How Suite It Isn’t: A Dearth of Female Bosses

December 17, 2006
How Suite It Isn’t: A Dearth of Female Bosses
By JULIE CRESWELL
LIKE so many other women who entered corporate America in the 1970s, Carol Bartz simply wanted to make a little money. She did not harbor secret desires to run her own company or become chief executive of a large corporation. She just wanted to do a good job.
After working her way through college at the University of Wisconsin in Madison as a cocktail waitress (required uniform: red miniskirt, black fishnets and red feather in hair), Ms. Bartz graduated with a computer science degree in 1971. Tall, blonde, boisterous and ambitious, she entered the work force at a time when the promise of new professional opportunities for women was in the air.
What Ms. Bartz says she discovered, however, was that male counterparts and supervisors shook the corporate ladder ever more fiercely with each rung that she and other pioneering women of her generation ascended. But by combining a first-rate mind with hard work and decisive career moves, she managed to duck, bob and weave her way through Silicon Valley’s male-dominated technology industry in the 1980s.
By the early 1990s, Ms. Bartz had become one of the first women to run a large corporation. She garnered accolades from Wall Street and her peers for turning Autodesk into a leading international software company. This spring, Ms. Bartz stepped down as Autodesk’s chief executive, but she remains the executive chairwoman of its board.
Despite her hard-won reputation as an astute businesswoman, Ms. Bartz found herself repeatedly skipped over during a recent meeting of business and political leaders in Washington. The reason was that the men at the table assumed that she was an office assistant, not a fellow executive. “Happens all of the time,” Ms. Bartz says dryly, recalling the incident. “Sometimes I stand up. Sometimes I just ignore it.”
The contours of her long, bumpy journey to the chief executive’s suite reflect some of the gains women have made in navigating corporate hierarchies over the last 30 years, but also illustrate how rare it still is for a woman to get the keys to a company’s most powerful corner office. For decades, the pat explanation was that women simply had not been in the work force long enough; with patience, the pipeline would fill.
A look at the pipeline suggests otherwise. While top business schools are churning out an increasing number of female M.B.A.’s, only about 16 percent of corporate officers at Fortune 500 companies are women, according to Catalyst, an organization that studies women in the workplace. The numbers are even sparer at the top of the pyramid: women fill only nine, or less than 2 percent, of the chief executive jobs at Fortune 500 companies.
“There have been women in the pipeline for 20 to 25 years; progress has been slower than anybody thought it ever would be,” laments Julie H. Daum, the North American board practice leader for Spencer Stuart, the executive search firm. She says she does not expect the situation to change anytime soon. “It’s not as if we’re in the beginning of something that’s going to explode and that there are going to be lots of women in the c-suite,” she said. “I think we’re still way far removed from where we should be and from where women would like to be.”
No one disputes that more women have highly visible roles as chief executives. During the past year alone, several women joined the ultra-exclusive C.E.O. club, taking the reins at large, prominent Fortune 500 companies. In June, Irene B. Rosenfeld was named the chief executive of Kraft Foods, a job that once eluded her earlier in her career at Kraft; she joined a competitor before she returned to the company. Two months earlier, Patricia A. Woertz jumped from the Chevron Corporation to become chief executive at the chemical giant Archer Daniels Midland. Those two anointments were followed by Indra Nooyi’s ascent to the top seat at PepsiCo.
Even so, those women remain statistical anomalies. And the complex question of why women remain so underrepresented in the corporate suite yields a variety of possible answers. A number of women leave their careers — sometimes by choice, sometimes not — to focus on rearing families. The remaining pool suffers from a lack of networking or mentoring programs, others contend.
Many other women end up in dead-end staff positions, says Ilene H. Lang, president of Catalyst. “Women are almost two and one half times as likely to be channeled into staff jobs like H.R. and communications than into operating roles where they would be generating revenue and managing profit and loss,” Ms. Lang says. “When more women hold line positions, there will be more women top earners and C.E.O.’s.”
Analysts and executive women also say that one of the biggest roadblocks between women and the c-suite is the thick layer of men who dominate boardrooms and corner offices across the country. “The men in the boardroom and the men at the top are choosing and tend to choose who they are comfortable with: other men,” Ms. Bartz says.
