Morris Number Ranges for Some Tech Companies (Morris Number 05)

CALCULATING MORRIS NUMBERS FOR TECH COMPANIES

Employment data is not easy to come by. But almost exactly a year ago, Julianne Pepitone published an article in CNN Money entitled "Black, female, and a Silicon Valley 'trade secret'" and subtitled "Silicon Valley Boys' Club" in which she sought to answer the question "How diverse is Silicon Valley?" Pepitone had managed to obtain employment data from five tech companies willing to permit such information to be public: Cisco, Dell, eBay, Ingram Micro and Intel. I discussed the article, and its excellent interactive tables, here.

Pepitone had sought information from twenty tech companies. Only three, Dell, Ingram Micro and Intel, cooperated; Intel alone has a policy of making such data public. After a FOIA request was filed seeking employment information that government contractors have to give the government, information about two more companies, Cisco and eBay, was obtained. Final tally: 20 companies, 5 with data, 15 not. Ten of those fifteen, including Amazon, Facebook and Twitter, had no government contracts so the FOIA request did not touch them. The other five -- Apple, Google, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Microsoft -- successfully petitioned to prevent disclosure on the grounds that it would cause "competitve harm," hence the 'trade secret' joke in the title of the article. Would a company with an excellent record of diversity want to make sure nobody saw the numbers? Hmmm. If you know of further developments in the quest for this kind of information, please let me know.

Pepitone's tables present the numbers of employees in six categories. She explains that these are averages over 5 years. [See "Methodology" below the interactive tables and click "Read More."] Those categories are related to a set of ten codes from an EEO-1 form that all companies with more than 100 employees must file with the EEOC. Those ten codes are aggregates from the 300 occupations the US census uses. See http://www.eeoc.gov/employers/eeo1survey/jobclassguide.cfm.

The EEOC, however, is prohibited by statute (subsection e of 42 USC 2000e-8) from divulging EEO-1 information, which is why the CNN Money investigators first asked the companies directly, and then used a FOIA request addressed to the Department of Labor. Unlike the EEOC, the Department of Labor is not subject to a gag rule but the contractors do have the right to petition to keep secret any trade secrets.

Pepitone reorganizes the data to focus more on upper level employees. She breaks out the subcategories of the EEO-1's top code (1.1: executive/senior officers and 1.2: First/Midlevel Officials and Managers), identifying the first as "Officers and Managers" and the second as "Midlevel Officer or Manager." She also collapses the lower five EEO-1 codes into a single "Admin/Other" category.

Total employees for each company are not displayed, so I have calculated them here.

Company Category	Cisco	Dell	eBay	Ingram Micro	Intel
Officer/Manager	225	125	55	236	41
Mid-level	6,496	3,374	1,804	574	5,027
Professional	24,100	11,237	3,977	846	28,306
Technical	59	3,370	58	119	10,970
Sales	2,850	5,895	163	714	577
Administrative/Other	902	4,820	2,700	2,123	2,000
Total	34,632	28,821	8,757	4,612	46,921

Apparently the five companies give different interpretations to the EEO codes. For example, Intel, which I calculate has almost 47,000 employees, has only 41 "Officers and Managers," less than 0.1% of the workforce. By contrast, Ingram Micro has 236 "Officers and Managers", almost 6 times as many as Intel, out of a workforce of 4600, one-tenth the size of Intel's. That means Ingram Micro's Officers and Managers are 5% of its workforce. Is Ingram Micro that top-heavy and is Intel that lean? Or what?

The CNN Money interactive tables let you view the total number of people the company designated in each category, as well as how many are men or women, or your choice of any combination of gender -- all, men or women -- and ethnicity -- all, Asian, Black, Hispanic, White, or Other.

Because all five companies have at least five women in the top category, it is possible to calculate a range of Morris Numbers. We cannot determine the precise value without more information about people's actual positions. (See Part 03 of this series for a discussion of different ways to rank employees using objective data.) Sometimes the companies' webpages help, at least for the very top of the top. I analyze some of this information below.

