Linda Wardell hasn’t forgotten her first Salt Lake City meeting with local business partners five years ago. Fifty men. One woman.
“I realized that maybe they’d never had a woman in the room before,” the Atlanta native says in her soft drawl about representatives from the real estate development arm of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly known as the Mormon church. “Some of them were looking a little uncomfortable.”
Today, Wardell – general manager of City Creek Center, an 800,000-square foot mixed-use development near Temple Square downtown – is still often the lone woman in meetings. Except now, she’s also part of a pack of mostly female executives, and some men, determined to drag the state’s workplaces out of the 1970s.
In many respects, Utah, whose state symbol is a beehive, is a model of industriousness for the rest of the nation. Its economy is among the fastest growing, and its unemployment rate is the sixth lowest.
So many technology companies, including Google and eBay, have clustered in Salt Lake, Ogden and Provo that the area has been dubbed Silicon Slopes. Part of the attraction is a workforce with Mormons who learned languages and entrepreneurial skills during missions abroad, according to Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. Throw in accommodating taxes, a top university and the state’s natural beauty, and Utah may be the ideal business destination.
But it’s a different story if you’re a working woman.
Women often find their aspirations stifled by what many in Salt Lake delicately refer to as “the culture.” The Mormon Church lays out a division of labor “by divine design” – men are providers; women are nurturers. Once children arrive, mothers tend to quit school or work.
Utah ranks last in the United States for the percentage of mothers with young children in the labor force, at 52.8 percent. That’s 42.7 percentage points – the biggest gap in the nation – behind working fathers. Though the state has the highest U.S. birth rate, it ranks 48th for affordability and availability of child care, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research in Washington. Paid maternity leave is rare.
Women also are less represented on campuses, with Utah one of the few states where male students still outnumber female. Graduation rates at public institutions run almost 10 percentage points below the national average for women. All this leads to a grim gender wage gap: Working Utah women collect 70 cents for every dollar paid to men, again 48th in the country.
“By every major metric, we’re about two generations behind the nation,” says Pamela Perlich, a demographer at the University of Utah.
But with unemployment of just 3.7 percent in August and job growth of 4 percent a year, Utah can no longer afford to keep half of its population underemployed. Former state Rep. Patricia Jones has taken up the cause through the new Women’s Leadership Institute. She got a boost out of the starting gate from a New York Post article that lumped Utah with Saudi Arabia and Indonesia as places where “sexism reaches into the highest echelons of government.”
“It was really an affront to people here,” said Jones, who grew up in a nonpracticing Mormon home with a working mother.
She used the resulting embarrassment to help enlist what she calls “men of influence,” recruiting public officeholders such as Salt Lake County Mayor Ben McAdams, a Democrat, and state Lt. Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, to help promote women’s leadership.
So far, 64 organizations have signed on, from national businesses with local offices such as American Express to Utah-based companies including natural-gas giant Questar and Zions Bancorporation, an institution with $58 billion in assets and operations throughout the Western U.S.
Even the Mormon Church has clambered aboard the bandwagon. Though its uppermost echelons remain a male preserve, in August it appointed three women to its governing executive councils for the first time in history.
“We understand the benefit of women’s voices in an organization, both in the front lines and in leadership,” Ben Porter, the church’s head of human resources, wrote in an emailed statement. “More than ever, we are focused in preparing women to serve in vital roles.”
Jones is well-schooled in the art of the soft sell. A Democrat who served 14 years in a Republican-dominated state Legislature, she was one of just six women senators out of 29 when she retired last year.
Her institute, which also aims to get more women to run for office, is avoiding the “shame and blame” game, she says. Instead, she’s trying to encourage organizations to join even if they have never focused on women before.
“There’s a lot of hand-holding,” she says. “This is ‘Kumbaya.’”
Among her most avid men of influence is Scott Anderson, chief executive officer of the Zions First National Bank subsidiary, which traces its roots to 1873 and Mormon leader Brigham Young. Anderson, 68, a descendant of the pioneers who entered Salt Lake Valley on July 24, 1847, began promoting a more robust role for women after retaining a firm that Jones ran to conduct market research more than a decade ago.
Customers were asked to describe what Zions would look like if it were a person.
“They said, ‘You’re an overweight, balding, middle-aged man,’” he recalled, arching his eyebrows in dismay.
Anderson set about promoting women’s groups, mentoring and training programs, scholarships, flexible working hours and the like.
The bank monitors wage levels biannually to ensure no slippage in its policy of equal pay for similar work.
“It just makes good business sense,” Anderson said.
“You can get a better workforce, a more productive workforce; you can get better decision-making done and be more successful in selling your wares.”