Women — particularly those who have made it to the top — may also shoulder some of the responsibility for the dearth of female C.E.O.’s. There is little consensus among them over how to approach the topic of women in power, or, in fact, whether the issue should even be addressed. Representatives of nearly all of the Fortune 500 female chief executives contacted for this article said that their bosses were either “too busy” or did not want to participate in an article about female C.E.O.’s. They said that these executives preferred to be acknowledged for their accomplishments, rather than for being women.
Another camp of women argues that until stories of women landing top jobs are no longer newsworthy — that is, as long as they remain curiosities or oddities — and until women’s occupation of the c-suite reaches a statistical par with men, women owe it to future generations to continue to address the topic.
“The truth is, left alone, I think the situation would get worse,” Ms. Bartz says. “I think the reason you see roughly 2 percent of Fortune 500 companies run by female C.E.O.’s is because there has been some discussion about the issue. If the topic didn’t continue to be highlighted as important, I do think that percentage would slide backward.”
MS. BARTZ, 58, reached a professional pinnacle in 1992 when, after contending with years of what she believed were stereotypes about women’s managerial aspirations, she assumed the chief executive’s job at Autodesk. The company had revolutionized the architecture and manufacturing design fields with software that allowed users to build multidimensional computer models of their plans.
For Ms. Bartz and other women of the watershed generation who moved into senior corporate roles, there were no how-to manuals and few mentors to offer guidance in handling corporate and personal challenges in the glare of the public spotlight. Ms. Bartz and other women say they also discovered that every decision they made — business or personal — was magnified.
Ms. Bartz was born on a Wisconsin dairy farm, where her grandmother raised her after her mother died. She was a high school cheerleader and homecoming queen who also excelled in physics and advanced algebra. And she saw education as a way to escape the confines of her small hometown.
“It was never about wanting to be a C.E.O.,” Ms. Bartz says. “I didn’t know what a C.E.O. was. It was about getting the A’s and getting the education.”
After college, Ms. Bartz took a few odd jobs before landing a sales position at 3M, where she says she ran directly into a wall of men stalling her career. There was, for instance, the time a manager booked her to share a room with a male sales representative during a business trip and then tried to fire her over it, she said. Ms. Bartz had actually quietly booked a separate room when she arrived at the hotel. In her fourth year at 3M, she asked for a transfer to corporate headquarters. “Women didn’t do those jobs,” she recalls being told. After that, she packed up her belongings and quit. A spokeswoman for 3M declined to comment.
During the following years, Ms. Bartz climbed the ranks at the Digital Equipment Corporation before joining Sun Microsystems in 1983. There, she flourished under the culture that gave managers more autonomy to make decisions quickly and shoulder more responsibility.
Kim Polese, who worked at Sun for seven years in the 1980s before helping to found a tech company, Marimba, in 1996, said: “Sun was a culture of true opportunity. I didn’t feel at Sun that the fact I as a woman factored into whether I would advance or not.” Ms. Bartz eventually became Sun’s No. 2, behind the chief executive Scott McNealy, who once described her as “hardly a shrinking violet.” Indeed, she earned a reputation as a direct and tough-as-nails manager who could soften her approach with humor and charm.
That style would become vitally important to her when she joined Autodesk in the early 1990s. She swept into her new role with enthusiasm. Her plans had to be put on hold, however, when she discovered during her first week on the job that she had breast cancer. After undergoing a mastectomy, Ms. Bartz ignored her doctor’s recommendation that she recuperate for six weeks. She did not want to appear fragile or weakened, and she returned to work after four weeks. (Asked about questions tossed her way that a male C.E.O. would never receive, Ms. Bartz said that during a news conference shortly after she disclosed her cancer, a reporter asked, “Which breast?”)
To be sure, there have been plenty of men who have gone out of their way to support the professional advancement of their female colleagues. Maggie Wilderotter, 51, the chief executive of Citizens Communications, a communications services company based in Stamford, Conn., credits an early boost to a male boss who gave her numerous opportunities in the emerging cable industry in the 1970s. During the 12 years she spent at a San Diego software company, CableData, she held no less than 14 different jobs.
“I was able to move from job to job, and that prepared me to be the leader of those business units at the company,” Ms. Wilderotter recalls. “A lot of that had to do with the entrepreneurial founder of the company, Bob Matthews, who built a culture where women were given opportunities.”
One of four daughters of a former telecom executive, Ms. Wilderotter said her early peek into the life of a working woman came from her mother, who worked part-time as a real estate agent in New Jersey.
