Dancing on the glass ceiling: women CEOs reflect on barriers.

• Author: Schwab, Robert

The glass ceiling facing women in business is a barrier mostly in the mind of the beholder, say a number of Colorado women CEOs who have shattered the glass. But recent studies and a sustained conviction among other women's advocates suggest the oft-cited cap on women's efforts to rise to the top tier of business leadership still needs significant breaking. "I still think it exists in peoples' minds," said Larissa Herda, chairman and chief executive officer of Time Warner Telecom Inc., one of the state's premier surviving broadband services providers. But Herda said the real barriers some women face in business are often "of their own making."

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"It's often their belief that because they are women there are barriers to success," said the woman who has led Time Warner Telecom since 1998 and through the entire telecom/technology economic bust. "Some women need to stop being hung up on the fact that they are women and focus on performance."

Still, a recent study and two of Colorado's top business women's advocates, Keller Hayes, president of the Colorado Women's Chamber of Commerce, and Steffie Allen, president of the Athena Group and chair of the Women's Vision Foundation, contend women's advancement in business continues to be less than equal to men's.

The most recent calculation, an Annenberg Public Policy Center report on women in the communications industry, reported in December that women still comprised just 15 percent of executive leaders at the 57 Fortune 500 communications-industry companies surveyed (in 2002), and that only 12 percent of board members at those companies were women. It said those numbers were virtually unchanged from the year before.

"Things are definitely better," said Steffie Allen. "But I'm not saying the glass ceiling has gone away. We wouldn't have 1,200 women if it had gone away." She was referring to the membership of the Women's Vision Foundation, a Colorado group that works exclusively with the women of corporate America in the state. She said many of the 70 older women corporate executives, who make up the foundation's Wise Woman Council, have been leaving their companies lately because "they say it's not worth it."

"You have no life," she said. "The 24-7 life (of a corporate executive) is untenable."

"I think that people are breaking through the glass ceiling the way they choose to do so," said Keller Hayes, of the Colorado Women's Chamber, the largest women's chamber in the nation. Hayes, whose group has 1,600 members, many of whom are business owners and partners, said women who come up through the ranks of corporate America are breaking through the glass ceiling not at the companies where they have established their careers but by leaving that company and...