A suspicious mind might suspect that companies use as broad a definition as they can for the top category in order to have as few zeroes in the non-white-male boxes as possible. The range for the Morris Number [LOW, HIGH] for each company does not prove or disprove that theory. The greater the overall number of employees in the top category, however, the higher (worse) the upper limit on the Morris Number range.

MORRIS NUMBER RANGES FOR THE FIVE TECH COMPANIES

If we do not know the precise rankings of the women in a company's top management, we can at least calculate the range. The best (lowest) Morris Number is obtained by assuming the first five woman are clustered at the top, above all the men, the highest (worst) Morris Number by assuming that the fifth and all lesser-ranked women in that category are clustered at the bottom. (The ordinary Morris Number is the same whether the first woman is in that bottom cluster, too, or is the CEO. I propose the weighted Morris Number to take into account the actual positions of the four women you pass on the way to finding the fifth highest ranking woman.

Let's take an example, first with numbers, then without, to understand how this works.
        Total people in the category Officer and Managers is 105.
        Number of women in that category is 5
        Number of men = 105-5 = 100

If we assume the least sexist (genderist?) case, the 5 women are all at the top, the 100 men come below them, and the Morris Number is 0. In the worst case, the 5th woman is ranked below the 100 men and the Morris Number is 100. We can write the range as [0,100].

We can derive a formula, too. If T = total and W = women, then the worst number is T-W. If there are 5 or more women in the category, the best number is 0. If there are less than 5, then the next category has to be included to get the Morris Number.

Now let's consider Pepitone's data.

MORRIS NUMBER RANGES FOR FIVE TECH COMPANIES

The Officers and Managers row of the interactive tables shows that
Cisco: Women are 44 of the 225. Morris Number Range: 0 to 181
Dell: Women are 27 out of 125. Morris Number Range: 0 to 98
eBay: Women are 10 out of 55. Morris Number Range: 0 to 45
Ingram Micro: Women are 47 of the 236. Morris Number Range: 0 to 189
Intel: Women are 6 out of 41. Morris Number Range: 0 to 35.

Conclusion: Intel looks the best. Ingram Micro looks the worst, with Cisco a close second.

WHAT CISCO, INGRAM MICRO AND INTEL
MAKE PUBLIC ABOUT THEIR EXECUTIVES

CISCO: The senior management (according to http://newsroom.cisco.com/exec-bios, last viewed 3/14/14), has only 71 people, compared to the 225 that CNN Money reported was on Cisco's EEO-1. The top level is called the Executive Leadership Team. The 15 members, 11 men and 4 women, are listed alphabetically by last name. The women's titles are SVP and Chief Marketing Officer; Chief Technology and Strategy Officer; CIO and SVP; and SVP and Chief Human Resources Officer. We need only look for one more woman to calculate the Morris Number. Of the 56 people in the next level, the Senior Leadership Team, 6 are women, 50 are men. (The fact that there are more women proportionally in the top level (4/15 = 27%) than in the second level (6/56 = 11% )reminds me of the Indira Phenomenon.) If one of the six women in Senior Leadership is above all the males in the category, the (lowest) Morris Number is 11. If all the men are above F#5, the (highest) Morris Number is 61. Range for Morris Number: [11,61].

INGRAM MICRO: The webpage listing Ingram Micro's senior management (corp.ingrammicro.com/About-Us/Executive-Leadership.aspx, last visited 3/17/14) has only 20 people, compared to 236 on the company's EEO-1 filing as shown on the CNN Money table. Of those 20, apparently listed in rank order, there are 2 females and 18 males. F1 is 11th, F2 is 14th. That means F3, F4 and F5 are below the 20 Executive Leaders. If they are directly below, the Morris Number is lowest: 18. If not, they must be somewhere among the remaining 216 (236-20, consisting of 189-18=171 men and 47-2=45 women). If F3, F4 and F5 are at the bottom with the rest of the women and below the 171 men, the worst Morris Number is 189. Range for Morris Number: [18, 189].

