The best route for a woman to reach the corporate boardroom is to promote herself.
Corporate boards are seeking additional female members to benefit from more-diversified decision making. However, the numbers tell a story of slow progress. Women held 14.7% of board seats at Fortune 500 companies in 2005, up from 13.6% in 2003 and 6.9% in 1995, according to a report from Catalyst, a New York-based nonprofit group that researches women's career issues.
Landing a board seat requires a more subtle strategy than a job search, says Wendy Alfus-Rothman, an executive coach in New York. "If you want a job, you can pursue a company, but you can't apply quite the same directness with boards, because they want to find you," she says. "If you want to be on a board, you must be invited to the party."
To be discovered as a board candidate, women may need to change their mind-set. While strategies for landing a board seat are pretty much the same for men and women, women typically are less comfortable carrying out some of them, says Ms. Alfus-Rothman. "It's not always in their nature to be self-promoting," she says. "Women hope the world will figure out how brilliant they are through their work, when in truth, it's their job to get the word out."
Source: Path to the Top, The Wall Street Journal, October 9, 2006