Choosing One Of Your Own
Comment
by Mark Lacter
A mating dance of sorts takes place at downtown’s Jonathan Club each business day around noon. There, in the ornate lobby you’ll see a parade of executive types pacing back and forth and occasionally glancing at their watches as they wait for luncheon companions. When everyone shows up, there are the usual handshakes and backslaps and then they head for the elevators that take them to the upstairs dining room.
As many times as this scene gets played out, a common theme emerges: the people are almost always male and almost always white.
This is not even a reflection on the Jonathan Club, which years ago abolished its exclusionary practices and opened up its doors to most anyone willing to fork over the hefty membership. What it does reflect, however, is an enduring demographic of the senior corporate executive and how that influences pay and promotion.
Every year some glass ceiling-type study comes out that cites the pitiful number of women and minorities that hold top executive posts in this country. For women, it’s creeping over 10 percent; for minorities, it’s roughly half that.
Of course, those percentages are an improvement from 30 or 40 years ago, but 30 or 40 years ago the thought of having a woman or African-American running a Fortune 500 company was, well, bordering on sacrilege. Then the world changed and young women (and to a lesser extent non-whites) began enrolling in business and law school by the droves and somewhere along the line after disco, before rap came the presumption that corporate CEOs would no longer be cut from the same WASP-ish cloth.
So why did it not happen? Ask one of those WASPY bizboys and he might cough up the standard-issue explanation about women wanting babies and how that gets in the way of running a big corporation. Better, he might add, that they start up their own smaller businesses (leaving out the fact that even today, women often have a tougher time getting financing than men).
As for minorities, he’ll no doubt mention Richard Parsons, who next month officially becomes chief executive of AOL Time Warner Inc., the largest corporation ever to be headed by an African American. He might also cite Kenneth Chenault, chief executive of American Express or Fannie Mae Chairman Franklin Raines or the powerful Washington lawyer Vernon Jordan.
The problem is that with those few names, he has pretty much exhausted the list of blacks holding prominent corporate positions. And there’s a good chance he’ll forget about the four Texaco employees who were taped using racial epithets a couple of years back. Or about Coca-Cola Co. settling a class action suit for $113 million regarding alleged disparities in pay and promotions for African-Americans.
Workplace diversity is not the point here. If anything, corporate offices are veritable melting pots. But once you reach the limousine-and-stadium box levels, complexions and gender revert to the tried-and-true. Not always, but often enough to see a leitmotif at play.
Which is, frankly, that people like to be with their own. They say they understand the importance of different backgrounds and perspectives, and they say they don’t have anything against outsiders trying to move up the ladder. But there’s a comfort level about being in your own group and when it comes time to search for a CEO, that comfort leads the top dogs to choose from their well-heeled progeny.
And then meet for lunch.
Mark Lacter is editor of the Business Journal.
