Thursday, February 17, 2011

Women at the Top, February 2011

Women at the Top
17:30pm Feb 15, 2011

Women at the Top blog
The Women at the Top blog contains news and discussions on women's advancement, fairness and equality in the business arena, as well as the role of the world's most prominent women in business and their increasing participation in global economic growth.

Gender gap narrows in Brazil
Women executives report progress in equality, but more needs to be done at the very top of the ladder, writes Joe Leahy
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Are women their own worst enemies in the boardroom?
According to an FT survey of women managers and chief executives, this is only partly true; there are other important factors too that prevent women from taking their places in the boardroom
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The top 50 women in world business
View respected businesswomen from around the globe – as an interactive graphic or full profiles – in this year's FT Women in World Business ranking, with Indra Nooyi, chief executive of PepsiCo, in first place for the second year in a row
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VIDEO
Women in the UK are half as likely as men to start their own businesses, but a growing number are choosing to do so

VIDEO
American business is crying out for comprehensive tax reform, says Indra Nooyi, chief executive of PepsiCo

INTERACTIVE GRAPHIC
View an interactive graphic of the top 50 women in world business in 2010

A woman to watch: Ester Levanon of the Tel Aviv stock exchange
Ester Levanon, chief executive of the Tel Aviv stock exchange since 2006, talks about her work and her background
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Boardroom gender quotas: the magic medicine fails
THE GREAT QUOTA DEBATE: Female quotas for company boards are the latest "magic medicine" said to deliver improved performance, but it is time for a rethink of this policy, writes Catherine Hakim
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Women on boards: time for the stick
THE GREAT QUOTA DEBATE: There can be no option but the implementation of quotas when it comes to the proportion of women on the board of companies, writes Lynda Gratton
Read more >

Monday, February 14, 2011

Digital Anthropologist

Forbes Focus
Digital Anthropologist
Kashmir Hill, 02.09.11, 06:00 PM EST
Forbes Magazine dated February 28, 2011

Danah boyd has become one of the most influential women in technology by hanging out with teens. Don't tell Mark Zuckerberg.

"Sometimes I feel like my job is Captain Obvious," says danah boyd, sitting cross-legged and shoeless in a neon-green chair at Microsoft Research's office overlooking a frozen Charles River in Cambridge, Mass. Her snow boots kicked off, the petite 33-year-old expert on the Internet and youth is wearing a loose tan sweater, dangly silver jewelry and a trademark fuzzy hat that resembles the ears of a white Pomeranian puppy.

That lower-case spelling of her name? Not a typo. She had it legally changed after graduating with a computer science degree from Brown in 2000, because of "political irritation at the importance of capitalization."

Roll your eyes and LOL, but boyd is a highly sought-after ethnographer--Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg is an instant message buddy--who has helped tech companies shape online products and privacy policies aimed at youth. Her résumé includes stints at Friendster, Google, Yahoo and Intel. Each year she spends a few months "in the field," playing Margaret Mead to America's youth by studying how they use technology. In 2009 boyd was the first to reveal how educated whites and Asians were fleeing the social media site MySpace in favor of Facebook.

She doesn't buy the conventional view that the Internet is a dramatic cultural game-changer; we're simply finding digital ways to replicate offline behavior. "The issues we have with technology are rarely about the technologies themselves," she says. At the moment she's finishing a book for publication in 2012 that debunks myths about teens and social media. (Myth number five: Kids don't care about privacy.) Mark Zuckerberg might want to pick up a copy. "He's whip-smart, but we fundamentally disagree on certain philosophical ideas about the world," says boyd--namely, privacy. (Zuckerberg declined to comment.)

"Her name is always brought up, almost reverentially, in tech circles," says Sarahjane Sacchetti, communications head at question-and-answer site Formspring. "Because of her teen focus groups, she understands how young people use the Internet and talks about it in a thoughtful, reasonable way."

Boyd, who has a doctorate in information studies from Berkeley, gained attention early in her career when she took on Sherry Turkle, the noted MIT psychologist and Internet social guru. Turkle viewed the Internet as a great equalizer, where users could reconstruct their gender and identity to suit their fancy. Boyd responded that race and class come in digital versions, too.

Turkle turned dystopian with her new book, Alone Together, which decries machines' disrupting human relationships. Boyd takes issue again. "Technology simply mirrors and magnifies all sorts of things we see in everyday life--and that's good, bad and ugly," she says, pointing to the societal obsession with cyberbullying. "Bullying's not worse today. Technology just makes it more visible, leaving evidence."

That's not to say that everything is obvious with youth online. When teenagers were being cyberbullied anonymously on Formspring--"Don't you hate Kristen?" or "Why are you such a slut?"--boyd took a look. She determined from Formspring sign-in data that some of the vicious questions were written by the teen under attack. Boyd speculated that it was a cry for attention and a way to get friends to rally to her defense. She called the practice "digital self-harm."

Boyd's job at Microsoft Research is similar to an academic's. She gets bonuses based on the visibility of her writings or through winning awards. She can pursue what she likes, and for one month every year she takes an e-mail sabbatical, during which she not only ignores all e-mail but also deletes it.

If you want to see boyd angry, mention Zuckerberg's statement that "privacy is no longer a social norm." The two have been on each other's instant message chat lists since 2004, when Zuckerberg took her out for coffee for her insights from studying Friendster's users. People go to great lengths to protect their privacy, she says, pointing to a teen she met who, instead of logging out of Facebook after a session, deactivates her account.

Boyd believes online privacy needs attention from Congress--"Facebook is a social utility; utilities get regulated"--but that it requires subtlety. A law to protect privacy of children under 13, for example, has failed because kids just lie about their ages.

"People are responding to structural conditions on the Internet in very reasonable, rational ways," says boyd. "My job is to uncover it and make sense of it in a way that makes you go, ‘Duh.'"

Saturday, February 12, 2011

Nicole Krauss: 'I take great pleasure in thinking'

Nicole Krauss photographed at home in Brooklyn, New York by Mike McGregor for the Observer.

Culture > Books > Literary fiction
Nicole Krauss: 'I take great pleasure in thinking'
The bestselling American author tells Rachel Cooke why she is surprised her fiction is labelled 'difficult' – and how her new novel was inspired by a piece of furniture
Rachel Cooke
The Observer, Sunday 13 February 2011

Great House by Nicole Krauss

When Nicole Krauss talks about her new novel, Great House, her hands flutter before her like tiny birds. It is, you see, such a difficult book to describe. Mysterious, absorbing, and full of ideas, it works like one of those old Chinese puzzle boxes: it will spring open in the end, but a certain amount of patience is required before its innermost secrets become apparent. She laughs. "I think of novels as houses," she says. "You live in them over the course of a long period, both as a reader and as a writer. And I have a very strong spatial sense. Perhaps it's genetic. My grandfather was an engineer, and my father was first an engineer and then an orthopaedic surgeon. The feeling I have when I write of putting all these pieces together, and noticing how they create a shape, and then knowing that I have built something and that it will stand up; it's so satisfying to me."

The elusive but exquisitely beautiful Great House has four narrators: an unhappy young New Yorker who once spent a night with a Chilean poet called Daniel Varsky; an Israeli widower who cannot reach his estranged son emotionally; an elderly British man who longs to discover what it is that his refugee wife has kept secret all her life; and another young American woman who, in Oxford, falls in love with the male half of a mysterious pair of reclusive siblings (their father is a famous Hungarian antiques dealer). Humming away at the edges of the story is the Holocaust; this is a book about grief and loss, and the way it is handed down through the generations almost imperceptibly. But, centre stage and eventually coming to link these disparate, scattered lives, is a piece of furniture: a monstrous great desk, dark and brooding, with 19 drawers, one of which is permanently locked.

Krauss has already told me that her books often start as a single image. Was the desk such an image in the case of Great House? "Yes, and no." The novel began its life as a short story, which was eventually collected in an anthology. It was only as Krauss wrote a short paragraph for the anthology's editor, explaining its source of inspiration, that she looked up and realised that her own desk was very similar to the one in her story. "I inherited it from the former owner of my house, who'd built it into the wall according to some very esoteric specifications. It doesn't have 19 drawers, but it is huge. I knew I was going to have to work at it; it was the obvious place. But I hated this desk. The trouble was, though, that to get rid of it, you would have to destroy it." In spite of her dislike, she began to feel a weird sense of responsibility towards it. So when she came to write a book about the burden of emotional inheritance, the desk insinuated its way into her story as a symbol of that load. And has she come to love the desk as a result? "No!" she wails. "I still hate the desk. I think we're going to have to move."

I had been rather dreading meeting Krauss: purest jealousy, I suppose. Wildly intelligent (she has degrees from Stanford and Oxford, and the poetry she wrote as a student was admired by Joseph Brodsky), and extremely privileged (she grew up on Long Island in a Bauhaus masterpiece), her second novel, The History of Love, sold more than 250,000 copies, was translated into 35 languages, and was shortlisted for the Orange, Medicis and Femina prizes. She is beautiful, too. Oh yes, and she's married to Jonathan Safran Foer, wunderkind author of the novels Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (they have two small children). But when I walk into the coffee shop near where she lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn, all this stuff just flies away. She is lovely: intense but so wry, and warm (she apologises for the freezing cold weather as if she were personally responsible for it). And I like the way she answers my questions – as if I'm so clever to have thought of them.

Great House is Krauss's third novel, but this doesn't mean she finds it easy to send a book out into the world, like some poor orphan. "The first time, I didn't know what to feel about it, and the feelings only came slowly, later on, many months after publication: feelings of wondering about whether I could justify writing another book. I don't know what I expected, but I felt like it had done nothing in the world. Perhaps there was some secret hope that the effect would be palpable. Of course, it was never going to be! But when you're younger, you want to be understood. I'm less fixated now on the idea of how something will be received, but even so, it [publication] is getting harder. This book is so personal to me, on every level."