INTEL: The webpage identifying senior management (http://www.intel.com/newsroom/assets/bio/CorpOfficers.htm , last viewed 3/14/14) has the same number of employees, 41, as Intel had reported to the EEOC. The Chairman of the Board, a non-employee, brings the page's total to 42. Within each title -- Executive Vice President, Senior VP, Corporate VP -- people are listed alphabetically by last name so no ranking is revealed. The President, listed after the CEO so overall ranked #2, is female. There is also a female EVP (1 of 4), a female SVP (1 of 6) and six female Corporate VPs (6 of 29). F#5 is thus among the Corporate VPs, but we do not know her rank within that group. If she is top-ranked, Intel has the lowest Morris Number: 9. If she is below all the male Corporate VPs, Intel has the highest Morris Number: 32. Range for Morris Number: [9,32].

Conclusion: Intel still looks best, Cisco looks better, Ingram Micro looks about the same.

FACEBOOK AND YAHOO

I also looked on the web for information about the younger tech companies with high profile women, Facebook (Sheryl Sandberg) and Yahoo (Marissa Mayer). The result was: they like to keep secrets. The Indira Phenomenon may be present at both companies.

Facebook lists only 4 executives on its main company information page, Sandberg and 3 men. The Board of Directors has the same ratio: 2 women and 6 men. A 2012 article in the Business Insider has a photo of 18 people from Facebook who had visited Walmart, 13 men and 5 women. Author Owen Thomas points out that the picture includes some "junior [Facebook] staffers who work closely with Walmart" which seems to include at least one of the women, a customer marketing manager involved with the Facebook-Walmart relationship. The other four women are COO Sandberg, her executive assistant, a (the?) director of design, and the VP for Human Resources (so often the only high level job for someone outside the homosocial reproduction group). If these are the four highest ranking women at Facebook, who and how far down is F5? Is Facebook better than Intel or Cisco?

Yahoo's Proxy Statement filed in 2013 has a table showing the ten most highly compensated current or former executives. Two are women, one with the highest compensation on the list, CEO Marissa Mayer, and one with the lowest. Other than the Proxy Statement, I was unable to find anything from Yahoo with any executive leadership biographies or other information from which to calculate a Morris Number range.

True of false? 1. The younger the tech company, the more secretive about diversity data. 2. The younger the tech company, the worse the Morris Number. (Two more PhD ideas there.)

March 19, 2014; rev 1 20140330,0403

Calculating the Morris Number - Hypotheticals (Morris Number 04)

The ordinary Morris Number, described here, is the number of men you pass, starting at the top of an organizational chart, on your way to finding the fifth highest ranking woman. 

Here are some illustrative examples.  A note on notation:  Female #3 or F3 means the 3rd highest ranking female.

A.  WOMEN'S ORGANIZATIONS

In a nunnery, the Morris Number is probably 0. If the Mother Superior is not really the top person but reports to a male Priest, the Morris Number is 1.

Note:  I thought the Girl Scouts might have a Morris Number of 0 but then I found the senior leadership here and realized I was wrong.  There is one man on that page and six women: Is the Morris Number 0 or 1?  We can infer that it is 1. The man apparently ranks third overall. This is suggested by the fact that the various Chiefs below the CEO and Chief of Staff are not in alphabetical order by title nor last name.  Mr. Boockvar, Chief Customer Officer, is listed above Chief Officers for Development, Information, and Financial, and the General Counsel (named, respectively, Taft, Miller, Olden and Rochon). If we were to use weights in calculating Morris Numbers, we would need to know M1's rank vis-a-vis F1 through F5. See Part 06 of this series.

Is a female as highly placed in the Boy Scouts organization? No. Their leadership team consists of eight men: three holding positions called "National" and designated volunteer -- the President, Commissioner and President-Elect, then four Scout Executives of different ranks and last the Chief Financial Officer.

