,” she says. “Here [in London] I know some very well-educated, intelligent, successful women who feel guilty about not shopping for their families or putting Sunday dinner on the table.” Her assessment: “It’s not about the women, it’s about men.”
All the executive women interviewed credited Mount Holyoke with giving them skills and confidence to succeed in their high-powered careers. For Desoer, the competitive environment on campus—“working with the best of the best,” she says—meant she had to be prepared and organized. “There was nowhere to hide,” she recalls. Her math major also prepared her for a career dealing with numbers.
Lustgarten, who majored in mathematical logic, found that the personal attention of faculty members—she particularly remembers Lee Bowie (philosophy) and Eliana Ortega Gonzalez MA ’72 (Spanish)—boosted the confidence of a Latina girl who felt she didn’t fit the Mount Holyoke mold when she arrived in South Hadley. “They found a way to help me exist within a system,” she says. “Thankfully I had a gift from God—I was good at math.” When she started working on Wall Street later on, she recalls thinking, “If I can do it at Mount Holyoke, I can do it here.”
McComb, who majored in romance languages and literature before getting an MBA, says the ability to speak multiple foreign languages—Spanish, Italian, and French—has allowed her access to the inner circles of international business. “I was constantly pushing my own limits and gaining confidence” at Mount Holyoke, she says. “I would have stayed another eight years if they’d let me.”
For Cassani, who majored in international relations and then attended the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton, Mount Holyoke represented the quest for excellence. “I felt strongly that ideas mattered; they were at the heart of change in the world.” She was also touched by the college’s idealism. That tradition of public service was an influence she carried with her on the Olympic committee.
Kavita N. Ramdas ’85 arrived in South Hadley as a transfer student from Delhi University in India in the early 1980s. “It was the smallest place I had ever been to in my life,” she remembers. Now chief executive of the Global Fund for Women, an international organization (it is active in 160 countries) that supports women’s issues and rights, Ramdas says the college allowed her to reinvent herself. She was thrilled that no one knew or cared who her father was, unlike in India. “I felt I was a big, fat sponge,” she says. “I couldn’t get enough. It was delicious.”
An international relations and politics major, Ramdas thrived in the community of foreign students at Mount Holyoke and in the Five College network. She was struck by the sense of tolerance, openness to the world, and the “extraordinary teachers” she had at the college. The seeds of her rise to the top of an international organization with a multimillion-dollar budget may have been sown the summer she stayed on campus and worked making calls on behalf of the college to thank contributors for gifts. “It was my first experience of giving money to something I cared about,” she says. “I gave $10 or $15 whenever I could. It made me think about philanthropy.” Based in San Francisco now, she has learned to use the skills and vocabulary of the for-profit world—she talks about “risk capital” and “start-up models”—to be successful as a fund-raiser. Her description of the Global Fund is “a venture capital firm for social entrepreneurs.”
Much of the career advice that these executive women give Mount Holyoke students and alumnae centers on setting goals and pursuing passions: “Go where your heart takes you,” says Desoer. As the world becomes more globally connected, she also encourages students to network with their foreign counterparts, and learn about different cultures.
“Only do things in your life that you care about,” says Jean Picker Firstenberg ’58. She now runs the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, a national culture center with a graduate institution in film, television, and digital media and a $25 million budget.
Cassani wishes more daring young women would enter the corporate world, but admits that student perceptions of business are difficult to overcome. Some students seem to think that “either you’re immoral or you’re not smart enough to work at [top management consulting firm] McKinsey” if you are an executive, she says. “It’s difficult to convince them business is interesting.”
London-based Julie L. Sell ’83 is a correspondent for The Economist.
McComb photo: Mindy J. Allport-Settle
Ramdas photo: Cynthia Keely
Firstenberg photo: Courtesy American Film Institute