In what way? "Well, I used to write mostly in the third person, but now I'm writing only in the first person. I've discovered that what thrills me is the sheer intimacy of becoming someone else. In the case of Great House, I felt these people were so naked, and in the process of stepping into their shoes, you're also shining a light on yourself, and these two things are tangled up in ways I can't even untangle." The peculiar thing is, though, that she has no idea what any of her characters look like. "I'm the opposite of someone like David Grossman, who knows how his characters walk, and how they smell. I don't allow myself to imagine what mine look like at all. My sense of them comes from the inside. They remain, by necessity, physically vague in my mind."

On a long book tour of the US, Krauss was taken aback to find that one of the things she heard most frequently from readers was: "this book is difficult". "I was so surprised," she says. "I realise that it's challenging, that it refuses to come together too easily, but I didn't think of it as a difficult read." So how to explain it? Krauss believes – or at least, she worries – that in the west, we are moving towards the end of effort. "We've arrived at this place where we just thoughtlessly plunge towards whatever the thing is that will allow us to make less of an effort. We know we're diminishing experience. We know that it was richer to walk to the store, talk to the bookseller, maybe meet your neighbour than it is to click online. But we can't stop ourselves. We're programmed to do the 'easier' thing. That's why people have Kindles. It's easier not to have to turn the page. All that's left of turning is this bizarre little sound to remind us of it. People no longer have the concentration to finish things; we skim along on the surface, and it's miserable."

She works at home, alone, and tries not to get too hung up about reviews. "The accolades, just like the scrapes and bruises, fade in the end, and all you're left with is your ambition. You can't imagine how hard I am on myself. Nothing pummels me like my own doubts, the feeling of how far I still have to go." I can sense that she is reluctant to talk about the other novelist in the house (perhaps she has looked at the dispiriting example of other literary couples, and realised that if she wants to be taken seriously as writer in her own right, best to try and pretend one doesn't even have a husband). But the pram in the hall seems fair game. Has motherhood made her writing life harder or easier? Krauss stirs her hot chocolate carefully. "There was a moment, quite a long moment, after my son was born when I wondered whether my ambition would return to me. I remember saying to my mom: my inner life has gone. But eventually, it flowed back, and when it did, I was surprised how much depth of feeling flooded into the work. Everything... trembled. And now, I'm so grateful for my inner life; it's almost visceral, when I'm working and alone." She smiles. "I take real pleasure in thinking."

“Just Smile”

(Photo: Jeff Riedel)
New York Magazine
“Just Smile”
Mayor Bloomberg hired magazine executive Cathie Black as schools chancellor to sell his educational philosophy to the public. But she’s having a hard enough time selling herself.
By Chris Smith Published Feb 6, 2011

Cathie Black is lost in Queens. Her day had started well, with the Pledge of Allegiance at a Coney Island elementary school, then a brisk walking tour of one of the city’s best middle schools, Mark Twain. Black smiles nonstop as she’s hustled from math to English to art class by Twain’s legendary no-nonsense principal, Carol Moore. When Black lingers, quizzing a teacher, Moore barks, “Come on, Chancellor!” Black is startled, then grins. “The actual question,” she says, stopping into a science class that’s charting how temperature affects the osmosis rate of cells, “is, how do we clone Ms. Moore?”

Her next stop is a high school in Jamaica. Black’s car suddenly pulls to the curb. There’s a pause, then an abrupt U-turn in the middle of a busy street, followed by a frantic acceleration onto the Belt Parkway. Usually when Black goes east, she’s headed to her $4 million house in Southampton, in a more comfortable ride. Today, she’s wedged into the backseat of a city-issued Prius. The car slows. Hesitates. Turns right … onto a service road leading into JFK airport. Has Black, just weeks into a bumpy transition from magazine-company executive to boss of the city’s fractious public-school system, already decided to hop a flight and flee?

Another U-turn, then a dash onto the Van Wyck heading north—and into total gridlock. Black’s beleaguered driver inches across two lanes of bumper-to-bumper traffic, then lurches for the first exit, which leads to a thicket of auto-body shops and fast-food joints. The Prius pulls up in front of Hillcrest High School, somehow only ten minutes behind schedule.

Inside, Black shakes hands and listens intently as a group of the high school’s top students praise their teachers. Hillcrest is in many ways a success story. Its student body is rich in ethnicities and languages but poor enough that 68 percent of the kids qualify for free lunch. Five years ago, with the help of a Gates Foundation grant and management direction from New Visions for Public Schools, Hillcrest’s 3,000 students were divided into seven self-contained programs, and the four-year graduation rate has climbed to 70 percent. But classrooms are crowded, and Principal Stephen Duch, who’s had to trim spending by 10 percent in the past two years, fears additional budget cuts will worsen the strain. Black steps into a room full of kids huddled around laptops, part of the city’s new “Innovation Zone” project integrating online learning with brick-and-mortar schools. She asks rapid-fire questions—“How does it compare to your regular classes? Who grades it? How long have you been in an iZone? Who monitors it? Are these their own laptops? Can they work in teams?”—but takes no notes, though she clutches a small notebook covered in bright-red suede everywhere she goes.

Black is unfailingly pleasant, if a bit distant. Until she enters a business class. The teacher, Michele Gensler, tells Black that her students are preparing for a competition in which they’ll pitch mock start-ups to adult business leaders. Black’s blue eyes shine. For the first time today, she eagerly volunteers advice.

“Just smile,” she tells the students, leaning across a cubicle wall and looking at each of them in turn—and smiling. “Smile at them, and they’ll respond to you!” The students are quiet, not sure what to make of the cheery blonde stranger in the snappy charcoal-striped pantsuit.

Black continues her mini-seminar. “Each time that you rehearse your presentation,” she says, “say it out loud. No reading!”

“Yes, that’s what they do,” Gensler says.

“Are you going first?” Black says to a girl seated in front of her. “Well, think of it this way: You don’t have to do anything after that, and you can relax!”

“Actually,” Gensler says, “she has to close too.”

Black beams. “I bet you’re going to be great!”


Black at USA Today in 1984.
(Photo: Rhoda Baer)
Mayor Michael Bloomberg has tried to improve what New Yorkers eat and breathe. Nothing he’s done, however, approaches the difficulty and importance of changing how the city’s public-school children think. First Bloomberg won control over the system in Albany; then he installed Joel Klein, a lawyer and corporate executive, as schools chancellor and backed Klein’s controversial reorganizations with millions of dollars. The effort injected welcome energy into the city’s reeling school system, but the results have been mixed: The grand experiment in charter-school expansion has yielded some creative gems, but nearly as many mediocrities. Parents have a wealth of new options but dread the competition for admission. Failing behemoth schools have been replaced by some thriving small schools, but many high-needs students have been shunted to the remaining big schools. Data has become a grinding obsession, and teachers have been scapegoated for problems not of their making. (Caveat lector: I have two children in the city’s public schools, and so far they’ve received generally excellent educations—albeit in schools whose methods and values were established before the Bloomberg revolution.)

The upheaval has brought the system to a pivotal moment. Good new schools are trying to establish firm roots. Too many others are still dysfunctional. High expectations have been instilled, and accountability established, but at a steep cost in bitterness. Last year, with Klein ready to depart the battlefield, Bloomberg had a chance to install a new leader and reestablish some credibility with the parents and teachers who think he cares only about the city’s elites and higher test scores. Instead, on the afternoon of November 9, the mayor strode to the podium in City Hall and unveiled Cathie Black as his pick, hailing the lifelong publishing executive as a “superstar manager.”

Last summer, New York State raised test-score standards, and the city’s proficiency rates crashed. New national curriculum guidelines are looming, necessitating an overhaul of the core courses taught in most New York schools. And, perhaps most critical, a massive state-budget deficit threatens to force the layoffs of thousands of teachers. In other words, this is a pretty good moment for a superstar manager of the school system. Could that really be Cathie Black?

On a blustery January morning, Black strides into the Chancellor’s Conference Room inside Tweed Courthouse, the immaculate headquarters of a very messy school system. She’s had the job for slightly more than two weeks now. She’s been all over the five boroughs, posing with adorable children and attending education forums. But she is still something of a cipher. At 66, she has a pixieish energy, though up close she’s endearingly ruddier in complexion than her lustrous official photographs. She makes the case for herself. “I’m an effective manager, I’m an effective leader, I have good communication skills,” she says. “I’m a decision-maker. I’m decisive.” And: “I’m a consensus builder, I’m a listener, I’m here to reach out.” She is also a bit of a flirt. Noticing that my security pass is stuck to the left thigh of my pants, Black points and says, “Huh! That’s kind of sexy.”

By itself, Black’s comment about my security sticker is harmless—except that she makes it one week after glibly joking that birth control could help solve school overcrowding, thereby setting off a small furor. It makes me wonder about her political instincts. She’s either admirably authentic or remarkably clueless about the brighter spotlight that now follows her.

That split extends to Black’s reputation among people who’ve worked with her during 40 years in the publishing business: Some corporate executives and former colleagues praise Black’s ability to run a tight ship, while others say her managerial talents are at best ordinary. “I never thought of her as a brilliant manager,” says a magazine editor who worked with Black for years. “I thought of her as a competent person. She was always kind of a mystery to me, because she kept getting big jobs and seemed to do all right with them, but it was never quite clear how that happened.”

