Raising Expectations

An organization seeks to improve leadership prospects for women at Jewish charities

Cindy Greenberg was 21 when she started working for charities that serve Jewish people and causes.

Now 32 and director of the Edgar M. Bronfman Center for Jewish Student Life at New York University, she says she has grown disheartened over the years to see so many of her female peers drop out of Jewish organizations. The culprit, she says, is discrimination.

More specifically, she says, she has seen “a systemic bias in Jewish organizations, probably designed by men, whether intentionally or not, that works against women, especially young women who want families.”

Although Ms. Greenberg, the mother of two children, praises her current employer for offering flexibility to employees with children, she says that in previous jobs she had experiences of “feeling discounted because of my youth and gender, to outright hostility based on gender.”

She is far from being alone in thinking that it is difficult for women to ascend to leadership roles at Jewish organizations.

Advancing Women Professionals and the Jewish Community was created in New York in 2001 to help curb the problem through several approaches: documenting the gender gap in leadership, opening up executive-training programs to more women, and putting pressure on Jewish groups to adopt flexible work schedules that help both men and women better balance their work and family obligations.

Obstacles to Leadership

In 2003, Advancing Women Professionals released some startling data: It found that although women made up approximately 70 percent of the professional staffs of Jewish federations, which provide fund raising for Jewish social services and causes, only two women led the largest 40 federations in the United States. And among major Jewish organizations in the educational, religious, policy, and social-service arenas, only a handful of women served as chief executive officers.

Although the overall picture for female leaders in Jewish organizations has remained the same the last four years, say Advancing Women Professionals officials, this past November brought a promising sign, when Barbara Benioff Friedman was selected as board chairwoman of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, a Reform seminary with affiliates in Cincinnati, Jerusalem, Los Angeles, and New York. She is believed to be the first woman chosen to head an American Jewish seminary.

In general, women who lead other types of nonprofit organizations fare better than their counterparts at Jewish groups. According to a study released last year by GuideStar, an organization that collects data that charities and foundations report to the Internal Revenue Service, 36 percent of nonprofit groups with budgets of $1-million or more are led by women. A majority of smaller groups — 57 percent — have women in the top jobs.

“The numbers are so counterintuitive because Jewish women are leaders in so many other fields, such as in secular foundations and universities,” says Shifra Bronznick, Advancing Women Professionals’ founder and president. “Somehow, Jewish organizations feel that women aren’t leaders, and women who are leaders in Jewish organizations are drawn from outside” the circle of Jewish groups.

Also, she says, experience at Jewish organizations isn’t always considered as prestigious as that gained at other organizations, she says. “If a woman ran the RAND Corporation, for example, then Jewish organizations feel she’s ‘good enough for us,’” Ms. Bronznick says. On the other hand, she notes, women who didn’t develop their careers at Jewish groups but seek leadership roles at them may find themselves battling criticism that they haven’t absorbed Jewish organizations’ values.

Identifying Problems

The seeds of Advancing Women Professionals were sown in 1998, when Ms. Bronznick, a management consultant for nonprofit organizations, completed a study for Ma’yan, a project of the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan that examines and supports the role of women in Jewish life.

The study found that few women held seats on boards of Jewish organizations, and Ms. Bronznick and staff members of Ma’yan began meeting with leaders of Jewish groups to find out why.

“It became apparent through talking with the executive directors that the gender imbalance was a kind of unseen problem,” recalls Ms. Bronznick. “The executive directors said, ‘There seem to be women everywhere in the field,’ so what was the problem? Others thought it was inevitable that the problem would take care of itself as women advanced in other fields and careers.”

To spur Jewish groups to address the issue, Ms. Bronznick applied for money to come up with possible solutions to the problem through the now-defunct Trust for Jewish Philanthropy.

The Dobkin Family Foundation provided a $1-million grant to help create Advancing Women Professionals because, says Barbara Dobkin, a longtime supporter of women’s issues, “It’s essential to get women at the table. Without women’s voices, I don’t think you can build a vibrant Jewish community.”

The bias Ms. Bronznick’s study found at Jewish organizations has persisted due to several factors, she says.

“Jewish people hate to wash their dirty linens in public — it’s very countercultural,” Ms. Bronznick says. Also, “There’s this notion that we’re very busy saving the world, so we can’t be distracted by things like robust professional development and letting people navigate life-work issues.

The overwhelmingly male makeup of boards at these organizations also plays a role, she says: “It’s like a big boy’s network. There are a lot of traditional male donors, who aren’t part of the world where there are aspiring women professionals.”

One of Advancing Women Professionals’ first goals was to document the bias it blamed for the glass ceiling.

In 2003, the group joined forces with United Jewish Communities, in New York, the umbrella organization for North American Jewish federations, groups that primarily support social-service causes and Jewish education, for a study of the obstacles female managers faced.

The resulting report identified some of the key factors that impede women’s advancement, including the misperception that women are not “tough enough” to lead — while, conversely, women who exhibit toughness are seen as too abrasive.

The study also found that federation leaders questioned women’s ability to solicit major annual gifts from men. Other obstacles included weak human-resources systems that couldn’t give employees enough support in balancing their work and personal obligations.

In other fields, Ms. Bronznick notes, “a lot of efforts to eradicate bias have depended upon admitting bias.” The United Jewish Communities report, she says, is a milestone: “Up until that time, any evidence of a perceived bias was considered very anecdotal, and that women were whining.”

Continuing Education

To deal with the issues raised by the study, Advancing Women Professionals worked with United Jewish Communities to ensure that half of the students in its executive-development program at the Mandel Center for Leadership Excellence are female.

The goal to reserve spots for women in the program, located at New York’s Columbia University, began about three years ago, says Ron Meier, United Jewish Communities’ senior vice president for the program.

