1973年，贝蒂•弗里丹的《女性的奥秘》（The Feminine Mystique）一书已经问世10年，《Ms.》杂志发行了第一期刊物。美国劳工统计局（Bureau of Labor Statistics）的资料显示，那年女性涌入职场，占到劳动人口的40%。拥有学龄子女的已婚女性多半从事着付薪工作。然而，《财富》（Fortune）杂志的温德姆•罗伯逊在1973年4月的一篇文章中调查了大公司的用人情况，他对这种所谓的女性职场崛起产生了疑问：“她们究竟在哪里？”

    美国劳工统计局的资料显示，只有3%的职场女性是“管理人员”。罗伯逊写道：“在最为显要的职位（也就是公司管理层）上很少看到女性的身影。”

    她们到底有多么罕见？《财富》将目光对准了工业企业1,000强和非工业企业50强榜单。在这1,300家公司中，有1,220家必须向美国证券交易委员会（SEC）提交报告，披露有关薪酬最高的三位高管和收入超过3万美元（相当于如今的16万美元左右）的所有主管的信息。在由此产生的6,500人中，只有11人是女性。在减去一位似乎并未过多参与公司管理的女性后，罗伯逊在一篇名为《大公司里职位最高的10名女性》（The Ten Highest-Ranking Women in Big Business）的文章中简要介绍了剩余的10位女性。这篇文章显示了40年来哪些已经改变，更为重要的是，哪些未曾改变。

    1973年，女性几乎不可能晋升到领导职位。罗伯逊写到，虽然这份榜单上的女性，包括《华盛顿邮报》（Washington Post）的凯瑟琳•格拉汉姆和芭比娃娃（Barbie）的创造者露丝•汉德勒，都是“很有才华、勤奋工作的高管”，但她们也都“受益于家庭关系、婚姻或者她们协助缔造了她们现在管理的那家公司，只有两人是例外。总而言之，她们中的大多数人不必处理至少两个问题，而这两个问题多年来已经阻碍了最有才干、最符合要求的女性。她们不是从公司里前途有限的职位干起，她们也不必面对歧视女性的公司等级制度。”

    讽刺的是，“这些女性显然都不必工作，实际上，要是没有家庭关系，她们中有些人根本不会去工作，或者不会拥有辉煌的事业”。时代明镜公司（Times Mirror Co.）的多萝西•钱德勒在她的个人简介中写道：“如果我不是诺曼•钱德勒太太，我就不会拥有我曾得到的那些机会。”

    但罗伯逊写道：“她们每个人都在各自的公司里发挥了积极和重要的作用。这是个引人瞩目的证据，证明其他的女性管理人才都被浪费掉了。”

    The year was 1973. Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique had been out for a decade; Ms.magazine had published its first issue. Women were pouring into the workforce, hitting 40% of the total working population that year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Over half of married women with school-age kids held a paying job. And yet, as Fortune'sWyndham Robertson surveyed the world of big business in an April 1973 story, he had a question about this supposed female surge: "Where in blazes are they?"

    A mere 3% of women in the workforce were "managers and administrators," according to the BLS, and, as Robertson wrote, "in jobs where visibility is greatest -- i.e. in corporate management -- women are seldom seen."

    How seldom seen? Fortune looked at its list of the 1,000 largest industrial companies, plus the 50 largest companies in six non-industrial businesses. From this list of 1,300 firms, 1,220 had to file proxies with the SEC that provided information on the top three paid officers, and any director earning over $30,000 (equivalent to just shy of $160,000 today). Of the 6,500 names generated that way, a mere 11 turned out to be women. After subtracting a woman who appeared not to be closely involved in running her company, Robertson profiled the others in a piece called "The Ten Highest-Ranking Women in Big Business" that is notable both for showing what has changed in 40 years and, as importantly, what has not.

    In 1973, it was almost impossible for a woman to work her way up the ranks to a leadership role. Robertson wrote that while the women on the list -- which included names such as the Washington Post's (WPO) Katharine Graham and Barbie creator Ruth Handler -- were "highly capable and hard-working executives," they also, with only two exceptions, "were helped along by a family connection, by marriage, or by the fact that they helped to create the organizations they now preside over. In short, most of them did not have to deal with at least two problems that have over the years held back even the most able and qualified women: They did not start out in their companies in jobs with limited futures, and they did not have to work their way through a corporate hierarchy that discriminated against them."

    The irony of this was that "none of these women, obviously, has to work, and in fact some of them wouldn't have -- or wouldn't have had careers -- without the family tie-in." Dorothy Chandler of the Times Mirror Co., reported in her profile that, "If I had not been Mrs. Norman Chandler, I would not have had the opportunities I've had."

    But, as Robinson wrote, "Each of them plays an effective and important role within her corporation -- an impressive bit of evidence that other female executive talent is going to waste."

