Women Hit The Roof Over Bank's Glass Ceiling

Eric Ellis, San Francisco

12/09/1998

AS MANY merger and takeover victims know, corporate culture clash is a delicate thing to contend with.

It most often concerns issues of management style, such as when the hard-nosed button-down America Online of tradition-steeped Virginia meets the pizza-munching geeks of Silicon Valley's Netscape.

Or it can be competing nationalities, such as when the detailed perfectionists of Germany's Daimler-Benz get together with the earthy Chrysler of the US. But what about when it concerns the sensitive area of gender? And when it happens in liberated San Francisco?

That question titillated corporate America this week when it was revealed that six of out of the 10 ranking female executives of San Francisco-based Bank America have resigned since it was merged with (read taken over by) the North Carolina-based NationsBank.

The San Francisco Chronicle said that of the four top women executives who are still with BA, all have been demoted.

Southern Good Ol' Boy misogynist meets Liberated Corporate Woman? With a record like that, it's a tempting conclusion.

The paper said that one of the six former BA executives had produced an explosive five-page memo of grievances.

The central plank of the memo was the claim that the entire generation of female executives created during (the past 25 years) had been wiped out in the wake of the takeover.

One of the disgruntled executives was quoted as saying: "I don't think they had any intention of having me in a position of influence.

"They harbour a feeling about women that they should have bumblebees on their shoulders and be playing tennis at the club."

The old Bank America had often been hailed by women's affairs groups as being an enlightened employer when it comes to promoting women executives.

The New York research group, Catalyst, which specialises in women's affairs, says that just 11 per cent of executives of the Fortune 500 major US companies are women.

Before the merger, some 11 of the bank's 45 senior executives were women, a higher average than Catalyst's data.

It's a policy that extends into its marketing where women, often young professionals, are featured prominently in its advertising pitches.

It's been a successful pitch, particularly in nearby gender-blind Silicon Valley, where female tech executives, such as venture capitalist Anne Winblad, Australia-born Katrina Garnett, of Crossworlds and Kim Polese, of hot internet company Marimba, are standard-bearers.

This is in contrast to Nations - led by the famously hard-driving Hugh McColl - which has prospered in the economy of the so-called New South and all the presumed baggage that comes with that.

Indeed, San Franciscan feminist sensibilities were rankled in the weeks just after the merger when Nations produced a hearts-and-minds internal video to explain the implications of the merger to employees.

Waxing lyrical about the future of the new unit, McColl spoke of having the best men in banking.

Many are willing to give McColl the benefit of the doubt. In October, he said that any organisation that wants to be America's bank is going to have to reflect the country's diversity.

An exclusive club of old, white males is not on the program. He may want to heed his own words.

Another sign that Nations may have installed a glass ceiling at BA is the fact that no women are on its new-look executive management team. The pre-merger BA had two.

Nations and BA have naturally denied the charges and point to the four out of 19 directors who are women, which they say puts the merged unit in fifth place of the top 50 US companies with women on the board.

What they didn't say was that Nations got all four of them from the BA merger. It had none before.

The takeover is already a sore point in San Francisco, which likes to think of itself as one of America's major financial centres, a claim long anchored by the presence of Bank America.

But with Nations moving its head office away from the city, already riled tempers have boiled over with this latest furore. It doesn't sit well with Nations' declared aim to create the US's first truly national bank from this merger.

A bank spokesman said that the published reports used anonymous sources and unfairly generalised about the management team. Most of the female executives cited in the report were offered very important positions in the new company.

Interestingly, the Nations drama comes in the middle of a spate of glossy magazine lists detailing the increasing clout of women in American corporate and public life, extending way beyond Attorney-General Janet Reno, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and First Lady Hillary Clinton.

Fortune recently published extensive well-publicised features in recent weeks celebrating the achievements of people such as Marjorie Scardino, who is turning around sclerotic British media-based conglomerate Pearson, of Financial Times and Baywatch fame, or Jill Barad, who runs toy giant Mattel and Sherry Lansing, chief executive of Paramount studios.

Those eminently successful women executives were also featured in a similar Vanity Fair list recently that lauded their achievements.

But even Vanity Fair seemed to have its own glass ceiling. The edition had Brad Pitt on the cover.