Getting girls into business-Women executives want to attract youngsters

Judy Bornstein’s journey to the executive suite started with a simple goal: to work in an office with a door. As chief financial officer of McCown De Leeuw and Co., a private equity firm in Menlo Park, her wish has more than come true.

Julie N. Lynem, San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer

But Bornstein, a former elementary schoolteacher and university administrator, admits that it wasn’t until her 30s that she considered a career in business. Business certainly never occurred to her as a girl growing up in Piedmont.

Now, as a successful businesswoman, Bornstein says it’s time for her and other women executives to step up and show girls that they do belong in corporate offices and boardrooms. Bornstein was among a group of high-powered businesswomen who met at Charles Schwab in San Francisco on Thursday night to talk candidly about why girls are shunning business careers and what they can do about it.

"I think it’s an important first step . . . to find some women to talk to girls about this, to plant the seed and give girls the opportunity to say to themselves, ‘Yeah, I can do that job,’ " Bornstein said.

The meeting kicked off a series of forums across the country designed to create awareness about the issue of girls’ attitudes toward business.

During the forum, many women heard for the first time results of a national study that paints a stark picture of how ambivalent and insecure girls are about business careers.

It’s not that girls necessarily have a sour view of business. The teen survey, sponsored last fall by the Simmons College School of Management in Boston and the Committee of 200, a national organization of top women business leaders, found that 85 percent of teenage girls and boys had a neutral to favorable impression of business overall.

A vast majority of girls also would rather have a career, with 80 percent expecting to work full time as adults. However, when asked to list career choices, only 9 percent of girls listed business careers as their first choice.

Fifteen percent of boys selected business, which also indicates a low level of interest among them, the study acknowledged.

But for girls, the issue goes deeper. Teen girls not only have little interest in business careers, but are less confident about their knowledge of business, math and decision-making skills, and are less likely to want to be the boss.

Teen girls also don’t believe there’s a place for them or the things they value in the business world. Girls, the study said, prefer careers in law, medicine and other professions because they see the connection between those occupations and making a contribution to society.

In the survey, 73 percent of teen girls, compared with 55 percent of boys, ranked helping others as extremely or very important in their career. More boys, 75 percent, said making money was important. Fifty-five percent of girls ranked that as a top priority.

Minority girls — defined as people of Hispanic, African-American and Asian origin — put a higher priority on making money than white girls. They also were more interested in being their own boss.

As troubling as the statistics may be, there’s hope for the future, businesswomen say. But it will take immediate action on the part of teachers, parents, the media and businesswomen to turn attitudes around, said Fiona Wilson, assistant professor at the Simmons School of Management.

People need to do a better job of showing girls that business isn’t all numbers, boring paperwork, skyscrapers, suits and briefcases, and that it’s possible to make money and a difference in their communities, Wilson said.

"It’s important for girls to understand on a basic level what business does for our economy and social well-being," Wilson said. "That you can really help others by being a great manager and a good, ethical strong leader."

Carrie Schwab-Pomerantz, founder of Schwab’s Women’s Investing Network, said there’s not enough education about opportunities in business. Educators, teachers and parents, she said, aren’t in a position to "articulate the benefits of working in business."

Schwab-Pomerantz said the fact that so few girls are jumping at business careers is a reminder of how far women have to go in corporate America.

"If you think about it, we have more and more women going into the workforce," she said. "However, there’s not a large percentage going into the highest ranks. Girls see it as a roadblock to getting there."

Today, women represent only 15.7 percent of corporate officers in America’s 500 largest companies, according to a 2002 survey by Catalyst, a nonprofit research organization that works to advance women in business. The study also found that 9.9 percent of women hold high-powered titles — chairman, chief executive officer, vice chairman, chief operating officer, senior executive vice president and executive vice president.

As one of the few women in a high-level corporate position, Bornstein said she’s all for exposing girls to the fun and creativity of business early on.

Perhaps, if someone had told her she had what it took to be a CFO, she would have gone for it a long time ago, Bornstein said.

"If you could get women business leaders in front of girls to talk about the skills they use to make them successful, then I’d bet you’d find a lot of girls who would say, ‘I’ve got that. That’s me, too.’ "

E-mail Julie N. Lynem at [email protected].

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