Women’s Ranks Slip, Despite Some Strides
More Awareness, Programs Don't Stem Departures
By K.C. Neel -- Multichannel News, 11/11/2007 7:00:00 PM
Despite an increase in awareness and programs designed to attract, retain and promote women employees, female workers have been slowly but steadily exiting the cable industry for the past five years, according to data from the latest Women In Cable Telecommunications’ PAR Initiative study.
The number of women in cable dropped across all categories, with the exception of women of color, which has actually seen growth over the past half decade. In 2003, 38.7% of all industry employees were women. That has steadily declined to 35.8% in 2007, according to the survey results. The proportion of women managers has also dipped from 38.4% in 2004 to 35.8% this year. But the number of female executives has remained steady: Women made up 27.6% of all senior executives in 2003, and 27.7% of the top ranks today.
Technology staffs, though, continue to have trouble recruiting and retaining women. In 2004, women comprised 30.4% of all corporate tech employees (those who run administrative, call center and other key infrastructure computer systems). Today, they represent 24.4%. Meanwhile, the proportion of women as IT managers and project directors has dropped from 19.9% in 2005 to 11.5% in 2007.
CALL-CENTER CHANGES
Perhaps most unexpectedly, the number of women working at call centers — traditionally a bastion for female workers and a traditional starting point for many people entering the industry — slipped. In 2004, the first year WICT counted call center employees separately, women made up 63.4% of employees. Now, they represent 61.3%.
In 2004, 62.8% of call center managers were women. Today that number stands at 56.9%. One explanation, according to Joanne Cleaver, a lead researcher with Working Mother Media, which works with WICT to put together the PAR study every year, goes back to the technology troubles dogging the industry. The explosion in broadband services demands a more technically skilled customer support staff, and today those staffers tend to be men.
Call centers also must begin changing the way they do business, Cleaver said. Flexible hours and telecommuting are beginning to take hold at several companies, but few call center employees currently enjoy that perk. Comcast has a pilot program in place that allows some high-performing call center employees to work from home, and Advance/Newhouse Communications’ Bright House Networks also has some telecommuting call center workers.
About 250 employees at Cox Communications’ Arizona call center telecommute now. That number will expand to about 300 next year, said Mae Douglas, the operator’s chief people officer. Still, the programs remain sparse, Cleaver said.
CABLE 'GETTING SMARTER’
“Some cable companies are getting smarter about how they let their call center workers do their jobs,” she said. “But I would have thought more companies would own this concept, yet it’s not widespread. It would really arm the industry with a great story. 'We do this for other companies. We can do it for you.’”
Bright House’s call centers are predominantly run by and staffed with women, said Jennifer Mooney, group vice president of public and government affairs. The company launched a telecommuting program for call center workers a year ago and the company is looking to expand it in the next year. Comcast is currently piloting a telecommuting program in one of its divisions, according to senior vice president of human resources Charisse Lillie.
Cox has long been at the forefront for its efforts to improve and expand call center working conditions.
“Cox is so far ahead with this kind of thing because of our leadership and their focus on our people,” Douglas said. “[Former Cox CEO] Jim Robbins just got it and [current CEO] Pat Esser gets it, too. Both Jim and Pat knew that it was going to be our people that made the company successful.”
WOMEN OF COLOR
Still, there was good news in this year’s PAR report. In addition to the launch and expansion of programs aimed at women by every survey participant, the overall number of women of color has improved since WICT’s first PAR survey in 2003, as has the number of women of color in management positions. Progress at the senior level for women of color has been slower to grow. After reaching a peak of 4.1% in 2006, the number of senior women of color slid to 3.7% in 2007.
Women of color have also made gains when compared to women workers in general. Indeed, women of color represented 14.8% of all cable industry employees this year, up from 13.2% in 2003. Furthermore, women of color represented 34% of all women employees in 2003; they represent 41.3% of all women workers today. And while tech jobs are generally hard to fill with women, the most impressive jump for women in color was in the field: the number of field installers growing from 33.5% in 2004 to 42% now. Managers increased from 22.2% in 2004 to 27.8% in 2007; and senior executives rose from 10.6% in 2003 to 13.4% in 2007.