B.  SOME POWERFUL FEMALES

This hypothetical organization has
    - one CEO, a female (F1)
              Contribution to Morris Number =   0
    - a COO, CFO and CTO, all reporting to the CEO; the first two are male and the CTO is female (F2): 
              Contribution to Morris Number =   2
    - five Executive Vice Presidents (EVPs); one is female (F3):
              Contribution to Morris Number =   4
    - eleven Senior Vice Presidents (SVP); one is female (F4): 
               Contribution to Morris Number = 10
    - one Associate Senior Vice President, a female (F5, so we can stop looking)
               Contribution to Morris Number =   0
                               The Morris Number is 16

Note that in this example we do not have to know the standing of Female #3 or Female #4, the lone female EVP and SVP, respectively, relative to the men with the same title because all those males are above Female #5. 


C.  ALL-MALE TOP MANAGEMENT

In this hypothetical organization:
    - The highest ranked woman is an Account Representative (AR).  Above her, there are 100 positions, all filled by males. 
            Contribution to Morris Number = 100.
     - There are 420 ARs, 20 of whom are women.   Without reliable information to know about the rank of the 5th women among the 420 ARs, we can nevertheless make some educated guesses.

       1. We can estimate the Morris Number assuming that the women and men in this organization have the same range of abilities. 

This may not be the case, especially given the absence of women in the first 100 positions and the widely accepted belief that people who do not conform to homosocial reproduction, which in this hypothetical means women, have to be better than men to attain the same level. Here is one citation for that proposition from thirty years ago: "Neutralizing Sexism in Mixed-Sex Groups: Do Women Have to Be Better Than Men?" by M. D. Pugh and Ralph Wahrman, American Journal of Sociology, 88:746-782 (Jan. 1983), available at http://www.jstor.org/stable/2779483, which references a study by the same authors from 1974 ("Sex, Noncomformity and Influence," Sociometry 37:137-47) in which they found that "[M]ale groups refused to be influenced by an obviously competent female despite the fact that without her they clearly failed at their task and lost money." Forty years later, how much has changed?

The 5th woman out of 20 is above 3/4 of the women.  She should therefore also rank above 3/4 of the men and therefore below 1/4 of them.
            Contribution to Morris Number:  1/4 of 400 = 100
            Morris Number assuming equal gender abilities:  200.
OR
        2. We can caculate the range of Morris Numbers, and the average within that range, obtained by calculating the lowest and highest possible numbers:
    - the Lowest Morris Number is obtained if the first five women are above all the men: 
            Contribution to Morris Number: 0 
            and
            the Morris Number is at least 100
    and
    - the Highest Morris Number:  all 400 men are above the first five women: 
            Contribution to Morris Number: 400
            and
            the Morris Number is at most 500

Morris Number Range: [100,400]. Average: 250

March 19, 2014; rev 1 20140328,0403

The Morris Number and Determining Rank (Morris Number 03; PhD Ideas 05)

 COUNTING HOW MANY MEN YOU PASS
ON THE WAY TO FEMALE #5:
WHEN THE ORG CHART IS NOT ENOUGH

To calculate the Morris Number of an organization, count the men above the fifth highest ranking female ("F5").  Sounds simple. But if several people have the same title as F5, and some of them are male, how many of those men should be counted?

One approach would be to assume that F5 is average:  half the men with the same title are above her, half below.  If F5 is not the only woman at that rank, we could guess that she is above the same percentage of men as she is above women. See this example. Or we might calculate the best and worst Morris Numbers, assuming that the woman is at the top or bottom of the rank, respectively.  That range may be useful for comparison to other companies or to the same company at a different time.

But maybe we can do better.  People with the same title, say, Senior Vice President, may not in fact have the same rank and they may not have the same power within the organization.   Assessments of relative power are likely to be subjective, but objective information may be available.  If the company website lists the management team, we may be able to guess who is above whom when the listing is not alphabetical.  (See the example here based on the Girl Scouts' public information.) If the job holders are high enough up in their organization, the company's Executive Leadership webpages or SEC filings may provide some answers as discussed here.