Black’s climb up the magazine-advertising ladder was dogged and pragmatic. In 1966, after growing up in Chicago and then graduating from all-female Trinity College in Washington, D.C., she found a sales-assistant job at Holiday magazine and found her niche. In 1972, she joined the fledgling Ms. magazine, then moved to New York Magazine in 1977. “I’d heard Cathie speak at some things, and she was very good,” says Joe Armstrong, the editor and publisher of this magazine at the time. “She’s very driven, and she worked hard.” Armstrong made Black the first female publisher of a major weekly magazine. Colleagues, however, sometimes wondered whether Black’s energies were devoted to promoting her magazines or herself. “She would be in her office all day, and much of her time was spent writing notes: ‘Dear Dr. Kissinger, what a pleasure it was to sit next to you at dinner last night,’ ” remembers an advertising associate. “Tons of that stuff; that’s what she does. Her assistant would say, ‘Cathie’s going to a party, and she wants me to write up a history of every single person who’s going to be there.’ ”

In 1983, Black left New York for USA Today. “People thought I was crazy: ‘You’ve got a great job in New York and you’re going to put yourself into the fray of the newspaper business, where you’ve never been? With a start-up that is not going to make it?’ ” she says. “But I thought to myself, This is an opportunity to throw myself into a real game-changer. This could completely transform the future of the newspaper business.” Plus her husband of one year, Tom Harvey, a lawyer, was working for Republican senator Alan Simpson in Washington, D.C., not far from USA Today’s offices in suburban Virginia.

“She was transformational,” says Tom Curley, USA Today’s former president and now the head of the Associated Press. “She came in and had a profile in the ad community that was absolutely necessary. A general-interest national newspaper was a new thing and an odd duck, and she really got people beyond that. She has both the energy and the articulation skills to move the conversation down the road, and she did.”

Yet USA Today became profitable only after Black left to head a newspaper-industry lobbying group. In November 1995, Black was hired as president of Hearst Magazines. “Many of the magazines were doing very well when Cathie arrived,” says Valerie Salembier, who worked for Black at USA Today and soon joined her at Hearst, first as publisher of Esquire and now of Harper’s Bazaar. “Cosmo has always been a big success; Redbook was doing well; Good Housekeeping, Town & Country, Country Living—it was a strong group of magazines.”

Black carefully shored up that profitable core group while launching a few big hits and a number of misses. CosmoGirl, a spinoff from Cosmopolitan, struggled for nine years before being closed; Shop Etc. magazine lasted for only two. She revitalized Esquire by hiring David Granger, who had been a top editor at GQ, Esquire’s longtime rival. “She’s remarkably direct,” Granger says. “Coming from Condé Nast, I remember [GQ editor] Art Cooper would spend hours every day trying to parse the tea leaves: Are you in? Are you out? What did Si [Newhouse] mean by what he said? With Cathie, you never had to wonder. She wanted her magazines and the people who worked for them to be successful. And she’s very direct in letting you know there was a better path than the one you were on.”

Her most dramatic delivery of cold reality came in January 2002. Talk magazine had been launched in a whirlwind of hype, glamour, and ego. Celebrity editor Tina Brown teamed with Harvey Weinstein of Miramax to create not just a monthly magazine but a book company that would synergize their access to Hollywood, Washington, and Wall Street. Or something. Hearst signed on as a financial and distribution partner. Which didn’t mean that the expensive conceptenjoyed Black’s enthusiasm. “When the idea is your idea, you usually champion it. And when it’s not, you usually don’t,” says Ron Galotti, the brash former publisher of Vogue who joined forces with Brown and Weinstein in the new venture. “And Talk wasn’t Cathie’s idea.” Black shut down the magazine after two money-losing years.

Talk was conspicuous at Hearst because it was a big risk and run by bold personalities; the magazine group under Black was otherwise dependably prudent and cautious. “Hearst is very proud of its workmanlike, professional, efficient, smart, bottom-line way of putting out their magazines,” a former Hearst editor says. “And they resented all the attention Condé Nast got, often by spending shitloads of money, which Hearst wouldn’t do. So they’d be envious in one way and superior in another way: ‘We’re really good managers; they just throw money at things.’ ”

Black’s time at Hearst included two enormous successes: O, the Oprah Magazine and Food NetworkMagazine. Black claims that the concept for both titles came out of “visioning” retreats she led with Hearst editors. But insiders credit Ellen Levine, the longtime editor of Good Housekeeping who is now Hearst’s editorial director, for doing the real labor to make both start-ups happen. Nevertheless, Black gave each the green light and helped make the crucial sale to Oprah Winfrey. She also kept Hearst’s magazines largely profitable through one of the worst downturns in mainstream publishing. “During the recent economic crisis,” Salembier says, “she made all of us believe, the editors and publishers, that we could do this with less people, that we were good enough and smart enough to problem-solve.”

Her budget trimming followed a pattern. “When Cathie was cutting costs, she would bring in somebody from the outside for a review,” a Hearst executive says. “Michael Wolf, the consultant, has been in here when he was at Booz Allen, he was in here when he was at McKinsey, and he will go at it in the mathematical pattern that they always use. Then the internal people will act on the findings. Cathie knew bringing some consultant in was more effective because it’s not personal.”

Black hired or retained talented lieutenants, like Hearst publishing director Michael Clinton and editor Kate White, whom Black moved from Redbook to Cosmo. “She did an excellent job for us,” says former Hearst Corporation CEO Victor Ganzi. “She was innovative at looking at new products, and she wasn’t wedded to the way things had been done in the past.” But Black’s claim to have “managed 2,000 people” at Hearst draws surprise, even from her friends. “Hmmm,” says one senior executive at the company. “Well, 2,000 people were under her. There are many different kinds of people on top. Some are great managers, and they move ahead, and they’re not going to walk around saying that they’re great managers or counting the number of people they manage, and they do a fine job.” Which wasn’t Black’s style: A Financial Times story called her “the First Lady of American magazines,” and she enthusiastically embraced the ceremonial aspect that the phrase implied, accumulating nine honorary degrees from colleges and universities. “She is a great platform speaker,” says a former colleague, when asked to name Black’s primary talent. “She can stir a group. You put her on a stage and she emotes, even with speeches that have been drafted for her. She’s encouraging and inspiring. She’s not poetic, but there’s an emotional component. It’s never facts and figures. It’s a rapture of ‘I believe in you, and I know you can do it, and this is what we need to do.’ What she says has some specific content, but it’s more about a belief system.”

Her aphorism-stuffed how-to-get-ahead-in-business memoir, Basic Black, came out in 2007, and Hearst threw a series of parties to help promote the book, rankling some staffers who thought Black was hogging the spotlight. One guest, a longtime colleague of Black’s, was reminded of a different setting. “I remember going into her home library, and it’s all these books: Swim With the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive, What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School. All these self-help business books, hundreds of them: ‘How to do the direct eye contact,’ ‘How to learn how to shake a hand,’ ‘How to learn to tell people you’re listening.’ All these tricks!” She was less of a superstar manager, in this view, than a gifted saleswoman of magazine ads—and herself.

Last June, the 66-year-old Black was kicked upstairs to a newly created position, chairman of Hearst Magazines, and replaced by 49-year-old David Carey, who’d been at Condé Nast. “She was given a certain period of time, a year or eighteen months, as chairman, as a gesture of respect and to ease the transition,” a friend at the company says. “Her time at Hearst had an expiration date. I’m sure she was deeply upset to have been replaced.” Black claims she was unfazed. “All batons have to be passed,” she says evenly. “I thought it was great for the company. In all of life, you just move on. I’m a glass-half-full person, always.”

“Her library is all self-help books. ‘How to make eye contact, shake a hand, tell people you’re listening.’ All these tricks!”

When Joel Klein accepted the job of schools chancellor, he told the mayor he’d be happy to stay for two full terms. But then Bloomberg decided limits didn’t apply to the mayor’s office and asked Klein to stay through the start of Bloomberg’s third term. Quietly, the mayor began looking for a new schools boss. As the Times first reported, Bloomberg approached Geoffrey Canada, the founder of the Harlem Children’s Zone, who decided to stay put. Michelle Rhee, the combative ex-head of Washington, D.C.’s schools, also would have been a logical contender, but she was on her way to launching her own multi-million-dollar school-reform operation. So Bloomberg, in a move many of his top aides didn’t see coming, turned to Black.

It made a kind of sense to the mayor. Bloomberg prides himself on his quick, instinctive assessments of people—it’s part of what he, as a superstar manager himself, believes in. “You’ll leave a meeting with the mayor, and he’ll say, ‘That guy was really smart,’ and it sticks in his head,” a Bloomberg adviser says. “He keeps a mental list of bright people who he knows from various circles and who he thinks could do a great job in any setting in the administration.” And that is what happened with Cathie Black. “She had been in the back of his mind for some time,” the adviser says. “She runs in a similar social circle, and he was impressed with her. His view is actually simple: ‘Great manager, totally against type. People will think I’m brilliant for thinking outside the box on this—and anybody that doesn’t get it is wrong.’ ” Black didn’t deliberate long before taking the job. “I said to the mayor, ‘If you think I’m the right person, and this is the skill set you believe is really important to run the DOE through the remainder of your term’—it didn’t take me days of gnashing my teeth and rolling around and wondering if I should do this,” she says. “He has been in the trenches on this for almost nine years. So let’s go ahead.”

