By John Byczkowski
Enquirer staff writer

About the best that can be said for the diversity of Greater Cincinnati's million-dollar executives is that the group has more women than Augusta National.

Of the 72 million-dollar executives in the Enquirer's study of compensation, all are white, and 70 are male.

The group has just two women: Cheryl Hodges, senior vice president at Omnicare Inc. in Covington; and Dawn Bertsche, chief financial officer at Multi-Color Corp.

Why has the front office remained so white and so male? "That's a good question," said John Schiff Jr., CEO at Cincinnati Financial Corp. "I've wondered the same thing in our company."

"I can remember when we had only male claim representatives" 25 years ago, Schiff said. "Now we've got a number of female claim representatives who go out and climb on damaged roofs. They go into auto body shops for car repairs. They'll go meet face to face with a plaintiff's attorney who represents one of our claimants. We get excellent productivity."

Women and minorities, however, are not reaching the highest levels of corporate life. "Women and minorities still have a long way to go with regard to progress at publicly traded companies," said Janet Reid, principal partner at Global Lead Management Consulting, a Cincinnati-based diversity consulting firm.

Competence counts when climbing the corporate ladder, but so do familiarity, comfort and trust, said Reid, who is also chairperson of the Greater Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce.

"It's not that people are saying, 'Gee, I don't want any women in here' or, 'I don't want any minorities in here.' It's not an issue of an overt kind of discrimination," she said.

"There's not enough energy and effort made to develop that familiarity, comfort and trust with minorities and women early on in their careers."

Top company officers need to seek out people who not only look differently, but also think differently, she said.

Formal diversity programs aren't always necessary. Bertsche, at Multi-Color, said she was never involved in a diversity program anywhere she worked. "I've been fortunate to have bosses that have given me good opportunities to learn," she said.

Flexibility helps. Her background is in finance, but during her 10 years with Clopay Corp., she was offered a position running sales, marketing and product development for the company's garage-door division. That's far from finance, but she believed it would broaden her experience, so she accepted the job.

"The most important thing that has gotten me to where I am is the ability to be flexible, to take every opportunity that comes my way, and work very hard, make a lot of sacrifices, but never to compromise myself," Bertsche said.

That's helped her survive in smaller companies, but in big companies, women and minorities might need more help. "I think generally, especially in bigger companies that can afford to have (diversity) programs, they can be incredibly helpful," she said. "It's the larger companies that need to be the role models."

Cincinnati Financial does not have any formal diversity programs. "All of our promotions are on merit," Schiff said. "Fortunately, we've had a variety of these folks who are simply like cream, rising on their own merit, and that's helping us."

Is he satisfied with the company's progress? "No, I'm not satisfied," Schiff said. "I wouldn't call it dissatisfied, but I think there's more opportunity to do a greater result along those lines."

Reid said that companies should measure their progress in diversity, as they track any other performance metric. "For anything that is critical to a company, there is usually a plan and a strategy around it, and a way to see if success is occurring or not. For any company you'd have to measure what you have versus what you deem to be your goal," she said. Companies that don't have diversity programs may not have a handle on where they stand, she said.

Aparna Joshi, an assistant professor of industrial relations and human resources at the University of Illinois, agrees. Her studies show that women are still paid less than men, and minorities less than whites. The gap in pay shrinks, however, when women and minorities are in management positions.

If companies have been talking about increasing diversity but still find they're too male and white, "they need to look more systematically at changing their organizations," she said. Rather than spending more on the latest fad in diversity programs, Joshi said companies should "seriously monitor what has already been done" and address cultural issues that may be hampering diversity efforts.

Cinergy Corp. CEO James Rogers said improving the company's diversity is one factor in his annual bonus. Working against the company, however, is that talented women and minorities are highly mobile.

"Women and people of color get bid up and bid out," he said. "We've really tried hard to have goals, to have more women and African-Americans, more people of color in key positions." Cinergy not long ago had three women in key management positions. None remains: One retired, one was recruited by General Electric Co., and another was recruited by the Bush administration to join the U.S. Department of Energy, Rogers said.

Rogers said it's inevitable that the front office of big companies will become less white and less male. "I think that will change fairly dramatically in the next 15-20 years. I think the population in the country is changing dramatically," he said.

One hopeful sign is rising diversity in enrollments in MBA programs nationwide. The percent of people earning MBAs who are white dropped to 55 percent in 2002 from 74 percent in 1992, as the number of African-Americans, Hispanics and Asians has risen. The percentage of MBA students who are women rose to 41 percent in 2001, up from 35 percent 10 years earlier and nearly double what it was in 1980.

E-mail johnb@enquirer.com