Other employees within the organization, or researchers granted limited access to employment data including title and gender (but no names, please), could use these proxies of true rank, alone or in combination:
       1st choice: compensation package, if available,
       2nd choice: median compensation of direct reports
       3rd choice: budget
       4th choice: seniority
       5th choice: number of direct and indirect reports. 
to calculate the Morris Number. Perhaps someone has already analyzed how accurately each of those predicts a manager's power within an organization.  If not, it seems like a good subject for some PhD research.

I choose direct/indirect reports last because a supervisor of lower-paid workers, compared to one who supervises higher-paid workers such as professionals (engineers, lawyers or accountants), may have
       - more people to supervise, and
       - the same or even a higher budget, but
       - less power or influence.
Seniority might indicate power within the organization, or it might be a sign of dead wood left in place because of strong social or family connections.  How many people you supervise may be less of a clue to your power than your own salary is.  The median salary of the people you supervise may be an even better clue.  Another PhD Idea there.

March 19, 2014; rev 1 20140328,0403

The Morris Number - A Few Questions and Answers (Morris Number 02)

Here are answers to some questions that came up during early discussions of the Morris Number.

"IN A PERFECT WORLD"

Q. How do you define "in a perfect world"?

A. In a perfect world, we can assume that
        1.  men and women receive equal treatment in education and employment,
        2.  the pool of people qualified for top-ranking jobs is half men, half women, and
         3.  women and men are equally likely to hold the top position in any organization.


Q. Why would the average Morris Number in a perfect world be 4.5 rather than a whole number?

A. I state the average Morris Number as 4.5 rather than a whole number to highlight how the number changes depending on Assumption 3. Assume that men and women alternate. If the top person is a woman, the fifth highest ranking woman is at position 9 and the Morris Number is 4. If the top person is a man, then the fifth highest woman is at position 10 and the Morris Number is 5. The average of many companies in the perfect world would be 4.5.


Q. What if the applicant pool is not 50-50?

A. If the applicant pool for top-ranking positions has more men than women, then we would expect the average Morris Number for a group of perfectly non-discriminatory entities to be more than 5. But there is no reason for the applicant pool to be other than 50-50 because in a perfect world there is no sex discrimination: men and women have equal educational and employment opportunities.

The Morris Number was created as a way to measure
        (a) the imperfections of the world, or some subset of it, with regard to gender neutrality, and
        (b) the progress toward perfection as the years go by.

WHY 5: WHY FIFTH HIGHEST RANKING?

Q. Why look for the fifth highest woman, not the third, say, or the tenth?

A. I hope that the choice of five follows the Goldilocks principle: neither too few nor too many but just right. Using two or three might be affected by the Indira Phenomenon: there might be as many as three women at the power table in some organiations, but the rest of the women would be in the bottom ranks. A number like eight or ten might be a problem in smaller organizations. A metric based on five will, I hope, give useful information about almost all employers.

Q. What about employers with less than five women employees?

A. Employers with less than five women employees and more than ten total employees have a Morris Number of infinity. (Below ten total, we can skip that employer until there are a few more hires.)

WHERE ARE THE BEST (LOWEST) MORRIS NUMBERS

Q. Where do I expect to find lower Morris Numbers?

A. Not in Silicon Valley, I'm afraid. Some of the reasons for my low expectations for tech companies are here.

I recently came across the phrase 'homosocial reproduction.' It fits Silicon Valley to a T, or rather it fits Silicon Valley's HR practices to an HR.

