Ground Floor:I berated myself in a previous column for not having nominating a woman as one of my business role models.
I still don't have a nomination to make but I was very pleased by the election of Nancy Pelosi as speaker in the House of Representatives in the US. I know this is a political role and is nothing to do with big business (besides, she's a Democrat!), but it is still heartening to see women take positions of power and responsibility - particularly grandmothers over the age of 60 - that had previously been the sole preserve of men.
Pelosi comes from a political family but was not elected to office until 1987 when her youngest child had completed much of her schooling. This is representative of the working lives of many women who rejoined the workforce after raising a family.
In many cases this has worked against them, as employers typically haven't given much weight to the family-raising achievement when they're weighing them up as a potential hiring possibility.
But the truth is that older people generally are better bets when it comes to productivity - remember that research which found that people born in the 1940s wasted just 30 minutes a day compared to those 40 years later who frittered away almost two hours?
In Pelosi's case, she has worked her way steadily up the political ladder over the past 20 years, proving that you can succeed from your 40s into your 60s and giving hope to lots of women who might have considered a glittering career to be out of their reach.
She is now America's most powerful woman having leap- frogged over Condoleezza Rice, and is a reminder to everyone that women don't lose their marbles after they turn 60 and that grandmothers aren't necessarily little old ladies who bake apple pies and look after their grandchildren.
There is a perception that women don't support each other as much as they should and that they're prepared to dish the dirt on each other in the back to get on. (Men do this too - it's just that people actually expect women to be nice.) Perhaps women are more realistic about the business and less likely to pander to each other's egos.
I was at a meeting recently where, having come to a decision, the men spent another half an hour telling each other what a good job they had done. The women, by contrast, were on the mobiles to home checking to see that the dinner was on the table. Women are more conscious of what really matters.
Generally speaking, women are also more conscious of value for money when it comes to the workplace. I'm hoping that the two women on the 12-person board of Home Depot in the US were less than enthusiastic about the pay-off that was made last week to former chairman and CEO, Bob Nardelli. Nardelli joined the then struggling Home Depot in 2000. Initially things looked good as profitability increased. But by the time Bob was closing his desk drawer for the last time, Home Depot's share price was languishing below $40, putting a valuation on the company of about $9 billion lower than when he had first laid his pens on the blotter.
For this achievement, the board awarded him a $210 million pay-off which included bonuses and long-term incentive awards of $9 million, $32 million in retirement benefits and $18 million of "other entitlements". Unsurprisingly, the shareholders who have seen the value of their investment decline over the past six years are incensed and are threatening legal action.
When a share price is rising - even if only as part of a generally rising market and not necessarily because of any great innovative action on the part of the CEO - most shareholders won't baulk at high payments to the people at the top (a mistake, in my view, but that's just me being thrifty with other people's money). But when the shareholders are hit in their pockets, it's another story.
Yet shouldn't chief executives be rewarded handsomely if the share price goes up? According to research at Stanford University, the whole concept of performance- related pay is nonsensical. Most performance schemes do link the remuneration to the company's share price. In that case, they point out, a CEO can collect all sorts of bonuses if the company does well. But if it doesn't?
The worst that can happen is that he gets fired. In other words, there's no upside to the amount someone can earn, but the downside is simply losing a job.
So the temptation is to engage in short-term policies which will have an initial impact on profitability and share price (and therefore bonuses) but which may not deliver long-term benefits to company or shareholders.
The Nardelli saga has caught the eye of the politicians who are sensitive to the ramifications of executive pay-outs. Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said they needed to examine the Nardelli pay-off which seemed to be part of a "pattern of CEO pay that appears to be out of control".
Meanwhile, the salary of the Speaker of the House will increase to $215,700 this year.
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