The student group Women in Business hosted a three-woman panel on corporate social responsibility Thursday evening in Tindle Lounge, the first of a battery of events slated for this weekend to give female students opportunities to network and share experiences with professionals.
The panelists told an audience of about 25 women that competition for careers in corporate philanthropy and community affairs is fairly tight.
"It's still new, it's still growing," said Cheryl Marihugh Tu '94, a consultant and former global business alliances director for the outdoor apparel company Timberland. "The people that have the jobs generally like those jobs, so they stay in them."
Marihugh said that finding a position in corporate social responsibility is about networking. Joan Ai '98 of Goldman Sachs' Charitable Services Group recommended setting up informational interviews to learn more about the work. Ai offered to help the women in attendance by introducing them to other professionals in the field.
That kind of networking is at the core of WIB's mission, according to co-founder Allison Zeilinger '04, who helped start up the group last year after Tuck School Assistant Dean Sally Jaeger suggested an undergraduate version of Tuck's WIB be established.
Zeilinger, who currently works in consulting, said there seems to be more equality in her field than in others. However, she believes that formal women's professional groups, such as WIB, help counterbalance informal old-boy's-club male networks.
"I've seen a lot of guys go to work at firms or banks where their fraternity brothers work, and I see that less so with sororities," Zeilinger said, "So this was like the other side of the men's room conversation."
Zeilinger said that social taboos also prevent senior male business associates from sharing career experience with younger females outside the office.
"Aside from men's room conversation, there's also a lot of conversation that goes on over a beer," she said, adding that a senior male executive "can ask out a new rookie guy and rehash stories," but inviting a female colleague to talk about business will probably never be "totally kosher."
WIB President Anne Ladenburger '05 said the organization has contributed to greater success for female students going through the corporate recruiting process. No women made it into the final recruitment rounds for consulting firm The Parthenon Group last year, according to Ladenburger, but three out of four female candidates received final-round interviews this year. Ladenburger will work for the San Francisco-based agency after graduation.
"Women in Business has really helped start those discussions where women can really get together and go over their cases before they go for the interview the next day," said Kristy Charbonneau '05, alumni affairs coordinator for WIB.
Charbonneau said part of the reason she opted to accept a post-graduation job in the private bank division of J.P. Morgan was that the division is approximately 40 percent female, while other divisions, like investment banking, are more male-dominated.
"Dartmouth Women in Business is not exclusively for women and we encourage men to attend our events and get involved," Ladenburger said.
Most events, however, are geared toward women's issues, including discrimination in the workplace and finding a balance between work and personal life.
Women's business groups tend to be more successful than men's business groups because many corporations consider women to be a minority group and engage them as minority recruits, Ladenburger said.
"As long as there's a disparity, there's going to be some sort of need to compensate in terms of providing networking opportunities for women," Ladenburger said, comparing WIB to other Dartmouth undergraduate groups for women like Women in Science and Women in Engineering.
The inequalities that still exist are more confined to the highest ranks of the business world now, Zeilinger said. The "glass ceiling" has been raised to the executive level, and women's ambitions tend to be "nearsighted" when they leave their careers to raise families.
"If I work really hard, and prove my way to partner, am I going to have to turn it over because I do want to be a mom and stay home with the kids?" Zeilinger said, explaining that she felt men and women seem to be on equal footing until a certain point when women feel the need to choose between family and business.
WIB will run a mock interview session Friday and hold its second golf clinic Saturday to connect female students with College and Tuck Business School alumnae and women in corporate America.
