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On Top of Their Game
Women managers defy the odds to break through the glass ceiling
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Business New Haven
4/1/2002
By:
Nancy Barnes
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The broad movement of women into the workforce that began roughly 30 years ago has seen few women in corporate life arrive at the top. In 2000, only six women held the position of chief executive officer within the Fortune 500 ranks, and that sum is not expected to change dramatically when figures for the year 2001 are released this week, according to Carrie Welch, spokesperson for the magazine. Women do continue to nudge their way up the corporate ladder in companies both public and private, large and small.
“I'm not in the lab working with test tubes,” says Lisa M. Dunkle, M.D., co-founder and senior vice president of drug development at New Haven's Achillion Inc. She was speaking at the conclusion of a conference on antiviral drug discovery in New Jersey, timing her telephone call so that she would miss the heavy traffic on the George Washington Bridge on her way back to Connecticut.
When not attending or presenting at a conference - she spoke at an InfoTechPharma Congress in London on outsourcing earlier this year - she plies her executive trade within the gray-beige building that houses the Achillion biotechnology firm.
Dunkle says she spends probably not more than 20 percent of her time travelling, although, she adds, “It seems like more than that sometimes.”
Dunkle, who completed her undergraduate work at Wellesley College before taking an M.D. degree at Johns Hopkins Medical School, began her career in academia. She achieved tenure as a professor with a joint appointment in pediatrics and microbiology at the St. Louis School of Medicine. There, she also served as Director of Infectious Diseases and Hospital Epidemiology at St. Louis University.
“When the AIDS epidemic hit, the first group of individuals who were recognized to have the disease included hemophiliacs,” says Dunkle, explaining why she worked in the field of pediatric infectious diseases.
Having conducted clinical research, she felt that antiviral research was then the “newest and most exciting place to be.” But, having climbed the ladder in academia, she says she began looking for other opportunities.” That's when she was recruited to start and head the antiviral group at the Bristol-Meyers Squibb Co. An expert in the clinical development of new antiviral agents, she stayed at the pharmaceutical giant for 11 years.
“The switch to Achillion gave me the opportunity to expand on my role within a company,” Dunkle explains. “At Bristol-Meyers, no one can have the influence that one can have within a small company. I was itching to do it [drug development] the way I saw best.”
That means her primary responsibilities now go toward the molecule the firm has decided is worthy of development into a drug. In addition to monitoring clinical trials (this is where Achillion, like other biotechnology firms, spends most of its money), she takes the drug through testing and development and then on to registration.
Dunkle says that she is at home in the overwhelmingly man's world that exists at the corporate level. “I entered a man's world 35 years ago when I went to medical school. I've become very comfortable within it,” she says. “Have I been subjected to sexual harassment?” she continues. “You bet. But that was 30 or 35 years ago when I don't think anyone realized what sexual harassment was.”
Throughout her career, she says that she has never had to fight the same kind of battles - such as wage discrimination - as her mother, who was a bookkeeper and accountant. “That hasn't happened to me,” she says.
Dunkle says that what is new and intriguing for her at Achillion includes understanding the business side, such as interacting with investors and a board of directors, as well as the science side of drug development. ”That's really the challenge of my third career,” she says.
“I'd like to put you on speakerphone, assuming I can figure out how to use it,” says Jacinta (Jaci) Coleman, speaking from the home office at People's Bank in Bridgeport - and betraying her self-deprecating, puckish wit. As executive vice president and chief information officer (CIO) of the largest independent bank in Connecticut, Coleman holds a position that is still not widely understood.
“I use it [information technology] to mean all of the bank's computer operations, infrastructure and data,” Coleman says. “The industry makes up new terms every couple of years. The title CIO has had broad use within the past 10 years. However, the functions existed prior to that. Director of IS [information systems] is one of them.”
Coleman, who holds a master's degree in computer science from the University of Utah and an M.B.A. from the Wharton School of Management, should know the intricacies of the term. Like Dunkle, she worked for numerous organizations - International Harvester and the Hartford Insurance Co. among them - before assuming her present position. At each, her specialty was information systems.
Coleman says that what marks corporate life is “the ability to play nicely in the sandbox with others. You're very much part of a team.”
“There's a book that claimed that everything you needed to know you learned in kindergarten, and I think that's probably true,” Coleman says, emphasizing an environment where people need to interact with others. And she cautions against burning bridges within corporate structures, saying, “These are people you'll work with for years.”
