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By Daniel McGinn
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Leslie Varon's boss lived by a simple rule: if he was in the office, she should be, too. In the early 1990s Varon worked in finance at Xerox, and the department's VP was an old-style organization man. "You could set your watch by the hours this man worked," Varon says, recalling 12-hour days that often began at 7 a.m. For Varon and her colleagues, that meant missing family dinners. After much discontent, they called a meeting. Couldn't they take work home in order to get out in time for supper? The boss agreed, slowly growing to believe that an employee's value lies in her work, not the hours spent at her desk. As for Varon, her earlier departures don't seem to have impeded her career: today she's Xerox's finance VP.
Her status as a female officer would make her a rarity at many companies, but not at Xerox. The $15.7 billion document-management company is one of only nine in the Fortune 500 with a female CEO, but its gender diversity extends far beyond the corner office. Of Xerox's 32 corporate officers, eight are women. So are 800 of its middle managers, more than 30 percent of the total. The company is routinely ranked among the best places for women to work. Inside its Connecticut headquarters, female employees describe a culture where no one hesitates to reschedule a meeting to take a child to the pediatrician. Managers are judged--and compensated--on meeting diversity goals. At Xerox, "people really believe this--this is not cosmetic," says David Nadler, chairman of Mercer Delta Consulting, who worked with Xerox for 20 years. "They don't see diversity as somehow in conflict with meritocracy."
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It's an attitude that began taking root nearly 40 years ago, when Xerox's top management became concerned about its treatment of black employees. By the 1970s Xerox was aggressively hiring blacks. And as feminism took hold, the company's progressive attitudes on race made it especially receptive to changes. But David Kearns, Xerox's CEO from 1982 to 1991, says he promoted women not because of fairness but because drawing from a bigger labor pool would help Xerox compete. "You had to get all of the people [involved] or you weren't going to be able to succeed," he recalls.
Many of today's senior Xerox women directly benefited from these early moves. Anne Mulcahy began as a sales rep in 1976. Though her numbers were great, she figured her Xerox career would be limited by her refusal to relocate with her husband and two children. But her bosses accommodated her by letting her commute to ever-bigger jobs. "[They said], 'We think you've got a career path here and we want you to take it as far as you can'," she says. She took it far indeed: in 2001, with Xerox mired in financial crisis, Mulcahy became CEO. She cut the work force from 79,000 to 58,000, refreshed the product line and strengthened the balance sheet. The result: its stock price is up 65 percent, and Mulcahy recently ranked ahead of Oprah Winfrey on Forbes's 2005 list of powerful women.
Around headquarters, there are subtle signs of what executives describe as Xerox's kinder culture. Instead of shaking hands, executives sometimes greet with hugs. Midlevel employees seem remarkably at ease among top officers. By most accounts, employees feel free to refuse to schedule 7:30 a.m. meetings because of day-care constraints. But despite the firm's track record, the National Association of Female Executives ranks seven companies--including Avon, Liz Claiborne and IBM--as better places for women managers. To rise higher, says NAFE president Betty Spence, Xerox needs more women with profit-and-loss responsibility and among its top earners. Mulcahy adds that it needs more women abroad, more Hispanics and more female engineers. Even for a company that's come a long way, baby, there's still far to go.
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