America's Mixed Record on Women's Advancement - Building Gender Balanced Business

• For all its progress, the United States still has a way to go in terms of gender parity, especially in business.

• That’s not news to readers of this site, but Albert Hunt, the Bloomberg News executive editor for Washington, lays out the positives and negatives on America’s gender report card. Alas, our guess is his grade for business is at best a C.

• “Of the largest Fortune 500 companies, only 15 have women chief executive officers. There are no female CEOs among the 25 largest companies, and … [m]anagers that make personnel decisions and board rooms are overwhelmingly male.”

• Hunt goes on to quote Dina Dublon, former chief financial officer of JPMorgan Chase: “A culture that is homogeneous is more likely to reject differences.”

• And he makes the point of listing the many bedeviled finance companies, the Lehman Bros. and Countrywides of America — and how all were headed by men.

• The positives? The judiciary, with more than a quarter of federal judges being women; academia, with four Ivy League schools headed by women; and student bodies, with women making up 58% of undergraduates picking up their degrees in the 2009 graduation season.

• “Higher education is a barometer of how far women are advancing in US society over the past several generations,” Hunt writes. But it would be nice to see more of those gains in business, too.

Albert Hunt’s column for Bloomberg News