Italian Women Strive to Snap Stereotype

16/11/2010 - Aaron Maines - The Wall Street Journal

Valore D aims to change corporate culture and their country's male-dominated business environment from within.

When it comes to women in the boardroom, Italy is trailing most of Europe. With just 4% of its company board members female, Italy outperforms only Bulgaria and Romania and is way behind the leader, Norway, where 41% of top managers are women.
Now an Italian women's association is using creative management-training techniques to try to usher in a revolution and challenge the country's persistent stereotypes of women as stay-at-home mothers or sexy soubrettes.

In May 2009, 11 Italian female managers joined forces to set up Valore D. Unlike many women's associations, Valore D (valore is Italian for value and the "d" stands for donne, or women) only accepts companies as members. The association works directly with the management of its member companies, promoting and organizing initiatives designed to increase the number of women in high-level management. Membership, which began with 11 companies, has now risen to 36, involving around 200,000 employees.

The association targeted international companies both for the higher profile they would provide and because they were the most receptive to the idea. They were also the companies for which Valore D's founders were working. Many of these big companies already had programs in place and found the association an ideal fit in their efforts to give women a bigger executive presence.

"We were tired of talking and hearing other people talk about how Italian women should make it, about whether or not they could, whether they had the skills and so on," says Maria Pierdicchi, head of Southern Europe for financial services and credit ratings agency Standard & Poor's, who also heads the association's role-modeling program. "We know we are good. We wanted to put our talent to work."

The association believes the more women who are actively involved in a company's administration, the more successful that company will be. Valore D doesn't seek confrontation but aims to change business attitudes and Italy's male-dominated business environment from within. Female stereotypes are deeply entrenched in the national consciousness, with the populist media taking a bigger interest in women for their role as the object of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's affections than for their business acumen. [...]