Did you know that Boston Hampton Inn and Suites at Crosstown Center has a complimentary shuttle that runs to Longwood Medical Area hospitals and schools daily (including Simmons college?) Beginning at 6am and running through 8pm! Stay with us when you are visiting hospitals or checking out schools!
source: boston.com
When Cathy Minehan was applying for financial services jobs in New York as a new college graduate in 1968, she would routinely ask her interviewers about management training. And they would routinely tell her: “We have a management training program, but we don’t accept women.’’
Minehan, who went on to become the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and is now dean of the management school at Simmons College, has seen women’s roles expand greatly in the corporate world since then. But they’re still far from being on a level playing field with men. In Massachusetts, female executive officers make up just 9.6 percent of executive teams at the 100 largest public companies in the state, down from 10.9 percent in 2007, according to the Boston Club, a women’s business organization.
“Forty years ago we thought 40 years from now this would be a problem that would be solved, and it isn’t,’’ says Minehan.
At Simmons since August, she hopes to become part of the solution by attracting more students to the women’s college, and particularly to its MBA program, the only one in the country designed exclusively for women.
Juliette Mayers, the executive director of multicultural marketing for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, got her MBA from Simmons in 2001. The confidence she gained in a women-only environment – as well as an awareness of how gender influences interactions – has helped her become a stronger negotiator, both at Blue Cross and on nonprofit boards.
“With women, it’s almost like power is a dirty word,’’ Mayers says. “And at Simmons, it’s embraced.’’
Enrollment in the Simmons MBA program has been rising slowly over the past few years, from 195 in 2005 to 207 this year. The program, which has been around since 1975, has survived because there is still a strong need to teach women how to get ahead in hard-nosed business environments dominated by men, Minehan says.
Women account for more than half of entry-level professionals in the largest American industrial corporations, but only 14 percent of the seats on executive committees, according to research by the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. and the women’s advocacy group Catalyst Inc. The odds of advancement for men are about double what they are for women, McKinsey found.
In Massachusetts, only 27 percent of the 100 largest public companies have women among their highest paid executives, a slightly lower rate than in 2005 and 2006, according to the Boston Club. The number of female directors has also fallen, from 96 in 2009, or 11.3 percent of all directors, to 93, or 11.1 percent, this year.
There’s a solid business reason companies should pay attention to the women in their ranks, Minehan points out. Companies that routinely have at least three women on their boards outperform those with a low representation of women by double digit percentages in several measures of profitability, according to Catalyst. More…