That Black is friendly with Diana Taylor, Bloomberg’s girlfriend, didn’t hurt her chances. But this hire was all Bloomberg. Choosing Black ratchets up the pitched argument that the mayor and others have been waging with the public-school Establishment for the past decade. In Bloomberg’s CEO-minded view, public schools are a closed society dominated by self-interested unions, desperately in need of free-market shock treatment. If only enlightened capitalists could wrest control of the schools from the hidebound, unionized teachers, the schools’ problems could be solved. This is a tremendously fashionable idea among the country’s business class, partly because it is so flattering to their self-image, and it’s reflected in the cult of Waiting for “Superman,” the 2010 charter-school-glorifying documentary starring Canada and Rhee that’s a favorite of the hedge-fund set.

The new chancellor brings a practical value when it comes to this group. “Cathie attended the Allen & Co. conference in Sun Valley every year as a Coca-Cola board member,” a corporate executive says. “In that room is several trillion dollars in net worth. If you look at who has funded these charter schools, it’s these same guys. One of her roles is to keep that going.” When Black talks about exploiting her ties to the business community, she sounds like a full-time, more energetic version of Caroline Kennedy, Bloomberg’s first emissary to the big-money donors. “I haven’t run across anybody that I know in the business world in the past five or six weeks who doesn’t say, ‘Just tell me what you want me to do,’ in this totally open way,” she says. “They want New York City schools to succeed. I saw a whole bunch of people the other night—‘Just call me! Anytime you want, just call me!’ Stan Shuman at Allen & Co., Terry Lundgren at Macy’s.” In the current climate, with public budgets being slashed, that pipeline matters more than ever to sustaining the growth of the charter business.

All of which, however, is secondary to why the mayor really hired Black as the new chancellor. Klein, for better or worse, was New York’s school-reform visionary. Bloomberg may say the system now needs a great manager, and he believes Black will turn out to be one. But what he doesn’t want, this time around, is big ideas. The mayor wants someone to sell his ideas.

The line that got her in trouble came in mid-January. Meeting with a group of Tribeca parents upset about school overcrowding, Black quipped, “Could we just have some birth control for a while? It could help us all out a lot.” She’d been apologizing ever since. Six nights later, Black attended her first public meeting of the Panel for Educational Policy, a monthly ritual that is supposed to give the appearance of community input into the school system but instead functions as a forum for desperate parents to vent their anger and beg for help. Black sat stonily onstage until 11 p.m. as she was booed and taunted with condoms. At home in her Park Avenue penthouse, the long day ended with a grilled cheese sandwich and a glass of wine.

“You know, it’s New York,” Black told me with a shrug the next morning. “And people are very opinionated, and so it’s quite an experience. You sit there and you just listen, you don’t respond. They have a point of view, or they’ve got placards, or they wrote songs. You know, it’s part of the American process. I did not bring my BlackBerry. I understand that had been a problem for too many people, including you know who,” she says, a mild jab at her predecessor, Klein, who was criticized for tuning out the demonstrators by reading e-mail. “But one could understand why you’d want to be on your BlackBerry, just doing whatever, crossword puzzles.” Last week, near the end of a raucous marathon hearing on school closings that went until 1:30 A.M., Black was less sanguine. When the crowd greeted her shouting for quiet with a mocking “Awwww,” Black topped it with an “Awwww” drenched in sarcasm. Then the mayor’s appointees to the panel voted unanimously to shut ten schools. Two days later, another twelve were axed. That night’s crowd chanted, “Black is wack” and “Black must go.” The week’s casualties included eight schools Bloomberg had opened.

What does Black think the furious reaction to her appointment says about the state of the school system? “I just kind of march forward,” she says. “They are going to have their own point of view. They’re either going to support me or they’re not. I’ve said I’m here to listen, we have the same goals: Children first.”

For someone who has spent her adult life as a saleswoman, Black can be surprisingly tone-deaf. But the problem isn’t that simple. “When you, for many, many years, have been talking to a crowd of people who depend on you for their salaries, it’s very basic. Nobody talks back to you in that room,” a former Hearst colleague says. “These people will talk back to her. This will continue to be a very difficult transition unless she has an intuitive side to her. I don’t know if she lacks one or she hasn’t had to practice it for fifteen years.” When Bloomberg selected her as chancellor, Black had to know she’d be caricatured as a rich Upper East Side elitist; with the schools scraping for cash, did she consider turning down a salary, a more or less symbolic move at her tax bracket but one that might have made her appointment more palatable? “No,” she says firmly. “I don’t think at the end of the day it would have meant a hill of beans.” Well, she did take a pay cut—to $250,000. “That’s for sure!” she says, laughing. “I’ve done my deal.”

Black’s most fervent sales pitch at the moment is for changing the way the city lays off teachers. State law requires systemwide cuts be made according to seniority. Black has been tirelessly on-message in pushing Bloomberg’s argument for more managerial discretion, hammering it home on NY1, writing an op-ed about the topic for the Post—coincidentally on the very day the Post’s editorial page championed the same idea. The teachers union is highly skeptical—citing flaws in the city’s methods for evaluating teachers, which lean heavily on test scores—and suspicious that the city’s real desire is to go after its oldest, highest-salaried teachers. “It’s not about age. It’s about their capacity to be a really effective teacher,” Black says. “The passion is about having the best teachers. And the system knows who are the good ones. The good ones tend to come together, they do more innovative things, they share best practices, and the others hide out.” Are there parallels between the metrics used to evaluate magazines and teachers? “I am about data,” Black says. “The magazine statistics—I used to say magazine math is really easy. It is about circulation performance, it’s about advertising revenue, it’s about share of market. You’ve got pretty simple indicators—do the readers of this magazine like it enough to subscribe? To renew? To buy on the newsstand? And does it have a place in the advertising market? As we look at, over the course of the next months and months—of all of the pilots we have in the marketplace here, in our schools, as we are transforming schools, as we are starting new schools, we need to be rigorous, as we are: How are the kids doing? How are the graduation rates? Are these children being educated in a way that they can go to college and they can be prepared for college? Or if they’re on a career track, are they going to go into a career that’s going to be promising?”

Black is but one part of the sophisticated campaign to rewrite the teacher-layoff rules. The Post’s news pages have been trumpeting a group of younger teachers who are supposedly rebelling against the inflexibility of the UFT’s leadership; the group is fueled in part by $160,000 that a private group co-chaired by Klein passed along from the Gates Foundation, one of the most powerful backers of Bloomberg’s education reform. Closing the circle, Klein now works for Post owner Rupert Murdoch. The ultimate target of all this lobbying is Governor Andrew Cuomo, whose backing is key to any significant overhaul of teacher-layoff policies. “A lot hinges on where Andrew comes down,” one Bloomberg adviser says. The mayor’s campaign contributions to State Senate Republicans could pay off as well. “If we have [Republican majority leader Dean] Skelos onboard and pass a good bill out of the State Senate, and raise enough public attention on the issue, through editorials and ads and everything else, and the governor is pounding away, it gets harder for Shelly [Silver, the Assembly majority leader] to ignore it,” another Bloomberg strategist says. He also highlights a further bit of leverage. “Quite frankly, this is Rupert’s top issue,” he says. “Does Andrew really want to lose the Post over this? And also make enemies of Mort Zuckerman and Bloomberg in his first few months?” If Cuomo pushes for the union and the city to negotiate a relaxation of the seniority rules, it would be an enormous victory for Bloomberg, with a minor assist from Black. But her real campaign is only beginning.

Bloomberg has already made one Albany deal related to Black—though that one was forced on the mayor. Perversely enough, it could also turn out to be the best thing for the school system. In exchange for granting Black the necessary non-educator waiver to become chancellor, New York State’s education commissioner compelled Bloomberg to install as Black’s second-in-command someone with actual education experience. The mayor picked Shael Polakow-Suransky.

The 39-year-old South African immigrant is a fascinating character and a seeming contradiction. The son of anti-apartheid intellectuals, Polakow-Suransky attended an experimental school-without-walls public high school in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and then Brown University before moving to New York and becoming the founding principal of a small high school in the Bronx. Yet Polakow-Suransky has also become a true believer in standardized testing and data and was chief accountability officer under Joel Klein.

“If you look at the old Board of Ed reports in the late nineties, they don’t even list student-achievement data. They have overcrowding data, they have safety data, they have how many lunches. Nothing about whether kids are learning or not,” Polakow-Suransky says. “We’ve taken a system that in many parts of the city was deeply neglected and brought a focus. I’ve been a teacher, an assistant principal, a principal. And I will never forget how demanding and interesting it is to be a teacher. It’s one of the hardest jobs you can do, and it takes time and a lot of support to do it well. But we need to be honest when people are not performing.”

While Polakow-Suransky makes no apologies for the emphasis on testing—and he is bent on creating new tests that push schools to broaden their curriculum—he admits to the hollowness of some of the numbers. “We have a 63 percent graduation rate, and half of those students still need remediation when they go to college,” he says. “We’re confident we know how to improve the graduation rates, but now we have to focus on, what does that diploma mean? That means changing the rigor of what’s happening in the classrooms.” With his new responsibilities, Polakow-Suransky says he’s eager to shift the balance somewhat, from structural change to instructional improvement. And he says Black is already doing more than rubber-stamping decisions that will help make that happen, pointing to her role, in late January, in delaying special-education expansion plans until better preparation could be done. “I like her a lot,” Polakow-Suransky says. “She’s very smart. She’s helping me think stuff through. She’s very good at facilitating a conversation at Cabinet meetings, an open dialogue with real debate. She’s not a micromanager. She gets involved at the point decisions need to be made, but she trusts people to do their work. So far, no red flags.”

