A retiring ace turnaround CEO is blunt about women's stalled progress.

Finally, a woman CEO who doesn't gloss the paucity of women heading Fortune 500 companies.

Anne Mulcahy did what a string of male predecessors at Xerox Corp. could not to - arrest the seemingly endless troubles at the copier firm, including routine massive writeoffs, bookkeeping scandals, and chronic market-share losses to nimble offshore competition.

Mulcahy can't claim during her decade-long tenure to have boosted Xerox's shareholder value, which remains about where it was when she took the helm in 2000. But it was quite enough that Mulcahy, a Xerox lifer, managed to pull the iconic company from the flames and keep its products relevant. Mulcahy also groomed an African American woman, Ursula Burns, as her successor.

Here's Mulcahy in her Bloomberg Businessweek exit interview:

I went from being 'I just want to be a CEO' to understanding that I have to be an advocate for women. There's a responsibility that comes with the position. If you don't speak about the need to focus on the progress of women, who will? Maybe we've reached a degree of parity at the entry level, but we clearly don't have that in the executive ranks - or in government, for that matter.

Comments

[Boff]

"Hobbies? I have none." I wouldn't be surprised if she didn't have kids, either. A major block to women's progress is the fact that they are still expected to shoulder the bulk of domestic responsibilities and to make the career sacrifices when children or work-related moves happen. To reach the CEO level, the time commitment militates against families or hobbies. Unless you're a man who still needs to play golf and own a yacht.

My wife and I are both university professors in the sciences (another time- and mobility-intensive career path). We know many other women profs...almost all of them have stay-at-home or underemployed husbands.

[David Olive]

Hi Boff: As it happens, Mulcahy does have two children (http://www.referenceforbusiness.com/biography/M-R/Mulcahy-Anne-M-1952.html), but the intensity of the turnaround effort at Xerox - a company I've followed for 30 years, most of them troubled ones - no doubt kept her from spending as much time with them as she, her husband and the children would have preferred. It's tougher in academe, I think, because you don't have the retinue of executive assistants to book your travel and help tend to personal matters (picking up a graduation present for your daughter, for instance). My professor friends are often on the road, presenting papers and dissertations, working on collaborative research projects with peers in New Zealand, Scotland and Chicago, and as you can testify, you pretty much do all the arrangements yourself. Mulcahy had a speechwriter, just for starters, and in-house first-class healthcare administered at Xerox's Norwalk, Conn. headquarters. The thing about hobbies is profoundly worrisome. The mind needs diversions, for sanity's sake and to be better equipped to assess opportunities and crises and make character judgments. When Matthew Barrett was heading BMO, he swore that training in Chaucer, absent MBA school, was sufficient to run a business. An MBA without a background would find you deprived of all-important people skills, like who to trust with the job of heading the export division. You mention golf and yachting. Not sure about yachting, but golf for most execs, especially at that level, is all about networking. It's work, not play. Obama, to pick an example, is never happier than in the gym or the basketball court, but took up golfing while in the Illinois senate because that was in many cases the only way to "buttonhole" a fellow legislator. You also learn a person's character on the course: Do they cheat? Do they ask for mulligans? (Clinton always did.) In sum, it does seem a narrow life. Maybe that's why, in the interview, Mulcahy appears to swear off future corporate work.