Thank you for asking me to speak to you today. The points you cited in your kind introduction — fairness, opportunity and business competitiveness — are subjects I feel deeply about. They are very much a part of these remarks.

We need to change the organizations in which we work. We need to change their leadership and their ways of thinking. We need to open our leadership to real gender equality. If we can change our organizations so that the idea of a pregnant CEO is no longer unusual, we will also help the millions of other parents besides us here today — both men and women — in the workforce.

At present, the women in our workforce, whose contributions are more than equal to those of their male counterparts, still must manage career, childbearing and childcare in addition to their jobs — with little support from either society or their companies. Where is the equality in this? If we value our families as much as we say we do, we should be encouraging men to participate more fully in the care of their children and the lives of their families. Instead, we continue policies and behavior that encourage women to drop out of work and men to drop out of their families.

These issues of how society and companies treat parenthood have to be seen in the context of what is going on around us. The world is changing at an unprecedented rate, leaving a lot of old institutions behind in the process. Just look at what has happened during the past decade: the Soviet empire has crumbled, the Berlin wall now is only a memory and thousands of souvenir rocks, and the people of South Africa have abolished apartheid. And these are only a few examples. People everywhere are demanding change and making it happen.

At the same time, the business world is struggling with change as never before. Individual businesses and whole industries are being faced with the need for increased profitability and productivity. We are losing markets we may never regain. We are unable to invest adequately for a robust future. Our education system is failing to provide enough skilled workers. Because of these problems and all of the personal pain created by the recession and the massive restructuring and downsizing of the past several years, people have a tendency to look outside of themselves for something or someone to blame. So, they round up the usual scapegoats — foreign competitors, too much government, too little government, too many immigrants, and so on.

But whose fault is it, really? In the immortal words of Pogo, “We have met the enemy and it is us.” To complain about Japan or China or the European Union is to miss the point — it does nothing to improve productivity or competitiveness. We have to look within our companies and ourselves to identify the problems and develop the solutions, to find ways to unlock the inherent strengths that will allow us to compete and win.

Some companies simply have not grasped the nature of the challenges. Or that they must respond if they are to survive. Others — like many people — are so attached to the comfort of the familiar that they have not been able to let go of old ways of doing business that are no longer adequate.

Nowhere is business’ failure to grasp its problems more obvious than in its unwillingness to tap the potential of the thousands of talented women who are ready and eminently qualified to step into leadership positions. I am not suggesting that just having more women in top management will cure all the ills we face. But it will certainly help. And the willful exclusion of women is representative of the resistance to change that holds many businesses back from taking other actions that could solve significant problems.

Maintaining barriers to women is an example of how we are not playing to our strengths as a nation — the greatest of which is a workforce that is flexible and adaptable — able to think outside the nine dots. We have a workforce with an abundance of initiative, a ‘can-do’ attitude and a passion for being first. We live in a competitive culture. We should be at our best in the way we respect and value individualism and individual differences. Cultural pluralism should be the source of our success — past, present and future.

That lesson is indelibly etched in my memory from an experience I had recently with a group of workers in a plant near here. We had major quality and cost problems with a part that was being assembled in the plant. Some of the managers were considering moving the operation to Asia as an alternative to a problem that seemed to them too big to fix. Most of the workers were women; many of them were minorities. I very much wanted them to be able to keep their jobs. So we challenged the workers to come up with a solution in their own way.

We worked with them, and organized them into teams. They then took over. They used a lot of common sense. They found ways to streamline the assembly process. They reduced scrap costs. They asked for and got training so they could maintain and calibrate equipment. They even shopped the malls on weekends to get a better price on toilet paper than the one the corporate purchasing department was getting. They solved problems; they charted their progress. They raised the bar whenever they reached a goal.

These workers — many of them single mothers — did a superb job of solving cost and quality problems and today are still the most competitive supplier in the world of this particular part. They succeeded because a flexible, self-directed solution was what was needed. Every day of their lives, these women have had to solve tough problems, with little help and often under adverse conditions. When they were encouraged to bring to work the resiliency, ingenuity and an “it’s all up to me” attitude that they had in the rest of their lives, they were unbeatable. They succeeded not in spite of being women and minorities, but because they were. The energy and creativity they have had to have to survive in an unhelpful and often unfriendly world gave them a competitive advantage.

The sooner we recognize the value of pluralism and diversity and encourage women and minorities to just be who they are, the quicker we will see how their contributions can transform the workforce at all levels.

The composition of the workforce has changed, beginning with the addition of significant numbers of women during World War II. Today more than 70% of all American women between the ages of 20 and 54 work outside the home; 45% of all American workers are women, and by the end of the century a majority of new entrants into the workforce will be women. Yet a recent Labor Department study showed that among executives and top officials, less than 7 percent are women. In another study, Fortune magazine examined nearly 800 of the largest industrial and service companies and found that of the 4000 highest-paid officers and directors, only 19 — less than one-half of 1 percent — were women.

Why? We all know that it has nothing to do with ability, education, ambition or availability. Instead, the reasons cited by both executives and workers — male and female alike — are stereotyping, preconceptions, lack of career planning, exclusion from key management jobs, and exclusion from informal networks of communication. In short, discrimination.

