Board Members Play Crucial Role in Closing the Gender Gap in Pay

A couple of years ago, an educational organization started a search for a new chief executive. The group’s top fund

raiser (whose name and employer’s name are withheld at her request) recalls that when she was approached by two board members about the job, they wound up delivering a mixed message. “You’d be wonderful,” the fund raiser was told. “But why would you want to do that when you have a family?”

She was startled, she says, to “bang up against these 1950s attitudes.” But she also took the hint, and didn’t apply for the job.

Boards decide who will lead organizations — and how much that leader will be paid. Thus, they play a large role in the continuing gap in salary and opportunity between male and female nonprofit heads.

Women are in the minority on charitable boards: Forty-three percent of nonprofit trustees are female, according to BoardSource, in Washington — and those women are most likely to fill the boards of smaller organizations, and those in the fields of health, human services, arts and culture, and the environment.

In some areas of the country and certain segments of the nonprofit field, the ratio of male-to-female trustees may be even more lopsided: William A. Brown, an affiliated faculty member at the Center for Nonprofit Leadership and Management at Arizona State University, says that, among charities in his county, the percentage of male board members runs as high as 75 percent.

The boards of larger organizations, such as hospitals, universities, and big national charities, are often overwhelmingly male, says Teresa Odendahl, co-editor of Women & Power in the Nonprofit Sector (Josey-Bass, 1994). And that fact, she says, goes a long way toward explaining why such institutions usually wind up hiring male leaders.

“There is a general tendency to hire people you consider to be like yourself,” she says. “For the more prestigious boards, they’re looking for someone they consider to be a peer. And it’s more difficult for a woman to break into that.”

Smaller organizations, though, can also contain old-boy networks in their boardrooms — even if the trustees aren’t all “boys.”

Trustees at charities in small towns “tend to reflect all the good and all the bad of those communities — all the assumptions, all the prejudices,” says Paula Shively, a 35-year nonprofit veteran who is currently executive director of ADEC, a charity in Elkhart, Ind., that serves people with disabilities. However, she says, she’s noticed that younger board members of both genders these days hold less traditional views of women, and are more conscious of creating opportunities for them.

Regardless of their age, many board members may hold hidebound notions of women’s capabilities, says Lisa A. Froemming, vice president for external affairs and advancement at the Milwaukee Public Museum. “If you have the wealth and position to be on a board, you may not have a wife who works outside the home,” she says. “You work hard to get nontraditional board members, but the people in the position of leadership tend to be of the more traditional background.”

Regardless of a board’s composition, it must make a conscious effort to make leadership diversity a priority, says Gail L. Warden, chief executive officer of the Henry Ford Health System, in Detroit.

“The organization’s got to have a will to behave like that,” he says. “If they don’t, they’ll fall right back into the old patterns.”

After 15 years at Henry Ford’s helm, he is planning to retire this year, and says that of the six finalists thus far for his job, two are women. “When we started looking for my replacement, we talked from the very beginning about he or she,” he says. “We didn’t talk about the new leader being a he.”

Henry Ford’s chief operating officer and the president of its largest hospital are women, notes Mr. Warden, who serves as trustee for five other nonprofit groups, four of which are headed by female leaders. If more large organizations haven’t picked women to lead them, he says, it’s only a matter of time. The social changes that have opened up career opportunities for women in recent years, he says, haven’t yet reached critical mass. “Going forward,” he says, “my expectation is that there will be just as many women in these jobs as men.”

Family Matters

Trustees who hold traditional views of women may unwittingly lead an organization onto shaky legal and ethical ground. Margaret Gibelman, director of the doctoral program in social welfare at Yeshiva University, in New York, says that the educational-organization trustee who asked solicitously about the fund raiser’s family obligations during the search for a chief executive was not only sending a message, but breaking federal job-discrimination laws.

“That member of the board wanted to hire either a single woman or a man,” she says. (The organization hired a man.) Employers often leap to the conclusion that women bear the primary responsibility for child care in their families, she says, and may assume they cannot shoulder a time-consuming job. “Of course, it’s illegal to ask these questions,” Ms. Gibelman says, “but that information is just known about candidates.”

Even when a board is equally open to job candidates of both sexes, however, men may have advantages over their female competitors, especially when vying to run large charities. For instance, says Colette Murray, chairwoman of the Association of Fundraising Professionals and head of a recruiting group for nonprofit clients in San Diego, women are less likely to relocate for a job — which means they are less likely to lead big charities that conduct national searches to fill their top spots.

“It’s a lot harder to get a woman to move and have her husband be the trailing spouse,” she says. “Very seldom will a man say, ‘I can’t leave because my wife has a great job.’ But it happens a lot with a woman.”

For instance, she says, she’s now looking to fill a position at a Midwestern university. She has had little luck finding female applicants who are willing to move, because the university is in a small town where jobs for spouses would be scarce. It’s especially worrisome, she says, because she knows the university “would lean over backwards for a woman candidate.”

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