Let’s hear it for the girls

How’s this for a depressing headline:  “Women in PA won’t get equal pay until 2072?”*  When I officially entered the workforce, women were making 56.6% of what men earned, the lowest it had been in the preceding 13 years.  As of 2013, that differential is up to 78.3%.  Progress, granted, although not always steady.  The fact that it will have taken a full 100 years plus nine for the first equal pay act—The Equal Pay Act of 1963—to achieve reality is beyond sad.  And it isn’t even guaranteed!  There is a lot of life, economic crises, unknown factors that can happen between now and 2072 that could ever so easily derail this promise.

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The good news is that the nonprofit sector, at least in some regions just might see the realization of pay equity sooner than the for-profit and government sectors.  Today, the nonprofit sector is no different than those other sectors:  here, too, women have historically made less than men, even though women dominate the pool of employees who work in the nonprofit sector.  And we have known for a very long time that the larger the organization, and, thus, the bigger the salary, the less likely we are to see women in the executive director position.

Earlier this month, the Bayer Center in Pittsburgh released its latest, affirming data.  While the average female executive director’s salary in the southwest region of Pennsylvania was a very respectable $101,475, it is still only 75% of what their male counterparts earned.  And this average was influenced by the distribution of male executive directors.  At the smallest organizations, those with budgets under $250,000, men made up only 27% of the executive directors; at the largest end of the spectrum, those with budgets over $15 M, 62% of the executive directors are men.  But there is a twist in Bayer’s data that gives hope:  at the largest nonprofits, the pay differential today is a  “mere” 88%.  Already 10 percentage points ahead of today, Pittsburgh’s female nonprofit employees just might achieve parity earlier in the second half of this century.

But this good news comes with some distressing data from Bayer’s 74% Project.  The sex of the board chair makes a difference in the salary of the executive director.  Boards with female board chairs earn less than males with a female board chair.  (AND regardless of organizational size, only a third to a quarter of nonprofits have a female board chair).  But what is truly staggering is that in the Pittsburgh region of the state with the motto “Virtue Liberty Independence” is, apparently, an indication of “moral excellence” that a male executive director of a large nonprofit (a budget of more than $7M) working with a male board chair earns $97,000 more than his female counterpart who has a female board chair.  Where is the moral excellence in that?  And what the heck is the matter with these female board chairs?

This is a great segue to Virginia’s Sweet Briar College, an all-female undergraduate student college (graduate students are both male and female).  It has a male chair of the board of trustees (despite the fact that there are a total of 22 board members, 19 of whom are female, not counting the Emeriti Board) and a female President who, according to the 2013 990, earned $333,449.  (As an aside, Virginia is ranked 8^th in the Status of Women in the States report.)  Without consulting, gathering data from or in any way involving faculty, students, alumnae, etc., the Board announced earlier this month that it would close its doors the end of August .  The school has an endowment of $84M, and up until the week before the Board’s announcement, was still actively raising funds.  Truthfully, I don’t know what has me more upset about this:  the fact that yet another board has allowed a major institution to bite the dust (think iconic Hull House in Chicago that closed in 2012 and Federation Employment and Guidance Service (FEGS) in New York that closed earlier this year, to mention just two, and then all of the other organizations teetering on the brink of or in bankruptcy) or that this institution is one of declining number of all women’s colleges.

Regardless of the source of my concern, there are important lessons that need to be learned here—from Hull House and FEGS and Sweet Briar, though the latter didn’t announce that doors would be locked within a week, but rather a matter of months—that can’t be learned because no one is talking because no one wants to talk because they are too embarrassed to talk.  Or at least they should be too embarrassed.

But they must talk so that other boards can learn not to wait as long as those boards did before they started scenario planning and trying different survival strategies—or at least I hoped were tried.  Faculty, alum and current students are now protesting and looking at ways to save the school.  Sadly, not all nonprofits have a client base sufficiently empowered to protest and band together to raise money to try and save an organization that has allowed itself to go deeper and deeper in depth while the board walks the deck in ball gowns and black tie while the ship is sinking.

So, we must learn from the gross mistakes of others—but only if we are allowed, by being given the data.  Recently, I was on a panel talking with an audience of mostly members of for-profit boards who also sit on nonprofit boards.  In response to a question, I commented that I, as I assume others do, use the Freeh Report on Penn State in my graduate Governance class.  My lawyer colleague on the panel immediately jumped in and said no, we couldn’t yet learn from Penn State because it was still in litigation.  I was stunned.

The lessons to be learned from Penn State—and Hull House, FEGS and the Status of Women in the States report—aren’t in what happens in the courts, but in what happened that brought us to the need for the report, investigation, litigation, so that all of us can avoid having to have a report, investigation and litigation.  It isn’t about what happens after the fact of the scandals and the closings but absolutely about taking measures to prevent these things happening in the future, learning from the mistakes of others.

*You can view other states’ data on “Status of Women in the States.”