Where to Find Women Directors
from
March/April 2007
by Julie Connelly
How would you like your next new board member to be a CEO with experience managing a large, diverse, possibly unionized labor force and navigating thickets of federal and state regulations? And did we mention that she’d be a woman?
Here’s an organization that routinely unearths such paragons: Women Business Leaders of the U.S. Health Care Industry Foundation. Familiarly known as WBL, the outfit helps senior female health-care executives find board seats.
Few industries are more complex and highly regulated than health care, so those who have built successful careers there can bring a useful set of skills to a boardroom. But for years it was the successful men, not the women, who got board invitations—something that caught the attention of attorney Lynn Shapiro Snyder, 50, who leads the health-care practice of Epstein Becker & Green. In 2001 she gathered 40 senior women executives and formed a steering committee for the group that evolved into WBL. Today the membership numbers 1,400 women, more than 60% of whom sit on nonprofit and for-profit boards.
WBL helps educate its members for board service with annual seminars. It also encourages companies to allow executive officers below the C level to join boards—many of its members are senior vice presidents. “That would liberate a lot of experienced women,” Snyder says.
Members who have ended up with a board seat include Ruth Williams Brinkley, 54, one of the original 40 participants and now CEO of Memorial Health Care System, which operates two hospitals with a total of 420 beds in Chattanooga, Tennessee. In 2002 Brinkley joined the board of Chattem Inc., a local consumer-products company best known for Selsun Blue dandruff shampoo and Gold Bond medicated powders, lotions, and sprays. “WBL gave me confidence to know I could be on a corporate board,” she says. “But the real support is the network that says it’s a good thing to be a woman on a board, that we bring something to the table because of our health-care background.”
If you’re interested in dipping into the WBL well, e-mail the organization with a description of the slot you’re trying to fill (click on “Contact Us” at
www.womenleadinghealthcare.org
). WBL will forward what you send to its members with a request for résumés. You’ll definitely hear back from some of them.
