Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!news.media.mit.edu!americast.com!usa-post Newsgroups: usa-today.bonus From: usa-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: usa-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: bonus Mon, Mar 23 1992 Date: Mon, 23 Mar 92 05:45:26 EST Message-ID: 03-23 0000 BONUS: Schwartz sees workplace utopia USA TODAY Update March 23, 1991 Source: USA TODAY:Gannett National Information Network Felice Schwartz envisions a day when CEOs will have baby showers and take maternity leaves. Job applicants will freely discuss their family plans with recruiters. And the mommy track will become the parent track. Yet, women still hold less than 5% of senior management jobs though they make up 45% of the workforce. The numbers suggest Schwartz's workplace utopia is eons away. Wrong, she says. WHAT GIVES SCHWARTZ OPTIMISM? "Employers are ready to ignite the second revolution," declares the president and founder of New York-based Catalyst, a non-profit research organization that advises corporations on women's issues. The first breakthrough came when women flooded into the workplace in the '70s and '80s. The second, she says, will happen when corporations realize it's good business to include women at the top. WHY IS SCHWARTZ RAISING THIS ISSUE? Schwartz is on tour to promote her new book, "Breaking with Tradition: Women and Work, the New Facts of Life". Three years ago, the 67-year-old grandmother was accused of setting the revolution back 20 years with an article she wrote for Harvard Business Review. Her opening line: "The cost of employing women in management is greater than the cost of employing men." WHAT DID THE ARTICLE GO ON TO SAY? She discussed two types of corporate women - "career primary" and "career-and-family." She said companies should treat the former just like men and let the latter drop off the fast track while their children are young. The New York Times dubbed her idea "the mommy track." To her surprise, many women suddenly cast her as the enemy. WHAT WAS THE REACTION TO THE ARTICLE? Rep. Pat Schroeder, D-Colo., questioned her research. Betty Friedan said Schwartz had an "employer mentality" and was not a feminist. Du Pont criticized her for treating family issues as a "woman's problem" when its own study showed men were increasingly concerned about work-family issues. WHAT DID SCHWARTZ THINK OF THE REACTION? The criticism stung. "I violated the tenets of political correctness by saying women are different from men," she says. "In the early feminist period, the assumption was that women were as good as men. Then, it became women were just like men. And that's not true." Schwartz says she has always thought men and women should share parenting equally. But she didn't think CEOs were ready three years ago to accept the idea of men stepping off the fast track. WHAT DOES SHE THINK NOW? She devotes a chapter of her book to defending the Business Review article. The media latched onto the idea of two career tracks for women, she says, when what she meant was that women should be viewed on a continuum, from totally focused on a career to wanting to balance career and family. Over the years, Schwartz's thinking has hardly been radical. That has served her well in her work with tradition-bound corporations. But in her own life, she's been somewhat of a maverick. WHAT IS SCHWARTZ'S BACKGROUND? Born Felice Nierenberg in 1925, she was raised in New York and graduated from Smith College. There, she was struck by how few black students were enrolled. So, after graduation in 1945, she married at 20 and went to work at the NAACP with a plan to help get more blacks into all-white colleges. Nine months later, impatient with what she perceived as unnecessary bureaucratic delays, she wrote to the head of the NAACP and asked for a longer leash. He suggested she leave. WHAT DID SHE DO AFTER THAT? She set up her own scholarship-assistance agency in an office in Harlem, and within two years had placed 750 black students in previously all-white colleges. At 23, she had her first child and continued working part-time. Four years later, her father died and left a failing family-owned business - a metal-engraving and etching plant in Long Island City. Schwartz and her brother were called on to turn the company around so it could be sold at a profit. For three years, she worked part-time as head of production, occupying an office on the shop floor. HOW SUCCESSFUL WAS SCHWARTZ AT MANAGING THE BUSINESS? There, she negotiated three labor contracts with 16 "tough shop stewards." They called her "Ducky," a family nickname, and made sexist jokes. "You can make a class-action suit out of it, or you can laugh at it," she says. She laughed, the company was sold for a modest profit and at 30, she returned to the suburbs to spend eight years raising three children. Full-time motherhood didn't suit her. In retrospect, she would have preferred working half-time. WHAT DID SHE DO? During that period, Schwartz and her husband, Irving, a physician, started what may have been one of the first commuter marriages. Disturbed by the restlessness she'd seen among suburban women, she got the idea to start Catalyst. When the family moved to Cincinnati so her husband could take a post at a medical school, she realized New York was the only place she could launch her idea. So she returned there with the children, and he spent the next two years flying back and forth on weekends. WHEN WAS CATALYST FOUNDED? In 1962, at 37, Felice Schwartz founded Catalyst to convince employers that women are a valuable resource. She argued that women could work before they have children, after the children are grown and part-time while the kids are in school. Even with that conciliatory message, corporations would have nothing to do with her. "Women were pariahs," she says, and the barriers were nearly impenetrable, as the title of her 1967 book suggests: "How to Go to Work When Your Husband is Against it, Your Children Aren't Old Enough and There's Nothing You Can Do Anyway." Catalyst's first successes were in the public sector. HOW HAS SCHWARTZ BEEN ABLE TO ACCOMPLISH ALL THT SHE HAS? Schwartz - who will retire next year - believes strongly that the best way to change the system is to work within it, starting at the top. Her new book, unlike her controverisal 1989 article, clearly includes men in the work-family equation. She urges corporate chiefs to consider a "parent track," where men and women can slow down while their children are young, then return to full-time work with the opportunity to climb the ladder as far as their talent will take them. WHY DOES SCHWARTZ THINK THINGS ARE BETTER? Schwartz's optimism about women's future in business stems from her belief in a severe shortage of skilled labor, currently masked by the recession. Because the pool of talented workers will diminish greatly, companies will be forced to put women in high-level jobs, she argues. More progress will be made in the '90s, she says, than was made the past 30 years. Bonus Editor: William Snoddy. (1-919-855-3491) Making copies of USA TODAY Update (Copyright, 1992) for further distribution violates federal law. This article is copyright 1992 Gannett News Service. Redistribution to other sites is not permitted except by arrangement with American Cybercasting Corporation. For more information, send-email to usa@AmeriCast.COM