THEY DON’T FAVOR WOMEN Hard-core feminists might call the FORTUNE Seven queen bees—women who move ahead but don’t pull along their sisters. Except for Dede Brooks, who wants to recruit female managers at Sotheby’s, these women don’t think about affirmative action. They don’t try to promote or even hire females. As Jill Barad says, “To get the best person, your approach has to be gender-free.” Charlotte Beers’s rule of recruiting is: “Don’t hire anyone you wouldn’t want to have dinner with.” It’s pure coincidence, then, that the CEO-to-be at Ogilvy & Mather is a woman: Shelly Lazarus, the level-headed, pragmatic, unpretentious foil to Beers. When she joined Ogilvy 25 years ago, she was the only woman among 100 account managers. Six months pregnant with her first child in 1973, she became the company’s first female account supervisor. She has consistently sought out difficult assignments that no one else wanted. Direct marketing was a dud business when she moved into it. “I didn’t care,” says Lazarus. “I wanted to run something.” She built up Ogilvy’s direct-marketing unit, and then she turned around the agency’s beleaguered New York office. Hoisted to higher-profile posts by Beers, Lazarus looks like an overnight sensation after 25 years. Following the footsteps of her boss, Lazarus doesn’t favor females. She angered working mothers at Ogilvy by forbidding anyone who works part time or flextime to become a senior partner (Ogilvy has 162 senior partners, 63 of whom are women). “Just because you’re a woman with a child, you can’t be allowed lower standards of performance,” Lazarus says.
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From Pattie Sellers’ 1996 FORTUNE piece “Women, Sex, and Power.”
(WOMEN, SEX, AND POWER - Fortune.com)
How quickly things change, and also not. I still wish that more people had this philosophy:
As Jill Barad says, “To get the best person, your approach has to be gender-free.”
