The great strides female heirs have made in business have come with some of the same baggage that has hampered male business heirs but I wouldn't be quick to seek lessons in family dynamics from some of the Shakespearean households of megalomaniacal commercial icons. But daughters do founder on some of the same rocky shoals as sons. It's another slice of a new era of female accomplishment — from the corridors of power in Washington to the helms of the family enterprise.
Consider:
*A study by the Raymond Institute, a New York consulting firm for family-owned companies, and MassMutual Financial Group found almost 35% of family-owned business executives believed that their company could be headed by a woman in the next five to seven years. That is up from 25% in a 1997 MassMutual study.
*Female leadership of the family business is going to affect a wide swath of the economy. According to a Citigroup report, families own or control 90% of U.S. businesses. They also employ half of all workers.
Why an upsurge in daughters as leaders? Pick a trend.
Records and role models
Women are coming out of business schools in record numbers. More women are learning the management trade with major companies and are taking their skills back home. And every time a woman takes the top spot at another corporation — or in Congress — there is another role model.
Do good companies have more women leaders, or do more women leaders make good companies?
Either way, dads who pick daughters to run their companies may be on to something. A study of 25 Fortune 500 companies by Pepperdine University, cited in the Harvard Business Review, found that firms with the best record of promoting women to top positions were 69% more profitable than the median for their industry when measuring profits as a percentage of stockholder equity.
The research advocacy group Catalyst found in a study of 353 Fortune 500 firms that those with the highest percentage of female senior managers had 35% higher return on investment than those in the lowest quartile.
Success in the family
Certainly, there is no shortage of father-daughter success stories. Still, there are tricky currents to navigate; in some ways even more so than for sons. I've interviewed a number of women rising in family businesses researching my book “Our Fathers Ourselves” on the changing relationship between fathers and daughters. They tell me that their status as the boss' daughter is a factor in ways they think are different from being the boss' son. There is more skepticism about their ability, a greater tendency to question their decisions — often going directly to dad — and a greater initial need to show toughness. Some even see a subtle belief that their role as company leader is an experiment, and that eventually a man will be in charge — or that the father has been running things all along.
Clearly, we've come far from the days when Eugene Meyer's son was not interested in taking over “The Washington Post”. Rather than turn to his daughter, Katharine, Meyer, her father handed the newspaper to Katharine’s husband. Women today don’t have to suffer their husband's death before they lead the family firm to glory as Katharine Graham did. But succession is not the seamless and expected ride that it has been for sons.
But daughters have and will take over — just as women have cracked the glass ceilings of business and politics. They have changed the face of American employment. Although, it has not always been easy.
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