Approximately 80 percent of the CEOs interviewed for a 1990 Catalyst study on women in corporate management acknowledged being aware of the barriers to women’s advancement. Most of these CEOs perceived women as equally or better prepared than male counterparts in terms of education, technical training, management skills and interpersonal skills. But women were thought not to be equal to men in career commitment, risk taking and initiative. Let’s look quickly at these three areas where women apparently fall down.

‘Career commitment’ is a euphemism for ‘what if she has a baby?’

Well, what if she does have a baby? Surprise: work goes on. She redistributes the work among her colleagues, she stays in touch by phone, fax and modem. It is very much the same as when a male CEO has a heart attack, or breaks his leg skiing, or has an automobile accident (or any of the thousands of other things that happen in real life) and is out of the office for a period of time. If any CEO (male or female) has not built depth and quality into the management team so that he or she is not indispensable, then we should all suspect there is a terminal case of the ‘CEO disease’ at work. (“Only I can make a decision. If I’m not here, nothing can happen.”). It is nonsense. There are probably a few moments in any given year when the CEO’s physical presence is critical, but those few moments are hardly a reason for not promoting women into top management positions.

Indeed, the “star” system of highly paid and visible CEOs may work against openness, candor and challenging — and other protections that can prevent one person from taking a company right into big trouble.

The legitimate issue of career commitment is how quickly we can offer high-potential women equal treatment so they can see the benefit of staying with a company. Because many companies have not implemented policies that support working parents, women who choose to have families often have a difficult decision to make. If the choice is between having children and being a significant part of their care OR being paid 65 percent of what a male counterpart is earning (who is also 20 times more likely to be promoted into a top job), it is not difficult to see why women might leave such a company to seek a better opportunity. If companies want stronger career commitment from women, they should hasten to correct pay inequities and create equal opportunities for promotion.

The other characteristics for which women were perceived as less than equal to men were risk-taking and initiative. This is astounding, coming from a group of people who just acknowledged their own lack of initiative and failure to take risks in the critical area of providing equal opportunity for nearly half their workforce. So much for those objections.

This conference is an opportunity to define solutions to work/life issues that business and government can embrace for a more productive, competitive future.

It is time for companies to acknowledge the primacy of family in the value systems of both men and women. Too many women still have to choose between career and family. And too often men sacrifice participation in lives of their families to meet the demands of their jobs. The costs to both people and the companies they work for are too high. As the world of work changes, people are beginning to seek rewards more enduring than a title and more fulfilling than just a good salary. I have never heard of anyone who on their deathbeds said they wished they had spent more time at the office. Many must wish they had spent more time with their children, or parents or husbands or wives or friends. Whatever it costs, family leave is cheap, because it lets people give their very best both at work and at home. No company that has provided family leave has found it to be anything but a help in retaining workers and improving loyalty and morale.

Companies are losing potential leaders because of discrimination against women. Women are either taking their skills elsewhere or are being ignored. The net loss to companies is the same in either case. It is a brain and creativity drain of major proportions. Companies cannot reverse entrenched attitudes overnight. But they can indicate their good faith by addressing pay inequities, by finding specific ways within their own cultures to attract and retain women in positions that lead to top management jobs, and by giving these efforts the high visibility and priority they deserve. Besides being the right thing to do, it’s the only thing to do to increase chances for business survival by the year 2000.

I cannot emphasize too strongly the need for the recruitment and in-house promotion of women into key management positions. This is the litmus test of a company's attitude toward the advancement of women. And nowhere is the stranglehold of the old boys network more pervasive than in succession planning at executive levels. You must be both persistent and consistent in instructions to executive recruiters and the managers who are hiring if you are committed to opening the selection process to women. This is important, since when women become a majority of new entrants into the workforce in a few short years, visible evidence of equal opportunity for women in top positions will be necessary for companies to compete for the best and brightest job applicants.

The same demographics are at work on the customer side. Which companies will have an advantage in a competitive sales situation? A forward-looking company well-represented at all levels by women, people of color and different cultural legacies, or a company that visibly cannot compete across the talent spectrum?

This week you will hear about policies for part-time work options, flextime, daycare, and a host of creative solutions devised to help parents balance the needs of work and family.

And you will hear about the need for legislation, for laws to replace the political "rhetoric" we hear about protecting and fostering the family. At the deepest level, law reflects enduring social values and beliefs. Legislation is more than just a set of rules. It reflects the values toward which we hope to change our society. For example, child labor laws were not only to stop companies from exploiting and harming children, relatively few were; rather, society wanted to make a pragmatic statement of how it valued children. Federal safety standards, workers’ compensation and minimum wage laws are other examples of attempts to codify deep social values.

Taken together, all these policies you will be hearing about provide meaningful support for all of our workforce. They will specifically help us take advantage of the enormous potential of our women workers.

As I mentioned at the beginning, we live in changing times. We also need to change. But women should not feel they need to change — to become more like men. Rather, our institutions and companies need to change so that women have a fair shot at the starting blocks, so women do not have to make a lifetime choice between career and family, and so that they are not discriminated against either when getting a job or while on the job. If together we can make these changes, then soon we will work for companies where women will be able to take the positions they have earned throughout society — including at the top.