In the passage, the executive who told the woman how she should sit was _________________.
Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage:
Ten years passed since U.S. corporations began hiring more than token numbers of women for jobs at the bottom rung of the management ladder. A decade into their careers, how far up have these women climbed? The answer: not as far as their male counterparts. Despite impressive progress at the entry level and in middle management, women are having trouble breaking into senior management. There is an invisible ceiling for women at that level, says Janet Jones-Parker, executive director of the Association of Executive Search Consultants Inc. After eight or ten years, they hit a barrier.
The trouble begins at about the $ 75,000 to $ 100,000 salary level, and seems to get worse the higher one looks.
Only one company on Fortune's list of the 500 largest U.S. industrial corporations has a woman chief executive. That woman, Katharine Graham of the Washington Post Co. (No. 3
42), readily admits she got the job because her family owns a controlling share of the corporation.
More surprising, given that women have been on the ladder for ten years, is that none currently seems to have a shot at the top rung. Executive recruiters, asked to identify women who might become presidents or chief executives of Fortune 500 companies, draw a blank. Even companies that have women in senior management privately concede that these women aren't going to occupy the chairman's office.
Women have only four of the 154 spots this year at the Harvard Business School's Advanced Management Program a prestigious 13-week conclave to which companies send executives they are grooming for the corridors of power. The numbers aren't much better at comparable programs at Stanford and at Dartmouth's Tuck School. But perhaps the most telling admission of trouble comes from men at the top. The women aren't making it, confessed the chief executive of a Fortune 500 company to a consultant. Can you help us find out why?”
All explanations are controversial to one faction or another in this highly charged debate. At one extreme, many women - and some men - maintain that women are the victims of blatant sexism. At the other extreme, many men - and a few women - believe women are unsuitable for the highest managerial jobs: they lack the necessary assertiveness, they don't know how to get along in this rarefied world, or they have children and lose interest in- or time for- their careers. Somewhere in between is a surprisingly large group of men and women who see discrimination as the major problem, but who often can't define precisely what they mean by the term.
The discrimination they talk about is not the simple minded sexism of dirty jokes and references to girls it is not born of hatred or indeed of any ill will that the bearer may be conscious of. What they call discrimination consists simply of treating women differently from men. The notion dumbfounds some male managers. You mean to say they ask, that managerial women don't want to be treated differently from men in any respect, and that by acting otherwise as I was raised to think only decent and gentlemanly I’m somehow prejudicing their chances for success? You the women respond.
Men I talk to would like to see more women in senior management says Ann Carol Brown, a consultant to several Fortune 500 companies. “But they don’t recognize the subtle barriers that stand in the way”, Brown thinks the biggest hurdle is a matter of comfort not competence. At senior management levels, competence is assumed she says. What you looking for is someone who fits someone who gets along someone you trust. Now that subtle stuff. How does a group of men feel that a women is going to fit? Think it's very hard.
The experience of an executive at a large North-eastern bank illustrates how many managerial women see the problem Promoted to senior vice president several years ago, she was the first woman named to that the position. But she now believes it will be many years before the bank appoints a woman executive vice president. The men just don't feel comfortable she says. They make all sorts of excuses that I'm not a banker (she worked as a consultant originally), that I don't know the culture. There's a smoke screen four miles thick. I attribute it to being a woman Similarly, 117 to 300 women executive polled recently by UCLA's Graduate School of Management and Korn/Ferry International an executive search firm felt that being a woman was the greatest obstacle to their success.
A common concern among women, particularly in law and investment banking is that the best assignments go to men, Some departments like sales and trading or mergers and acquisitions are considered more macho, hence more prestigious”, says a woman at a New York investment bank. It's nothing explicit. But if women can't get the assignments that allow them to shine, how can they advance”.
Women also worry that they don't receive the same kind of constructive criticism that men do. While these women probably overestimate the amount of feedback their male colleagues receive, even some men acknowledge wide spread male reluctance to criticize a woman. There are vast number of men who can't do it says Eugene Jennings, professor of business administration at Michigan State University and a consultant to a dozen large companies. A male banking executive agrees; “A male boss will haul a guy aside and just kick his ass if large the subordinate performs badly in front of a client. But I heard about a woman here who gets nervous and tends to giggle in front of customers. She's unaware of it and her boss hasn't told her. But behind her back he downgrades her for not being smooth with customers.
Sometimes the message that has to be conveyed to a woman manager is much more sensitive. An executive at a large company says he once had to tell a woman that she should either cross her legs or keep her legs together when she sat. The encounter was obviously painful to him. She listened to me and thanked me and expressed shock at what she was doing he recalls, with a touch of agony in his voice. My God, this is something only your mother tells you. I'm a fairly direct person and a great believer in equal opportunity. But it was damn difficult for me to say this to a woman whom I view to be very proper in all other respects.
Research by Anne Harlan a human resource manager at the Federal Aviation Administration. And Carol Weiss, a managing associate of Charles Hamilton Associates, a Boston consulting firm, suggests that the situation doesn't necessarily improve as the number of women in an organization increases. Their study conducted at the Wellesley College Centre for Research on Women and completed in 1982. Challenges the theory advanced by some expect that when a corporation attained a critical mass of executive women defined as somewhere between 30% and 35% job discrimination would vanish naturally as men and women began to take each other for granted.
Harlan and Weiss observed the effects of different numbers of women in an organization during a three-year study of 100 men and women managers at two North-eastern retailing corporations. While their sample of companies was not large, after their results were published other companies said they had similar experiences Harlan and Weiss found that while overt resistance drops quickly after the first few women become managers it seems to pick up again as the number of women reaches 15%. In one company they studied only 6% of the managers were women, compared with 19% in the second company. But more women in the second company complained of discrimination, ranging from sexual harassment to inadequate feedback. Could something other than discrimination- very different corporate cultures, say have accounted for the result? Harlen and Weiss say no, that the two companies were eminently comparable.