“I grew up in a household where it was a matter of fact that we would all go to college and a matter of fact that we could do and be anything that we wanted to be,” she says. “I didn’t feel that I had to be relegated to only getting married and having kids.”
Ms. Wilderotter studied economics and business administration at the College of the Holy Cross and, like Ms. Bartz, did not know what career path she would follow. “I never sat down and said, ‘I’m going to be a doctor when I grow up,’ ” she says. “I just had opportunities present themselves to me in my career.”
Opportunities eventually led her to McCaw Cellular and then to AT&T, where she became an executive in the AT&T Wireless unit. In 1996, she became the chief executive of a start-up called Wink, which provided electronic commerce on television. While her career was moving forward quickly, finding the right work-life balance over the years wasn’t always easy.
When she was nine months’ pregnant with her first son in 1984, Ms. Wilderotter jumped on an airplane because a customer refused to sign a contract unless she appeared before him in person — regardless of her condition. After an arduous cross-country trip involving canceled flights and late-night arrivals, Ms. Wilderotter marched into the customer’s office at 10 a.m. and dropped the contract on his desk, threatening to have the baby in his office if he didn’t sign the document in five minutes. He signed, and her baby arrived seven days later.
Today, having raised two sons, Ms. Wilderotter says her husband’s flexible schedule as the owner of a small vineyard allowed her to take on increasingly demanding opportunities as a businesswoman.
“Having that backstop at home was essential for me to be able to do what I needed to do from a business demand perspective, but there were many times I missed the soccer game or couldn’t make it to the parent-teacher conference,” she says. “But my boys have grown into delightful young men and they are very proud of me as a working woman and even the women they date now are strong women. I think of that as a gift to my boys.”
Another legacy Ms. Wilderotter hopes to leave is the presence of more women on corporate boards. Some analysts argue that the key to securing more C.E.O. titles for women may be found in the boardroom. Boards play pivotal roles when it comes to recruiting and appointing chief executives, and they are a power center in which women remain very underrepresented.
In the most recent Catalyst report on women in the workplace, women held 14.7 percent of the director seats at Fortune 500 companies. More glaringly, 53 companies have no women as directors, while 182 other companies each have only one woman on the board, according to the report.
CORPORATE boards remain, for the most part, clubby and male-dominated worlds where members have attended many of the same schools, dress the same and represent a single social class, says Douglas M. Branson, a professor of corporate governance at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. In his new book, “No Seat at the Table: How Corporate Governance and Law Keep Women Out of the Boardroom,” he argues that boards can minimize their isolation from larger social issues by adding women. Others agree.
“Women on boards are the ones who pay attention to the pool of employees and succession planning and whether there are women and people of color coming up in those succession plans,” says Vicki W. Kramer, a management consultant and co-author of a study, “Critical Mass on Corporate Boards: Why Three or More Women Enhance Governance,” that was released this fall by the Wellesley Centers for Women.
Through interviews with 12 C.E.O.’s and 50 women who served on a combined 175 boards of Fortune 1000 companies, the study examined how the dynamics and issues discussed in the boardroom changed as more women were added to the mix. A single woman on a board is typically viewed as a “token woman” and is unlikely to drive female-related issues because she does not want to be seen as a one-issue director, Ms. Kramer says.
The addition of a second woman to the board only slightly changes the environment. The women sometimes feel the need to stay away from each other, worried that it will appear as if they are conspiring against the men on the board.
The tipping point is the presence of three women on a board. “Somehow, at three, gender goes away and they are much less concerned about being seen together,” Ms. Kramer says.
Still, the number of corporations with three or more women on the board is fairly limited. Only 76 boards among the Fortune 500 have three or more female members. Ms. Wilderotter herself started off as the lone woman on nearly all the 14 boards of which she has been a member over the years, with the exception of those at Xerox and the McClatchy Company. She says she is most proud of the fact that she never left a board without a woman on it. “I would finesse myself onto the nominating committee and try to populate boards with women,” she says, laughing.
That includes her own company, Citizens. When she joined the company two years ago, it had no women as board members and only one woman in a senior position. Today, 5 of Citizen’s 14 directors are women. And women hold many of the senior operating positions at the company.