My guess is that the best (lowest) Morris Numbers are to be found in companies whose products in the bad old days would have been featured on the women's pages of newspapers: cosmetics, fashion, food, things for children. For a century or more, women started their own companies in those industries. 
         Coco Chanel opened her first shop in 1910.
         Madame C J Walker began her own hair products business in Indiana in 1910.
         In 1945 Ruth Handler co-founded Mattel, a picture-frame company that became a maker of doll-house furniture a year later and then a toy company (and, yes, introduced Handler's invention, the Barbie doll, in 1959).
        Estee Lauder founded the company that bears her name in 1946.
   In the "women's pages" industries, as compared to "man's world" industries (finance, heavy industry, agribusiness) and regardless of the gender of the founder, women were hired more often and more readily, and that, in turn, improved the odds that a woman could rise to a higher position.

In 2013 there were 23 companies in the Fortune 500 that had female CEOs. See below. By my count, six of those companies are in women's pages industries (four in food, one in cosmetics and one in fashion). Five are in tech (software, hardware or both). In 2010, there were 15 companies in the Fortune 500 with female CEOs; by my count, four were in women's pages industries and two in tech. In 2000, the Fortune 500 companies with female CEOs numbered two, three or four, depending on when the count was made, and five different women were involved. Three of them headed companies that make products heavily marketed to women: Mattel (toys: Jill Barad), Avon (cosmetics: Andrea Jung) and Walmart (retail: Jeanne Jackson). The other two were Carly Fiorina at HP and Marion O. Sandler at Golden West Financial.

Second, among the "man's world" companies, the best (lowest) Morris Numbers are more likely to be in older, rust-belt industries rather than 21st century ones.  The older companies, after all, have spent the last half century with the threat of affirmative action lawsuits forcing them to discriminate a little less and a little less openly. Those companies also hire from top business and law schools, and those schools have graduated plenty of women by now. Tech companies may hire fewer lawyers and B-school grads. I have heard that the tech world excuses its failure to hire women on the grounds that women don't get degrees in computer science. Assuming they are correct that women haven't pursued computer science in large enough numbers to make a dent in the Boys' Club culture of Silicon Valley, I can think of some solutions that the biggest employers - Google, Apple, Facebook - could easily afford that would make a dramatic difference pretty quickly. Just ask.

BLAMING WOMEN? NO.

In the post that led to my developing the Morris Number I wrote:

We all know about Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman at HP, and Marissa Mayer formerly at Google now at Yahoo, and Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook. What happens, though, if you look in those companies for the next highest ranking female? How many men do you pass on the way down?

Q. Do you mean that women who get to the top do not help other women?

A. No. That was not my point. The only reason I referred to those famous ladies is to illustrate that a female in the top position does not prove that the company is an equal opportunity employer.

Women do not have to hire and promote *only* women. And the fact is that any new leader has only limited opportunity to create new positions or to replace incumbents. It takes time to create an optimal management team. Sometimes, too, filling positions with outside candidates may not be an option for corporate-cultural reasons. If the company has not promoted women into positions within a few levels of the top, then the internal candidates will all be male.

The 23 Fortune 500 companies with female CEOs, see http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2013/05/09/women-ceos-fortune-500, last updated December 10, 2013, would be interesting to study with regard to the blame question. See number 13 of my PhD ideas. We do not know those companies' Morris Numbers but we can come up with a Morris-style Number that tells us something about the Fortune 500. If we consider the CEOs of the Fortune 500 as part of a single organization and give them their companies' Fortune 500 rankings, the Morris Number is 38: you pass 38 men on the way to finding the fifth highest company with a woman CEO, 43rd ranked Pepsico's CEO Indra K. Nooyi.

Maybe some women who get to the top are as blind as the men around them to the excellence of women. Maybe not. But until those female CEOs have had their titles for several years, and until the top women are at companies that in the past have consistently promoted women into upper management, the presence or absence of women in other important positions does not prove much about whether women help women.

March 19, 2014; rev 1 20140328,0401; typos fixed 20150223

The Morris Number - Introduction (Morris Number 01)

I propose a new metric I'm calling the Morris Number.  It is a way to quantify how gender-neutral an organization really is. It makes it possible to compare employers -- businesses, non-profits, universities, governments -- with regard to their equal opportunity characteristics.  I thought of the concept when I wrote about Silicon Valley: Boys Club last year.  Whatever the organization, the Morris Number answers the following question:

How many men do you pass on the way to finding the fifth highest ranking woman?

