Women have a miniscule presence on Southern California corporate boards, holding just 7 percent of the directors’ seats at publicly traded companies in Los Angeles, Orange and Riverside counties or half the national average.
More than half of the locally based public companies have no women board members at all, according to a report by the L.A. chapter of the National Association of Women Business Owners.
Of 219 companies surveyed, 68 firms had one woman each on their boards; 24 had two each. One company, Hot Topic Inc., a retailer of teenage apparel in City of Industry, has three women board members. Pacific Life Insurance Co. in Newport Beach has four.
Among companies with no women on their boards: Edison International Inc., Computer Sciences Corp., DirecTV Group Inc., Univision Communications Inc., Public Storage Inc. and THQ Inc.
Los Angeles ranks behind Boston, Chicago and New York in the number of women board members in part because so few Fortune 1,000 firms are based here. Nationally, Fortune 1,000 companies have 1,643 board seats held by women, compared with 12,142 directorships held by men.
“This is the last bastion of the “old boy’s network” and CEOs usually want to look around the room and see people that are just like them,” said Nell Minow, editor of the Corporate Library, an independent ratings agency focused on corporate governance.
She said there’s also an ingrained tendency at big organizations to pick consensus builders, or people who “get along,” rather than mavericks willing to ask tough questions. “The people who get invited to be on boards are those whose number one skill is to walk into a room, size up the norms and blend in,” she said.
Minow noted that Enron Corp.’s board voted three separate times to waive the company’s conflict of interest rules, while Tyco International Ltd.’s board approved former chairman and chief executive Dennis Kozlowski’s revised employment contract, which stated that a felony conviction was not grounds for dismissal.
De facto directors
Renee White Fraser, president and chief executive of Fraser Communications, a Los Angeles advertising agency, said she expected Sarbanes-Oxley legislation would provide a window of opportunity for women because of the requirement that more directors be independent.
“When you speak to men about it, they say there aren’t enough women with CEO experience because they haven’t been in the pipeline long enough,” she said. “But there are plenty of women at the senior vice president level so why aren’t they on boards?”
Another problem is that women who make it to the board level become de facto representatives of their sex, serving on several boards.
Vilma Martinez, a lawyer at Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP in Los Angeles, serves on four boards Anheuser-Busch Cos. Inc., Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp., Fluor Corp. and Bank of the West.
Monica Lozano, president and chief operating officer of Spanish-language newspaper La Opinion, serves on five boards: Walt Disney Co., Union Bank of California and three non-profits, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Judy Rosener, a professor at the Paul Merage School of Business at UC Irvine, said larger firms are less likely to change their corporate cultures to include women or minorities and only do so because of media scrutiny.
“There are far more people employed by women and small businesses than there are by Fortune 1,000 firms,” she said. “But it’s much harder to count up all the little companies. In Southern California, they are the engines of growth. That’s where women board members can be found.”
Lane Nemeth, a director at Small World Kids Inc. in Culver City, and founder of PetLane, a multi-level marketing firm that sells pet products, said many women are more likely to own their own companies and hire women to work under them. Large public companies, she said, also tend to look to hire women executives from other large firms. “There is still a huge glass ceiling, and I think for a lot of companies women are still invisible,” she said.
Executives of most local companies in the survey chose not to return calls.
“I’m uncomfortable with the subject of what different things they bring (to the table) because it implies that there are differences,” said Bob Haskell, senior vice president of public affairs at Pacific Life, which has the highest number of women directors four of any public company in Southern California. “All board members are different and they all have particular strengths and the women don’t all bring the same strengths.”
The non-profit NAWBO culled its survey information from the Business Journal’s list of 200 public companies, as well as Fortune 1,000 firms based in Southern California.
