Women outnumber men in managerial and professional positions, and most companies have installed policies that aim to help their leaders balance the demands of job and family.
Yet three decades after a woman first became chief executive of a Fortune 500 company, fewer than 2 percent of the nation’s biggest corporations are run by women. Executive recruiters and corporate boards could be forgiven for asking themselves why.
The answer, experts are beginning to conclude, has less to do with discrimination in the corporate suite or pressures at home than with frustration and boredom on the job.
“Men will grit their teeth and bear everything, while women will say: ‘Is this all there is? I need more than this!”‘ said Mabel Miguel, a professor of management at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Big companies are starting to respond. Industrial powerhouses like General Electric, Procter & Gamble, and IBM, as well as partnership firms like Booz Allen Hamilton, Ernst & Young, and Deloitte & Touche, have all begun programs aimed at keeping women professionally engaged.
The results are starting to show, as more women who skipped out on companies that did not offer them intellectually challenging work resurface at companies that do.
Consider Zara Larsen, 48, who learned long ago to use e-mail, telecommuting and other tools to juggle family responsibilities and work. Last year, feeling that her career had reached a plateau, she quit to pursue a doctorate in management.
An “irresistible” offer from Raytheon Missile Systems wooed her back to the corporate world: Take time to pursue your degree, the company said, but also be our director of enterprise effectiveness, responsible for shrinking costs, speeding up processes and otherwise changing the culture.
Such a tale should not surprise corporate executives. A decade ago, Procter & Gamble, plagued by an attrition rate that was twice as high for women as for men, asked the women it considered “regretted losses” – high performers whom it wanted to retain – about why they left.
The answer was that they did not feel valued.
Deloitte had a greater comeuppance when it surveyed women on the partner track who had quit the firm in the 1990s.
“It turned out that more than 90 percent of them were still employed, just not by us,” recalled Deloitte’s Cathleen Benko. “So much for the idea that women stay home to run families.”
But it is only in the last few years that companies have been acting on the knowledge that women have as much desire to get to the top as men. And their retention numbers are rising accordingly.