Career counselling favoured by US women climbing career ladder

Career counselling is the most favoured form of female advancement – over and above management and leadership training for women – at the US' top companies for women, according to the National Association for Female Executives.

The number of women accessing career counselling at these companies has doubled in the last year, it reports.

NATFE has just published its top 50 companies for executive women and says on average they employ 53% of women staff and women make up 23% of board directors, compared to 16% - the Fortune 500 average.

Among its top 10 companies are Proctor & Gamble, KPMG, Prudential Financial and IBM.

Although recent turnover lowered the number of female CEOs at the NAFE Top 50 Companies, which now numbers five total, or 10%, this is still higher than the figure for the Fortune 500 Companies, which stood at 3.6% in October 2011.

The NAFE Top 50 also continue to outpace the Fortune 500 on representation of women at the executive level. Twenty-two percent of executive officers at the winning companies are women, compared to 14% on Fortune 500 companies.

At the NAFE Top 50, women make up 19% of the profit-and-loss corporate executives and almost a quarter of the executives who run billion-dollar divisions.

All managers at the NAFE Top 10 are trained to manage work life issues and flexible work arrangements.

Despite the glowing credentials, NATFE points out some areas in need of improvement. For instance, CEOs at most NAFE Top Companies review succession plans for gender equity, but the task forces representing women and work life issues report directly to the CEO at only a minority of the NAFE Top 50.

Meanwhile although more than half the employees at the NAFE Top Companies are women, they still make up less than a quarter of their corporate executives.

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