What environmental elements are currently emerging as "the best of the best" to attract, welcome, develop and retain women pursuing technical track careers in large corporations?

The question was recently addressed by executives of major companies on a panel at the 223rd national meeting of the American Chemical Society in Orlando. The panelists, chosen from Working Mother magazine's 2001 list of the 100 Best Companies for Working Mothers, agreed that:

— Women need active mentoring to realize their strengths and potential to advance, as members of working teams, creative individuals and professionals, within the corporation.

— Work schedules should be negotiable and flexible, allowing for the individual needs of professional women with husbands, partners, children and aging parents whose needs are woven into the fabric of their daily lives.

— Policies must be in place to "level the playing field" for women in the workplace, with full support of top management.

"Mentoring of women by women is the contemporary counterbalance to the old boy network," Sharon Larkin, divisional vice-president of Human Resources Programs and Business Integration at Abbott Laboratories said. "Proactive and institutionalized mentoring programs, designed to help women enter the company, develop in the company and stay in the company are not only right for women. They are smart business. We believe that the mentoring programs at Abbott are largely responsible for creating the environment that leads women to stay and for our comparatively low turnover rate."

Larkin said that according to the Committee on Women in Science and Engineering of the National Research Council, women scientists encounter subtle, as well as overt, obstacles to advancement, a lack of information about the corporate job market for industry science careers, an absence of female role models and mentors and exclusion from informal networks. "These and other barriers to success are exactly the kind of things that a good mentoring relationship can address and help a woman overcome," she said.

To emphasize her point, Larkin quoted the words of Sheila Wellington, president of Catalyst, an organization monitoring issues facing women in the workplace. "Mentors are more important to career success than hard work, more important than talent, more important than intelligence."

Agreeing that mentoring has a priority in career development and retention strategies at BPAmerica Production Corporation, Lisa Marrufo, manager of Diversity and HR Compliance, cited flexibility in the scheduling of work as "most important to our women employees.

"The next generation of employees is smaller and we foresee possible labor shortages in the petrochemical industry in the next ten to fifteen years," Marrufo said. "The next generation of employees is seeking a more flexible workplace."

Citing efforts that her company is taking to make work more flexible, Marrufo highlighted the availability to women at BP of compressed work schedules, flextime, reimbursement for dependent care related to business travel, telecommuting arrangements and technology such as teleconferencing designed to reduce business travel.

"In a word, flexibility," Marrufo said.

Underscoring the importance of flexibility, Ron Webb, manager of doctoral recruiting and university relations at Proctor and Gamble, said that providing the tools and resources to help women balance career and family is key to creating the right corporate culture in a company where 48 percent of new management hires are women - and to the success of the business as a business.

Flexible work arrangements and telecommuting are a fully integrated part of life at Proctor and Gamble, Webb noted. "For example," he said, "women may come in at 7 and leave at 3 in order to be at home when they need to be there for their families --- and it works just fine, if we work together to make it work."

"Recruiting women by itself is not enough. Recognizing women as they progress and retaining them and their rich contributions to the company are crucial. These are our operating principles in relationship to women professionals at our company -- recruit, recognize and retain." Webb said.

"Flexibility is key at every point in implementing these principles with real women who have very a diverse lives."

In pre-symposium remarks, Mary Funke, the event organizer and manager of JobSpectrum.org at the American Chemical Society, noted that all of the companies represented on the panel recruit and retain women chemists through a variety of strategies and programs, including those emphasizing mentoring and flexibility. "However," she said, "they have also been leveling the playing field for women by making sure that, in the first place, women know about available positions and doing this, in part, by working with JobSpectrum."

JobSpectrum.org is a comprehensive online career resource Web site for professionals in chemistry and for recruiters. Recruiters place job ads quickly and easily, chemistry professionals -- including new graduates -- post resumes, and the system automatically alerts recruiters to resumes meeting their search criteria. "It is another way we help women and men in chemistry to overcome information barriers and to equalize opportunities between the sexes."

What makes a company a "winner" for women in 2002?

"Many things, including strong mentoring, flexibility and a level field for placement and advancement," Funke said. "But," she noted and the panelists agreed, "there has to be an accountable executive in the company whose job it is to make sure that words have feet and, importantly, that top management is fully supportive. Ideas may come from the bottom upward. But implementation works from the top down in corporations like these. And this has been key to making these companies the 'winners' for women that they are."

View each panelist's presentations:

Frankie Wood Black, Philips Petroleum and Chair, ACS Women Chemists Committee
Elsa Reichmanis, Bell Labs Fellow and Director of the Materials Research Department, Lucent Technologies
Ron Webb, Senior Manager of Doctoral Recruiting, Procter & Gamble
Lisa Marrufo, Manager, Diversity and HR Compliance Team, BP America Production Company
Sharon D. Larkin, Divisional Vice President, Human Resources, Abbott Laboratories