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Today is May 18, 2012

Think Outside the Cubicle

If that job is for you then great! If you’re ready to shake it up, here’s where to look!

Interview with Carol Evans (Page 4)

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Working Mothers Media

Carol: Two things that are related:

1. The lack of women in profit and loss jobs. The route to the top for all women, whether you’re a mom or not, and for all men as well, is through profit and loss jobs. You can’t progress up the ladder of a corporation or business without getting hands-on experience and being responsible for the bottom line. Only 9% of all American jobs, where you have P&L responsibility, you are responsible for making sure that bottom line, whether it’s a unit, or company or brand — wherever that bottom line has to be met — only 9% of those jobs are held by women. And that is the route to the next step. You cannot progress without being able to be responsible for the bottom line. That’s a big obstacle on the road to the CEO, to the board room, to…well, everything. And it’s not our fault. It’s the fault of those who haven’t trusted us enough to give us that ultimate responsibility. We haven’t been trusted with it and we haven’t really been trained and taught that we need that to get ahead. That is the biggest blockade to getting ahead, in my mind.

2. The second one is access to capital. I know, as an entrepreneur, how hard it is to get access to capital as a woman., I think it’s actually tied to this issue of P&L experience. Without the initial capital it’s hard to get more, and women find it difficult to attract new capital even as they succeed. It’s unbelievably much easier for men. That’s because the VC [Venture Capital] world is managed and led by men and they don’t realize that they have this unconscious bias that they don’t want to fun women’s companies. I went through this on my own quest to become an entrepreneur and I see it all the time. This is why so many women’s businesses often remain small. This is another big issue that is holding women back from breaking that true glass ceiling.

Sarah: What do you think we can do about it?

Carol: We need to really focus women’s attention on getting P&L experience. As an entrepreneur, we need to lead the funding of women’s companies. If men aren’t going to step up to the plate, then women should really be helping each other. Women have great access to capital as individuals if other rich women around the world would fund women’s businesses. The government is really doing a lot to help businesses founded by women, so women need to help as well and get supportive of the government programs that are put in place to help them succeed. These are all things that are teachable.

Sarah: Thank you for that. Are there any dreams or goals that you have that you haven’t met yet?

Carol: One, well, this is going to sound silly, but three times when I was young, I hiked Long’s Peak in Colorado. I was 14 the first time, 19 the second time and I think 22 the third time. So my best friend and I decided we wanted to climb it again. But I had no idea how different my body had become. We got about a mile up the path, and we just turned right around. We said, “Oh my, we have to go back and train!” And I’ve never found the time to train. So that’s one thing I really have a dream about. I don’t know if I’ll ever make it, but it’s a dream.

The other dream is that I’ve always wanted to have a TV show that would really respond to working mothers as opposed to just stay-at-home women. I think there’s a TV show that needs to be created, and I think I need to create it, so working moms can get their dose of exciting support and fun and laugh at ourselves and cry at ourselves.

Sarah: OK, but you have to promise me that you’ll call me when you do that because it’s a dream of mine as well. It’s always been a dream of mine.

Carol: I’m working on it, we’ll do it together.

Sarah: Yes, please. My husband is always laughing at me and asking, “What is this thing you have about wanting to be on TV to help women?” And I say, “I don’t know, but just get out of my way…it’s gonna happen.”

Carol: You know, I think it’s time. Let’s move forward on it!

Sarah: OK…call me.

Carol: I will, and I’m serious you know.

Sarah: Me too! OK, I hate to do this, but back to the interview….as a mom who is about to send her daughter off to college, what are your hopes for her as a woman who will be entering the workforce soon? What do you want her to get from everything you’ve done?

Carol: I feel like she’s very different from me. She’s a very different person. She’s not as extroverted as I am. She’s very talented at things that I don’t care about. Like, she’s a great chef. And she’s extremely fashion forward, she really understands fashion in a way that I don’t care about — which is why I let her dress me all the time. And she’s decorates her room over and over. She really has a design mind, where I don’t at all. I don’t really care about it enough to even pay attention to my surroundings that way. We have totally different skill sets and she’s much more of a homebody than me. I don’t even try to imagine what they might do with her talent. She’s very talented and I want her to make her own choices. I feel like if she wants to be a stay at home mom, I’ll go and visit her and invite her to come with me on some of my business trips. And if she wants to go out into the world and make a big name for herself as a designer, I would try to help her. But I can’t predict which way she’ll go, because she’s still forming her own identity of who she’s going to be as an adult.