Other discriminatory behavior can also be evaluated with Morris Numbers.  Instead of men and women, any two demographic categories can be compared, e.g., whites and non-whites (or, for tech companies, TECMYs and non-TECMYs).

In a perfect world, the Morris Number averaged over many organizations would be 4.5. Assumptions behind the phrase "in a perfect world" are discussed in Part 02. That post also includes questions raised by friends when I first mentioned the Morris Number.

In the real world, almost all employers have a Morris Number above 4.5, often far above. Perhaps if we start calculating and publicizing Morris Numbers we can start to see them change.

The Morris Number may remind some readers of the Bechdel Test, which evaluates movies on a scale from 0 (bad) to 3 (good) depending on the presence of female characters and what they do. Both the Morris Number and the Bechdel test are metrics concerning unequal opportunities for women. They differ, however, in that

• the Morris Number is for all employers, not just movie producers,
• unlike Bechdel, and instead like golf and cholesterol, a lower Morris Number is better than a high one, and
• the Morris Number can be much higher than 3, and almost never, alas, is that low.

A Morris Number in the single digits means that the employer's hiring and promotion practices today are what I would have predicted back when I was in law school.  A Morris Number above 10 reminds me that change sometimes takes a long time.

In the Fortune 500, is the average Morris Number below 30? What about in Silicon Valley?  Among major nonprofits? At the top research universities?  Wouldn't you like to know? I would.

HOW TO CALCULATE THE MORRIS NUMBER

You may be wondering how to identify the fifth highest ranking woman in an organization.  For a start, we can use the employer's organizational chart. 

Starting from the top person in the hierarchy, usually the CEO, count all the men you have to pass before you get to the fifth woman.  That is the Morris Number in its ordinary form.

True, there is an obvious problem with org charts.  If several people have the same title, how do you determine who has a higher rank?  You might want to base your answer on how much power each person has. To evaluate that, you might try objective indicia of power such as salary, budget, or direct reports.  Ideas about going beyond the org chart are discussed in Part 03.

EXAMPLES

In Part 04 I calculate ordinary Morris Numbers for some hypothetical entities and discuss a way to deal with the same-title-different-power problem.  Morris Numbers calculated from the tech company data presented in Julianne Pepitone's 2013 CNN Money article can be found in Part 05.

SAME MORRIS NUMBER, DIFFERENT REALITY

Part 06 presents a comparison of the ordinary Morris Number, which we  might call the OMN, with a weighted Morris Number, WMN.  The reason to add weights is to distinguish between two companies with identical OMNs but different distributions of the sexes. For example, a company with a Morris Number (OMN) of 5 might have men and women alternating in the top 10 positions, or it might have men in the top 5 positions and women in the next 5.  The WMN quantifies the difference.

MORE PhD IDEAS

Comparing Morris Numbers among companies, times, or regions, would be interesting. So would looking at how a company's Morris Number changes when it has a female CEO. We might also use Morris Numbers to examine what I call the Indira Phenomenon. (It probably has a name already but I am not aware of it.)

Another metric for gauging equal opportunity would be to identify the compensation deciles with a 50/50 gender ratio or an ethnic ratio similar to the population in the area.

Those and other ideas for PhD dissertations in Economics, Political Science, Statistics, Sociology, Gender Studies or American Studies are in Part 07.

RJM 3/19/2014; rev 1 20140321;0401

       May 08, 2014
Part 08 has a brief excerpt from Patricia Sellers' October 2000 Fortune article about Women CEOs in which she quotes Cisco CEO John Chambers on the future for women in Silicon Valley companies. It is 2014. Rank Chambers' prediction on a scale from 1 to 5 where 1 is totally wrong and 5 is totally right. And weep.

