ICSC Programs Address Women in Industry

Boston Attorney Marianne Ajemian, president of the organization, will talk about the new follow-up findings in Las Vegas at the International Council of Shopping Centers Spring Convention panel "The Changing Face of Commercial Real Estate" on May 22. She will be joined by the group's past president Beth Lambert-Saul, vice president with the Archon Group in Dallas.

The 2005 survey results have been widely known by those working with commercial space: Men usually get paid more, and hold higher corporate posts, even in the female-consumer-dominated retail industry. Ajemian says CREW wanted to go further than just showing these facts.

"There's definitely a glass ceiling there, but how do we change that?" she says. "We also need to find ways to show companies that women are increasingly entering the workforce, and may make up some of their best talent."

She says CREW arranged a series of 18 workshops with its smaller chapters to explore the survey results in summer 2006, with about 400 women attending. In an exclusive interview with GSR, Ajemian detailed some of the workshop findings. This included, she says, the surprising fact that most women didn't know they are generally paid less for comparable work in fields such as brokerage, development and property management.

In the 2005 survey of more than 2,000 industry professionals, 58% of men reported earning a yearly income of $150,000 or more, but only 24% of women earned $150,000 or more.

"There is a need for transparent compensation information," Ajemian says. "Part of the issue seemed to be that there's an apparent lack of understanding of what the compensation parameters are for different positions. Women don't have the data to negotiate for themselves above the industry standard."

Another lesson learned, she says, is that more than half of the women in the 2005 survey believe that men and women are more comfortable managing teams of their own gender. "That's an obstacle we have to overcome, we have to be able to mix up teams, to help men recognize the talent that women have," she says.

Look around today, Ajemian says, and it's apparent that women are being taken more seriously as consumers, and are subsequently more respected by corporations. What a woman thinks about a product, a layout of a store, or how a building is designed, is now closely examined, she says.

"Companies are recognizing the statistical demographic out there," she says. "Even when request for proposals for developments go out, companies want to know if there's a diverse workforce that is going to handle matters, because it's important that they reflect the interest of their customers."

One woman who's had success at building a popular retail brand is Sara Blakely, the creator of Spanx hosiery, a mega-hit product that is favored by top Hollywood stars and are now in thousands of stores across the country, including Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue, Bloomingdales and Parisian. Though she started in 2000 with not much more than an idea and $5,000, her company, Spanx Inc., made $85 million in 2005.

Blakely is the other CREW sponsored speaker at the ICSC Spring Convention, headlining the "Women in Real Estate Breakfast" on May 21. She's also been pretty busy on her own show, where she is set to co-star as a judge on the second season of ABC's "American Inventor."Blakely tells GSR that it was difficult in breaking through the male ranks as a top fashion retailer, in a product line where a surprising amount of men dominate the industry. "But now, there are so many women out there creating products for women, it isn't as tough to get people to take notice of women-designed products and fashions," she says.

She doesn't have her own stores yet, but says it's a possibility someday. "We get many requests from women around the country to open a flagship store near them!" she says.

Ajemian says it's women like Blakely who show others that females can compete in any industry. "You're seeing more of a focus on the business world's taste for diversity. Newsweek magazine recently did a feature 'The Year of the Woman,' and even financial publications are portraying women more," Ajemian says.

The hope, she says, is that these findings from the focus groups will empower women to fix the discrepancies of the sexes, especially when it comes to where women make their career choices.

"Development and brokerage, the high wage earners in the industry, typically don't have much female representation as, say, the steady jobs, such as the financial services or retail industry," Ajemian says. "We have to look at why this is. Is it because development and brokerage demand higher risk, where women are choosing instead to have their compensation well defined? We need to examine what women think about their work-life balance, and how that is impacting the compensation gap."

She says that that new findings will also help companies learn how to diversify their workforce, and give them tools to help them reach out more to customers. "We want to give companies guidelines for progress, what they need to try to address, such as a checklist of questions on how to create gender neutral policies and procedures, or how companies can provide better encouragement toward career path goals."