Commentary—

Work For A Corporation? Don’t Get Pregnant

By Martha Burk

Five years after the Worldcom and Enron cases spawned the government’s Corporate Fraud Task Force, some very scary figures have just come out. Since its inception in 2002, the Task Force has convicted 1,236 executives, including 214 chief executive officers and presidents, 129 vice presidents, 53 chief financial officers, and 23 corporate counsels or attorneys, for various frauds and criminal activities.

Maybe they should have snagged a few diversity officers as well — because not all corporate fraud is financial. There is big business in a kind of nonfinancial fraud that can really hurt workers, especially women and minorities. I call it the diversity dodge. It’s a shell game where highly paid folks with high-falutin’ titles like “Diversity Vice President” spend the majority of their time getting the companies on so-called “best places to work” lists. You know the ones: “Most Family-Friendly Workplaces,” “Fifty Best Places for Latinas to Work,” “Best Companies for Diversity,” and so on. The VP is valued more for the image she or he is able to build for the company than for any other duty — like maybe promoting policies that would mean better pay and promotions for the groups in question.

In corporate America, one of the most highly prized lists is Working Mother magazine’s “100 Best Companies for Working Mothers,” to be released on October 1. But the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR) in Washington, D.C., has just released a revealing report on the pregnancy leave policies of those companies that made the list last year (if history is any guide, most will win again). This report sheds some light on just how good — or not so good — these firms are when it comes to putting their policies behind their public relations. Can you believe seven percent of the highest-ranked companies offer no maternity leave at all, and another seven percent provide only one to two weeks? A mere 28 percent of companies provide nine or more weeks, and “many of the winners’ paid parental leave policies fall far short of families’ needs,” according to IWPR. Not one company in the top 100 provides more than six weeks of paid paternity leave and only seven percent provide seven weeks or more of paid adoptive leave.

If these are the best companies for working mothers, I’d hate to see the worst ones. Actually, some of the winners could also make a “worst” list. Doing a little math using numbers supplied by the companies themselves, we find that American Express, Bank of America, IBM, Citigroup, and Prudential Financial — all “Working Mother” multiyear “Hall of Fame” winners — fall short when it comes to women’s pay. Bank of America is typical. While 68 percent of their employees are female, only 39 percent of the top fifth of earners are women. The story is nearly identical at the other firms. Not a single one has women in the ranks of top earners anywhere near matching their numbers in the company. For non-hall-of-famers who nevertheless made the list, it gets worse. JPMorgan Chase has a workforce that is 60 percent female — but only 30 percent of the top earners are women. At General Electric, women make up a paltry 20 percent at the top of the money heap. There’s no doubt these numbers would look even more dismal if stock options and perks, instead of just paychecks, were reported. And one more thing — none of these exemplary firms has more than three women on the board; some have only one.

So what’s a working mother to do? Her own research, for one thing. Remember that the award lists are not what they appear. Magazines get ad dollars from awardees, awardees get good publicity from the magazines, so both win. The only losers in this fraudulent game are working women who believe all the hype.

(Martha Burk is the author of Cult of Power: Sex Discrimination in Corporate America and What Can Be Done About It, just out from Scribner and is director of the Corporate Accountability Project, National Council of Women’s Organizations. )