NEW YORK — Maggie Wilderotter called the best dealmakers she knew to pull off an acquisition that earlier this year doubled the size of Frontier Communications, where she’d been chief executive officer for more than a decade.
NEW YORK — Maggie Wilderotter called the best dealmakers she knew to pull off an acquisition that earlier this year doubled the size of Frontier Communications, where she’d been chief executive officer for more than a decade.
To negotiate a $10.5 billion bid for a chunk of Verizon Communications’ landline assets, Wilderotter tapped JPMorgan Chase & Co. investment banker Jennifer Nason, Skadden Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom partner Martha McGarry, and acquisitions public relations strategist Joele Frank.
“I hired them because of their talents and competencies,” says Wilderotter, who stepped down last month as CEO and remains Frontier’s chairman. “But it’s a win-win that they’re women.”
That’s not as rare as it once was. Women hold only about 14 percent of senior executive jobs and 19 percent of board seats at the biggest U.S. companies, but they’re working the circuit to make their numbers count. Many at the top are doing deals together or recruiting and recommending one another for jobs, consulting work and boardroom seats. It’s what men have always done, accessing contacts made in the old boys’ club network of putting greens, ballgame box seats and frat-house reunions.
“Suddenly there’s a lot less stigma about women helping one another than there used to be,” says Kay Koplovitz, founder of cable’s USA Network and chairman of Springboard Enterprises, which invests in technology companies led by women. “A decade ago, there weren’t enough women with power to trigger deals or invest in startups — plus many were afraid that if they affiliated with each other they’d be judged too soft.”
Beth Stewart used to be one of those. She started at Goldman Sachs in the early 1980s as one of the first female analysts in the investment banking division. When some female colleagues went to a senior partner to ask for more flexible work schedules, she didn’t join them. “I said, ‘It’s your choice to work here, so don’t complain,’ ” she recalls.
Her thinking has since “changed completely,” she says. “To get ahead women need to speak up about what they need and want, and join together.”
Members of the old girls’ club are likely to know one another through Catalyst, the Committee of 200, or any of the dozens of professional outfits that support women in corporate jobs and work to put more women in them.
Stewart, founder and CEO of Trewstar Corporate Board Services, belongs to the Thirty Percent Coalition and other advocacy groups where she meets women who introduce her to prospects. In the last two years, she’s placed 20 female directors with companies including Symantec and Mosaic.
Doris Meister, president of U.S. Markets at BNY Mellon Wealth Management, has met clients through the Women’s Forum of New York, which by invitation-only has more than 450 members. The same goes for Davia Temin, a former executive at General Electric’s GE Capital who runs the crisis management consultancy Temin & Co. and belongs to organizations including the Women’s Forum and WomenCorporateDirectors.
“Groups that used to be a refuge” where women could commiserate about their isolation and loneliness in male dominated workplaces “have become a destination,” Temin says.
The corporate world still has its queen bees: women who are more critical of female than male subordinates and have no interest, or an aggressive disinterest, in helping others of their gender succeed. But the old girls’ club is aging the queen bee out.
“Women can learn as much from competent women as men,” Wilderotter says, “and sometimes we have more in common, including what it’s taken for us to get where we are.”
Wilderotter, who calls networking “my hobby,” has served on 23 boards in 29 years — right now she’s a director at Xerox and Procter & Gamble. At Frontier, where she became CEO in 2004 after leaving Microsoft as a senior vice president, more than 40 percent of managers and three of 10 directors are female.
One is Larraine Segil, an entrepreneur and management consultant who advised Wilderotter at Microsoft. “When Maggie was tapped to run Frontier, she said, ‘You’re coming with me,’ ” Segil says.
Wilderotter bonded with Skadden Arps’ McGarry — one of the minds behind Coca-Cola’s investment in Monster Beverage and its strategic partnership with Keurig Green Mountain — over drinks at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women conference about six years ago, then invited her to dinner. They chatted about their sisters; McGarry has five and Wilderotter three, including Denise Morrison, Campbell Soup Co.’s CEO. But they spent most of the evening talking business.
“It’s a sport for us,” says McGarry. “I work with lots of different companies and she’s been on so many boards, so we can talk about what’s happening across industries.”
Wilderotter last year enlisted McGarry and JP Morgan Chase’s Nason, global chairman of technology, media and telecom investment banking, to negotiate Frontier’s $2 billion acquisition of AT&T’s Connecticut wireline operations. After they closed that “without any faux pas” she says, she hired them to lead the Verizon deal and added Frank, whose firm represented deals with a total value of $121.6 billion last year.
They’ve become friends but “business is business,” Nason says. “When Maggie isn’t happy about something, I’ll get it right between the eyes.”
Nason’s been involved in several mostly women-driven deals, including Gannett’s acquisition in 2013 of Belo, two companies with female CEOs. And she’s discovered that women are less emotional than men, she says, “more results-driven, more focused on getting the job done, and don’t invest time in being master of the universe.”
When there are more of their gender than men in a conference room, she says, “we don’t say to one another, ‘Isn’t this unusual?’ Because we don’t have time. It’s after the fact that we say, ‘Wasn’t this cool — and productive?’”