The students in the Mandel program are “full-time professionals working in Jewish federations, in mid- to senior-level positions, and are a step or two away from CEO consideration at some of our largest federations in the country,” says Mr. Meier. “We’ll ultimately judge some of the success of the program by the number of students who do pursue and are selected to lead our Jewish organizations.”

All students in the program are required to complete a two-year program of study that connects Jewish values to leadership skills, hones management abilities, and provides coaching from executives of major federations.

Recruiting female students for the Mandel program was not easy in the beginning, says Cindy Chazan, vice president for alumni and community development at the Wexner Foundation, in New York, who served as chairwoman of the program’s selection committee.

“It took a lot of very hard, behind-the-scenes conversations” to find candidates, she says. “After so many years of women being told they can’t become No. 1 in the system, very logically women would shy away from saying they would be a candidate for this. We were encouraging, while at the same time telling them there was a rigorous application process. We had to tell women to choose, that here was an opportunity to make change.”

Cathrine Fischer Schwartz, who has been executive director of the Jewish Federation of Greater Hartford for three years, says she was nominated for the program by her federation and was interested because “I was very new in the job and saw the program as a way to get better skills and get myself on the [radar] screen for a job in a larger city at some point.”

With eight months to go in the program, Ms. Schwartz also says that she “has a feeling many people thought it was an affirmative-action thing and that perhaps there were women who were accepted to the program who may not have been qualified otherwise,” she says. “I have to say that after being in the program, I feel confident that any of them could certainly have a job in a large federation and direct it well.”

The Mandel program is only one of United Jewish Communities’ efforts to reduce gender inequality in Jewish organizations, says Mr. Meier. Among its activities: The group has begun featuring more female speakers at its conferences, and has started an annual benchmarking of how many women hold positions in Jewish federations, so that it can chart whether women are faring any better.

Although the results thus far are not showing significantly more women moving into leadership slots, Advancing Women Professionals has helped lay the groundwork for change, says Rabbi Jennie Rosenn, program director for Jewish life and values at the Nathan Cummings Foundation, in New York. “The ways in which it is harder for women to advance in the Jewish community, as opposed to the secular nonprofit world, hadn’t been recognized as an issue,” she says. Advancing Women Professionals, she adds, has “done a great job at showing this is not just about women, but advancing the Jewish field.”

Rigid Schedules

Advancing Women Professionals has focused some of its efforts on removing one of the barriers to female executives’ ascendency at their organizations: rigid work schedules that make it difficult to balance caring for children or older relatives with professional obligations.

The group consults with Jewish organizations to help them figure out ways to offer flexible schedules, offering training and help in customizing policies and programs to help recruit and retain promising professionals, says Ms. Bronznick.

A pilot program began three years ago at the Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services, in New York, a 2,000-employee charity with more than 185 programs that serve about 65,000 clients annually.

Allan B. Siskind, the group’s chief executive, says he was persuaded to try bringing flexible schedules to his organization after he heard Ms. Bronznick make a presentation. “We expect women to do everything at work, then go home and take care of kids,” says Mr. Siskind. “We need to be friendlier to realities that women have.”

The group worked with Advancing Women Professionals to create a new policy, which laid out three options for workers: flexible starting and ending hours to employees’ workdays; a compressed weekly schedule, which would allow employees to work fewer but longer days; and part-time work, which would bring reduced hours and benefits.

First, Mr. Siskind’s charity experimented with flexible schedules in some of its central departments, such as human resources and information technology, and taught senior managers and staff members how to integrate the concept into the group’s network of social-service programs.

It also produced a brochure on flexible-scheduling policies that was distributed in the charity’s offices.

The new policies have had reverberations for all of Mr. Siskind’s group’s workers, he says: “When you get sensitive to meeting the needs of some employees, it affects everyone. Men can take advantage of flexible work arrangements as well.” Though the program is still in its early stages, he adds, “we feel it works.”

Mindy Liss, director of communications and marketing at the organization, was able to work special hours in the spring of 2005 to care for her ailing mother until her mother’s death that summer.

To have such flexibility, Ms. Liss says, “makes you appreciate your employer even more.”

Mr. Siskind was “very open to participating with AWP on this,” Ms. Liss adds.

“That he was receptive to this and is much respected in the Jewish world sent a signal” to other Jewish organizations, she says, about the importance of flexible policies.

Mentor Program

Advancing Women Professionals’ work with other Jewish organizations on helping employees balance work and personal demands has not run as smoothly, however.

A project with Hillel, an organization in Washington that runs Jewish groups for college students, for example, stalled when Hillel’s leader left the organization, says Ms. Bronznick.

But her group does have other plans for 2007. It is considering starting a small mentorship program for promising female managers at Jewish groups.

In addition, it is gathering some of the field’s best minds to brainstorm ideas.

In April, Advancing Women Professionals and the Center for Leadership Initiatives, a private operating foundation in Vancouver, British Columbia, that works to develop Jewish leaders, will hold a gathering in Princeton, N.J., of Jewish professionals, philanthropists, volunteer leaders, and academics to develop concrete solutions to gender inequity that can be used in a range of settings.

Ms. Bronznick’s organization also aims to publish a book, Leveling the Playing Field: A Guidebook for Change, in 2007 and distribute it to professionals and volunteers who seek guidance on creating their own grass-roots efforts to help women succeed in Jewish organizations.

In the meantime, Ms. Bronznick says, she maintains patience about the long-term change her group seeks.

“We have to be willing to live with the difficulties and the ‘boredom of change,’ because you have to say the same things one hundred, maybe one thousand times,” she says. “But that’s how change happens — cumulatively.”