Word: cunningham
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Cunningham's predicament outlines just how vulnerable women are in male-dominated corporate hierarchies. What happened to Cunningham could happen to any young woman who rises too far, too rapidly in the eyes of her male colleagues. "What this means," a woman student at the Business School said yesterday, "is that all corporate women are going to have to put up the barricade and watch their defenses constantly...
...soon as the rumors became public, the issue of Cunningham's integrity dominated coffee table chatter and cocktail party scuttlebutt at corporate gatherings everywhere. The press lavished so much attention on speculations about Cunningham's morality that The New York Times--after running the story on its own front page--editorialized, "Never in recent memory has so much been written about so little," The question both the media and the business world seemed to want answered was not whether Cunningham was qualified, but the snickering, "was she or wasn...
...Cunningham's appointment as vice president for strategic planning had been confirmed by Bendix's directors, who further showed their support by denying her request for a leave of absence when the rumors began. Despite that, observers within and outsidv the corporation jumped to the conclusion that Cunningham must have used sexual favors to reach the top. Although a man a year younger than Cunningham had been appointed without incident to a top-level post the year before, as a women, Cunningham's youth automatically made her suspect. The most retrograde lesson yet drawn from the affair comes from...
...Perhaps Cunningham had muddied the waters by appoaring with Agee at quasi-social events (like the Republican National Convention) and by speaking of him in terms like, "He is the finest human being I've ever met." And Agee certainly made matter worse by trying to dispel the gossip in front of a public meeting of 600 employees. Both Agee and Cunningham have acknowledged their relationship as mentor and protege. In business, that type of relationship is not only customary, but often promoted at business schools as the key to success. And women, precisely because they have not yet been...
...Mary Cunningham incident does not reveal any startling new truths, only that old assumptions take along time to die. If anything, the episode shows just how urgent is the need for a stronger affirmative action effort at the highest corporate levels. Nowadays, any woman who reached a position like Cunningham's--after all, only one of 11 vice presidents in the nation's 88th largest corporation--is viewed as an oddity whose personal behavior needs to be scrutinized to explain her unusual success. Only when the number of women in the boardroom roughly equals that of men will Mary Cunningham...