"Breaking the Glass Ceiling from the Top"

I will state my bias right up front: I worked with Catalyst over the summer and I absolutely consider myself a Catalysta. And so should you.

Ilene Lang, the president and CEO of Catalyst, just shared a small sliver of the research Catalyst is doing that is changing the makeup of organizations and board leadership. And as she says--even though the values-based argument and a person's sense of fair play may be the most important motivating reason for addressing gender gaps-- financial and "bottom line" measures are a good way to help sweep others along.

So here's the bottom line: it just makes good business sense (and that's in a dollars sense of the word). According to Catalyst research, Fortune 500 companies with higher percentages of women on their boards see equity returns 53 percent higher than those companies with the fewest number of women on their boards, as well as 42 percent higher return on sales and 66 percent higher return on investment.

Granted, this is a correlation, not a causation. But given the other compelling reasons--not to mention our current economy--what part of 15.2% F500 board seats held by women makes any sense (or cents) at all?

"There is no glass ceiling in the world…it’s just a thick layer of men."

Laura Liswood, Secretary General at the Council of Women World Leaders, kicked off the conference this morning, eliciting laughs from the audience with the above statements. This conference, in her view, is a call to action--and action has already begun.

During the breakfast this morning, as I sat with some of the senior women from some of the leading financial and banking institutions from around the world, discussions about the gender gap in the business world were already in full swing.

On the surface, women have a lot to be optimistic about right now. A slew of articles, including Hanna Rosin's "The End of Men" article in the Atlantic this past summer, the Washington Post's article on women making six-figure salaries and the Economist's first issue of the year, proclaiming "We did it!" paints a picture in which women are actually doing much better than ever before--that we are doing well, in fact, in comparison to men.

Unfortunately, this is not really the case, as the facts show. Only 2% of Board chairmanships are held by women (in the U.S.). Women in the U.S. comprise approximately 15% of corporate boards. Full time women managers still make 81 cents on the dollar as compared to their male counterparts. And as Saadia Zahidi just pointed out in her sneak peak at the 2010 Global Gender Gap Report, at the rate at which we're going, we will reach the year 4000 before we reach gender parity as indicated by the World Economic Forum's Gender Gap Index (measuring political empowerment, health and survival, educational attainment and economic participation).

I'm pretty sure we cannot wait 1990 years.