Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 22, 1992 TAG: 9203200122
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: B-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MAG POFF BUSINESS WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
But when Koch comes into the office on Saturdays or evenings, chances are her son will be by her side, doing homework.
For Nick, now 7, it's the only way of life he's ever known: having two parents with separate business careers in two different cities.
Sacrificing what many would consider a normal family life is necessary, according to Roanoke Valley women who have advanced to the executive ranks. It reflects the drive shared by several women who hold significant, high-profile jobs in banking, accounting, transportation, industry and health care.
"My husband understands there are two professionals in the family," said Judie Snipes, vice president for quality management at Carilion Health Systems, She, like other female executives said she sees no artificial barriers to continued progress by women in industry. "We're our own barriers," Snipes said.
At Norfolk Southern Corp., "there are a lot of younger, very good women coming up," said Kathryn McQuade, director of tax administration. Her bosses mentored her career, McQuade said, and in her climb "all of my predecessors were men."
"I never felt I was held back," said Ann Harrell, senior vice president and retail division head for Crestar Bank. Top management "has always done the right thing by me."
"I haven't found that much of a physical glass ceiling," said Helene Mawyer, manager of business and development and information systems at General Electric Co. "GE has been very willing to advance women's careers. They've helped me all along."
But by the time her generation came along, Mawyer noted, mathematics was no longer viewed as an unfeminine pursuit. "Perhaps the culture was already changing," she said.
Pat Stowers attributed her position as general records supervisor to "tremendous bosses" at Appalachian Power Co. who taught her a lot about accounting.
"The '80s was a major change decade for women - and men," Koch said, because the pool of trained women is significantly larger. If Dominion Bankshares had barriers, she said, "I wouldn't be where I am."
Their perceptions are borne out in a recent study by Korn/Ferry International, a New York executive recruiting service.
The firm found that the number of its women placed in senior-level positions more than tripled from 1981 to 1991.
Korn/Ferry said 5 percent of its top placements in 1981 were women. The portion rose to 9 percent by 1986 and to 16 percent last year.
"With women today accounting for half of the graduates of our nation's graduate business schools, we . . . expect the number of women placements into senior executive positions to increase dramatically over the next 10 years," according to Korn/Ferry president Richard Ferry.
"There isn't any job that's closed to women today," he said. "The glass ceiling has cracked."
Six of the Roanoke Valley's top women executives came to their positions with varying educational backgrounds and from different directions.
But there are some common threads in their climbs of corporate ladders. All are married to men who support their careers, and most of them are in their 40s. They also share a willingness to work very hard and to sacrifice some aspects of their personal lives for their positions. And all of them succeeded men in their present jobs.
Susan Koch's career demonstrates some of the changes in attitude about executive women over the last two decades.
Koch, 44, once backed away from enrolling in the graduate business administration program at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
That was in 1969, when only three women were enrolled, or about 1 percent of the class, Koch said. "I wasn't really ready to commit myself to a career in business" at that time, she explained.
Instead she took demographic and Middle East studies at Columbia University and spent 10 years directing a Planned Parenthood clinic in Hartford, Conn.
She watched her two brothers earn MBAs and start work at very high salaries. When the youngest graduated with an MBA from Harvard, she said to herself, "I'm at least as smart as he is. I should be making that kind of money."
So she returned to Wharton. Only this time, just a decade later, women made up 30 percent of the class. She married another Wharton MBA candidate and came to Roanoke in 1981 when he took a job with ITT.
Roanoke had few openings for MBAs, Koch found, but she got a job by pioneering what has today become a familiar technique: networking. Her husband's associate at ITT had a wife who worked for Dominion and she delivered Koch's resume to the bank.
Dominion took a chance on her, Koch said, because she had no business experience at all.
Banking was then newly deregulated. Instead of the government telling them what to do, Koch said, banks had to develop and manage their own products, much the way Proctor & Gamble sells soap.
Koch became Dominion's first product manager. Her initial responsibility was travelers checks. It wasn't one of Dominion's most important products, she said, "but I made it a profitable one."
In 1989, Koch developed the Dominion Premier program, built around incentives for a total consumer banking relationship in both deposits and loans. It was an enormous success in the amount of new business it generated for Dominion "which was significant. . . . "Thank goodness," she said.
Koch was promoted last November to senior vice president for marketing.
"Marketing is messy and chaotic. . . . Marketing is like the liberal arts of business."
It's more than advertising and public relations, she said. It involves financial analysis, an ability to write and a visual sense.
"It's the voice of the customer inside the organization," Koch said.
Nine years ago, her husband went to work for a private engineering firm in Washington. That meant maintaining two households. They have houses here and there.
"We're still happily married," Koch said, adding that her own childhood makes the situation seem natural. When she grew up in Cincinnati, her father spent the work-week away from his family, as brewmaster at the Wooden Shoe Brewery in Minster, Ohio.
At first, "I could focus on my work during the week, then go off to Washington and have a nice time." When Nick came along, her husband took over the weekend commute although they enjoy occasional visits to the nation's capital.
Koch admits she has sometimes thought of looking for work in Washington, but: "A. I really like my job a lot; and B. It's a great place to raise a kid. . . . Roanoke is just more of a family town. I like it here a lot. I've never really been tempted" to leave.
She advises young women on the way up to "choose your mate carefully." And a key to success is a good baby sitter, she said, the major issue among working mothers.
Koch cited two men in her department who are in their 30s and greatly involved in raising their children. It's never assumed the mother will be the one to take time off when a child is sick. "The responsibility is much more shared," she said.
