By KATE BERRY
Women have a small presence on the corporate boards of large publicly traded companies in Orange, Los Angeles and Riverside counties.
Just 7% of the directors’ seats at Southern California’s large public companies are represented by women,about half the national average.
More than half of the locally based public companies have no women on their boards, according to a report by the L.A. chapter of the National Association of Women Business Owners.
Of 219 companies surveyed, 68 had one woman board member and 24 had two, including Santa Ana-based Ingram Micro Inc.
Irvine chipmaker Broadcom Corp. added two female directors to its board in the past two weeks: Maureen Grzelakowski, a Chicago-based consultant for Internet and telecommunications companies, and Nancy Handel, financial chief at Santa Clara’s Applied Materials Inc., a maker of chip production gear.
One company, Hot Topic Inc., a teen apparel retailer in Industry, had three women board members. Newport Beach-based Pacific Life Insurance Co. counted four female directors, the most in Southern California.
The area ranked behind Boston, Chicago and New York in the number of women board members,in part because relatively few Fortune 1000 companies are based here. Nationally, women board members make up about 12% of directorships at Fortune 1000 businesses.
Renee White Fraser, president and chief executive of Fraser Communications, a Los Angeles advertising agency, said she expected Sarbanes-Oxley legislation would provide opportunity for women because of the requirement that more directors be independent.
“When you speak to men about it, they say there aren’t enough women with CEO experience because they haven’t been in the pipeline long enough,” she said. “But there are plenty of women at the senior vice president level,so why aren’t they on boards?”
Another problem is that women who make it to the board level become de facto representatives of their sex, serving on several boards.
Vilma Martinez, a lawyer at Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP in Los Angeles, serves on four boards,Aliso Viejo-based Fluor Corp., St. Louis-based Anheuser-Busch Cos., Fort Worth, Texas-based Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp. and San Francisco-based Bank of the West.
Larger companies are less likely to change their corporate cultures to include women or minorities, said Judy Rosener, a professor at the Paul Merage School of Business at University of California, Irvine. Rosener said they will change, but only because of media scrutiny.
“There are far more people employed by women and small businesses than there are by Fortune 1000 firms,” she said. “But it’s much harder to count up all the little companies. In Southern California, they are the engines of growth. That’s where women board members can be found.”
Many women are more likely to own their own companies and hire women to work under them, said Lane Nemeth, a director at Small World Kids Inc. in Culver City and founder of PetLane, a marketing company that sells pet products.
Large public companies tend to tap women executives from other large companies for director positions, Nemeth said.
“There is still a huge glass ceiling, and I think for a lot of companies women are still invisible,” she said.
Executives of most local companies in the survey chose not to return calls.
“I’m uncomfortable with the subject of what different things they bring (to the table) because it implies that there are differences,” said Bob Haskell, senior vice president of public affairs at Pacific Life. “All board members are different and they all have particular strengths and the women don’t all bring the same strengths.”
The nonprofit National Association of Women Business Owners culled its survey information from the Los Angeles Business Journal’s list of 200 public companies, as well as Fortune 1000 companies based in Southern California.
Berry is a staff writer with the Los Angeles Business Journal.