I don’t really try to shape my kids too much, because it hasn’t really worked too well when I’ve tried [laughs].

Sarah: Yes, you can only beat your head against that wall for so long. So you’ve done a lot of interviews, you’ve written this great book and people have asked you a lot of questions, much like I have today. What is the one question you hope you never have to answer again (and I hope I didn’t ask it!)?

Carol: Well, I really like answering everyone’s questions, so this is hard…oh! I know! “Should there be a magazine for working fathers?” That question has been asked so many times, and people think they’re being so fun and clever and witty, but I’ve been asked that question since 1979 and the truth is, in this country, dads barely read the one article that we give them from a magazine. Maybe that’s changing, but dads are not ready to support a magazine of their own about fatherhood. It’s been tried, and it’s failed. When they are ready, I will celebrate and be happy to create it.

Sarah: OK, so on the flip side, is there anything that you’ve always wanted to be asked that no one has asked you?

Carol: I want to talk more about how wonderful my own mother was. My mother was so wonderful, and my father was so wonderful — I had such a great childhood. Even though we had some differences as adults, I just always want to say to everyone that my mother was such a role model. She turned into a working mom when I was 12, and she worked so hard to find her way in her career. I wrote a lot about that in my book, but I can never say enough about how her personality and her freedom to explore the world and to enter the world of work that she felt completely unprepared for, how that must have been a foundation for me to be so brave in my career. I could just talk about her forever. I miss her ever day. She was just such a great person in my life.

Not because she was perfect, she certainly wasn’t, she could certainly bore you to tears with all of her talking, but she was a great great woman.

Sarah: Did you miss her when she started working? Or were you more proud?

Carol: Are you kidding? We were celebrating! We were like, “Yeah! Mom won’t be home!” We were ecstatic! The three of us, my older brother and my younger brother, we were absolutely celebrating and trying to help her. “Yes! Yes mom! GO!” We did not miss her at all. We were very content. But I did help her a lot. I didn’t know she needed my help, but I did help her without knowing she needed it. It was really interesting for me, and when I look back I realize what a big deal that was — for me to help her become a successful working woman.

But no, we were not sad. My mother was a high-energy person, and she always needed a lot more to do. She’d always volunteered a lot, so it was almost like she had been working all of our lives. But volunteering was deep in her comfort zone. Getting a paycheck, well she wasn’t sure she had anything that was worthy of getting paid for, so watching her build this fabulous program for vocational training for kids at our high school, and watching her build this from nothing in 17 years, was thrilling. The program was acknowledged by the state of Illinois, and that was truly inspirational. Even if at the time, I did my best to ignore her! You can imagine…she was there at my high school! It’s not like I was skipping over to her classroom every day!

Sarah: You know, it really is amazing how much our moms shape us, just by being around us. We don’t always realize it.

Carol: I totally agree. You know, once my mom died, I would talk about her quite a bit in my speeches, mostly just to share. I would always say, go home and hug your mother, because you’re lucky your mom is still around. And a woman who was in the audience at an advertising business crowd wrote me a letter later. Her mother had died about 6 months after my speech, and in her letter she said, “Thank you so much for telling me as an audience member, the value of this relationship. I had always had a very difficult relationship with my mother and I went home after your speech and I reconsidered my relationship and I was able to mend fences and get very close to my mother and then she died suddenly.” She was so grateful not to have been left with that legacy of not having gone home and hugged her mother. I gotta tell you, that kind of thing is just amazing. It’s like, “Wow! I made a difference in someone’s life!”

Sarah: What a wonderful story. We should all be lucky enough to have our careers have that kind of effect on people.

Carol: Yes, it’s very sweet. And it’s pretty amazing to have someone else have a little bit of a better life because of what you do.

Sarah: Carol, thank you so much for taking out the time to do this, I know as a CEO you’re incredibly busy and it means a lot that you would talk to Better Way Moms!

Carol: Absolutely! It was fun!

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