Bentley University News

Dear Faculty and Staff,

What a season. The 2011-2012 Bentley women’s basketball team tallied 31 wins and came within one victory of the Division II National Championship game, falling in the semifinals to Ashland (Ohio) University. It was a second consecutive appearance in the Division II Elite Eight for the squad and coach Barbara Stevens – and the program’s best finish since 2002-2003.

Our Women on Success series presents opinions, advice, and observations from women in a variety of positions. Some are just starting out, others are more advanced. The PreparedU research probed the issues they face. These writers are living those issues. In this first installment, Bentley undergraduate student Angela Scott '15 shares her thoughts on how women professionals just starting out can prepare for future career success. 

Boards of directors have two jobs: oversight and advising. But can too much oversight lead to worse advice?

“Once upon a time, serving as a corporate board director was a prestigious thing. Today, thanks to the intense burdens of monitoring and governance we’ve piled onto boards generally and independent directors specifically, board service is more like a pain in the backside. And now some clever academics have tried to quantify precisely how much that pain costs corporate operations” (Compliance Week, November 15, 2010).

Let’s not fool ourselves. Qualified women of today are unlikely to find themselves on the board of directors at top companies in Massachusetts. However sad and counterproductive, this is a statistical reality. 

Yet there are reasons to hope for strong and lasting change. Every year, the business world is held accountable and pushed forward by the annual Census of Women Directors and Executive Officers of Massachusetts Public Companies.

Behind the scenes, in health-care organizations all across the country, thousands of physicians and allied health care providers are struggling with “compassion fatigue.”

Business ethicists are quick to comment on sensational cases of compensation involving very high pay for CEOs and very low pay for workers in overseas factories and sweatshops. But why do they rarely discuss the ethics of compensation in general, including for “ordinary” workers?

There’s one career strategy that is rarely considered but could prove useful, even pivotal, in the advancement of young women in the workplace.

It is simply this: Stop and find out if women exist in the upper echelons at a given company. Are there any women in the executive suites or on the board of directors? If you can’t find any, watch out.

This week, millennial actress and recent college graduate Emma Watson gave a powerful speech to the United Nations, launching the UN’s new solidarity campaign called He for She, which urges men to look at gender equality as more than a women’s issue — and for women to stop thinking that feminism is anti-men.