Older executives now in power didn't have working wives, Koch said, but they see their sons and daughters coping with new definitions of family.
The next generation of CEOs, Koch said, will have a different view of the world. "When it's your life or has touched you personally," Koch said, it affects your attitudes."
Her boss, Dominion Chairman Warner Dalhouse, said he has asked his managers to find minorities and women "to put into important jobs. It's in our best interest from a lot of perspectives." Women, he said, bring "a subtle benefit to the bank."
He said women like Susan Koch and Carol Jarratt, who runs Dominion's retail banking division for Western Virginia, are professional, intelligent, organized, tough and dependable. Their judgment is sound, he said, and they make strategic decisions for the whole company.
But behind them, Dalhouse said, "there are a lot more women now in the mix."
Just 15 years ago, he said, all corporate lending officers were male. Now Susan Boyle handles many of Dominion's largest and most important corporate customers.
Even greater numbers of women are at the entry level for today's business.
Mawyer of GE said more women are studying engineering, mathematics and other high-tech subjects.
But she believes acceptance of women, now common at GE, is uneven at other industries. The machine tool industry, for instance, is "a male domain."
Mawyer has learned to work with those industries and even with GE's Japanese partners. She said her title, her doctorate and acceptance of her proposed business plan contributed to their respect.
McQuade of Norfolk Southern said women fill more than half of accounting classes today, forming a pool for future business leaders. The financial industry, she said, is "a hot one for women."
Snipes at Carilion said today's top managers are the men who trained under the GI Bill after World War II. Women were not in that pool of qualified candidates.
If there are inequalities, Snipes said, it's because women were unaware of their opportunities even though they dominate the health care industry.
Until 10 or 15 years ago, she said, women aimed to be directors of nursing rather than hospital administrators. Today, Snipes said, women are entering the programs and achieving high places in administration.
But women must work the same long hours as their male counterparts if they want to reach high executive positions.
Mawyer, for example, is at her desk by 7:30 or 8 in the morning and leaves, with work in her briefcase, at 7 or 7:30 p.m. Her goal is to manage a small business segment at GE.
McQuade is at work by 8 a.m. and stays until 7 or 8 p.m. because she uses the quiet evening hours to plan the days and weeks ahead. She is "very content with my job the way it is," but any top job "requires a lot of personal sacrifices."
Stowers, on the other hand, is at her desk at Apco at 6 a.m. "I'm an early person. I'm at my best in the morning," hours she uses to study new office techniques and procedures. Stowers stays late into the evenings when books are closed the first few days of the month.
Harrell gets to work at Crestar by 8 a.m. and leaves in the evening about 6:30. And she's usually back on Saturdays.
"I'm committed to spending the time" to perform the job of running Crestar's 17 local branches, Harrell said. But it's no burden to her because "I love my job."
Noting she was on the leading edge of the baby boom generation, Harrell said she spent her working years "really focused" on her career, taking care of her family and balancing those two aspects of her life.
But the world of women may be turning yet again.
Harrell's 25-year-old daughter is a full-time housewife. "She is very, very happy," Harrell said. "She's not quite as driven as her mother."
Profiles\
Susan Koch: After a graduate program in population and Middle East studies, Susan Koch, 44, started her first career as director of a family planning clinic in Hartford, Conn.
She came to Roanoke in 1981 because her husband found a job here with ITT.
Dominion Bankshares Corp. she started as a product manager and worked her way up to senior vice president of marketing. She now has a commuting marriage because her husband's career took him to Washington. They have a 7-year-old son.
Pat Stowers: A graduate of Saltville High School, Stowers, 57, came to Roanoke to study secretarial science at the former Virginia Southern College. But she found she didn't like typing, so she switched to accounting.
She started as a junior clerk in Appalachian Power Co.'s accounting department and soon was "promoted" to stenographer. Stowers quit rather than type and found another accounting job with Apco in Point Pleasant, W.Va.
When she returned to Roanoke to marry, Apco took her back in its accounting department. She bacame its supervisor in the 1970s.
Her husband is a senior technician in the engineering group at General Electric Co. As for children, "I've not been one of the lucky people."
Ann Harrell worked more than 15 years for a bank in Brownsville, Tenn., starting as a note clerk in 1968. With the goal of learning "everything I could," she earned an associate degree in bank management and rose to vice president and manager of retail lending.
She moved to Roanoke in 1984 when her husband became dean of academic and student affairs at Virginia Western Community College.
Harrell responded to an ad placed by Colonial American National Bank in a Sunday newspaper and became its retail manager. She and her Crestar counterpart shared the title after the banks merged in 1989. Last June the man who shared the position left the bank rather than accept a transfer. And Harrell, 46, was elevated to senior vice president in January. She has a daughter who is 25.
Helene Mawyer: A graduate of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, Helene Mawyer, 42, earned a doctorate in theoretical mathematics at the University of Virginia.
She started as a mathematician in an engineering function for General Electric Co. at Syracuse, N.Y., about a year ago became manager of business development and information systems for the drive systems division in Salem.
Her husband is in a construction-related business in Salem. They decided not to have children because, "I felt I wouldn't have been able to give children the amount of attention that I think they needed."
Judie Snipes: The Roanoke native graduated from Roanoke Memorial School of Nursing and worked there as a staff nurse. But in the late 1970s health care administration became her goal. She commuted to the College of William and Mary until she earned a master's in business administration. Her son, now 21, entered college just as she graduated. At 45, she is Carilion Health systems vice president for quality management.
by CNB