From the Wall Street Journal

Men still dominate the oil patch, but women have carved out their own turf in the energy business: Utilities have more female chief executives than any other sector in the S&P 500.

From Lynn Good, the longtime chief of Charlotte, N.C.-based Duke Energy DUK -2.09%Corp., to Geisha Williams, the new head of PG&E Corp. PCG -2.28% in San Francisco—and the first Latina CEO in the history of the Fortune 500—companies that provide electricity and natural gas to the public have a record of putting women in the corner office. Nearly 20% of the utilities in the S&P 500 are run by women.

WOMEN IN THE WORKPLACE

This article is part of a Wall Street Journal special report on women, men and work based on a study by LeanIn.Org and McKinsey & Co.

That the utility sector has so many women in charge today is a testament to how it prioritized female executive development years ago, says Jane Stevenson, head of the CEO succession practice at executive-recruitment firm Korn/Ferry .

“You can’t just find these women and their next move is CEO,” she says. Women, like men, need to be part of a company’s operations and rotate through profit-and-loss centers of the business to really understand it.

Patricia Poppe, an industrial engineer who is chief executive of CMS Energy Corp. CMS -2.96% in Michigan, now knows the power business inside and out. She joined the utility world as a power-plant director, coming from General Motors Co. , where she worked for Mary Barra managing auto plants in Michigan, Ohio and California.

When GM tapped her to move to South Korea to manage a plant there, Ms. Poppe realized that her twin girls would go into third grade and enter their fifth school, which worried her. A chance meeting with an old friend and co-worker from GM who had made the leap to the power sector compelled her to make the switch, too.

“His sales pitch was ‘You’ll have a better life,’” she says. “I worked for GM for 15 years and we were moving every 18 months. That’s why I left. It was a great company and a pivotal time. But we took the option to come home and settle down.”

At the time, Ms. Poppe says, she didn’t think leaving the auto maker for a power company was a brilliant career move, but about 18 months into the job people at the utility started to talk to her about the possibility of becoming CEO. “Honestly, I had no idea my career would accelerate the way it did,” she says. “I had worked for them six years when I was named CEO, but the whole time I was being rotated into key positions in the company to prepare me.”

Many women who aspire to the highest rank find themselves siloed too early in their careers, Ms. Stevenson says. In contrast, Ms. Poppe had roles in operations, including lateral moves, as well as stints in regulatory jobs and customer service, which are key in the business of providing heat and electricity to the public. That kind of varied experience between finance and operations also helped women like Constance Lau, CEO of Hawaiian Electric ,HE -1.03% and Patricia Kampling, CEO of Alliant Energy Corp. LNT -1.52% , based in Madison, Wis., rise to the top office at their utilities.

At a recent meeting of power-company chiefs, Ms. Poppe says, people laughed when they realized “there are more Patricias around this table than Toms.”

 


Legal Notice