Boards open up to women
but California, with best tally in U.S., clocks only 14.3%

Pia Sarkar, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 25, 2004

The good news is that, as a percentage, California has more women serving on boards of directors of Fortune 500 companies than any other state in the country.

The bad news is that women only make up 14.3 percent of those boards.

Such are the findings of a report released Tuesday by Corporate Women Directors International, a research group in Washington, D.C., that has conducted similar studies in Canada, Australia, Spain and South Africa.

"No matter which country or state you look at, women are still few and far between," said Irene Natividad, co-chairwoman of Corporate Women Directors International, who spoke to an audience of mostly women at a luncheon Tuesday hosted by the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco.

Corporate Women's latest report took into account all 53 Fortune 500 companies based in California and compared the result against the figure for women who sat on Fortune 500 corporate boards nationwide at the end of last year -- 13.6 percent.

Among the 105 Fortune 1000 companies in California, 78 of them -- or 74. 3 percent -- have at least one woman as a board member. However, when taken as a percentage of total board members, women fare much worse. Of the 1,508 board seats, only 127 -- or 12 percent -- are occupied by women.

Smaller companies with smaller boards of directors also have fewer women.

But some big companies, such as Apple Computer, Gateway, Solectron and Computer Sciences Corp., have no women on their boards at all. In fact, the report found that among the 27 California companies with no female representation, most were technology-related businesses.

An independent report by Spencer Stuart, a management consulting firm, found that Silicon Valley firms had fewer women on their boards than companies nationwide. Bay Area companies had more female board members than Silicon Valley but still less than the nationwide percentage.

Health and financial services, on the other hand, tend to have the most female representation on their boards, according to the Corporate Women's report. One company that has done particularly well is Oakland's Golden West Financial Corp., where five of nine directors are women, including Marion Sandler, the company's co-CEO, who was a panelist at Tuesday's luncheon.

Ruth Owades, president of Owades Enterprises, a marketing firm, talked to the audience about her own experiences as the lone woman on various boards of directors.

"When I was the only woman, there was this sense of, 'We let you in. Don't rock the boat,' " she said.

With a male-dominated board, "There is definitely a sense of collegiality and how things are run," Owades said.

But when more women -- as well as minorities -- enter the picture, the old boys' club gets wiped out and replaced with a greater focus on the company itself, she said.

Leonard Schaeffer, chairman and chief executive officer of WellPoint, the nation's second-largest publicly traded health care company whose board boasts four female members out of nine, said he makes it a point to scout for female board members because "women have a closer connection with the health care system."

He further noted that women are major contributors to the nation's economy, a point reiterated in the Corporate Women's report, which shows that women comprise a majority of all consumers, 47 percent of the workforce, 47 percent of investors and 38 percent of business owners.

"Women are no longer the market segment -- they are the market," Natividad said.

Seated in the audience, Karla Keyser related the statistics cited in the report to her own experiences. A former employee of the now-defunct Excite. com, she said there were no women on the company's board.

"We freely called it the White Men Over 40 Club," Keyser said.

Beside her sat Emily Mendel, who, in 1977, was only the second female attorney to be hired at her law firm in San Francisco. Three years later, she quit to start her own law firm.

Things have improved since then, Mendel said.

"The discrimination is much less blatant," she said. "Nobody calls me 'little lady,' so it's easier to tolerate."

Mendel came to Tuesday's luncheon not as a lawyer but as an investor wanting to learn more about what steps companies are taking to diversify their boards.

"I'm putting my money in a company, and I want to feel that that company will reflect my views," she said.