“We’ve all had hurdles we’ve had to overcome, but I also believe you can take control over your own destiny,” Ms. Wilderotter says. “I’ve always tried to align myself with companies that had good, positive cultures in the work environment that supported both women and men.”
At Autodesk, Ms. Bartz felt under intense pressure to perform immediately at a very high level, not only because she was one of the first women to get the keys to a corner office in Silicon Valley, but because Autodesk was desperately in need of a new direction.
Founded by an unconventional programmer, Autodesk was a classic Valley example of a successful company being run by an unwieldy group of innovators. For years, it had ridden on the success of its AutoCAD software product, but by the time Ms. Bartz arrived on the scene, Microsoft had solidified its dominant position in the software industry and Autodesk was struggling to release a Windows version of its product.
From Ms. Bartz’s perspective, being a woman was not a hindrance at Autodesk, but being an outsider among the insulated cadre of programmers and coders was.
But she eventually found her footing, and during her 14-year reign as Autodesk’s C.E.O., the company’s annual revenue jumped to $1.52 billion from $368 million and shareholders were rewarded with an 18.6 percent annualized return on their stock, versus 10.6 percent for the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index.
Ms. Bartz says she believes that a lot of women take themselves out of the race to the c-suite before it ever begins. “There is a whole lot of hand-wringing going on with women,” she says. “They get the high-power degrees and then they drop back because they tell themselves they’re not going to get very far anyway. I think they look around and wonder whether the struggle is worth it or not.”
Finding a work-life balance was also easier for her because she could afford good child care, Ms. Bartz notes. (Her husband is a retired Sun executive.) “The problem with balance is that it only works if you can buy some balance,” she observes.
And while Ms. Bartz says networking played an important part in driving her career forward, she is not big on mentoring programs. “It’s sort of like trying to find the perfect snowflake match,” she says. “Does someone think in order to be successful, they need to act like me?”
Now retired and with her daughter at college, Ms. Bartz says her life has entered an awkward stage. “Before, every second was planned. I’d be pointed to a conference room, told who was in there and off I’d go,” she said. “I didn’t have a minute to spare, therefore, I don’t think I wasted any minutes.”
BUT as executive chairman of the Autodesk board, Ms. Bartz still travels regularly on behalf of the company. She recently returned from a trip to Moscow, where she was surprised to be ushered into a room to meet a top executive with one of the country’s largest energy companies.
“He wanted to meet me. My guys were doing back flips because it was a really big deal to get a meeting with him,” she says, laughing. “That’s the irony of the whole situation of being a female C.E.O. It is so darn hard to get to the top, but you do get the privileges once you are there.”
No one knows that better than the former Hewlett-Packard chief executive Carleton S. Fiorina, who declared after she had been removed from her job that she had been treated differently simply because she was a woman. Many other powerful businesswomen, however, contend that the polished blonde who graced glossy magazine covers actively pursued and used the media spotlight to draw attention to herself and her leadership at H.P. — in the process becoming one of the best-known female executives in recent memory.
“She lived her tenure in the press, but she did that by design. That was her strategy,” Ms. Wilderotter says. “I guess it’s a lesson in being careful what you ask for.”
Ms. Wilderotter says that for up-and-coming female C.E.O.’s, a better example of grace under pressure is Anne Mulcahy, the chief executive of Xerox who has stunned Wall Street and her peers by saving a company many had written off. “She does not seek publicity but gets publicity because she’s good at what she does,” Ms. Wilderotter says.
Ms. Mulcahy, who has been at Xerox for 30 years, says she was lucky to inherit a company in which “enlightened leaders” long ago had built an infrastructure of recruiting and sourcing and development that has created a diverse team of leaders at the top.
“I feel fortunate because this is a company that understood the value of inclusiveness before it was in vogue because it believed it was the best way to keep talent,” Ms. Mulcahy says. “But you have to keep focusing on it. This doesn’t happen by accident. But it helps to have a culture that has a history of practicing this.”
Looking forward, Ms. Wilderotter says change in the c-suite will occur only if chief executives lead by example and begin adding different voices to their leadership teams.
“I don’t think it’s about mentoring programs or diversity programs at companies — it starts with a C.E.O. who is willing to have a diverse leadership team to run his or her business,” she says. “If a C.E.O. declares through his actions that men and women are important to the performance of the company, the rest of the company takes notice and changes the paradigm.”