The latest PAR study also reported that 15% of women of color in the industry work in new media, considered a high-tech sector in the industry.
New media is “very sexy these days,” Cleaver said. “There is a lot of high gloss and excitement with this sector. It pays well and has a hot consumer image. I see this as an area where women can really get a foothold.”
Despite the overall drop in women workers, cable companies are better equipped today to hire, retain, promote and satisfy female employees than ever before.
Formal pay equity programs are increasingly being put in place, leadership training and career planning programs are commonplace, and flexibility in the workplace is constantly morphing to meet employees’ needs. So it’s unclear why they’re leaving or where women are going. Cleaver said that although exit interviews are designed to glean such information, all too often, they rarely net real answers. She suggests more companies contact valued ex-employees several months after their departure to get an idea of why they really left.
“Many times, employees don’t even know the real reasons they are leaving a company,” Cleaver said. “By keeping in touch after they leave, employers are telling those people they are still valuable and they may also get a better picture of why that person left in the first place.”
WORKFORCE SHIFTS
Some human resource executives believe the number of women leaving the industry is part of a larger overall shift in the workforce. Although the number of women entering the workplace grew at breakneck speed in four decades following World War II, that growth began stalling in the mid 1990s.
Indeed, the numbers have been sliding since 2001, according to a March 3, 2006, article in The New York Times. The reasons for this vary from women choosing to stay home to take care of their families to starting their own businesses or going back to school.
In fact, U.S. Census Bureau data reveals that in 2002, there were an estimated 6.2 million women-owned, privately-held businesses, compared to only 400,000 in 1972. Indeed, women-owned businesses account for one in four of all firms in the U.S., and employ 9.2 million workers. According to Catalyst Inc., women earned 60% of master’s degrees and approximately 50% of doctoral degrees in 2005 and 2006. And the research firm forecasts that by 2011, women will earn 2.8 million more undergraduate and graduate degrees than men.
This is a unique time for many women, added Julie Cookson, senior vice president of human resources for Scripps Networks. “It’s a balancing act for many women,” she said. “Many are taking care of children and ailing parents at the same time. They are balancing different things, and they can’t be all things to all people all the time. We talk about balance all the time and I tell people they can have balance, just not all the time.”
That’s where companies’ work/life policies come in. Firms must be nimble when it comes to satisfying their employees’ needs at work and away. Flextime schedules, telecommuting and other non-traditional work environments must be made available, Cleaver said, if companies want to keep employees happy and within their fold. Across the industry, flextime policies declined slightly. But there was an increase in companies offering full-time telecommuting. The PAR study found that many companies still struggle with consistent application of flex work and telecommuting policies, reporting that some managers value face time more than productivity.
Several companies have child and elder care provisions giving employees paid time off to take care of family issues. Some offer financial assistance or help in finding the right child care. Others have built on-site child care centers designed to give emergency and regular care. Cox paved the way when it opened an on-site day care facility at its San Diego call center.
ON-SITE DAY CARE
Turner Broadcasting System was not far behind when it opened its child care facility in Atlanta. ESPN and Discovery are currently building on-site child care facilities. In lieu of on-site day care, The Weather Channel has partnered with an Atlanta facility to assist with day-care options.
“We’ve always had strong programs around child care including consultants who help employees find the right environment for their children,” said Adria Alpert-Romm, senior vice president of human resources for Discovery Communications. “This new child care center is icing on the cake.”
