Making Sure Women Count in the Workplace

With statistics on female business owners lacking, women’s issues lost impact. A new council will change that.

Here’s one story that never got written.

A Wall Street Journal article reported in November that women were dropping out of the labor force. Nearly 600,000 had left in five months, the article said, though no one was sure about where the women were going.

It seemed like an intriguing story if local statistics could be found to describe any similar changes in this region.

Eleanor Jordan, Orange County labor market analyst in the state’s Employment Development Division, said no similar figures were available for Orange County. But the state keeps such statistics for Los Angeles County.

“Most figures that are broken down by sex and ethnicity are at the state level,” Jordan said. “We don’t have that data for Orange County.”

The incident raised the question of how numbers serve as the raw material for news stories, public policy and how we perceive reality.

Bickley Townsend had a story to tell along these lines. She’s vice president of advisory services for Catalyst, a New York-based consulting firm that is hired by companies to discover why women and minorities are not advancing into upper management.

Chief executive officers at several companies, Townsend said, were asked how many of their employees fit the traditional model of one parent working, the other at home with the kids. The chief executives supposed that that model fit about 50% of their employees.

An actual count showed the real figure was between 10% and 12%. Most employees were in two-income situations.

“Because CEOs consort with their own age and status group, they hardly ever see these people,” Townsend said, “and it’s inconceivable to them that (their male employees) wouldn’t have a wife at home.”

As a result, the chief executives would not understand if an employee had to go home to meet a repair man or retrieve a child from day care.

“A lot of sensitivity needs to be raised out there, and I think collecting these statistics is one of the best ways of doing it,” Townsend said. “We measure what we value.”

Exactly the point of the National Assn. of Women Business Owners chapters in Orange and Los Angeles counties, which lobbied for almost two years for a council that would count the women-owned businesses in California.

Last fall, the state Legislature agreed, after the groups created a plan to fund the council through private donations.

Counting the number of women-owned businesses, adding up their revenue, tallying the number of people they employ--a three-year process--is a way of measuring their importance. It makes them visible.

Nationally, the association estimates that women are starting businesses at twice the rate of men. So, there’s reason to suspect that a count of women-owned businesses would produce interesting results.

Somewhere between visible and invisible are Orange County parents who need day care for their children. Jacqui Murray, a special projects director for KinderCare Inc. in Lake Forest, said it is generally acknowledged in the county that there is a need for more day-care facilities.

But county figures are not available on how many children there are compared to the number of suitable child-care openings. Riverside County, by contrast, commissioned such a study. It showed that there are more than 130,000 children who need day care and only about 26,000 slots in licensed facilities.

For Orange County, “we extrapolate from national statistics,” Murray said. “It would be nice to have the real numbers, but there’s almost always a recognition of the need” for more day-care slots.

Predicting a future need is the mission of Christopher Hayes, a data collector in New York who runs the National Center for Women and Retirement Research.

Today, 80% of retirement-age women (65 and older) have no pension benefits, Hayes said. It’s a crisis, but it is not one that is resolving itself, even as more women enter the work force.

According to Hayes, just over 52% of working women ages 35 to 55 are earning pension benefits. And those who have no formal pension plan are often neglecting to save money on their own.

“We are looking at an entire new generation of older women who will be in poverty in 20 years,” Hayes said. “So, you see, statistics in this area are pivotal. They allow us to get the word out to women: If you don’t do some planning, this is likely to happen to you.”

We would like to consider your story about women in business or issues that affect businesswomen for a column. Call O.C. Enterprise at (714) 966-7871.