Women and the glass ceiling

by Angela Genusa

April 17, 2001 —

FEW WOMEN EVER make it into the "O-zone" -- the positions of CEO, COO and CFO -- at Fortune 500 companies. Even fewer become CIOs. Surely, you would think, the hue and cry for IT talent last year reached a pitch high enough to shatter any glass ceiling.

But in 2000, only a handful of females were CIOs or CTOs at Fortune 500 companies -- 36 to be exact. And the number of women CIOs leading technology companies in the elite Fortune 500? You can count them on one hand. According to a census by Catalyst, a nonprofit research and advisory organization working to advance women in business, there were just two: Patricia A. Cusick, CIO of Xerox, and Nancy Li, CTO of Computer Associates International (CAI). (Li has since become CEO of iCan-ASP, a CAI spinoff.)

Only five of the 56 tech companies on the Fortune list can boast that women form at least 25 percent of their chief officers: Hewlett-Packard, Pitney Bowes, SBC Communications, Unisys and US West. Thirteen Fortune 500 tech companies had no women corporate officers at all. Women also hold only 7 percent of line officer positions (those with profit-and-loss responsibility often leading to top spots) in IT companies.

Sheila Wellington, president of Catalyst, disdains the usual excuse -- that fewer women are pursuing degrees in computer science and engineering. "Chief officers in these companies need general executive management, marketing and sales skills, and there certainly are women out there with that kind of education and experience," Wellington says. "About a third of all graduates from top business schools are women."

Wellington's opinion is backed by a Korn-Ferry International paper that says a degree in computer science or engineering is not one of the top 10 CIO characteristics. According to Korn-Ferry, the foremost characteristic of a CIO is "a top-notch, highly effective business leader."

To find out more about the Catalyst census, see www.catalystwomen.org.

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