Orienting the East

Education Supplement Orienting the East U. Michigan Psychologist Richard Nisbett Asks: Do Asians and Westerners Think Differently? by Hua Hsu April 16 - 22, 2003

illustration: Suzanne Allen

In 1944, the eminent Chinese anthropologist and sociologist Fei Xiaotang accepted an offer from the State Department to spend a year working in the United States. Fei's stint began with all of the excitement and wonder promised by this still-rising star among nations, but as the months drew on he grew exhausted with the fidgety, restless nature that outlined every feature of American life. He returned to China wiser and more attuned to American customs, but thankful that they were not his own: "American children hear no stories about ghosts. They spend a dime at the drugstore to buy a Superman comic book. . . . Superman represents actual capabilities or future potential, while ghosts symbolize belief in and reverence for the accumulated past. How could ghosts gain a foothold in American cities? People move like the tide, unable to form permanent ties with places, still less with other people. . . . In a world without ghosts, life is free and easy. American eyes can gaze straight ahead. But still I think they lack something and I do not envy their life."

Fei's ennui would lead to a complete turnabout in thought as he went from a fascinated student of American culture to a strident critic. But rather than causing us to write him off as someone who, say, hates us for our freedom, Fei's comments suggest deeper assumptive differences. University of Michigan psychologist Richard Nisbett explores the psychological dimension of this gap in his new book, The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently . . . and Why (Free Press). "The Easterner lives in a very complex social world where role relations are much more important than in the West," he explains over the phone from his office in Ann Arbor. "The person is literally a different person if they're taken out of their web of relationships. That's just not the attitude in the West—in the West, I'm a bundle of attributes. What I am is my wants, needs, traits, and abilities. I am a package of those things, and I am that package regardless of the social milieu in which I find myself."

Geography rests on a simple premise: Due to a variety of socio-historical factors, Asians (defined as those from China, Korea, and Japan) and Westerners (defined as people of European culture, but mostly focusing on Americans) possess different cognitive approaches to understanding their place in the world and solving problems. Asians approach the world with a holistic, field-oriented sensibility, paying careful mind to an object or act's web of relations and context; Westerners are more object-oriented, training their eye on that object or act's prominence and often slighting the surrounding field.

