Carol Bartz, the former chief executive of Autodesk, said that it was not uncommon for men in business meetings to assume that she was an office assistant, not a fellow corporate executive.
Please read the beginning of the article published 18 years ago in the NYT on 12/17/06
A Decade of Female Bosses
By Julie Creswell
“Like so many other women who entered corporate America in the 1970s, Carol Bartz simply wanted to make a little money. She did not harbor secret desires to run her own company or become chief executive of a large corporation. She just wanted to do a good job.
How many girls dare to dream of big careers today?
After working her way through college at the University of Wisconsin in Madison as a cocktail waitress (required uniform: red miniskirt, black fishnets and red feather in hair), Ms. Bartz graduated with a computer science degree in 1971. Tall, blonde, boisterous and ambitious, she entered the work force at a time when the promise of new professional opportunities for women was in the air.
Have we become free from the dress codes clichés?
What Ms. Bartz says she discovered, however, was that male counterparts and supervisors shook the corporate ladder ever more fiercely with each rung that she and other pioneering women of her generation ascended. But by combining a first-rate mind with hard work and decisive career moves, she managed to duck, bob and weave her way through Silicon Valley’s male-dominated technology industry in the 1980s.
Which reactions do a woman climbing the social ladder still provoke around her?
By the early 1990s, Ms Bartz had become one of the first women to run a large corporation. She garnered accolades from Wall Street and her peers for turning Autodesk into a leading international software company. This spring, Ms. Bartz stepped down as Autodesk’s chief executive, but she remains the executive chairwoman of its board.
Despite her hard-won reputation as an astute business-woman, Ms. Bartz found herself repeatedly skipped over during a recent meeting of business and political leaders in Washington. The reason was that the men at the table assumed that she was an office assistant, not a fellow executive.
“Happens all the time”, Ms. Bartz says dryly, recalling the incident.
“Sometimes I stand up. Sometimes I just ignore it.”
The contours of her long, bumpy journey to the chief executive’s suite reflect some of the grains women have made in navigating corporate hierarchies over the last 30 years, but also illustrate how rare it still is for a woman to get the keys to a company’s most powerful corner office.”
What happened to me, Florence Klein?
As I entered the financial industry as a stockbroker in the 1960s in Philadelphia, I found myself as the only woman in the room. I encountered barriers and challenges when I sought a promotion, but this did not discourage me.
Here is the extract of my book “Under the Hat” page 54:
“After working at Robinson & Co. for two and a half years, I was becoming quite successful at financial planning. Not only was I getting my own clients and setting up a steady of lunch seminars, but I was also becoming keenly interested to work downstairs in the boardroom, not just in the financial planning department.
One day I approached the department manager to tell him about my interest in the boardroom. (…) His answer was swift. “Oh no Florence – why would you want to go into the boardroom and get involved with stocks and bonds? You know that is really more risk-oriented, and, besides, you’re doing so well now. The market is so volatile.”
(…) A few weeks later, I again requested to make the move and received the same negative reply. Of course, that didn’t stop me. I went to Frank, the boardroom manager, and requested the new role. Frank’s response was the same denial.
(…) Three weeks later, I made my request yet again. Perhaps they were surprised at my persistence. I felt certain they were not dismissing me, exactly – they just wanted to make sure I kept up my productivity and weren’t certain I could handle the pressure. After all, they had never overseen any women brokers before.
Completely undeterred when I had an objective, I continued pursuing my wishes until the managers finally understood that, with my positive work performance, I could easily transfer to another brokerage firm. They consented to give me a desk directly in front of the large moving stock exchange tape. At last, I’d made it into the boardroom with the male other stockbrokers! I was thrilled.”
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Florence Under the Hat 
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