When it comes to attracting women, the cable industry and individual companies should be touting the advantages of working in such a dynamic, exciting business sector, said WICT president and CEO Benita Fitzgerald Mosley. A concerted public relations effort by accounting firms — traditionally known as a male-dominated industry — has been highly successful in recent years, she said. “When you see the top 50 workplaces named by Fortune magazine, Working Mother magazine or DiversityInc magazine, you’ll see not only those companies on the lists, but also ads from companies like Deloitte Touche touting why they are a great place for women and minorities to work,” she said. “We’re starting to see more cable companies show up on those lists. Discovery has long been on [Working Mother Media’s] list but we’re seeing companies like Turner show up as well. Other companies could be there, if they let people know what they do every day.”
This year, Discovery, Turner and Cisco Systems were among Working Mother magazine’s top companies to work for. Cox was on DiversityInc’s list of the top 50 companies for minorities this year. Bright House Networks has won a half-dozen regional awards as one of the best places to work.
Traditionally, operators have been criticized for lagging behind their programmer brethren when it comes to hiring and promoting. It is true, operators have lower percentages of women employees, especially at higher executive levels, than programming firms. However, proportionately they move more women into first-line and middle management, according to the latest PAR findings. This may be explained by the operators’ advantage of having call center operations where 56.9% of managers are women.
And even though the number is dwindling, women still make up the majority of call-center employees. Even so, at the senior level, programmers continue to have a much higher proportion of female top-level executives than operators with women making up 57% of programming managers and 61.3% of total employees.
FILLING TECH SPOTS
Finding and keeping women to fill tech jobs seems to be a problem for operators and programmers. On the other hand, there are some shining examples of success in this area. Deanna Brown left Yahoo earlier this year to head Scripps’ Interactive Media group. Some 75% of the recent hires in that department are also women including a senior vice president and several directors, Scripps Networks executive vice president Chris Powell said.
Comcast is working with military organizations and building trades to lure women to installer positions.
“Tech positions are very physical, and some women don’t want to do it,” Comcast’s Lillie said. “But there are a lot of women who have been in the military and who have worked in the building trades that would like the work. We think that this program will bring in women who enjoy the physical aspects of the job and will thrive.”
The program has been in place for about a year now. Other companies are joining forces with local and national engineering groups to lure women into cable’s fold. It’s going to take a while for results to materialize, Fitzgerald Mosley admits.
Cable is by no means alone when it comes to hiring women for technical and IT jobs. Research by the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that employment of women in a broad range of IT positions has declined in relative and absolute terms over the past several years.
Some 984,000 women worked in eight IT categories in 2000, accounting for 28.9% of all IT workers, according to CIO Insight magazine. The corresponding numbers for 2006, when overall IT employment hit an all-time high of nearly 3.47 million, show a 7.7% drop from 2000, with 908,000 women working in IT, or just 26.2% of the total.
Trying to fix or improve all these issues will require a major change in the way business is conducted, according to cable executives. Everyone is looking for the same talent so the industry must differentiate itself from businesses and that means the work model must change, said Lisa Chang, executive vice president of human resources for The Weather Channel.
CHANGING MENTALITY
“Today’s technology, much of it provided by the cable industry, means work can be done anywhere anytime now,” Chang said. “It’s hard for companies to get away from the face-time mentality and we haven’t been able to, as a whole, prove that we can change and still be effective. As a society we’ve tripled our work, but we’ve not changed how we work and companies need to take the initiative to make those changes. But it’s not easy to do even if we want to.”
At the current rate of change, it would take women 47 years to reach parity with men as corporate officers of Fortune 500 companies, according to Catalyst.
The non-profit’s latest study in February 2007, found that women held just 15.6% of Fortune 500 corporate officer jobs, down from 16.4% in 2005 and that the number of companies with three or more women corporate officers decreased during that time. Interestingly, Catalyst found that companies with the greatest number of female board members on average outperformed other firms’ return on equity by at least 53%.
Honoring the Best of the Best
11/16/2008Honoring the Best Operators, Programmers
11/11/2007Ranks of Women Workers Grow
11/16/2008Clearwire Hires Two Execs As CMO Departs
11/06/2009Ranks of Women Workers Grow: PAR Survey
11/17/2008
