The picture for women in family businesses has changed dramatically over the past five to ten years. Many women have taken the helm of notable family companies and are now running them with great aplomb. Early last year, Sherry S. Russell took over at Alderfer Inc., a Harleysville, Pa., meat company started by her grandfather in 1922. Craigie Zildjian has held the CEO post for six years at Zildjian Co., a Norwell, Mass., manufacturer of cymbals and drumsticks that traces its history back to 1623. Other women head family firms in a diverse range of industries, including apparel as well as construction and pre-cast concrete.
“It’s not an automatic that your daughters won’t go into your business and only the sons will,” observes Karen Bressler, 43, CEO since 2001 of Agar Supply Inc., a food products distributor in Taunton, Mass., with annual revenues of $460 million.
The emergence of women in visible, legitimate seats of power in family businesses has, in fact, only just begun. Family business advisers suggest that in the years to come, more and more women will rise to a variety of positions of leadership and influence in their families’ businesses and in the families themselves.
Just how far have women really come? It’s instructive to look at the past.
Consider Marjorie Merriweather Post. She was just 27 in 1914 when her father, the celebrated cereal entrepreneur C.W. Post, died. An only child whose mother had passed away 19 months earlier, Marjorie inherited her father’s enterprise, the Postum Cereal Company in Battle Creek, Mich., and became one of the world’s richest women.
It was unseemly at the time for women to engage in business. Marjorie’s formal education ended at age 17, when she graduated from a “finishing school” aimed at making young women into suitable wives for upper-crust men. C.W. Post had never envisioned his daughter as running his business, but he had done his best to prepare her for owning it, commanding her to attend staff meetings while she was still a child and discussing them with her afterward. The world viewed her as a beautiful heiress, and she played that role to the hilt, turning her considerable intelligence and organizational skills to art, philanthropy, extravagant entertaining and good works.
Early on after C.W.’s death, Marjorie’s uncle served as chairman of Postum and her first husband represented her on the board of directors. “Marjorie did not expect to serve on the board herself,” writes her biographer, Nancy Rubin, in American Empress: The Life and Times of Marjorie Merriweather Post (Villard Books, 1995).
From afar, Marjorie made the major decisions for the company. She had the good sense to choose the brilliant stockbroker E.F. Hutton as her second husband and to involve him in her business. As chairman of the board, he transformed Postum into a public company in 1922. At Marjorie’s insistence, Postum acquired Birds Eye Frosted Foods, a frozen-food company, and Postum began to evolve into the General Foods Corporation. After a painful divorce from Hutton (he cheated on her, after all), Marjorie, who still owned 10% of the company’s stock, finally sought and was appointed, in 1936, to a seat on the board of directors, where she served for 22 years.
About three-quarters of a century would go by from the time of Marjorie Merriweather Post’s inheritance until things began to change substantially for women in business-owning families.
Jane Hilburt-Davis, founder of Key Resources in Lexington, Mass., remembers what it was like for women in business-owning families when she began consulting to family firms 25 years ago.
“Women were behind the scenes generally and had informal power but not formal power,” she says. “They certainly did not generally have any titles or any salary or say or recognition.” Fathers were still likely to want to sell a family business or close it down if they didn’t have sons to leave it to, she notes.
Fredda Herz Brown, managing partner and senior consultant at the Metropolitan Group in Cresskill, N.J., recalls colleagues who called women in business-owning families “the invisible women.” These women “were really very powerful from their background positions as family members, but they were not seen as people who could take central positions in the family enterprise,” she says.
As of the 1980s, almost all family businesses had been founded by men. Some family business experts began to refer to the wives as the “chief emotional officers” because of these women’s role in tending to the emotional needs of family members and holding the family together. It was a phrase that riled some but was viewed as appropriate by others.
“I use that phrase to say that women typically get pulled into the role of addressing the interface between the family and the business,” says Leslie Dashew, a consultant with the Human Side of Enterprise in Scottsdale, Ariz., and the Aspen Family Business Group. She sees women’s ability to recognize and respond to emotions as “an additional skill women bring as opposed to the only thing they bring.”
In the 1980s, Dashew recalls, women were “marginalized”—they were not actively involved as owners, leaders or educated stewards of their families’ businesses.
As the decade unfolded, opportunities began to open up for women in corporate America, and many women also began to create opportunities for themselves by starting their own businesses in unprecedented numbers. More women had professional training than ever before, and it was not uncommon for those from business-owning families to seek careers elsewhere because they held out no hope that they could ever have a job in their families’ companies.
Without knowing it, they were doing what family business consultants and educators now urge young people to do before they join the family firm: get experience somewhere else first.
“The fact that they went out into the world and made their own way makes them much more prized candidates for positions inside the family business,” says Herz Brown. Many women, she finds, have much broader outside experience and more credibility than their brothers do.
As the parents began to see that their daughters could succeed in a business environment, they welcomed them into the family firm. They started to recognize that their daughters represented human capital that could benefit their businesses and that those companies could provide the younger women with great opportunities. What’s more, says Dashew, there was a real generational change: Younger men—those under 50—had grown up in an era when women were more a part of the business world. “We’re seeing more men who are really open to appreciate the contribution of women,” she observes.
For their part, the daughters recognized that the family business could offer them a quicker path to the top than they found in corporate life.
Unfortunately, many of these observations are anecdotal. Very little research has yet been done on women in family business.
