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Thursday, May 17, 2012
Feature: June 2009
Leading Ladies
Local execs who buck boardroom trends
Story by Russell Nichols
Women don’t belong in the boardroom — or at least it might seem that way if you look at the 400 largest publicly held corporations based in California.
The UC Davis Graduate School of Management with the Forum for Women Entrepreneurs and Executives examined these companies for the fourth annual “UC Davis Study of California Women Business Leaders: A Census of Women Directors and Executive Officers.”
The study revealed, among other things, that women hold only 10.9 percent of board seats and top executive officer positions, virtually unchanged from the prior year. Also, 177 of those 400 companies have no women in top executive positions or on the board of directors. Only 13 have a female CEO.
Despite advances in science and technology and the nontraditional nature of California, these statistics reveal a staggering truth about women and the corporate world.
“The corporate structure is very closed off,” says Nicole Woolsey Biggart, dean of the UC Davis
Graduate School of Management. “The people in those top positions simply borrowed the patterns that existed before in the U.S. It’s a very conservative way to pick smart, capable people.”
One key factor in the disparity is that women network differently than men, says Wendy Beecham, whose Bay Area-based organization co-authored the study and whose mission is to get more women onto boards and into executive offices.
Men, she says, form weak ties, making strategic bonds with people who can help them reach a specific goal. Women, on the other hand, develop stronger relationships with smaller groups. This contradicts the modern corporate model, which suggests it’s all about who you know rather than how well you know them.
“Women really do need to learn how to network differently in order to break in,” Beecham says, adding that 80 percent of board positions are filled through networking and “men network with people they know.”
But Beecham also says this boardroom imbalance goes beyond gender and that it really highlights corporate culture and stereotypes. Other countries such as Norway and Spain, she says, have created legislation to have women on boards.
“I don’t know that that will ever happen here in the U.S.,” she says. “It’s really interesting the steps people have had to take to create diversity where it doesn’t exist.”
Jonna Ward
President and CEO, Visionary Integration Professionals LLC
VIP is a global technology and outsourcing firm providing solutions to private industry as well as federal, state and local government.
Headquarters: Folsom
Year founded: 1996
2009 projected revenue: $158 million
Full-time employees: 900+
Mantra: “Commit with conviction; execute with pride.”
Biggart took major steps a few years back when Apple Inc. had no women on its board of directors. She says her group targeted the company with an Op-Ed piece in the San Jose Mercury News. One month later, in January 2008, Apple appointed Andrea Jung, CEO of Avon Products Inc., to the board.
The following three women have made similar strides. In the male-dominated industries of information technology, transportation and construction, these women have built and grown their own businesses, and now they sit at the top of companies that compete with the best. They have endured despite the odds and proved that nobody has any business telling them where they belong.
Information technology
Elko, a rural speck in the northeast corner of Nevada, is no destination city. Between Salt Lake City and Reno, it is a middle-of-nowhere place most people drive through en route to bigger cities with brighter lights. This is also the place where Jonna Ward grew up.
Her father migrated from Spain at age 16 with an eighth-grade education. But he had the spirit of an entrepreneur. He and Ward’s mother owned a Basque bar and restaurant in Elko, which served family-style Spanish cuisine. In the restaurant, Ward recalls, her parents always had free appetizers at the bar, knew the names of local customers and chatted with travelers who dropped in for a quick bite.
“That small-town work ethic was instilled in me at a young age,” says Ward, who founded Visionary Integration Professionals, an information technology consulting company, in 1996.
Now, with 900 staff members and offices across the country and in India, Ward holds her own in a male-dominated field by putting people first.
Females make up about 25 percent of the nation’s IT work force of 3.6 million, according to the Information Technology Association of America.
Based on a study by research firm Sheila Greco Associates, only 13 percent of IT vice presidents and chief financial officers are women; their salaries are estimated to be about 9 percent lower than salaries of men.
Leilanie Steers
Founder and CEO,
Freight Solution Providers
Freight Solution Providers is a leading freight-forwarder specializing in solutions for complex logistics for Fortune 500 companies across North America.
Headquarters: Sacramento
Year founded: 1989
2009 projected revenue: Would not disclose
Full-time employees: 150
Mantra: “Service first.”
But money was not Ward’s motivation. After graduating from the University of Nevada, Reno, she worked for Accenture Limited, a global consulting company. Money was good, but the company was too big. So in 1995, she quit.
“In a very large multibillion-dollar organization, I didn’t like having two masters,” she says. “I didn’t like having corporate as one master and the customer as a separate master. I believe there should be a single master who puts bread and butter on the table, which is our clients.”
Ward started VIP with 10 employees. She believed success would come if she concentrated on keeping customers and staff satisfied. VIP made $275,000 in revenue that first year, and $1.9 million one year later. In 2008, Ward’s company made $148.7 million.
Tina Moore, “employee No. 32,” started in the company with a back-office job. The day before she left for a weeklong vacation, she went to talk to Ward about changing positions. By the time she came back, Moore had a new job in the company. Now she is director of operations.
This is common in Ward’s company. Few people in the office have their original titles because Ward wants her employees to expand their careers, says Melanie Topp, director of human resources and recruiting.
But with her company growing so fast, does Ward worry that VIP might become one of those big impersonal companies she worked so hard to get away from?
“All I can tell you is we’re not there yet,” she says. “I’m not convinced you ever have to become one of those. Even at the $150 million mark, that’s still a long way from $20 billion in revenue. It’s a couple zeros away from an IBM.”