All of these distinctions trickle down to individual self-perception and mark the different approaches Easterners and Westerners may have to solving problems. According to Nisbett, deference toward field relations and interconnectedness allows Asians to find meaning or peace in contradiction. The stubborn primacy of the individual in Western thinking lends itself to ideas of control, and as a result it's more difficult for a Westerner to leave contradiction alone.

"In the individualistic West, you have the luxury of paying attention just to your relationship to some object or to your own goals, so the social field and physical field become less important," he says. Westerners have a sense of personal control. To the extent there is a feeling of control, it's in league with other people—I have to do this in some sort of harmonious set of relations with other people, I can't just go off like a cowboy."

The idea for Nisbett's work came from one of his Chinese graduate students, Kaiping Peng. Peng, who now teaches at the University of California at Berkeley, believed that there were fundamental differences in the way he and his adviser understood the world, gaps that couldn't be reconciled by culture, religion, or history, but rather through a re-examination of cognition and epistemology. Nisbett explains: "He would propose an experiment to do, and I would say, 'But nobody thinks the way you say the Chinese do,' and I always turned out to be wrong."

Nisbett eventually grew enamored with his own conclusions, and he cheekily describes this period of research as "dancing with the devil." Though it seems fairly intuitive to say that people are differently socialized, and that these differences trickle down to the level of thought and action, it was an unpopular idea in Nisbett's home field of psychology. It was fine to say that people held different thoughts but not that people could possess different approaches to thinking. Nisbett and his graduate researchers collaborated with psychologists throughout the U.S., Japan, China, and South Korea to get to the bottom of Peng's suspicion.

The teams ran a battery of experiments in each nation and concluded that these different cognitive approaches were very real. One of the most basic experiments involved showing Japanese and American subjects an animated underwater scene and asking them to describe what they saw. Japanese subjects made 70 percent more statements about the scene's background, while American subjects usually focused their observations on the single biggest, fastest, or most strikingly colored fish. Another experiment gave subjects a picture of a cow and then asked them to pair it with either a chicken or a patch of grass. Researchers found that Westerners invariably linked cow with chicken since they were both classifiable objects. The more field-oriented Asians matched the cow with grass.

Nisbett points to newer data collected in the past year that would suggest the possibility of change at a young age. "I'm certainly not an essentialist in that I think that these differences are genetic . . . and I'm not an essentialist in that I think these things aren't changeable. We don't know at what point these differences become ingrained, and we don't even know how fixed they are in being ingrained."

You'd be forgiven for regarding Nisbett's conclusions with a wary eye. On the surface, they run counter to the conventions about human difference we would like to believe, particularly at a time when culture and nation are misread as a difference that can only be reconciled by violence. Universalism is good—it sounds fair, bears no grudges, and offers a hopeful understanding of the world. What if it's just a fiction?

Nisbett himself was worried that his work would be interpreted as something that condemned, rather than celebrated, human difference. "Universalism is kind of a religion," he explains. "It wasn't just that I had a deep intellectual conviction; it was really a religion for me that we were all the same. It was very important. But if we are really different, we ought to know that. Otherwise, we can attribute difference to the other person being a jerk, or to them belonging to a group that's inferior in some way."

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Ever since Samuel Huntington's jarring Clash of Civilizations (1996) recast the seemingly peaceful post-Cold War world as an array of rigid, potentially antagonistic cultures, there has been a heightened interest in acknowledging, explaining, and understanding the world's differences. In particular, recent books like Kishore Mahbubani's Can Asians Think?, William Hannas's The Writing on the Wall: How Asian Orthography Curbs Creativity (2003), and C. Fred Alford's Think No Evil: Korean Values in the Age of Globalization (1999) have fixed on that nebulous space dividing Asian and American. Though Nisbett's book glosses over some of the obvious historical or linguistic reasons separating Asian and Western thought—and though it invests itself in a simplistic promise of even cross-cultural exchange—it's a vital contribution to the discussion of how humans differ and how they can get along in spite of those differences.

