By Jack Thomas, Globe Staff, 6/21/2004

When Andrea Silbert graduated from Harvard Business School in 1992, the economy was booming and Wall Street was beckoning. For a dynamic woman with an MBA, every tomorrow held the promise of power, privilege, and money -- oodles of it. But Silbert had other ideas.

In a departure from the very model of a modern Harvard MBA -- which is to say, grand salary, grandiose home, fancy car, and fat portfolio -- Silbert rolled up her sleeves nine years ago and, with a few grants, a staff of three, and a budget of merely $350,000, moved into donated space at Northeastern University and cofounded a nonprofit agency dedicated to helping women start and build their own companies.

Today, the Center for Women & Enterprise, as Breaking Breadit's called, has 25 employees and more than 100 volunteers at headquarters on School Street and at branches in Worcester and Providence. More than 8,000 women, many of them single mothers and some who were on welfare, have been helped in starting or expanding companies. The number who have benefited -- that is, employees, vendors, contractors, and their families -- is impossible to measure. Silbert resigned May 1, and now that the goodbye parties are over, the speeches ended, and the last white wine drained from the final toasts, she will retreat to her Harwich home and her husband and two young children for a six-month sabbatical. Over lox and a bagel at Zaftigs in Brookline, she talked about the new role of women in business.

"Women as entrepreneurs will change the work culture," she said. "Women are creating so many jobs in companies of 10, 20, or 30 people that it's among the fastest-growing segments of the economy. Women are going to make business stand up and notice."

But how, she is asked, will women make a difference? What does a woman bring to ownership of a company that a man does not?

"Well, for one thing, women take better care of employees and they're more concerned with benefits, not because they want to be good, but because they know it's smart business. Women see business more holistically.

"A man might say, OK, maybe I won't provide health insurance so I can save a few dollars, but a woman is more likely to say, well, I have great employees and I want to keep them because turnover costs a lot. Also, women tend to be more flexible about hours because, over the years, we've been forced ourselves to be more flexible."

It's that flexibility, she says, that gives small business an advantage over corporations in adapting to cultural changes.

"For most Americans, work is structured as it was in the early 20th century. We show up at 9, leave at 5, and for eight hours we're fully engaged in the company. At work, home is not supposed to intrude. At home, work is not supposed to intrude.

"But this isn't reality. Work is less about showing up on assembly lines, creating products, and then going home to family. Today it's fluid. How many people get home, give the kids dinner, then go back on the computer to work? So, at a time when more flexibility is needed, most Americans are employed by corporations that haven't figured out it makes sense to make the workplace flexible."

Among her theories -- unusual among traditionally conservative business-school alumni -- is a conviction that the corporate appetite for profit and a worker's desire for a healthful home life are not mutually exclusive, that a combination of corporate initiatives, helped along by government stimulation, can satisfy corporate and family needs, and at the same time increase productivity.

"We operate as if there's a full-time person at home," she said. "What does it mean if a husband comes late to work 20 percent of the time because a kid is sick or child care fell through? That's lost productivity, and business needs to stop thinking about work and home as separate spheres, because they're not."

Eventually, she predicts, corporations will recognize that policies in the workplace hostile to family life translate into decreased productivity, and then the business community will lobby for government support of such programs as all-day kindergarten and public preschool classes. If these seem like radical notions from someone in the traditionally conservative business community, by her own admission, Silbert is not your average Harvard Business School graduate.

"My friends at HBS don't think government's the solution. They think business should come up with corporate initiatives, and they're right. Corporations should be more flexible, but the pressure is on us to do something now. Our generation doesn't have the option of having one spouse at home, and the result is stress on parents, stress on marriages, stress on kids."

With more women in the workplace, there's been a shift in roles of women and men, she says, that has not been integrated at work or at home.

"Men today care more about being with their kids than before, and women more about a career. And yet we haven't adjusted. Most of us think that if a family can afford it, Mom ought to stay home while Dad goes to work. For women, this is an issue of great stress. Parade magazine reported that about 85 percent of mothers who work feel guilty. Do you know the percentage of fathers who feel guilty? Zero. Not a single guy felt an ounce of guilt. Zero. So we have to get over that. For one thing, in a third of dual-income families, the woman makes more than the man."

Silbert was merely warming up. Next came an assault on men happy to have a wife's paycheck added to family income but reluctant to pitch in with domestic chores.

"Seventy percent of women with kids under 18 work full time, and yet there's been no commensurate change in what women and men are responsible for at home, in terms of child care, elder care. A professor at Boston College, Juliet Schor, has quantified the hours women and men spend at work and at home, and she found that even women who spend 50 hours a week at a job outside the home still spend a disproportionate time doing housework. So women end up working 70 to 80 hours a week and men 40 or 50 or whatever."

Many of the women for whom CWE has been a life jacket were from lower economic levels, and they arrived at CWE with nothing but a dream.

"We don't supply the dream," said Silbert. "We don't say, `Hey, why don't you open an ice cream store?' They bring their own dream. If someone's new to business, we suggest a six-week program to create a vision, then six weeks of financial literacy. We have consultants, mostly volunteers, who meet with them about marketing, bookkeeping, sales. Everybody pays on a sliding scale, and we have a full-time attorney, donated by a local law firm, so students can learn to incorporate."

Silbert, who was earning $120,000 a year, is succeeded by Donna Good, former manager of the Denver Department of Human Services, who grew up in Dorchester. The budget today is $2.5 million, $1 million from federal, state, and local governments, $500,000 each from corporate sponsors and private donors, $300,000 from foundations, and $200,000 from fees paid by clients.

CWE is popular among politicians because it crosses party lines. Republicans like it because it fosters self-reliance, Democrats because it promotes economic justice, and success stories abound.

Carrie Johnson of Framingham was a newspaper reporter living in low-income housing and struggling to provide for two children when she started a cleaning company. The business grew, but eventually she fell behind in taxes. When the IRS threatened to close her business, she went to CWE in tears.

"In business, sometimes you feel like you're all alone," Johnson said, "and that's true especially if you're a woman. So connecting with women at the CWE gave me the confidence I needed, and we got the business back on solid ground." When she sold it in 2002, she had 165 employees and annual sales of $3.5 million.

Now Silbert is looking forward to six months with her children and her husband, who is an artist and graphic designer. "I'll be going to the beach, wind surfing, kayaking, and volunteering for Senator Kerry, who helped in getting CWE started nine years ago."

But she's also looking to her next project.

"I'm going to push myself again. I know how small businesses survive, and I know how hard it is for middle- and lower-income families, and what I want to do is make a difference in public debate and corporate initiatives that produce polices that are pro-business and pro-family. I might start another nonprofit or maybe an agency that lobbies for change in government policy to find all the overlapping needs of families and small business.

"Corporations may not realize it, but the future of business depends on taking stress away from families so that workers can be more productive."

This story ran on page B5 of the Boston Globe on 6/21/2004.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.

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