Catalyst, an organization that supports expanding opportunities for women in business, conducted a census in 2007. They created a pyramid depicting the percentage of women in the labor force as the base, building to the percentage of women CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. I have reprinted the pyramid here.

I found it fascinating that despite the fact that women make up half of the management, professional and other related occupations in the labor market, their representation drops significantly in the Fortune 500. Could this be further proof of the existence of the “glass ceiling” in America’s largest corporations? Or could there be other, more compelling reasons for the low representation of women in large companies?

Then I ran across some recent statistics from ProGroup, an organization that supports diversity in the workplace: 

• Women entrepreneurs are the fastest growing economic trend in the United States.

• Women-owned businesses are growing at twice the rate of all U.S. firms.

• In 2006, over 10.6 million businesses were at least 50% owned by women, which means that women own 30% of all businesses

• Women-owned businesses generated over $2 trillion in sales in 2006.

The conclusion I’m coming to is that perhaps women are voluntarily stepping off the corporate ladder to start their own businesses. The glass ceiling could be one of many reasons that women make the decision to leave corporate America.

In another research article conducted by Catalyst in conjunction with the National Foundation for Women Business Owners, the need for flexibility of work hours (44%) far outpaced the glass ceiling (16%) as the reason women left public companies to open their own businesses (both numbers were slightly higher for women leaving private companies, 51% and 29%, respectively.) The interesting point to note is that women entrepreneurs do not define flexibility as working less hours; in fact, women business owners work just as long or even longer hours than women in large corporations. These women define flexibility as having control over the hours that they work; they choose what part of the day to devote their time to their businesses, thus offering them the opportunity to create a work/life balance on their own terms.

So, what could companies do to help attract successful women entrepreneurs back to the large corporations or, better yet, how can they keep them from leaving in the first place? I will discuss this and more in Part Two.