    40年后，这种情况看起来相当明显了。每年一度的财富“最具影响力商界女性”排行榜可以轻松地罗列出50位女性，远高于1973年的10人。《财富》在2012年10月发布的排行榜上写道：“虽然目前有19位财富500强女性CEO……但杰出的女性太多了，我们不得不割爱其中两位。”

    在这50位女性中，有些人是沿着所在公司的艰难晋升之路向上攀爬。例如，IBM公司CEO罗睿兰在1981年加入这个科技巨头，当时她才20岁出头。仅仅8年前，罗伯逊指出了女性管理人员面临的“荒唐”歧视，比如密尔沃基房地产规划委员会（Milwaukee Estate Planning Council）拒绝把会员资格授予威斯康星第一信托公司（First Wisconsin Trust Co.）总裁凯瑟琳•克利里（她是1973年财富“最具影响力商界女性”排行榜成员），尽管她管理的资产达到12.5亿美元，这意味着她管理着密尔沃基（实际上是整个威斯康星州）最大的信托公司。

    同样有趣的是，罗伯逊在1973年那篇文章中提出的一些问题与如今的情况非常相似。

    罗伯逊忠实地告诉读者：“这些女性大多都能兼顾事业与家庭。她们中有6人已婚，3人丧偶。这9人中有7人身为人母。”但罗伯逊写到，没有更多女性担任领导职位的一个重要原因在于事业和子女不能兼顾的观点。确实，“受过良好教育的女性常常在养育学龄前儿童期间辞职。如果她们不辞职，她们可能是最有机会获得晋升的女性。”

    然后是抱负的问题。Facebook首席运营官谢丽尔•桑德伯格谈到了女性是否应该“在生孩子之前辞职”。罗伯逊写道：“这些极其成功的商界女性有个共识，那就是女性的抱负仍然太低。”

    “女性或许能达到某个较低层级的最高职位，但她们不会攀向下一个高峰，”奥格登公司（Ogden Corp）的蒂莉•刘易斯说。“她们没有受到激励。现在有了妇女解放运动，或许她们将会受到激励。”

    Alberto-Culve公司的柏妮丝•拉文的个人介绍显示，她的三个孩子出生时，她像玛丽莎•梅耶那样休假一个月，“从来没觉得大力家庭会增加付薪工作的难度”。柏妮丝说，她销售队伍中的女性比男性做得更好。但罗伯逊写道：“她发现更多的女性不愿意承担重任，过于害怕犯错。她说，‘很多女孩想做秘书，仅此而已。’”(财富中文网)

    译者：千牛絮

    Forty years later, this seems pretty apparent. Fortune's annual Most Powerful Women in Business list can easily rank 50 women vs. the 10 on the 1973 proto-list, and as Fortune noted in its October 2012 rankings, "While there are currently 19 female Fortune 500 CEOs ... the talent pool was so deep that two of them didn't make the cut."

    Some of these 50 women climbed the harrowing ranks of their companies. IBM (IBM) CEO Ginni Rometty, for instance, joined the tech giant in her early 20s in 1981. That's a mere eight years after Robertson pointed out the "absurd" discrimination female executives faced, such as the Milwaukee Estate Planning Council's refusal to grant membership to Catherine Cleary, president of the First Wisconsin Trust Co. (and a member of Fortune's 1973 list), despite the fact that the $1.25 billion in assets under her management meant she was running the largest trust company in Milwaukee ("indeed in all of Wisconsin.")

    What's also interesting is how similar some of the issues brought up in Robinson's 1973 article are to what's rehashed now.

    Robinson dutifully informed readers that "Most of the women were able to combine careers with families. Six of them are married, and three are widows. Seven of those nine are mothers." But one key reason there weren't more women in leadership roles, Robinson wrote, is the view that careers and kids were incompatible. Indeed, "highly educated women are the ones who most frequently quit their jobs during the rearing of preschool children -- and they are presumably the women whose chances of advancement would otherwise be greatest."

    And then there's the question of ambition -- whether women "leave before you leave" to quote Facebook (FB) COO Sheryl Sandberg. "Among these highly successful businesswomen there is general agreement that women's aspirations are still far too low," Robertson wrote.

    "Women may get to the top of the heap at some low level, but they don't try to move up to the next plateau," said Tillie Lewis of Ogden Corp. "Somehow they're not inspired. Maybe they will be, now with women's lib."

    Bernice Lavin of Alberto-Culver, whose profile noted that she took off a Marissa Mayer-esque one month when her three children were born and "has never felt that running a home made her paying job more difficult," reported that the women in her sales force did a better job than the men. But, writes Robertson, "she finds lots more women unwilling to take on responsibility and unduly fearful of making mistakes. She says 'A lot of girls want to be secretaries, and that's it.'"