Acronym

Next week the Greater Washington Network of ASAE will be holding its "In Honor of Women Program." It seems timely to note there are some women's professional organizations that are doing some very heavy lifting in the transition from aspiring to advance women in the professions to quantifying and measuring real progress. It's heartening to observe that within one adult lifetime, we have gone from watching the first women enter prominent and formerly all-male colleges and universities to seeing 50%( and over) female graduating classes. We've gone from petitioning to get women in the door to getting increasing numbers seated at the board tables and heading corporations. Now, studies indicate we're stuck in a place that needs some different thinking, and associations - as usual - are rising to the occasion.

My personal new favorite is the teaming up of the American Society of Women Accountants and the American Women's Society of Certified Public Accountants with research firm Wilson-Taylor Associates for their MOVE Project. One would think these number crunchers would have long had all these figures down, but they are about to launch their second year of the project to gauge progress from their 2010 results. The key driver? Firms know that women have strengths needed in obtaining and retaining clients. For transportation, what better acronym than MOVE? So my current organization is working to launch a similar project.

Women in Cable Telecommunications launched its benchmarking PAR program in 2003 with membership and program growth and development that can be linked directly to their research. The Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology found that "Women comprise an increasingly smaller proportion of the workforce at each successive level (from entry to mid to high)" in its research "Climbing the Technical Ladder: Obstacles and Solutions for Mid-Level Women in Technology." Delve into any and all of these studies, and the results are predictably similar: women opt out/are discouraged from/find barriers to success in the top echelons of organizations.

Aside from numerical equity, a pronounced gap appears to be in the view of whether the disparity matters. In a study of corporate boards conducted by Heidrick and Struggles, only 56% of male directors felt women brought a unique perspective to the table, while 90% of women thought female board directors provided something distinctly different. Also evident were gender differences regarding the effects of diversity on board behaviors such as trust and transparency.

Once we successfully knock down obvious barriers to entry, the challenge for women changes from addressing diversity issues as a minority group to much more complex issues of organizational behavior and innovation in order to remove barriers to equity. Solutions are starting to surface based on the science: moving from mentors to sponsors who invest in success of their colleagues; changing evaluation criteria; recruiting women specifically for P&L oversight; evaluating flexibility options; and targeting mid-level women to move upward. I suspect my colleagues who are addressing other diversity issues in their organizations find comparable challenges. This is a true opportunity for associations ...and who better?