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The Conference Board Review® Article
Escape From Corporate America
More and more women are abandoning big companies to strike out on their own.
By Laurel Delaney
Laurel Delaney is founder of GlobeTrade.com, a Chicago-based global marketing and consulting company, and creator of the e-newsletter "Borderbuster." She is currently at work on her next book, Women Entrepreneurs Take On the World. She can be reached at ldelaney@globetrade.com.
Divorce, dumping, or abandonment: Call it what you like, but many women are trading in Corporate America for entrepreneurship. According to Cheskin Research, they are starting businesses at twice the rate of men and have become a major force in both the traditional and the e-business marketplace. The Center for Women's Business Research estimates that, as of 2002, there are 6.2 million women-owned businesses, employing 9.2 million workers and generating $1.15 trillion in annual revenue.
In the interest of security, women used to be willing to channel their time, energy, and effort to the corporation's needs at the expense of fulfilling their own professional goals -- but no more. In starting their own businesses, they're seeking freedom, flexibility, recognition, more money, and opportunities to leave a legacy -- all of the things they once thought they would find within corporations.
Dorothy Perrin Moore, author of Careerpreneurs: Lessons From Leading Women Entrepreneurs on Building a Career Without Boundaries, claims women are breaking away from the constraints of corporate life in record numbers to seek professional fulfillment in their own ways. She refers to it as the organizational push and entrepreneurial pull.
Praise, Yes. Ownership, No
Is Corporate America actively pushing out its most talented women? Despite the diversity initiatives that have proliferated in recent years, many organizations still unconsciously treat their women as second-class citizens. Nobody knows this better than Kay Koplovitz, who founded USA Networks and ran it for 21 years. In 1997, USA Networks became a bargaining chip in an unpleasant lawsuit between Viacom and MCA, and was sold for $4.5 billion. Since Koplovitz had no equity in the company, not a dime of the sale proceeds came her way. "Hell, when I started out in cable in the early '70s, it wasn't just male-dominated. It was male," she says. "The boys had always treated me cordially, had always lavished praise on my performance. But they had never, not even remotely, been ready to make room for me as a co-owner."
Her goal had been to take USA Networks public to recoup her investment; when that didn't happen, she suddenly found herself looking to buy a new company. Despite her extensive experience, she found that women remained at a distinct disadvantage in raising venture capital -- at the time, in 1997, only 1.7 percent of venture capital was going to businesses owned or run by women. This spurred Koplovitz, along with some other seasoned and well-connected women, to form Boldcap Ventures LLC, an angel fund for high-net-worth women investors intended to help women start and grow businesses. Although the fund is in its infancy, Koplovitz says, "We have funded three companies: an agribusiness, a cancer diagnostic, and an online security company."
Koplovitz shares her experience with other women entrepreneurs as chair of both Broadway Television Network and the National Women's Business Council. She also continues to run her angel fund and has authored Bold Women, Big Ideas: Learning to Play the High-Risk Entrepreneurial Game.
What Really Walks Out the Door?
Koplovitz's situation is not an isolated example. According to a study by Catalyst, a nonprofit research and advisory organization working to advance women in business and the professions, 29 percent of women business owners with prior private-sector experience cited glass-ceiling issues as the major reason for leaving corporate positions. Of those women, 44 percent felt their contributions were not recognized or valued.
Sheila Wellington, Catalyst's president, shares one survey respondent's experience: "'I worked for a corporation in the area, and I just got tired of people coming in, especially male counterparts, who were being promoted above me.'" One-third of the women surveyed agreed with the statement "you were not taken seriously by your employer or supervisor." Fifty-eight percent of the respondents said that nothing would attract them back to the corporate world; 24 percent could be lured back by more money, and 11 percent by greater flexibility. In fact, lack of flexibility is an even bigger problem for women in Corporate America than glass-ceiling issues: 51 percent of the women surveyed cited the desire for more flexibility as the major reason for leaving corporate positions.
What are the repercussions of these results for corporations? "As women walk out the door after years of training," Wellington says, "what really walks out is the potential that those women would have brought to Corporate America."
If anything, women's reluctance to conform to corporate strictures will become even more pronounced as the younger generation enters the workforce and starts ascending the corporate ladder. Marilyn Moats Kennedy, managing partner of Wilmette, Ill.-based Career Strategies, indicates that the women she sees are perfectly willing to work for a Fortune 500 for a few years as a learning experience. Then they're gone. Kennedy says: "When I've done focus groups with junior and senior women at University of Michigan and Northwestern University, they see corporations as places to hone your skills, but not to stay long-term. They object to office politics, asking, 'Why do I have to toady to some old guy who ceased to be productive years ago?' They don't value longevity. They don't care about seniority. They want to control their work lives, especially their hours."
Comments? Write a letter to the editor.
Return to the March/April 2003 The Conference Board Review® issue.
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