Why women of power win.

AS BLACK ENTERPRISE prepares to welcome more than 500 women to our inaugural Women of Power Summit this February in Phoenix, we thought this was a perfect time for our magazine to celebrate the achievements of black women at the highest echelons in business. The result has been our roster of the 50 Most Powerful Black Women in Business--a registry we haven't developed for close to a decade. Those represented on our list run the gamut, from senior managers of the world's largest industrial corporations to founders of the nation's largest black-owned businesses.

Developing this list afforded us the opportunity to review the current status of black women in the workplace. BE was one of the first business publications to fully explore this topic. In fact, we visited this subject as early as August 1974 when our editors highlighted "Black Women in Business and Public Life" and featured Ernesta G. Procope on the cover--then president of the largest black-owned insurance brokerage firm and one of our ultimate wealth builders (see September 2005 issue). We produced a list of "Women of Power and Influence in Corporate America" twice in the 1990s--in 1991, where we identified 21 women, and in 1997, where we identified 20 women--to spotlight female executives at the pinnacle of American business.

What have we discovered in the development of our most recent list? It's still a tough road for black women in corporate America. Catalyst, the New York-based women's research and advisory outfit, found that only an abysmal 1.1% of black female executives reach corporate officer or top earner status.

Over the past decade, we have assessed their hurdles to ascension. In 1997, we revealed a Catalyst study in which senior-level female executives cited four barriers to corporate success: exclusion from informal networks, male stereotyping and their preconceptions of women, a lack of mentoring, and insufficient line experience. The same women also listed what they considered success triggers: adapting their style to make males comfortable, consistently exceeding expectations, having an influential mentor, and seeking difficult or highly visible assignments. At the time, only 46 of the 460 women Catalyst surveyed were women of color.

Seven years later, in 2004, Catalyst released Advancing African-American Women in the Workplace: What Managers Need to Know, a study yielding somewhat different responses. Lack of access to a mentor, a paucity of peer networks, few role models of the same race or ethnicity, and a lack of high visibility projects were the top four barriers identified by black women executives. The four success factors were access to high visibility assign merits, performing above managers' expectations, possessing solid communication skills, and having an influential mentor or sponsor. In analyzing the data, Katherine Giscombe, senior director of research at Catalyst, found that the difference between the results of the women of color and their white counterparts is "the lack of faith that women of color had in a meritocracy."

The challenges black women consistently face in corporate America may explain data from the Center for Women's Business Research (www.womensbusinessresearch.org) that shows that, between1997 and 2004, the number of African American women-owned firms increased by 32.5%. That's why our Top 50 list doesn't solely focus on corporate stars. We have included women entrepreneurs carving out important niches and helping to drive our economy. Their businesses employ nearly 254,000 and generate $19.5 billion in sales. But even those who venture into entrepreneurship face challenges related to capital, growth, and competition in this ever-evolving business environment.

In the face of such trials, we celebrate women who have successfully developed strategies to not only weather storms but economically impact industry. "When I look at my friends who have hit walls, a lot of times it's the anger over the institution or a group of people not accepting their individual style or idiosyncrasies," offers Deborah C. Wright, chairwoman and CEO of Carver Bancorp Inc. Those who succeed, she says, have learned hard lessons about how to not take challenges personally--even when they are clearly discriminatory. Those who succeed understand the game, know the playing field, and have a strategy for winning. And they do.