I spoke to Nisbett the day before the war on Iraq officially began and we wondered aloud whether this was an appropriate time to ditch universalism. Interspersed among Geography's flat details of theory and experimentation, you read Nisbett himself struggling with his conclusions, and you eventually find him relinquishing one kind of hope for another. "Now that I know that we're different, my crusade is a little different," he explains. He closes the book with an inspired call for a more humane globalism, one that departs from foundational differences but aspires toward universal values and compassion.

"It's a little harder to believe [in convergence] today than it was four or five months ago," Nisbett says. "It doesn't seem quite so likely today." He pauses, considering the weight of his words. "That's the hopeful conclusion." send a letter to the editor

The larger shame behind New Orleans

By Nicholas D. Kristof The New York Times

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2005

NEW YORK The wretchedness coming across our TV screens from Louisiana has illuminated the way children sometimes pay with their lives, even in America, for being born to poor families. It has also underscored the Bush administration's ongoing reluctance or ineptitude in helping the poorest Americans.

The scenes in New Orleans reminded me of the suffering I saw after a similar storm killed 130,000 people in Bangladesh in 1991 - except that Bangladesh's government showed more urgency in trying to save its most vulnerable citizens.

But Hurricane Katrina also underscores a much larger problem: the growing number of Americans trapped in a never-ending cyclone of poverty. And while it may be too early to apportion blame definitively for the mishandling of the hurricane, even George W. Bush's own administration acknowledges that America's poverty is worsening on his watch.

The Census Bureau reported a few days ago that the poverty rate rose again last year, with 1.1 million more Americans living in poverty in 2004 than a year earlier. After falling sharply under Bill Clinton, the number of poor people has now risen 17 percent under Bush.

If it's shameful that we have bloated corpses on New Orleans streets, it's even more disgraceful that the infant mortality rate in America's capital is twice as high as in China's capital. That's right - the number of babies who died before their first birthdays amounted to 11.5 per thousand live births in 2002 in Washington, compared with 4.6 in Beijing.

Indeed, according to the UN Development Program, an African-American baby in Washington has less chance of surviving its first year than a baby born in urban parts of the state of Kerala in India.

The national infant mortality rate has risen under Bush for the first time since 1958. The United States ranks 43rd in the world in infant mortality, according to the CIA's World Factbook; if we could reach the level of Singapore, ranked No. 1, we would save 18,900 children's lives each year.

So in some ways the poor children evacuated from New Orleans are the lucky ones because they may now get checkups and vaccinations. But nationally, 29 percent of children had no health insurance at some point in the last 12 months, and many get neither checkups nor vaccinations. The United States ranks 84th in the world for measles immunizations and 89th for polio.

One dispiriting element of Katrina was the looting. I covered the 1995 earthquake that leveled much of Kobe, Japan, killing more than 6,000, and for days I searched there for any sign of criminal behavior. Finally I found a resident who had seen three men steal food. I asked him whether he was embarrassed that Japanese would engage in such thuggery.

"No, you misunderstand," he said firmly. "These looters weren't Japanese. They were foreigners."

The reasons for this are complex and partly cultural, but one reason is that Japan has tried hard to stitch all Japanese together into the nation's social fabric. In contrast, the United States - particularly under the Bush administration - has systematically cut people out of the social fabric by redistributing wealth from the most vulnerable Americans to the most affluent.

It's not just that funds may have gone to Iraq rather than to the levees in New Orleans; it's also that money went to tax cuts for the wealthiest rather than vaccinations for children.

None of this is to suggest that there are easy solutions for American poverty. As Ronald Reagan once said, "We fought a war on poverty, and poverty won." But we don't need to be that pessimistic - in the late 1990s, we made real headway.