Transportation and freight
From the cornfields in the Philippines to her current position as CEO of the largest minority- and female-owned freight forwarding company in the country, Leilanie Steers has always been on the move.
In the past 20 years, Steers has taken Freight Solution Providers to the forefront of the transportation field by working around the clock, bidding for jobs to transport high-tech equipment and making sure the right parts made it to the right place in a timely manner.
“We get e-mails from her at 3 and 4 in the morning that we don’t see until we get in at 7 or 8,” says Jeff Adams, the company’s “first employee,” who is now the executive vice president. “Leilanie took it upon herself to literally have the laptop in the bedroom.”
Out of 68 million women employed in the U.S., 39 percent worked in management, professional and related occupations, but only 6 percent worked in production, transportation and material moving jobs, according to the 2007 U.S. Department of Labor.
Dorene C. Dominguez
President, Vanir Group
of Companies
Vanir focuses on real estate development, construction management and green energy. Vanir also supports philanthropy through its nonprofit, The Vanir Foundation.
Headquarters: Sacramento
Year founded: 1964
2009 projected revenue: Would not disclose
Full-time employees: Would not disclose
Mantra: “Solution for success.”
In this ever-moving industry, where the perseverant prevail and the sluggish often get left in the dust, Steers’ drive stems from the trials of her childhood.
Steers grew up poor in the Philippines. As a child, she moved from house to house. On some nights, she had to share one cup of rice divided among eight or more people; other times, she had to work for food.
“I used to sell bottles and papers with my brother at 4 in the morning to be able to eat that day,” she says. “But it was not unusual for younger children to be working.”
But those hardships, she says, did push her to pursue another path. Her sister’s marriage to a man in the U.S. Navy allowed Steers to come to America. She was 16 when she landed in Hawaii in the late ’70s. Eventually, she found her way to California.
After making $1,300 a month at a local electrical company for four years, Steers decided to ask for a raise. Her manager turned her down, but she used the rejection as fuel to launch her own company in 1989. (“I thank him for not giving me that raise.”)
The company started out in a 1,600-square-foot office with two phones and lawn chairs for furniture. In the beginning, it was difficult for clients to see past her gender.
“At that time,” she says, “when you would tell them you were a certified minority woman-owned company, it was actually a turnoff. I had to go out and sell my company without telling them who I was.”
In two decades, FSP has come a long way. Now operating across from Mather Field, Steers manages about 230 staff nationwide with her husband, company President Ken Steers. They host Christmas parties and fly nonlocal staff to Tahoe or Monterey every year for three days.
Perhaps Steers’ most beloved perk is that her company pays 100 percent of medical and dental benefits. For her, giving back is a big deal because she knows how far she’s come.
“I always remember the struggles I’ve had in the past,” she says. “It was a tough life. But it made me who I am now, made me more driven.”
Construction and development
Away from the clamor of construction gears and the smell of dust and dirt, Dorene C. Dominguez finds peace in her private garden.
Located behind her Granite Bay home, this is where Dominguez settles down when she’s not flying to meet with clients or checking on projects. But even in this garden — a patch of diverse flowers and ponds filled with koi — Dominguez is never really separated from her work as president and chairman of the board of Vanir Group of Companies. Because both the garden and her business were built by the same man: her late father, H. Frank Dominguez.
In the wide field of construction, Dominguez is part of a small segment. As of 2006, women comprised only 9.6 percent of the work force, according to the National Association of Women in Construction. Between 1997 and 2002, however, women-owned firms grew 20 percent.
Even with her petite 5-foot frame, Dominguez wasn’t intimidated by the male-dominated industry. She was born into the business: Her father started Vanir Development Company Inc. in 1964 when she was 1. In high school, she spent summers working for the family-owned company. When she went to the University of Notre Dame — as the first in her family to go to college — she was still surrounded mostly by men.
“I learned to (study) with the boys at an early age,” she says.
In the past four decades, the Vanir companies — Vanir Construction Management Inc., Vanir Development Company Inc. and Vanir Construction Company Inc. — have completed several billion dollars in construction services, real estate development projects and design-build leases.
When her father passed away about six years ago, Dominguez took over the company. Now she manages a staff of more than 300 with offices in various states and in Dubai. She travels often. When she’s in town, she works from the company’s three-story, 60,000-square-foot building in Natomas that’s named after her father.
As much as she learned from her father, Dominguez says she manages the company differently than a man might. For one, she says, she focuses more on building relationships and fostering collaboration.
“I don’t walk up and say ‘I’m the boss, and it has to be this way.’ ... I like collaborating,” she says.
But she stands her ground when necessary, says Alex Leon, Vanir’s chief financial officer, who has known her since 1977.
“I’ve been in meetings where she’s come up against somebody who tried to push her into a corner,” he says. “But she doesn’t back down.”
Dominguez believes diversification is the key to growth. Last year, she started Vanir Energy, a solar-thermal power company that manufactures and installs solar panels. The company recently outfitted a 900,000-square-foot facility in North Carolina, a project billed as the largest installation of solar-thermal heating-and-cooling technology in the world.
In memory of her father, she founded The Vanir Foundation in 2004, which adopts schools. On days when Dominguez returns home, she relaxes and reflects on his legacy while her mother plants in the garden.
“I know my father is proud of the company,” she says. “He’s looking down from heaven, and he’s happy with what he sees.”
photographer Kyle Monk
