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Panhandle powers

In perhaps the most conservative major city in Florida, many women have cracked the glass ceiling.

By LOUIS HAU
Published April 10, 2005

PENSACOLA - Evon Emerson has seen a lot in her years as a bank executive and as head of her management consulting firm.

Nothing, however, tops what she sees in the executive suites of the Pensacola business community:

The president and chief executive of the electric utility is a woman.

The publisher of the daily newspaper is a woman.

The local managing director of Merrill Lynch. The West Panhandle president of Wachovia Bank. The top supervisors at the area's two largest manufacturing plants.

All are women.

That has left some local observers wide-eyed in amazement, none more so than Emerson, 65, who took over the helm of the Pensacola Bay Area Chamber of Commerce in 2002 to become the chamber's first female chief administrator in its 113-year history.

"I wish I could say there's something magical about all of this happening," she says. "Maybe there is - there's something bigger than we are."

Aside from Emerson's appointment, the rise of a new female business elite in Pensacola is the result of decisions made at corporate offices outside the area, rather than the outcome of sudden changes in the local community.

Still, there is no escaping its symbolic importance, especially considering that it is all happening in what is perhaps the most conservative major city in Florida - a city where no woman has served as mayor and where nine out of 10 City Council members are men.

Take the appointment two years ago of Susan Story to president and chief executive of Gulf Power Co. Gulf isn't the largest employer in the Pensacola area, but it is one of the city's most prominent corporate citizens, its headquarters housed in a modern glass-and-brick building that looms over Bayfront Parkway.

Story, a longtime executive at Gulf parent Southern Co. of Atlanta, says she was surprised and gratified to learn she wasn't the only top female executive in town.

"Nowhere I had worked, (even) in much bigger cities, did I see this type of female representation at the top ranks," Story says. "I thought it was a real neat thing."

The convergence of so many female executive appointments in Pensacola is a dramatic illustration of a more modest nationwide upswing in the number of women who gradually are climbing to the peaks of their respective professions.

In 1986, when the Wall Street Journal first popularized the term "glass ceiling," Katharine Graham of the Washington Post Co. was the only woman heading a Fortune 500 company. Now there are female chief executives at nine Fortune 500 companies. (The most visible CEO - Carly Fiorina of Hewlett-Packard - resigned in February.)

According to the most recent figures compiled by Catalyst, a New York research and advocacy group, women accounted for 15.3 percent of corporate officers at Fortune 500 companies in 2002, up from 8.7 percent in 1995. Catalyst figures also show that 5.2 percent of the top earners at such companies were female, up from 1.2 percent in 1995.

The rising number of women in senior executive jobs stems from changes within corporate America and in society as a whole.

During the past two decades, there has been a dramatic shift in corporate attitudes, with a greater emphasis placed on the value of diversity in the work force, including at the leadership level. As a result, executive search committees have become more aggressive in seeking out qualified women to promote to top positions, says Joyce Jacobsen, an economist at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn.

Explicit prejudice against female candidates for executive appointments is rarer than in the past, observers say. But more subtle hurdles persist in the form of unspoken but deep-seated views on gender roles, which tend to ascribe leadership qualities - such as assertiveness and ambition - more readily to men than women, according to Northwestern University psychologist Alice Eagly.

Still, she said in a 2003 study, what management consultants and organizational experts define as good leadership has evolved in recent years to incorporate more "feminine" elements, such as team-based skills, democratic relationships and participatory decisionmaking.

"The appearance of female leaders in greater numbers than in the past and their success in these roles portend increasing representation of women in leadership roles in the future," Eagly said.

While women have long held leadership positions in fields such as education, marketing and the nonprofit sector, the expanding ranks of female executives include many in less traditional industries as well.

It's a phenomenon that can be seen in the Pensacola area, where three female engineers have risen to top positions. They include industrial engineer Story; mechanical engineer Nicki Slusser, plant manager for International Paper Co.'s pulp and paper mill in Pensacola; and chemical engineer Rebecca Peterson, plant manager for Solutia Inc.'s nylon-fiber plant in nearby Cantonment. (Solutia was formed in 1997 from the spun-off chemical operations of Monsanto Co.)

Peterson, 46, says she had always excelled in math and chemistry as a kid and never thought her interests were unusual for a girl - at least not until she wrapped up her undergraduate studies at Georgia Institute of Technology in 1980.

"Even at Tech, there were women in my classes," she says. "It wasn't 50-50, but it was probably 25 percent women, so it didn't seem all that weird to me."

Then, Peterson adds with a laugh, "I went out and started interviewing (for jobs) and I'm looking around and going, "There are no women. None.' I was very naive and I learned a lot pretty quick."

Still, when she began her career at Monsanto in the early 1980s, it was a time when the chemical industry was making a concerted effort to promote more female supervisors, she says.

"I always felt there were people out there pulling for me," she says.

Story, 45, says a dearth of female engineers is a major reason why there are relatively few female executives in the utility and construction industries.

"Having an engineering degree gives you a lot of technical credibility, which helped my career considerably," she says.

Story thinks more women should be encouraged to study math and science, and said she was distressed by the highly publicized remarks made in January by Harvard University president Lawrence Summers, who seemed to suggest that gender differences may help determine aptitude in those fields.

"I don't totally negate everything he said," Story says. "There are physiological differences in men's and women's brains. It's not better, worse, good, bad - it's just different. . . . I think I know what he was trying to get at. However, how he did it and the blanket statement he made was very destructive."

Story and Peterson stand out in their respective fields because they work in industries where women leaders are relatively scarce. But their training and work experience were fairly conventional for the jobs they hold today.

Susan Cruz, meanwhile, managed the unusual trick of parlaying an entry-level job as an administrative assistant for Merrill Lynch into a successful career that culminated in her appointment in 2001 to head up the firm's operations in the western Panhandle and southern Alabama.

