Therapy for Sexists

Since passage of the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972, the Government has been able to win big money settlements from major corporations for discriminating against women employees. Today, partly to avoid such costly lawsuits, many concerned employers are trying to do justice by their female workers, but how are they to rid themselves of rigid policies and largely unconscious prejudices formed over decades? That is where Barbara Boyle, 37, and Sharon Kirkman, 32, come in.

Both got their start working to set up "affirmativeaction" programs to create a better employment climate for women at IBM, where Boyle (who was married last month) was a marketing manager and Kirkman a data-processing marketing representative. While at IBM, Boyle accepted equal-employment assignments at other companies on a freelance basis; Kirkman left the company to devise an affirmative-action program for the American Express Co. They set up Boyle/Kirkman Associates in Manhattan in 1972, with Boyle as president and Kirkman as vice president. One of a handful of management consulting firms that advise top companies on ways to eliminate practices that discriminate against women, Boyle/Kirkman has worked with such clients as CBS, Pillsbury and Avon.

Never Asked. The Boyle/Kirkman therapy can last as long as 24 months and cost up to $50,000. It usually begins with a thorough search through women's personnel records for patterns of discrimination in such areas as salary and lines of advancement, and continues through interviews with top executives, middle managers and a random sample of female employees. Then Boyle, Kirkman or one of the firm's five consultants (all women) present recommendations to top management. One startling example of bias that they turned up: Kirkman, reviewing the records of 300 women employed by a major oil company, found that all had supposedly expressed unwillingness to relocate if offered a better job. Upon checking, she found that the women had never actually been asked: someone had programmed the company's computer to automatically print out "no" when it came to that question on the personnel form of a female employee. The assumption apparently was made by a low-level male employee who wanted the computer to give standard answers, but it had never occurred to top managers to wonder why not even one woman had ever volunteered to move.

Boyle and Kirkman agree that it is easier to give a computer a new program than to equip a human being with a new perception. "The real problem," says Kirkman, "is personal attitudes about women on the part of middle managers, who largely determine whether --and how far--women will rise." In an attempt to get bosses to look hard at their behavior, Boyle and Kirkman have devised a series of play-acting scenarios that they put clients through. In one, a male executive was asked to offer an important but demanding job to Boyle. "He stressed all the negative aspects," she recounts. "How I would be the only woman in the department and away from my family a lot." Suddenly, she says, the manager confessed, "I would never be doing this to a man. I would be telling him what a great opportunity it was." As a result of such sessions, says John M. Martin, chairman of Hercules Inc., a chemical producer based in Wilmington, Del., "many of our managers are weighing factors they had not given real attention to before, such as considering women for outside sales jobs." Realizing that women's own attitudes may block their progress, Boyle and Kirkman also conduct awareness sessions among female employees. After one session at Hercules, a woman echoed the comic-strip character Pogo: "We have seen the enemy, and it is us." Should Boyle and Kirkman succeed completely in changing the male attitude toward women workers, they would put themselves out of their present business. But they are not worried; they figure it will take at least a decade for women to win full equality with men in the corporate world. Meanwhile, the business is lucrative; in their last fiscal year they took in revenues of $300,000 from about 30 clients. They now plan to add five more consultants to their staff by the end of 1975. At least one, they hope, will be male.

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