Advertisement

Will 2016 deliver a watershed year for women in business? One Tampa firm hopes so

 
Holly Grogan, vice president of Tribridge's "people team," or human resources department. [Photo courtesy of Tribridge]
Holly Grogan, vice president of Tribridge's "people team," or human resources department. [Photo courtesy of Tribridge]
Published Feb. 13, 2016

Could 2016 become a year of progress for women in business when more glass ceilings shatter, pay gaps shrink and corporate boards and executive managements swell with well-qualified women?

Wishful thinking? Many of these issues do not have quick fixes. Of the 98 directors currently serving on the boards of Tampa Bay's 10 largest public companies, only 18 are women — a puny figure typical at many larger U.S. companies.

Half of those 10 area companies have just one woman on their boards — enough, cynics might say, to keep critics at bay.

Yet some compelling signs exist — here in Tampa Bay and in the broader business world — that suggest the rise of women in business is gaining speed.

The idea that it is both smart and profitable to hire more women and elevate more to senior positions is winning attention in several ways.

A report released this past Monday found that having more women in overall executive positions was tied to greater profitability. Companies with at least 30 percent female leaders had net profit margins up to 6 percentage points higher than companies with no women in the top ranks. If that doesn't get the attention of investors, what will?

The study in addition found companies with more women on the board of directors also performed modestly better. The survey by the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a nonpartisan policy outfit, polled 21,980 publicly held firms from 91 countries.

During the lead-up to last weekend's Super Bowl, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said he will now require that women be interviewed for executive positions with league teams and in his own office. "We believe in diversity," Goodell said. "We believe we're better as an organization when we have good people at the table.

Other analyses of women's progress in business circles are far less bullish.

Last fall, a study by LeanIn.org and McKinsey & Co. of 118 companies and nearly 30,000 employees found that corporate diversity initiatives do little for gender equality at any corporate level — and not just in the C-suite (senior executive suite) where the disparity is greatest, but at every corporate level.

"If NASA launched a person into space today, she could soar past Mars, travel all the way to Pluto and return to Earth 10 times before women occupy half of C-suite offices," Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer and founder of the Lean In Foundation, wrote in the Wall Street Journal. "Yes, we're that far away."

• • •

One small but promising movement here in our back yard is happening at a Tampa technology company called Tribridge. The swiftly growing 700-employee private firm offers tech consulting services to businesses.

Forty percent of its employees are women, an impressive statistic for a male-heavy technology industry. You would think Tribridge would be content on the gender front. But it's not.

In a Dec. 7 column published in Inc. magazine, Tribridge founder and CEO Tony DiBenedetto — a prominent technology executive in this area — acknowledged a "harsh realization" that the company he spent years building may have failed some women team members at Tribridge.

Initially pleased by numbers showing four of 10 employees are women at Tribridge, he said he grew disheartened when he dug deeper.

"There is a disconnect between the number of people in the company and the percentage of women in senior leadership roles, particularly in the technical delivery side of the business," DiBenedetto wrote. "Our numbers reflect the skewed landscape of the tech industry: The more senior the leadership position, the more likely that a man fills that role."

Rather than write and forget about the gender imbalance, Tribridge is trying to do something about it. Before last fall, the company's board of directors consisted of four men. Since then, two experienced women were recruited, replacing two directors and raising the gender mix to 50-50 for now (the board will add more people). In a broader move, Tribridge this month said it will launch a formal program aimed at improving gender equality. The "Tribridge Women's Network" will include measurable commitments for recruiting, retention and development of women leaders.

Helping lead that effort is Holly Grogan, the company's vice president of its "people team" — Tribridge's more contemporary term for human resources. The number of women vice presidents at Tribridge has tripled in the last year, the company says. Grogan is the only woman, though, who serves on the firm's seven-person executive team.

DiBenedetto said he is committed to developing and recruiting women to Tribridge's leadership team just as he brought on more women to serve on the board.

In an interview, Grogan said it is getting easier to hire young women with strong technology skills that Tribridge needs. Previously, women hired at the company tended to end up in sales or marketing jobs rather than in tech consulting or software systems. What's especially daunting, Grogan said, is to recruit more senior women with technology backgrounds. There are few of them, and the good ones are in big demand.

Grogan outlined what the new women's network means. It offers unlimited paid time off for female or male employees (to accommodate family matters, for example) as well as 12 weeks of paid maternity and paternity leave. To improve recruitment, the company is expanding networking and educational programs to attract more female job candidates. And to help more women up the company ladder, Tribridge will offer a professional development series, and increase mentoring and community outreach to support women in the workforce and help school-aged girls explore technology careers.

Grogan said she hopes the program's benefits to Tribridge will encourage other tech companies to become more proactive in recruiting women.

Success, of course, will depend on the measurable rise of women to positions of greater importance at Tribridge.

DiBenedetto acknowledged that even with the new urgency at Tribridge, changing the gender mix at all levels of the company will take time. As he concluded in his Inc. column: "We are just getting started."

Any other companies want to step up?

Contact Robert Trigaux at rtrigaux@tampabay.com. Follow @venturetampabay.

Editor's note: This story was updated to clarify that Tribridge has more than one woman vice president.