The best monument to the catastrophe in New Orleans would be a serious national effort to address the poverty that afflicts the entire country. And in our shock and guilt, that might be politically feasible. Rich Lowry of The National Review, in defending Bush, offered an excellent suggestion: "a grand right-left bargain that includes greater attention to out-of-wedlock births from the left in exchange for the right's support for more urban spending." That would be the best legacy possible for Katrina.

Otherwise, long after the horrors have left TV screens, about 50 of the 77 babies who die each day, on average, will die needlessly, because of poverty. That's the larger hurricane of poverty that shames our land.

In the tsunami region, disbelief over U.S. woes

By Seth Mydans International Herald Tribune

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2005

BANGKOK In Aceh, where a tsunami last December hit hardest in Asia, the first reaction to the disaster in New Orleans was sympathy, said Azwar Hasan, a social worker in the Indonesian province where at least 126,000 people died.

"Is there any food there?" he asked. "Any water? I'm really sorry to hear what has happened."

But then he made a statement that is being repeated around Southeast Asia, where America is remembered with gratitude and admiration for its fast, well-organized assistance to victims of the tsunami.

"America is the best-developed country in the world," Azwar said. "This kind of thing shouldn't be happening in America. We are wondering what is going on in America, and why."

Around the region, people have watched the televised scenes from the United States of suffering and chaos with sympathy, with horror and with bewilderment at America's inability to take care of itself.

For some, the scenes from Hurricane Katrina seem to be shaking fundamental ideas about the country's strength and competence. Many of the comments, in telephone interviews around the region, came in the form of puzzled questions.

"How is it possible?" asked Aristedes Katoppo, an Indonesian journalist. "How is it possible that in an advanced society like the United States it is so difficult to provide help or rescue people? How is it possible that this breakdown in law and order could happen?"

He said he felt uncomfortable criticizing a nation in the midst of suffering, but he found comparisons with America's forceful role in Iraq unavoidable.

"Let's just say that it is noted that America sends troops to try to maintain order in distant places, but it seems to have difficulty to do it in their own back yard," he said.

Some people, like F. Sionel Jose, a novelist in the Philippines who has had a long and enthusiastic relationship with America, seemed crestfallen.

"It's very disappointing," he said. "It's something people like me don't expect. Somebody told me they're shooting at helicopters! And looting."

Paulynn Sicam, a government official in the Philippines who has studied and lived in the United States, also sounded disappointed, and angry.

"It's so heartbreaking to see how helpless America has become," she said. "You're not strong any more. You can't even save your own countrymen and there you are, out there trying to control the world."

She said there was no excuse in a nation like America for the suffering and apparent incompetence she had seen on television. "Why are people hungry?" she said. "That really bothers me. Why are they hungry? The first thing you do, you feed them."

She added: "The other thing that bothers me is how capitalism continues its merry way in the light of a disaster like this, with gas prices going up sky high. It's so opportunistic. Is this America? Is this the American way?"

Several people were struck by the social and racial divisions that have come to the surface, a side of America that clashes with the common view of a rich, advanced nation.

"It came to my mind that I didn't see that many whites on television," said Anusart Suwanmongkol, the managing director of a hotel in Pattani, Thailand.

"What you saw was the helpless, the infirm, the poor and the old - mostly black, the underclass," he said. "It's quite a powerful image on television." Like many people, he has followed the coverage closely on local television channels, CNN and satellite feeds of American networks.

"It was quite incredible that President Bush, I think on 'Good Morning America,' was smiling, and that didn't go well with me," he said. "I thought he would project a serious image - the nation needs help."

American hubris may have contributed to the disaster, said Supara Kapasuwan, a college dean in Bangkok who spent more than five years in the United States earning a master's degree and a doctorate.

"I can't say I was surprised," she said, speaking of the failure to evacuate the city.

"Americans - not all of them but many - seem to have this attitude that they are invincible, that nothing's going to happen to them," she said.

Newspapers around the region reflected these views, sharing sympathy while expressing shock and amazement at this unusual view of what one called "the planet's most powerful country."