When I listen to Polakow-Suransky, it’s possible to believe that this shotgun marriage could work, with him as an eggheady Mr. Inside while Black becomes the glossy Ms. Outside. Though the second part is going to take considerable time. “I want to empower our principals,” Black says. “Because the empowerment of principals, I believe, is critical to the success of the system. And we have empowered them. That’s been a huge movement over the last number of years.” Which sounds good—but ask Black for specifics, and she gets tangled in empty verbiage. What power do principals currently lack? “Well, too many people will say, ‘I don’t have the money.’ But the smartest principals will figure out ‘How do I reallocate my resources for the things I think are most important in my own school? The teacher evaluation, the … all of the work now in terms of curriculum development, for the core standards.’ This is going to be a game-changer. But it’s a lot of hard slogging, also. Then we have, with the new schools, whether they be charter schools or just new approaches … they’re very exciting. But too many people are afraid of change. They’re very wed to whatever they truly believe in. So obviously there’s a lot of noise about that.”

Although glaring weaknesses like the racial performance gap need attention, the mayor believes he has the correct educational-reform strategy in place: More and differentiated school options, more small schools, more charter schools, more control over the hiring and firing of teachers. Polakow-Suransky and other technocrats can handle most of the on-the-ground educational stuff. Applying political pressure to the unions and Albany is the responsibility of City Hall. Black’s first real management test won’t start until April, with the internal wrangling over the DOE’s shrunken budget. Yet her main task for the next three years is to win grassroots hearts and minds so that the changes go down more smoothly and the results generate more love for Bloomberg. “The distrust in the system is real. We understand that,” says Dennis Walcott, Bloomberg’s deputy mayor for education and community development. “But at the local level, for the most part, people think their child is doing better and getting a better education. Part of our challenge is to make sure people understand the connection to Tweed and to this administration. Cathie is acclimating herself to this new world, but her style and personality will allow people to see things differently and hear them differently and build trust where people are distrustful.”

That seems like wishful thinking now. Black has become the problem she was hired to fix. But it’s still early, and she is nothing if not tenacious. One Sunday morning in late January, Bloomberg took to the pulpit at the Christian Cultural Center in Canarsie to issue another blast at teacher-seniority rules. Black didn’t speak that day. Instead she diligently jotted notes as the Reverend A. R. Bernard, a reliable Bloomberg booster and the savvy leader of Brooklyn’s most politically powerful megachurch, delivered the sermon. That afternoon, Black sent Bernard an e-mail following up on a parishioner’s complaint about a school. “I was pleasantly surprised,” Bernard says. “She’s open to correction, in terms of what she’s insensitive to, and she’s willing to learn the landscape. I appreciate that she’s not coming in as a know-it-all.”

There are tougher audiences ahead, and Black’s brutal start has only made the task of winning them over harder. If she can rebrand herself, and use her vaunted inspirational talent to ease the pain of reform, it wouldn’t just be a significant boost to Bloomberg’s educational legacy. It would be the greatest sale of Cathie Black’s life.

Life as a Working Mom of Four


WSJ BLOGS / The Juggle
WSJ.com on choices and tradeoffs people make as they juggle work and family.
FEBRUARY 11, 2011, 9:19 AM ET
Life as a Working Mom of Four
By Demetria Gallegos

We just posted on comedian Tina Fey’s internal tug-of-war whether to have a second child as her career is hitting a peak. Here’s WSJ editor Demetria Gallego’s take on a different kind of juggle: being a working mother of four close-in-age daughters.

“Excuse me,” said the lady, stepping past me gingerly on a snow-packed New York curb.

“Excuse us,” I said reflexively, even though I was alone.

That’s just what a mother of four says. We have the collectivized brains of bumble bees. Our hive mind keeps our eyes sweeping the perimeter of any restaurant for forgotten pacifiers or glasses or iPods. It calculates our impact on any gathering — both the locust-like devastation of a buffet table that our family can wreak, and the peril of failing to RSVP. And it keeps us speaking in the first person plural.

I was the youngest of six, and I loved growing up in a chaotic, loud and exciting household. Even though my folks were far from rich and say my siblings and I were “born despite every form of birth control known to man,” they made it clear that having kids was the most fun they’d ever had. My older brothers and sisters each chose to have just two kids or fewer, but I always wanted more. Six did sound a bit excessive, so I thought five sounded quite modest by comparison.

My husband, who has just two siblings, took it in stride and immediately began looking for a large house in Colorado as soon as we were married. The first baby came and had us completely charmed, cooing and smiling at six months old. I was pregnant again before she began crawling and then as we began chasing her it occurred to me we were probably in trouble. We scaled back the plan to just four, and all turned out to be girls, now ages 14, 13, 11 and 9. We named the last one “Jewel” because we wanted her to know that we hadn’t just been trying for a boy all those times. She was EXACTLY the baby we wanted, our treasure.

Back when the girls were coming along, my husband made a spectacular deal in his home-based rare-book business and we got an even bigger house. Each girl had her own room, until this surprising new job opportunity as a Journal editor in New York City came along. Suddenly, I was hearing from brokers that there weren’t any four or five bedroom apartments in the neighborhoods we wanted. They just didn’t exist. And the more spacious apartments that did exist would break us. That was the first major reckoning about how our family might be too big for New York City. (Ultimately, all the girls doubled up so three bedrooms are doing the trick.)

While keeping up with four is a lot of work, the main reason things work well in our family is my husband. He’s a stay-at-home dad now and the most frugal man alive. He feeds us and packs our lunches. He takes on the laundry which was never fun, but now involves a laundromat a block away. He helps defray our rent by taking on the thankless job of building superintendent. He volunteers at school and eases my guilty working-mother conscience.

When my daughters were born, i took four maternity leaves in six years, but the leaves were generally the minimum six weeks and I tried to compensate by working some insanely long hours and never missing work for a sick kid or school complication. I stayed with that employer for ten years, and I think they got their money’s worth. I certainly might have risen higher in that newsroom with fewer kids, but one can never be sure. I am reassured to see that more professional women these days are opting for bigger families. If you can pull them off, they are more than worth it.

Still, we are paying dearly for the privilege of having a large family. According to Forbes, a college-educated woman loses about $1 million in lifetime earnings after having just one child. Which leads us to our next cruel big-family reckoning – paying for college. We have friends who spaced their two kids four years apart with all this in mind. We will have three enrolled at a time, possibly four if they go to grad school. What were we thinking?

We sometimes have to answer for our decision to have such a big family. No, we’re not deeply religious. But I often feel greedy. Are we putting an undue burden on the world’s resources? Are we being selfish? Are we just hedging our bets that they will care for us in old age? Or, if we get them all through college and they prove to be as hard-working and creative as we think, will they give something much larger back to our world?

We prefer to take the long view — past the financial hit of college or even another pair of braces to the pleasure of admiring their unique abilities and personalities. Or the eventual joy of getting them all re-assembled as adults with their own families for a holiday meal (or the odds that one or two of them might choose one day to live nearby. ) And we are grateful that our girls are healthy, devoted to each other and are still speaking to us even though two are now teens.

Author Elizabeth Stone once wrote that the decision to have a baby was “to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.” Mine heads in four directions most days, and takes me places I could have never gone.

Readers, any of you have or grow up in large families? Would you like to? Or would it place too much stress on your juggle?

How 1970s Manhattan spawned creativity

Financial Times
Arts Extra
How 1970s Manhattan spawned creativity
By Dominic Lutyens - 23:42pm Feb 11, 2011

'Laurie Anderson, Trisha Brown, Gordon Matta-Clark: Pioneers of the Downtown Scene, New York 1970s' runs from March 3 to May 22 at the Barbican Centre, London
www.barbican.org.uk

Times were tough during the economic crises of the 1970s yet those adverse conditions often sparked intense bursts of creativity. The fears raised by an emerging ecology lobby about the world's dwindling resources, which were confirmed by the 1973 oil crisis, inspired architects and designers to recycle inexpensive industrial materials in the home – a new movement called high-tech. And the do-it-yourself ethos of punks, who created music and clothing cheaply out of any equipment or materials at their disposal, thrived during the mid-1970s recession.

Punk had much in common with Fluxus, a movement founded in New York in 1961 that made art out of discarded, throwaway materials. Its multidisciplinary approach, encompassing art, dance, film and music, helped to foster a cross-disciplinary art movement that thrived in run-down, recession-hit downtown Manhattan.

Three of its prime movers – performance artist and composer Laurie Anderson, choreographer Trisha Brown and the late artist Gordon Matta-Clark – are the subject of an upcoming exhibition at London's Barbican Centre. Exploring their milieu in New York at a dismally low point in its history – the city was on the brink of bankruptcy, with high rates of crime and unemployment – it will show about 160 works including sculptures, drawings, films, live performances, posters and ephemera.

Why put on this show now? "With the UK going through a recession, people today are interested in the parallels between then and now," says curator Lydia Yee. "The art produced in New York provides a welcome alternative to the overblown, glossy production values of the past decade – the art of Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami."

Frequently ephemeral, site-specific and collaboratively created, the downtown artists' work differed from the recent pop art and minimalist movements, which favoured mechanical processes to make permanent pieces that could be sold in galleries. Broadly speaking, the community valued ideas and the exploration of creative processes over polished objects.

The early 1970s work of Anderson, who moved to New York in 1966, typified this multimedia approach. She moved restlessly between photography, text, sound and street performances engaging with the public. "My art wasn't about hiding away in a studio," she remembers. The Barbican will display her photographically recorded project, "Institutional Dream Series" (1972), which saw her sleep in public spaces, then record the location's effect on her dreams.

Anderson remembers New York then as "dark, dangerous and broke" yet exhilarating: "It was like Paris in the 20s. I was part of a group of artists who worked on each other's pieces, and boundaries between art forms were loose."

The district south of Houston Street, soon nicknamed SoHo, had been zoned for manufacturing but factories had been moving out since the 1940s. The artists who colonised it from the late 1960s took advantage of working and living in its disused, decaying factories for a very low rent, exhibiting their work informally in these raw, cavernous spaces.