“I'm good at numbers, but it stops short of fascination,” she continues, referring to what fueled her interest in her corporate specialty. “The way I got into information technology was computers. When I was 16, my father was in the Army Reserves. He was exposed to them, and he fell in love with them. I just decided at age 16 that I was going to be a programmer.” Coleman began her career as a programmer with International Business Machines, better known as IBM.
Among the initiatives in which she is presently involved is People's Customer Relations Management, which she says the bank is taking toward contact management. “A lot of the information that we try to pull together is to support tailored solutions,” she says.
Like Dunkle, whose daughter will begin medical school this fall, Coleman leads a balanced life. Her 19-year-old son has a major in computer science at WHAT university. Her daughter, 15, remains at home.
A strong sense of family caused another corporate executive, Meredith B. Reuben, CEO of the Eastern Bag & Paper Group, to arrive at the Omni-New Haven Hotel at 7 a.m. on a very damp Ides of March. Seated at a table near the dais, she watched her niece, Casey Selwyn, accept an award as a “young hero” at New Haven County's Annual Red Cross breakfast for Selwyn's fundraising efforts following September 11.
Reuben's commitment to her family - and her desire to keep Milford based Eastern Bag & Paper within it - is one of the reasons she left her career as a lawyer in 1979 to join her family's privately-owned firm.
“It teaches you how to be fair in the workplace,” she says of her first career, when she spent several years as a labor lawyer.
Founded by Reuben's grandfather Samuel Baum in 1908, Eastern Bag & Paper is one of the largest distributors of paper and some chemical supplies in the Northeast. As one of three daughters, Reuben, who received an undergraduate degree from Tufts University and holds her law degree from Boston University, has been in a unique position to watch Eastern Bag & Paper grow.
Among her childhood memories are her father, who then served as the company's CEO, discussing what Reuben terms “the problem of the day” at the family dinner table. From visits to her father's office, she recalls the smell, ”a pungent but wonderful smell,” of the corrugated packaging that wrapped Eastern Bag & Paper's products.
Reuben says her grandmother, who managed the business's retail store, never let a commercial customer leave without a packet of napkins or a trinket for that person's child. Her mother, who succeeded her husband as CEO in 1983, was a detail-oriented woman, Reuben says, whereas she feels she is a big-picture person.
Having served as director of purchasing as well as vice president, Reuben became CEO of Eastern Bag & Paper, in 1992. That was the year the company acquired the Salem Paper Co. in Tewksbury, Mass.
“As Eastern Bag has evolved from a small to a midsize company, its management requires a bit more sensitivity to what is said within a group and what is said at meetings,” Reuben says. “There's a bit more formality in a corporate structure,” she adds.
When not off on a business trip - or attending an early breakfast to honor the next generation in her family - Reuben spends much of her working day with clients and the company's employees. Eastern Bag & Paper sets goals by a manager at the beginning of each year, Reuben points out, and she reviews where management is on that continuum. “I'm sort of an orchestra leader,” she observes.
Reuben has three children of her own, including two teenage daughters and a 20-year-old son who is an economics major at WHAT?? university.
“I do believe men have to have priorities, but I think women with families have to have priorities that are crystal clear.
“I can't go to all meetings. I can't serve on all boards,” says Reuben, a woman who sits on the board of the Connecticut Business and Industry Association and the Bridgeport Hospital Finance Committee, among others. “I think that's really the biggest difference” in the professional lives of corporate women and corporate men.
Females Hold Few CEO Positions
“Typically, as we go down the Fortune list, fewer women are represented,” says Johanna Ramos-Boyer, spokesperson for the research and advisory group, Catalyst. Ramos-Boyer notes that, although six women served as CEO in Fortune 500 companies in the year 2000, only nine held that position within the entire Fortune 1000 list.
Among corporate officers and top earners - that is to say, persons within two or three reporting levels of the CEO - women held 12.5 percent of those positions in Fortune 500 companies.
Yet, according to Ramos-Boyer, women are getting ahead incrementally. When Catalyst began compiling statistics on the Fortune lists in 1995, the number of women in senior corporate positions stood at 8.5 percent.
With women accounting for only 11 percent of corporate officers and top earners in Fortune's top 500 companies located in the state, according to Ramos-Boyer, Connecticut ranks below the national average. Among the Connecticut-based companies on the Fortune 500 list that did have women in senior corporate positions in the year 2000 are: Aetna US Healthcare Inc., Ames Department Stores Inc., the General Electric Co., Hartford Financial Services Group Inc., Oxford Health Plans Inc. Tosco Corp., Union Carbide Corp., United Technologies Corp., and the Xerox Corp.
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