       June 2, 2014
Part 09 discusses Google's diversity numbers and the quote on its Diversity page about how women do not major in CS like they used to. There's an obvious idea there that Google is somehow missing.

Andy Borowitz and Minnesota (Borowitz 02, PhD Ideas 04)

Today, two and a half years after I posted Andy Borowitz and his recycled names

[ http://myunpublishedworks2.blogspot.com/2011/09/andy-borowitz-tracy-klugian-and-harland.html ],

I received this comment from Anonymous:

February 6, 2014 at 9:08 AM

Just caught this after think the same thing about Tracy Klugian. One other thing I have noticed is that many of his academic experts are from the University of Minnesota.

That prompted me to search for "Andy Borowitz Minnesota." One of the top hits was about Al Franken becoming Senator.  I wondered whether Al and Andy know each other.  They might.  Both are humorists and Harvard graduates: Al '73 and Andy '80.  Al overlapped with Andy's brother Peter '74, whom I knew when we both worked at the Holyoke Center Ticket Office in Harvard Square.


Andy is originally from Ohio.  Ohio appears often, too, I believe. (My original post mentioned Klugian as a spokeman for Ohio Art).

Perhaps he chooses Minnesota because he is a Vikings fan.  The Vikings may appear more often than other football teams.

PhD Ideas
A student of American Humor, with a special interest in the early 21st century, could write a dissertation about the states where Borowitz's fictitional people live, the sports teams he uses (other than when their own actions are the reason for the story), and so on.  Which states dominate?  Are there trends?  Has Minnesota risen in popularity during the Senator Franken years?  Also, what is the M/F ratio of Borowitz' fictional people, overall and year by year? 

Andy, if you read this, please include more fictional women.  I don't ask for equality -- I understand how time-consuming it would be to overcome knee-jerk gender stereotyping, see tinyurl.com/genkster --  but maybe you could aim for 25%?  You could call your next imagined female "Robertina Morslon" (I checked: there are no Robertina Morslons on the web) and it would be our little secret.  I can say that because nobody reads my blogs.  Except once in a while to read about Tracy Klugian.  That post has brought in more of the kindness of strangers than I would otherwise receive.

Good old Tracy.  There he is, still a HE, in today's Report.  http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/borowitzreport/2014/02/sochi-hotel-guests-complain-about-topless-portraits-of-putin-in-rooms.html.  This time Tracy is there with his wife.  How about Tracy and her husband?  Or, given that the piece is about Putin, Tracy and her wife?!

Yesterday's column had one fictional character, a Microsoft spokesMAN.  But hooray, two days ago Borowitz mentioned Carol Foyler, a mother from Akron, Ohio.  Foyler, although not as frequent a character as Tracy Klugian or Harland Dorinson, has appeared since at least 2007.  Even better, she is not always a mother.  She has been a senior this and a senior that, an executive director, a mayor ... and that's only looking at the first few hits. I apologize for not noticing Carol back when I wrote about Tracy, Harland and Davis.  Carol: You go, girl!

The Morris Number: A Way to Quantify How Gender-Neutral an Organization Really Is (Morris Number 00)

The Morris Number Series

01  Introduction (tinyurl.com/omn-intro)
02  A Few Questions and Answers(tinyurl.com/omn-qanda)
03  How to Determine Ranks (tinyurl.com/omn-rank)
04  Calculating a Morris Number - Some Hypotheticals
       (tinyurl.com/omn-hypos)
05  Morris Number Ranges for Some Tech Companies
       (tinyurl.com/omn-tech)
06  The Weighted Morris Number (tinyurl.com/omn-wmn)
07  PhD Ideas (tinyurl.com/omn-phd)

March 18, 2014; updated 20140321

        Posts added May 08, 2014 and thereafter
08  Women in Silicon Valley - A Prediction from 2000
        (here or tinyurl.com/omn-2000)
09 Google's Diversity Numbers and the Women CS majors of
        the Class of 1994 (here or tinyurl.com/omn-goog)