Brown moved to New York in 1961 and by the early 1970s was a respected performance artist, having studied under legendary dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham. She dispensed with the idea of a stage, often performing on rooftops and car parks. She used both untrained and trained dancers, invited audiences to participate and encouraged improvisation. In her topsy-turvy world, works appeared to defy gravity: in "Walking on the Wall" (1971), dancers (rigged to a track in the ceiling) pace along a wall as if it were the floor. This will be re-enacted by dancers in the Barbican's lower-level, double-height gallery, which, says Yee, "echoes the scale of SoHo's lofts".

"I was inventing choreography outside any existing system or venues for presenting it at that time," recalls Brown. "SoHo's urban landscape was ready-made for this."

Matta-Clark studied architecture in New York in the 1960s and had an arty pedigree: his godfather was artist Marcel Duchamp. Charismatic and dynamic, Matta-Clark is regarded as the ringleader of this scene and many believe it died when he did, in 1978. In 1969, he had designed and built one of the area's first alternative arts spaces, 98 Greene Street, for art collectors Holly and Horace Solomon. His own dramatic architectural interventions, which entailed cutting parts out of buildings – he called them "building dissections" – were political. They highlighted the "imprisonment" of the poor inside New York's soulless "urban and suburban boxes" and reflected his desire to break down social and economic barriers. The most ambitious of these, entitled "Splitting" (1974), saw him bisect an entire building. A film of this will be screened in the Barbican exhibition.

The early 70s in the US were a time of highly organised political activism. Even so, according to Anderson, most downtown artists weren't especially political. "We'd protested in the 60s. By the 70s the political beliefs of the counterculture were a given, we'd internalised them."

But 1960s activism had bred certain attitudes: generosity, anti-materialism and a strong sense of communality. "There was huge camaraderie," explains Anderson. "We helped each other with plumbing, hanging our shows or lending stuff like videotapes. We had no interest in money and thought those who did were idiots. It was a completely different world."

It's tempting to romanticise this era and assume that there could never be another movement like this again. But some believe it's similar to today's art communities in Brooklyn except that, as art historian RoseLee Goldberg, an original member of the downtown scene, says: "They're paying $3,000 a month, we were paying $200."

Woman in the News: Arianna Huffington

FT Home > Comment > Analysis
Woman in the News: Arianna Huffington
By David Gelles
Published: February 11 2011 20:47 | Last updated: February 11 2011 20:47

When Arianna Huffington launched The Huffington Post in 2005, critics wrote off the venture as doomed from the start. “The Madonna of the mediapolitic world has undergone one reinvention too many,” said acid-tongued Hollywood blogger Nikki Finke. “She is finally played out publicly.”

Ms Huffington had indeed already played many roles, from international socialite, to best-selling author, to California gubernatorial candidate, to political pundit on both the right and left. This latest venture, pitched as a blog for her and her famous friends, seemed thin at best and self-aggrandising at worst. Even allies were sceptical. “It seemed like an interesting, if not very probable, idea,” says Bill Hillsman, who ran communications for her 2003 campaign and writes for HuffPo.

Less than six years later, however, Ms Huffington has never seemed more comfortable in the spotlight. With the sale of HuffPo to AOL for $315m this week, she has affirmed her bona fides as a dealmaker and tastemaker, and will now assume editorial control of a vast collection of online properties, from the influential TechCrunch blog to the AOL homepage.

It is one of the symbolic deals of what many are calling another dotcom bubble, and also the highest sum ever paid for a blog. But her proven protean persona notwithstanding, Ms Huffington must now perform her greatest reinvention yet, helping turn round the foundering AOL.

The round-cheeked and famously red-haired 60-year-old will be the face of this expanding empire, and HuffPo, now with 25m monthly readers and 440m page views a month, will be its spiritual centre.

The website is a jumble of often disparate ideas and influences, not unlike the career of its founder. Born into the Greek intelligentsia as Arianna Stassinopoulos, she studied economics at Cambridge University and had a stint when she was best known in the gossip pages as partner to Bernard Levin, the polymathic British journalist and wit. On HuffPo, investigative news, cultural criticism and celebrity gossip all coexist.

If it is not always coherent, that is perhaps an accurate reflection of Ms Huffington, who has written books on topics from Picasso to politics. In the US, she married a Republican oilman, Michael Huffington, had two daughters with him before they divorced, and then went on to become an outspoken Democrat. “Part of the reason she’s been so successful is that she’s willing to change her mind,” says one long-time associate. “She wants differing opinions.” The one-time critic of Bill Clinton went on to endorse Democrat John Kerry for president.

Her admirers cite this as a sign of her savviness. “She’s tremendously smart,” says Mr Hillsman. “Sometimes that gets overlooked.” She is also, by all accounts, acutely aware of how she is viewed by others. “She’s very cognisant of her public image,” says one person who has worked closely with her for years. “She has Google alerts for her name and the website, and different iterations of all the terms. If there is anything negative she goes after it.”

A singular moment of self-awareness came “the first day that a HuffPo story was referenced in a New York Times article”, she tells the Financial Times. “It was really a coming of age, the fact that our original reporting was now shaping the national conversation, which was always a goal of mine.”

That Ms Huffington seeks validation from The New York Times is not without irony. HuffPo is often accused of piggybacking on the work of traditional media outlets while at the same time hastening their demise. Indeed, much of the site’s traffic is derived from aggregation – the summarising of original reporting in mainstream media outlets.

Yet, the fact that HuffPo is at heart a referential publication should come as no surprise, given its founder. “She is, in her social life, an aggregator,” says a friend. Sure enough, in the course of a 25-minute conversation with the FT, she name-drops everyone from author Nora Ephron to the Chilean president, Sebastián Piñera.

The qualities that define her, including charm and intensity, have made her business a success. But her record as a manager is patchy. “She’s impetuous,” says one employee. “She doesn’t have great impulse control.” Her impulsiveness was on view last year when she announced on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart that HuffPo would provide free buses from New York to Washington, so that people could attend Mr Stewart’s rally. “I came up with that idea when I was on air,” she tells the FT.

What she did not anticipate is that 10,000 people would take her up on the offer, requiring a scramble for 300 buses and $250,000 in sponsorship. “That’s what HuffPost is like,” says one ex-employee. “Do your base job plus all these other Arianna things that are sort of crazy.”

Those familiar with her spontaneity say it could make for a difficult fit at AOL, which has a surprisingly bureaucratic culture for a digital company. “Arianna has a lot of pet projects and causes that may not work when she’s running something as big as this,” says one former HuffPo emp loyee. “It’s going to be interesting to see how her management style scales to the corporate level.”

Internal tensions at HuffPo were already rising before the sale. Some on the business side wanted to take the company public, but HuffPo’s financial backers were eager for a clean exit. “We were not looking to sell the company,” Ms Huffington says. “But when [AOL chief executive] Tim Armstrong came forward, it made sense.” With AOL paying a staggering 10 times HuffPo’s revenues of $31m, she could hardly say no.

She has capitalised handsomely, though the exact figures have not been revealed, capping off the singular achievement in her already impressively diverse career. She concedes editing AOL is not what she expected she might do when she was at Cambridge. “Blogging had not even been invented,” she says, “I became a writer by accident.”

That’s a classic Arianna line, suggesting her career has been one happy adventure. Proving that HuffPo and her outsize personality are worth a small fortune, however, will require rather more: deliberate, and measurable, success.

Friday, February 11, 2011

Business Plan Contests: Where Are the Women?

February 10, 2011, 11:46AM EST
Business Plan Contests: Where Are the Women?
Many groups are trying to increase female participation in competitions for promising ventures
By Karen E. Klein

SPECIAL REPORT. Focus On Entrepreneurs, February 2011

Something bothered Jane Pak when she served as a judge for a regional competition of the Global Student Entrepreneur Awards (GSEA) at the University of Southern California last summer: All the contestants were male. "Where are the girls?" she asked the two other female judges. "It was so obvious to us that this was a problem," says Pak, chief executive officer of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Association of Women Business Owners. "No one else seemed to notice."

Women often go missing from the 100-plus entrepreneurial competitions held annually in the U.S., where winners take home prizes ranging from cash and trophies to contacts that can lead to opportunities. In the GSEA's 2010 contest, just 25 of the 145 competitors were women and the winners and runners-up were all male. Since 2007 only 13 percent of the event's 117 finalists have been female. The scant presence of women in such events "makes me want to put my head down and weep," says J. Janelle Shubert, director of the Center for Women's Leadership at Babson College.

While no formal statistics are kept, several people connected with business plan and entrepreneurship competitions say women represent at most 20 ercent of entrants. That's even though they launch 40 percent of all private companies, according to the Kauffman Foundation, which promotes entrepreneurship. "Fewer women are still finding their way into spearheading their own idea," says Sara Gragnolati, 33, the first solo woman to win the top prize in Babson's MBA business plan contest, launched more than two decades ago. She took home $20,000 for her company, Cocomama Foods, which sells gluten-free breakfast cereals. "I felt kind of honored," Gragnolati says, "but I found it surprising and sad" that it had taken so long for a woman to win.

Experts in entrepreneurship—both women and men—say a lack of confidence and bluster, an aversion to risk, and a continued scarcity of women in engineering programs may explain the shortage. Pak believes the problem starts in childhood. "Even the most progressive parents don't assume their daughters are going to be primary breadwinners," she says. Babson's Shubert says women are less likely to belong to organizations that sponsor contests. Although more than half of graduate students are female, women "are not driving to positions of influence," says Sharon Vosmek, CEO of Astia, a nonprofit that supports women-owned companies. "You have to be ready to toot your own horn in a way that we're not seeing women doing."

