Slow and skimpy progress for women.

• Author: Kristie, James
• Position: LEADERSHIP - Reprint

From Newspaperman by Warren H. Phillips. Copyright [c]2012 by the author. Published by McGraw-Hill (www.mhprofessional.com).

WE THOUGHT WE WERE TRYING HARD and making progress moving women into managerial jobs. In 1974 about 35 percent of Dow Jones's employees were women. But I was aware that the progress was slower and skimpier than I and others wished.

"Your record of women in key news positions is nonexistent," Michael Gartner, a respected Journal alumnus, wrote to me on Dec. 17, 1977. I had a practice of asking a few of the brightest Journal alumni to give me, from time to time, in strict confidence, no-holds-barred critiques of the paper and their ideas for improving it. Mike made recommendations of specific promotions to correct the situation.

In the years that followed, women would become bureau chiefs in Boston, London, and other cities; assistant and deputy managing editors of the Journal; Dow Jones's vice president for staff development; and, a few years after I retired, publisher of the Journal But we did not move fast enough or far enough to satisfy the women--or ourselves. Very few were ever represented in the upper reaches of management.

What's the explanation for how I could have failed to order the more rapid and more meaningful advancement of women at Dow Jones? The chief explanation is that in organizations such as ours that had historically been made up mostly of men...