Women are gaining ground in the corporate world, to some extent. More and more females are assuming management positions, yet the number of them with decision-making responsibility continues to lag far behind men. That was the significant finding in a recent telephone survey of some 100,000 U.S. businesses conducted by Trinet, Inc., Parsippany, NJ, a leading resource of information on U.S. companies.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that women hold more than one-third of the 12.7 million executive, administrative, and management jobs in the U.S. Yet. Trinet's study found a much lower percentage of women in top decision-making positions at the surveyed companies.

"Overall, women still occupy a low percentage of decision-making positions compared to men," said Charles Stryker, president and co-founder of Trinet. "However, women are doing better in service industries and in specific departments like telecommunications and data processing."

More in administration

The survey found that there are more women decision-makers than men in administrative positions (e.g. office manager and personnel administrator), but only 20% of women decision-makers can be found in traditionally male-dominated industries like mining, manufacturing, construction, and securities brokerage firms.

Overall, the percentage of women holding the highest ranking position was 4.5% (see Table 1, p. 45). The percentage increased to 5.7% for financial decision-makers and 14% for both data processing and telecommunications decision-makers.

The percentage of highest ranking women varies greatly by industry, from 23% in health services to 0% in coal and metal mining (see Tables 2 and 3, p. 45). Other industries with high ranking women decision-makers include: Social services, 21%; clothing retailers, 18%; educational, 15%; and amusement and recreation services, 14%.

Disparity increasing

"The data indicate that women are not displacing men from jobs like plant manager. However, as new executive jobs are created in telecommunications departments or in the service sector, women are gaining a larger share of certain decision-making positions. Over time, I would expect the disparity between men and women bosses to steadily decrease," predicted Stryker.

Trinet also compiled statistics on women by department. The telecommunications and data processing numbers are higher by department since many companies make telecommunications and data processing decisions without having specialized departments. The data indicate that women are more likely to make business decisions where a specialized department exists as a data processing manager or telecommunications manager than they are if the decisions are made by a non-specialist.

Trinet's telephone survey is based on more than 100,000 interviews with business locations with at least 20 employees to ascertain the names and titles of the highest ranking persons and decision-makers for financial, telecommunications and data processing departments.

Marketing purposes

"We did the survey for our own interests," explains William Woods, vice president of marketing at Trinet, "and we're just remarketing the results. We're also looking to stir interest among business marketers and it may be significant to those marketers who want to focus their business mailings primarily to females." The company gathers this kind of data on businesses for marketing purposes and for persons in sales and marketing or strategic planning.

"We provide information on things such as who the companies are, what they do, how many employees they have, what their sales volume and output value are, geographic data and names of the company's CEO and any other officials, and who the ultimate decision-maker is in areas such as financial, telecommunications and data processing," continues Woods.

Trinet was able to determine who the primary decision-makers were in the respective companies by using a table of names of males and females.

"We genderize the individual names because clients want to personalize their mailings."

Trinet, Inc., provides three basic information services: A data-base of seven million U.S. business locations, business-to-business telemarketing services and application services. It is one of two companies in the U.S. that provides a database of in-depth information on businesses. The other is Dunn's Marketing Services.