After a couple of years processing loan documents at a Sarasota bank, Cruz joined Merrill when she was a 24-year-old married mother of two without a college degree. By dint of hard work and pestering her boss to let her get trained as a financial adviser, Cruz rose in the ranks. After nearly a decade at the firm, she entered Merrill's management-training program at the urging of a female manager she knew.

"I quickly figured out that this was a business that I really liked," Cruz says. "I just was able to prove to them how hard I would work and that I had the desire to do this type of work. I guess persistence was part of it."

Earlier in her career, Cruz worked full days at the office, attended night school to earn a college degree and raised her children.

Cruz, 46, divorced, remarried and had two more kids. Today, her husband, Lenny, a former college football coach, is a stay-at-home dad, a decision they reached five years ago after their live-in nanny left to get married.

"There's no way I could do what I'm doing today if he didn't do that," Cruz says. "There's not enough energy around to make it happen and to create the home life that we have. He has done a phenomenal job. It's not something that every husband can do. I'm very fortunate."

Similarly, Peterson and her husband, Kyle, an electrical engineer, decided four years ago that he would stay home with their son and daughter, now 12 and 15, respectively.

"From my perspective, I think it would be very difficult to have two people in very high-profile type (jobs) and raise a family if you wanted to be there at all," Peterson says. "It's a challenge and it's a struggle. You try to do the very best you can."

Peterson says balancing work and family weighs particularly heavily on working women. Men face these challenges too, "but it's a little bit different," she says.

Long before female executives and supervisors began appearing in large numbers, the traditional task of raising kids made women natural managers who were accustomed to dealing with constant and disruptive change in their lives, Cruz says.

"There's nothing that makes you more flexible than a 2 year old," she quips.

Aside from occasional instances in the past when male supervisors or subordinates may have said or done things that expressed displeasure or discomfort at working with a woman, Pensacola's female supervisors and executives say their employers have provided supportive environments for their career advancement.

But that's not to say that special pressures don't exist for women working in jobs that previously had been handled almost exclusively by men.

"The hardest thing is being the first," Story says. "When you're the first, you're not only trying to perform and produce for yourself but it's almost like people are tacking on your whole group. . . . The first ones have all of this weight on their shoulders because they know if I blow it, there are going to be some who will generalize."

Peterson says women aren't as likely to get the benefit of the doubt as men, at least initially.

"When people meet you, they make assumptions about you, whether about your height, weight, sex, nationality," she says. "So you start at a certain place and from those assumptions, it takes time for them to figure out where you really are. . . . It's that initial period of figuring out, is she good or not. Once they figure that out, then you're okay."

But, Peterson adds laughing, "you better not have a screw-up too early or you're surely totally doomed."

A desire to prove herself has occasionally led to humorous results, she says. Peterson recalls how a female foreman she knew in St. Louis once told her that her male colleagues laughed at her for carrying an umbrella when it rained because it "was just unbelievably feminine or something."

Since hearing that story, Peterson has worn a hardhat and a rain slicker when it rains. But she never, ever carries an umbrella.

"You care about what people's perceptions are," she says, "and if they believe that demonstrating you're one of the boys - one of the gang, that you belong there - means that you don't carry an umbrella, then you don't carry an umbrella."

Carol Carlan, a former SunTrust Bank and Nations Bank executive who was named West Panhandle president of Wachovia Bank in 2002, says early mentors - most of them men - were crucial in encouraging her to set her sights high.

Carlan, 50, emphasizes the importance of making one's aspirations known to those in a position to help you.

"Tell people what you want, share your dreams," she says. "I think you will be amazed at how the majority of everybody around you wants to be helpful and is very giving. The ones that aren't, don't waste your time on them."

American society has come a long way from the traditional gender roles that were idealized on old TV sitcoms like The Donna Reed Show, Carlan says.

"The husband comes home from work, the wife has been at home, she's dressed up, has the beautiful hairdo, dinner's on the table, she's serving a martini - you know," she says with a laugh.

The burgeoning sisterhood of Pensacola female business executives, which includes other top managers such as Pensacola News Journal president and publisher Denise Ivey, occasionally meets for lunch to talk shop and compare notes.

"It's actually really fun," Cruz says. "We're all extremely busy so we don't get to communicate as often as we'd like to, but when we do, it's nice to share we're going through this, we're going through that."

The principal organizer of the lunches is chamber president Emerson who, as the oldest of the group, plays the role of den mother.

"That's a way that I just try to keep people connected because I think that this is unique," she says. "There are things we can talk about together, just like guys have things they talk about together. I just think it's important for us to know that we're here for each other and if anybody needs anything, pick up the phone and call."

Emerson says working women today are advancing further than previous generations partly because they have learned to be more assertive in the rough-and-tumble corporate America.

"And I don't mean "aggressive,' " she adds quickly. "If (men) are really hacked off at somebody, it's because she's aggressive. If they really like somebody who's done the same thing, it's because she's assertive.

"Aggressive tends to rub people kind of like an emery board," she says. "Assertive tends to file the nail off and you don't even know it's been filed."

Emerson has convened lunches to celebrate the appointment of women to prestigious jobs outside the local business community as well, including Jean Norman, a former development director at Pensacola PBS affiliate WSRE-TV who recently was named president and chief executive of the United Way of Escambia County, and Casey Rodgers, who was appointed in 2003 as a U.S. District Court judge in the court's Pensacola division.

"I'm just thrilled with the association that I have with these women," Emerson says, adding that, "Here's an example where there are a whole group of women in this one community that made it through the glass ceiling. They broke it."

Louis Hau can be reached at 813 226-3404 or hau@sptimes.com

[Last modified April 10, 2005, 00:39:14]