I grew up in South Africa as one of four daughters in a household that valued very lively, sometimes raucous conversations, even when we had very different opinions. My parents encouraged us to involve ourselves in activities and experiences from which we might learn and grow. My mom used to tell me that there was nothing I could not do if I really set my mind to it. Being part of an all-girl household, it never occurred to us to think in any other way. That was until others reminded me that it was not quite the way of the real world.

I had been a youth leader from an early age, and at 18, the designated leader of a large national teen group. Naturally, when a trip was to be organized for younger teens to travel abroad, I was primed to head it up. Instead, senior leaders picked a male friend of mine who was in the youth organization but had no leadership experience or contact with this group. "We don't think that the teens and their parents will accept a female as the group travel leader," they told me. 

Imagine my surprise.

I was reminded of this long forgotten incident when I began reading Gail Collins’ book, When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present. Collins describes with poignant accuracy the small and large ways in which women were held back, discouraged, or otherwise excluded from the labor force, from political life, and from full and equal participation in society.

National Organization for Women (NOW) founder and president Betty Naomi Goldstein Friedan is seated second from the left, followed by NOW co-chair and Washington, D.C., lobbyist Barbara Ireton; and feminist attorney Marguerite Rawalt. 

A case in point she cites: Marguerite Rawalt, a government tax attorney from Texas, who served on JFK's Commission on the Status of Women. She said at the time: "You have to be a lot more qualified than the man to get the job." Even that was not enough. She dreamed of being a judge, but year after year, she was passed over. Her job was to train the men. When her colleague, Lyndon Johnson, became vice president, Rawalt sought a judgeship and was told that she was too old.

Reading this history chronicling the progress within our own lifetimes made me wonder how far we have actually come. As world leaders convened last month in Mexico, Reuters news agency asked gender experts to rank G-20 nations as best and worst in their placement of women in the work force. The U.S. placed sixth. First was Canada, where 62 percent of university graduates and 1 in 3 federally appointed judges are women.

In our nonprofit and philanthropic sector, we see women in major leadership roles but have we closed the gap in the top jobs and on Boards of Directors in our sector, in government, and business? My colleague Pete Smith, president of Smith Compensation Consulting, reminded me that there continues to be a big disparity in compensation between the sexes. He recently wrote an article drawing on the GuideStar 2011 Nonprofit Compensation Report. Findings include:

• In every one of GuideStar’s nine nonprofit size categories, the average compensation of male CEOs is materially higher than that of female CEOs;
• The difference ranges from 15% in organizations with $500,000 to $1 million in revenues to 22 percent in the largest organizations (revenues over $50 million); and
• In dollars, the differences range from $12,000 per year in the smallest organizations to $150,000 per year in the largest organizations, on average.

The gender pay gap is even more pronounced in large organizations. As BoardSource puts it, the larger the organization, the more likely its chief executive is male. While 63 percent of CEOs in the smallest nonprofits (under $250,000 of revenues) are women, females occupy only 16 percent of the CEO positions in the high-paying, largest organizations. 

It is, of course, the Boards of these organizations who hire the search firms and then select the executive. It is up to them to insist that they have a diverse pool of candidates from which to draw and to think hard about the value of bringing diverse leaders into the organization.

Diversity to be sure, includes race and ethnicity but also gender and sexual orientation. However, having a pool is not enough if the result continues to be an extension of current practices. Boards that are themselves diverse are more likely to be attracted to diverse candidates as they recommend people or relate well to candidates with familiar characteristics and backgrounds. We know and readily acknowledge our responsibility to be committed to equal participation and fair play. But we must also pause and ask ourselves if our actions match our rhetoric. CEO’s can help also by developing succession plans and talking with Boards about what kinds of people the Boards should be considering.

Gail Collins' important book reminds us that history can be rewritten in our lifetimes. But our work will only be done when the transformation we seek for women is written not just in our laws, but in the lives of our nonprofit, corporate, and government leaders -- and into the very marrow of our society.