More practical considerations may also contribute. Elif Hanna, an MBA student at the University of California, Irvine, was the only mother to enter her school's annual business plan competition. "It was very hard for me to participate," she says. "Most of the meetings were after seven." Rejected in the first round, Hanna started an online wedding invitations company, funding it herself.

Efforts are under way to boost participation by women. Ernst & Young set up its annual Entrepreneurial Winning Women contest in 2008 to strengthen promising female-led businesses by connecting them with potential partners and investors. This year, Kauffman Foundation and Astia are sponsoring the first Women in Science and Engineering Business Idea Competition.

Tech networking group Women 2.0 says its annual pitchfest—in which teams presenting ideas to potential investors must include at least one woman—is attracting more venture capitalists. A 2010 participant pitched technology that lets immigrants send money home via mobile phones, says Women 2.0 CEO Shaherose Charania. It's "something that a Sand Hill Road [VC] guy is never going to use," she says, "but it solves a real problem instead of just making rich peoples' lives more cushy."

The bottom line: Few women entrepreneurs participate in business plan contests. Now many groups are trying to boost their numbers.

Karen E. Klein is a Los Angeles-based writer who covers entrepreneurship and small-business issues.

Women Top Men at Earning Bachelor's Degrees, U.S. Data Show


Women Top Men at Earning Bachelor's Degrees, U.S. Data Show
By John Hechinger - Feb 10, 2011 9:38 AM PT

Women in the U.S. are almost twice as likely as men to earn a bachelor’s degree by age 23, underscoring decades of gains by females in schools and the workforce, according to a government survey.

By that age, almost one in four women earned the college degree compared with one in seven men, the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics said in a report released today in Washington. The research comes from a study that annually follows the lives of the same 9,000 people, born from 1980 to 1984, according to an agency release.

Women’s outperformance coincided with their increasing opportunities in the workforce as jobs shifted from male- dominated factories to offices open to female employees, Jay Meisenheimer, a bureau economist and one of the study’s authors, said in a telephone interview.

“We’ve seen this great transformation in the workforce away from manufacturing toward more of a service economy,” Meisenheimer said. “Now that there are more opportunities for women to work, we’re seeing a growing number completing high school and college and going on to graduate and professional programs.”

This year’s results mark the first time the study had a big enough sample of students old enough to have finished college to make a meaningful comparison between men and women, Meisenheimer said. Participants’ responses have been tracked annually since the survey began in 1997.

To contact the reporter on this story: John Hechinger in Boston at jhechinger@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jonathan Kaufman at Jkaufman17@bloomberg.net

Merkel Asks Why No Women on Boards as Ackermann Prompts Howls

Bloomberg
Merkel Asks Why No Women on Boards as Ackermann Prompts Howls
By Angela Cullen - Feb 11, 2011 3:10 AM PT

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has filled one third of her ministerial positions with women. Deutsche Bank AG Chief Executive Officer Josef Ackermann doesn’t have a single female on the 12-member group executive committee that oversees the nation’s biggest bank.

Fresh from a scrap over making bond investors help cover the costs of bailing out European banks, Ackermann angered Merkel’s ministers by saying last week that his board “will be more colorful and prettier” with a woman. Consumer minister Ilse Aigner responded by telling Handelsblatt newspaper that “if it’s more color or beauty you want, you should go to a flower garden or a museum.”

At Germany’s 30 largest companies, just four of 186 management board positions are held by women, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Barbara Kux, 56, Siemens AG’s head of global supply chain management, became the first woman in 12 years to sit on a board when she was appointed in 2008. The lack of women in top management is a “scandal,” Merkel said at a Feb. 8 conference in Berlin.

“We should do much better than that,” said Barbara Bierach, author of the 2002 book “Das Daemliche Geschlecht,” or The Stupid Sex, which attempts to explain why there are few female managers in Germany.

The nation lags behind in Europe, where some governments have set quotas to improve the balance of female representation in corporate management. Norway was first, in 2003, to enforce female minimums. Spain followed in 2007 with its own legislation, and France plans to impose a 20 percent quota by 2012 and 40 percent by 2016 for its 2,500 biggest companies.

Waiting and Watching

Merkel, who has opposed quotas, said at the Berlin conference that she’ll give German companies “one last chance” to confront the issue before her government enforces change.

At the European Union’s biggest publicly traded companies, one of every 10 board members is a woman, the European Commission said in a gender equality report published last March. In Norway, 42 percent of board members at the country’s largest companies are women.

Women account for about 12 percent of board members at France’s benchmark CAC 40 Index companies, according to a study published last October by Ernst & Young and France Proxy. By contrast, only 3.2 percent of women hold management board positions at Germany’s 200 biggest companies, according to a Jan. 18 study by the Berlin-based DIW economic institute. The proportion is 2.9 percent at the country’s largest banks, up just half a percentage point since 2006, the report said.

Euro Peripherals

“The problem is that in certain areas, like banks and insurers, they like to recruit terribly nice young ladies,” said Sybille Busch, who has run an executive consulting firm in Hamburg since the mid-1980s. “If you recruit lambs, they stay lambs, and you can’t make wolves out of them.”

Merkel, 56, and Ackermann, 63, have disagreed publicly over how to fix the sovereign-debt crisis that has already led to the financial rescues of Greece and Ireland. Merkel has called on bond investors to shoulder the cost of future sovereign bailouts, prompting Ackermann in November to say the chancellor’s remarks were roiling markets and raising borrowing costs.

German lenders hold more than 112 billion euros ($152 billion) of debt issued by the governments of Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy, according to Bloomberg data.

The spat over how to save peripheral Europe comes less than three years since Merkel and Ackermann worked together to help stave off the collapse of commercial-property lender Hypo Real Estate Holding AG in what would have been the country’s biggest bank failure since 1931.

Ackermann Initiative

Ackermann started a campaign two years ago to promote women at Frankfurt-based Deutsche Bank, according to company spokesman Christoph Blumenthal. Eileen Taylor, the bank’s global head of diversity, said in an e-mail that Ackermann’s support has boosted diversity programs at the company.

“Joe knows that diversity is a business imperative and that diverse teams are smarter teams and lead to stronger business results,” Taylor wrote in the e-mail.

Deutsche Bank didn’t have a woman executive to send to the World Economic Forum conference in Davos last month, even after organizers offered the company an extra slot. Ackermann’s “prettier” comment was made Feb. 3 after the bank reported 2010 earnings. He also said during the presentation that “it’s unbelievably important that we succeed in bringing more women into management positions.”

Deutsche Bank

Ellen Ruth Schneider-Lenne was a member of Deutsche Bank’s management board from 1988 until her death in 1996. Schneider- Lenne, who was responsible for risk, also was the first female to become a top executive at a major German bank.

About 44 percent of Deutsche Bank’s employees are women, and 16 percent hold managing director or director positions, according to Deutsche Bank’s latest figures.

Ackermann initiated a program entitled Atlas, which selects 20 women each year from Deutsche Bank’s business units and geographical regions “to groom suitable candidates for the bank’s top management,” the company said in its 2009 corporate sustainability report.

Merkel has rejected calls by her labor minister, Ursula von der Leyen, to impose a 30 percent quota, saying German companies should do more to promote women from within. Family minister Kristina Schroeder said she would force companies above a certain size to set and publish quotas for women on management and supervisory boards as a first step.

Germany’s half-day school system and its affluence relative to other countries make it difficult for women to juggle motherhood and a career, and mean it’s “much easier to stay at home,” Bierach said in a telephone interview from Sydney where she now lives.

DAX 30

Deutsche Telekom AG introduced a quota a year ago for women in management positions, becoming the first DAX 30 company to do so. The former German telecommunications monopoly, based in Bonn, aims to increase the proportion of women in upper and mid-level executive posts to 30 percent by the end of 2015, it said in a March 15 statement.

Siemens, based in Munich, has two female executives on its eight-member board. Software company SAP AG and power company E.ON AG each have one. Stuttgart-based Daimler AG plans to appoint constitutional judge Christine Hohmann-Dennhardt to its management board to head compliance as early as next week, according to people familiar with the situation.

Merck KGaA in Darmstadt said yesterday it will increase the proportion of women in management to as much as 30 percent by 2016 from 22 percent.

Raven Mother

Female leadership is more common among family-owned German enterprises, where women run 25 percent of the companies, a report by the Bonn-based Intes Academy for Family-Owned Companies said.

German women “who dare to have a career” are often criticized by their peers, said Bierach, the author of the Stupid Sex. The German term “Rabenmutter,” or raven mother, is a derogative word used to describe women who leave the nest to go to work. There is no male equivalent. The Nazi regime used to award a Mothers Cross as part of Adolf Hitler’s plan to encourage Aryan population growth.

“There’s a terrible legacy from the Nazi period,” Bierach said. “It’s a deep-seated culture problem. You’re a raven mother if you don’t make the spaghetti yourself.”

Germany has slipped to 13th place in the World Economic Forum’s latest Global Gender Gap report, which ranks 134 countries on 14 measures of treatment of and opportunities for men and women, published in October. It ranked sixth in 2006.

Iceland had the highest score last year, while the U.S. made the top 20 for the first time, at 19th place. Yemen was in last place.