Perhaps the first statistical study to mention women, the MassMutual Family Business Study of 1993, reported that about 16% of the respondents’ daughters were involved in day-to-day operations (compared with 37% of the sons). The gender of potential successors was not explored. But in a 1997 MassMutual study, more than 25% of the family business owners surveyed said they expected their next CEO to be a woman. By 2002, that figure had reached 34%, and the number of firms with women CEOs had doubled within in the same period.
For now, the best source of information about the trends involving women in family firms is the family business consultants. These professionals are seeing not only more women CEOs but also more women in other senior management positions.
Just as important, they note that the advent of family business as a field of academic study in the last 20 years has spawned more informal educational opportunities for women. As a result, women are becoming more sophisticated about their roles as shareholders in family firms and as family leaders. Though the changes are still slow, increasingly women are becoming involved in organizing family councils, sitting on boards of directors and playing influential roles in family foundations and family offices.
Lonely at the top
There are downsides, however, to being a family business leader, especially a CEO. Like their male counterparts, women CEOs find that it’s lonely at the top. Female business leaders who are single report dating difficulties; they lament that many potential suitors see them as intimidating, while others are blatant fortune-hunters.
But the biggest issue, family business women say, is finding the right balance between being CEO and being a good parent, wife and care-taking family member. Often their role is also assumed to include meeting the needs of the family patriarch. Many female family business leaders say they experience guilt over what society expects of them and what they can actually deliver.
“There’s guilt and then there’s also exhaustion, because what do you say no to? Who do you say no to?” says Marcy Syms, 53, CEO of Syms Corp., a Secausus, N.J., off-price clothing retailer with 2,000 employees and 37 stores. She put off parenting for many years out of comcern that it would conflict with her family business responsibilities.
Now the mother of a seven-year-old son, Syms says the struggle for balance as a CEO is much as it was when she was in middle management. “I think you feel those same stresses when you’re managing a department just as much as if you’re a CEO,” she says.
Several advisers interviewed for this article spoke of women CEOs who became so burned-out or ill that they had to leave their companies for a while.
But the advantages of being a CEO outweigh the disadvantages, says Jane Hilburt-Davis, who is president-elect of the Family Firm Institute, an international organization of professionals serving family businesses. On the plus side, she points out, there’s the power, the positive feedback and the self-confidence that a woman gains.
For Karen Bressler at Agar, a big reward is the mental challenge. “I’m never bored,” she says. “I never run out of things to do. Every day is an adventure.”
Not to mention the financial rewards. According to documents filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Marcy Syms, whose company is family-controlled but publicly owned, received compensation of $576,000 in 2004.
Some prejudices against women in family business still linger. Many fathers, for example, still prefer male successors. And, as Paul I. Karofsky, executive director emeritus of the Northeaster University Center for Family Business, points out, “Compensation for women in business, let alone family business, is still not equal to that of men. A lack of fairness is still out there.”
Yet women’s worth is slowly but surely being recognized and appreciated. These changes are not limited to the U.S. Women family business leaders are beginning to emerge in the rest of the world, as well.
Ernesto J. Poza, a professor at Case Western Reserve University’s Weatherhead School of Management in Cleveland, has consulted extensively in Spanish-speaking countries. The biggest change he has noted in Latin American family businesses, he says, is among the mothers. As recently as the 1980s, he reports, he often saw them sabotage their daughters’ family business ambitions out of worry that the daughters wouldn’t be desirable moms for their grandchildren. Now, he says, they are championing the daughters as potential CEOs and finding ways to help them meet the demands of being both parents and CEOs.
At the Y.B.A. Kanoo Group, a sixth-generation conglomerate in Bahrain, women family members have been in the company since the fourth generation, some of them overseeing operating divisions, writes Khalid M. Kanoo in The House of Kanoo: A Century of an Arabian Family Business (London Centre of Arab Studies, 1997). The family, according to Kanoo, recognizes “the possibility that one day a talented and ambitious Kanoo woman may seek appointment to the Board…. [As] a part of our corporate evolution, that time will surely come.”
When it comes to women in family business, it’s like the old saying goes: We ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
Sharon Nelton has been writing about women entrepreneurs and family business for more than 20 years. She is a former board member of the Family Firm Institute.
Advice for aspiring female family business leaders
From Marcy Syms, CEO, Syms Corp., Secaucus, N.J.:
• Ask yourself if you really like your family. Do you really want to do 24/7 with these people?
• Next ask yourself, “Do I really like this business?” There’s got to be something within the business itself that turns you on.
• Also ask yourself, “Is this a life sentence or is it a choice?” It has been said that most people hold an average of seven jobs in their lifetime. As you plan your career in your family business, you should also be thinking about exit strategies.
From Paul I. Karofsky of the Transition Consulting Group Inc., based in Weston, Mass., and Palm Beach Gardens, Fla.:
• Be hyper-prepared. Have the knowledge, skills, and experience necessary.
• Go through a career-development process with a coach or mentor. Identify goals and what you need to achieve them. Understand where your company is headed and what its needs are, and assess your own performance every six months.
• Don’t be afraid to make decisions. Members of today’s younger generation tend to be overly consensus-oriented—so much so that decisions don’t necessarily get made well.
From Karen Bressler, CEO, Agar Supply Inc., Taunton, Mass.:
• Be yourself. Don’t think you have to fit into some mold.
• Be patient. Bide your time and be humble while you’re doing it, so you can gain respect on your own merit and not just because you have the same last name as the head of the company.
• Be prepared to make sacrifices and work hard.