By Melissa J. Anderson

In a ForbesWoman article earlier this month, Sylvia Ann Hewlett, founding president of the Center for Talent Innovation (formerly Center for Work-Life Policy), wrote that while there are 144 boards with no women in the Fortune 1000 and women make up only 15 percent of all Fortune 1000 directors, there is also some good news when it comes to the effort to achieve board parity.

The good news, Hewlett says, is that over 1,100 directors on Fortune 1000 boards are over 70 years old.

If we only wait just a bit longer, she suggests, soon qualified women can rush into the seats vacated by retiring males. She concludes:

“The time may finally be arriving for women to fulfill B.C. Forbes’ predication. As more women pry open the boardroom door and assume a seat at the table, they can not only serve as a powerful voice for change within each company but can proactively broaden the pipeline of female candidates to ensure that even more women advance.”

Hewlett’s message about being rigorously prepared to assume board service when elected is valuable. But her suggestion that women simply wait their turn to be chosen for board service when the old guys are out of the way is disappointing. Women have been waiting for decades to get to the top, and – as Catalyst data on the percentage of women making it into the boardroom shows – playing the waiting game isn’t getting women anywhere fast.

By Melissa J. Anderson

The Financial Times recently reported that the number of female executive directors on FTSE 350 boards has slipped in the past year – all this after significant work to raise awareness of the benefits of board diversity in the UK following the release of the Lord Davies Report.

In fact, wrote Elizabeth Rigsby, the FT’s Chief Political Correspondent, “89 per cent of FTSE 350 companies have no female executives on their boards.”

Prospective female directors in the US are faring better – but not by much. According to Catalyst research released late last year, women occupy only 16.1 percent of Fortune 500 board directorships. That means over four out of five board seats belong to men. And, the report said, about one in ten Fortune 500 companies had no women on their boards.

Why is it that, despite all the research pointing to the business value of boardroom diversity, companies still stubbornly refuse to open the boardroom door to diverse candidates? Here are three convenient non-excuses that boards make for their lack of business-building diversity – and to counter them.

By Robin Madell

There’s only so much that individuals can do on their own to try to catapult their careers. One finding of Catalyst’s Myth of the Ideal Worker report is that even when women tried all the strategies they had been told will help them get ahead—using the same tactics as men—they still advanced less than their male counterparts and had slower pay growth. Therefore, as with latticing, it’s up to the companies themselves to meet women halfway.

DDI’s Global Leadership Forecast 2011 found that some organizations are doing a better job than others of getting women into leadership positions—and those organizations have more formal processes in place for talent management.

But how can change agents encourage their organizations to make these changes?

By Melissa J. Anderson

In her new book, Half A Wife: The Working Family’s Guide To Getting A Life Back, Gaby Hinsliff explains that the challenges that mothers and fathers face in the workplace, as they pertain to work/life balance, aren’t the same. Much of the work/life discussion revolves around time – having the time to build a career one is proud of, as well as manage family responsibilities in a way one is also proud of.

But there’s more to it than that. When it comes to compromise in this area, men and women are judged differently in the workplace, and likely perceive their own sacrifices differently. She writes:

“A successful woman who compromises her career for the children will often be praised for doing so, because she is conforming to a sentimental idea of what ‘good’ women do. A man doing the same, however, is challenging the idea of what it means to be a man: competitive, ambitious and a successful provider. The idea that mothers are ‘necessary’ to children but fathers more dispensable is ingrained in most men from childhood, not least by their own fathers.”

But a recent study shows that this attitude is changing amongst fathers – and there is a desire for corporations to change as well. The Boston College Center for Work and Family’s survey of almost 1,000 “white collar” fathers at large corporations revealed that while men considered themselves career driven, the majority wished they could spend more time at home.

Brad Harrington, Executive Director of BC’s Center for Work & Family, said “We see that fathers, too, need a family-supportive work environment when it comes to aligning work and family, and this has tangible benefits for their jobs and careers, and in turn for their organizations.”