To contact the reporter on this story: Angela Cullen in Frankfurt at acullen8@bloomberg.net;

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Tim Quinson at tquinson@bloomberg.net

Thursday, February 10, 2011

Japan’s ‘Camera Girls’: Behind the Lens

Wall Street Journal / Japan Real Time
FEBRUARY 10, 2011, 8:02 PM JST
Japan’s ‘Camera Girls’: Behind the Lens
By Yuri Tomikawa

There’s long been a mutual love-in between the Japanese photographic industry and the country’s younger women. But having graduated from Puri Kura photobooth stickers, cellphone snaps and sleek and shiny compact digital cameras, growing numbers of Japanese women have taken to more serious camera technology in recent years to create their own art for personal blogs featuring “yurukawa” images —a term that combines the words “yurui” meaning loose and “kawaii” for cute — and for other social media like Mixi and Twitter.

And now, on top of specialist magazines like “Joshi Camera” catering to what are becoming known as “Camera Gaaru (girls),” camera makers are turning out sophisticated single lens reflex, or mirrorless interchangeable lens cameras specifically targeted at women. With good reason: According to the country’s Camera and Imaging Products Association, women’s use of single-lens reflex cameras with interchangeable lenses has increased from 2.3% of the total Japanese market in 2004 to 11% in 2009, increasing by 3% between 2008 and 2009.

This week Fujifilm Holdings Corp. introduced a new but vintage-look camera, the FinePix X100, combining the retro feel of a more serious camera with the functionality of a modern digital compact. Retailing at 130,000 yen ($1,580), Fujifilm says an unexpected amount of the buzz on micro-blogging service Twitter, a wildfire success in Japan, is coming from young female amateur photographers.

It’s a path well trod by Japanese camera maker Olympus Corp. with its Olympus Pen series. According to company spokeswoman Natsuki Takada, while female customers usually make up about 10% of most of Olympus’s mirrorless camera products, they have made up at least 30% of the new Olympus Pen Series. The company says it specifically targeted women by producing white and red-bodied models, rather than solely the big black types that previously dominated shelves. The camera’s website and TV commercials clearly target women, using a full cast of female models.

At camera giant Canon Inc. it’s a similar story: “Women have been increasingly becoming our main target for the single-lens reflex cameras,” says spokesman Yoshinobu Shoshi, explaining the company’s collaboration with magazine “Joshi Camera” in creating cuter camera straps and developing a flowery website for its Kiss series cameras. And Bic Camera, one of the largest electronics store chains in Japan, holds a “Girls’ Camera Section” where it sells women-targeted professional cameras and accessories.

Photography classes specifically held for women are also in growing demand. Nadar, a school located in Shibuya, has over 100 students on its books today for its women-only classes with most of the 15 student classes full, compared to the 20 to 30 students it attracted per year several years ago.

Why exactly are women turning to more professional cameras? Kazumi Hayashi, who wrote the textbook used at Nadar, explains that for many women, blogs are the gateway to photography. “When they see nice photos on other people’s blogs, they find out that they were taken with single-lens reflex cameras and think, ‘I’d like to try that too.’”

For others, it’s a more simple case of outgrowing easy-to-use, but very basic compact cameras for photos of their travels, hobbies or children. “The photos I took with my digital (compact) camera weren’t so great,” says Shoko Shibata, a mother of a one-year-old in her 30s who recently began photography classes at Nadar. “I go out on walks more now that I have a child so I take many photos then.”

UN Women – catchy name, shame about the budget

UN Women – catchy name, shame about the budget
February 10, 2011 — London
Writer: Sophie Arie

The UN’s new agency – UN Women – is slowly cranking into gear. But while it has a dynamic leader, a shiny new logo – a pictorial blend of a female gender symbol and the UN’s global map – and a launch party scheduled for later this month, it still lacks proper funding.

There’s a lot of hope and quite a bit of fanfare surrounding this mission. It is widely agreed by UN member countries that the organisation has done little for women and gender equality in the developing world, and that a high-profile agency with real clout and global impact is long overdue. 

UN Women aims to help formulate new policies and global standards on equality and women’s rights and to monitor and support member countries in their efforts to meet those standards.

A lot of thought has gone into the image of the new agency, which brings together four smaller units – UNIFEM, CEDAW, INSTRAW, OSAGI – all of which have been targeting women’s issues for years but are not widely known.

The UN has broken from its tradition of naming organisations with acronyms. Technically this is the UN Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women. “UN Women”, however, states its purpose much more powerfully, and will probably register with more people than “UNEGEEW”.  

The head of this new entity, former Chilean president Michelle Bachelet, is widely respected in the international community and has the rank of under-secretary general, meaning she will have a seat at the highest UN tables.

“This is about leadership. And about articulating what we do much more clearly,” says Moez Doraid, UN Women’s interim head of operations.

It is also about making the UN more efficient. “In this era of financial crisis, this is as much about consolidation as it is about creating something new,” he says.

The agency was created with the unanimous support of UN member countries after decades of debate, and it has a $500m (€366m) budget for its inaugural year.

Only three per cent of that comes from the UN – the rest has been pledged voluntarily by 100 countries, with Spain, Norway the UK, US, Canada and Sweden being the most generous.

Much of the funding is yet to arrive but when it does, $500m looks rather measly. UN Women will still be tiny compared to the major UN agencies such as Unicef (which had a budget of $3.25bn/€2.3bn in 2009) and UNDP (which had $4.77bn/€3.50bn the same year).

It remains to be seen if the rebrand we’ve seen so far can produce the desired results without a bigger injection of cash. 

Sophie Arie is a Monocle contributing editor based in London

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Private equity is a man's world... seriously

Fortune
Term Sheet. The latest on private equity, M&A, deals and movements — from Wall Street to Silicon Valley
Private equity is a man's world... seriously
Posted by Dan Primack
February 8, 2011 4:50 pm

Are you a woman who wants to succeed in private equity? Here's some free advice: Learn about sports. And don't get pregnant. In fact, it might be best to project an active antagonism toward motherhood.

Those are the depressing findings of a new study by Catherine Turco, titled: Cultural Foundations of Tokenism : Evidence from the Leveraged Buyout Industry.

Turco was a Baker Scholar at Harvard Business School, and currently is a graduate student in the university's sociology department (the study was published by the American Sociological Review).

Her original goal was to examine occupational structure and workplace dynamics in the private equity industry, but she soon changed gears to focus specifically on the experiences of women and African-American men. Both are severe minorities in private equity, which each representing less than 10% of the total professional workforce (a lower figure than in corporate law or investment banking).

What Turco found was that while both groups face serious structural barriers at the outset (i.e., getting a foot in the door), women face far greater cultural challenges.

Before continuing, I cringed a bit at the thesis (our oppression is worse than your oppression). And Turco explicitly acknowledges the prospect for her own biases, being a white female. She notes, however, that African-American women she interviewed also felt that their gender was more relevant than their race within private equity firms. Moreover, Turco says that many African-American men openly discussed personal experiences of racism within their professional lives, thus making Turco more confident that she wasn't only getting one side of the story.

So what is it about being a women that's so problematic within private equity firms?

Turco identifies two primary factors: The first is a knowledge and love of sports. Take a look at the following two quotes from people Turco interviewed -- the first is an African-American man, the second is a woman:

''Sports was the sieve through which I could connect and bond. They had firm sports teams like baseball and basketball. . . . It was really like a locker room. It had that sort of camaraderie. At night in the office, a senior guy would come out and yell 'Stop working. Let's arm wrestle.' and people would start placing bets. . . . You'd get all these goofy competitive things going.''

''There are guys at the firm who play basketball together, and I'm never invited. I know they do serious bonding and then they talk about it on Monday at work. . . . I don't play basketball so if they asked I wouldn't go. But I hate it because I'm missing an opportunity to connect.''

Turco also mentioned that "women who never followed sports before entering [private equity] reported watching SportsCenter or checking ESPN.com regularly now."

There obviously is an implicit assumption here -- that men are into sports and women aren't. There obviously are exceptions to both, which is why Turco's second cultural factor is much more compelling: Motherhood (or the potential for motherhood).

Turco argues that the private equity ideal is someone who puts work above all else, and that most male private equity pros find that to be inherently incompatible with motherhood (even if the mother has multiple paid caregivers or a stay-at-home husband). This is despite the fact, she says, that private equity pros travel less and work shorter days than do their peers in the investment banking, law or consulting worlds. In other words, it's the idea of motherhood that offends, rather than its actual demands.

Some troubling excerpts:

One pregnant respondent described a recent incident with her boss: ''He turned to me and lashed out and said, 'Are you even going to come back? I guess you won't even tell us if you're not. You're probably going to stay home and play with the baby.' He was angry. . . . He had asked me three or four times before if I was coming back to work and I always said, 'I'm definitely working.'. . . For him to ask again, to say it like he made up his mind already, I just know that now he doesn't view me as being as valuable as someone who doesn't have kids.''

Several described incidents in which women were fired or involuntarily transferred to non-deal roles after announcing they were pregnant. One woman said, ''I call each of my kids my 'million dollar babies' because of how much each of them has cost me.''

Statements by recruiters and male LBO investors corroborate women's accounts. One recruiter admitted that up to 20 percent of LBO firms direct her not to send female applicants because ''they'll get pregnant andthey don't want to have to deal with it.'' Of the eight African American men who stated that gender was a bigger obstacle than race in LBO, six mentioned motherhood in their explanations.

Private equity firms, for the most part, are small partnerships. Often they are born of existing relationships, and it's difficult to join if you aren't already "in the club." I get it, and there isn't necessarily anything wrong with that.

But private equity has a serious problem if it cannot adequately incorporate "others" when it comes time to expand. Women obviously should not be second-class citizens within their own firms or, even worse, be excluded from the hiring process altogether. Private equity firms may have come a long way from the days in which it was literally impossible to find a female partner, but it has not come nearly far enough. The core culture must evolve, not just the payroll demographics.