Speaking truths about women in business

She’s the brains behind some of the most innovative networks on television, and she has watched her career grow from childhood, to adolescence, to adulthood as her network affiliation has changed: first as an independent producer of Nickelodeon, then as vice chairman of MTV Networks and now as founder, chairman and CEO of Oxygen Media.

Geraldine Laybourne, the latest public speaker to grace the SMU lecture circuit, spoke at the fifth annual Louise Ballerstedt Raggio Endowed Lecture benefiting SMU’s women’s studies program Wednesday. Although billed as a lecture on “The truth about women,” Laybourne was quick to add the qualifier “in business,” warning any men in the audience who were looking for answers perhaps they wouldn’t be getting what they hoped for.

Laybourne was at SMU to outline her rise to the top of the media industry at a time when women were welcome to walk through the door, but weren’t as welcome behind the closed doors of executive meetings. As a mother, she was horrified by the lack of quality children’s programming on television, and she wanted to see if it was possible to go into the market and change what she saw as an injustice to children.

“There wasn’t good television for kids available when kids were available to watch,” she said.

Laybourne approached the fledgling Nickelodeon in the late 1970s as an independent producer, and soon both the network and Laybourne were on their way to the top. As for her success, Laybourne claims she was never a television person … but she was a “kid person”, and she was in the right industry at the right time.

“It [broadcasting] was a great environment for women,” she said. “We were lucky. We were pioneers in making headway for women.”

Laybourne says her generation was concerned with securing opportunities for women in the future. The present generation is trying to achieve a balance between work and family, between the ambition and the nurturing instinct inherent in so many women; and for the future generation. Laybourne sees women struggling to find intimacy, both at home and at work.

For Laybourne, the contributions of women in the workplace are fundamental in progressing business and industry in the United States. To prove her point, she compared the five percent of all businesses in the 1970s owned by women with the 70 percent owned by women today.

“And 80 percent of those [women-owned] businesses succeed, a number well above the national average,” she added.

According to the Center for Women’s Business Owners, women-owned firms generate $1.5 trillion in sales, and between 1997 and 2002, the number of women-owned businesses grew at twice the rate of all U.S. firms, reaching the current number of 6.2 million.

Laybourne asserts women “really don’t have a clue just how good they are.” She says women are naturally collaborative, but find it hard to “toot their own horn,” despite the fact that women have “come a long way down an uneven playing field.” The biggest downfall to most women? The need to keep the businesses they have invested themselves in safe from harm.

“This is why women aren’t more prevalent in the Fortune 500 companies: [we won’t] take risks without covering all the bases.”

But Laybourne sees women as indispensable in the future of business.

“Women love to give birth, not just to babies, but to ideas,” she said. “We think long term, and we want to see it through to the end.”

Laybourne hopes to see her network Oxygen through to the end as well. She anticipates the three and a half-year-old company will turn a profit starting next year, thanks to an availability expansion that will put the network in 43 million homes by the end of the year.

Laybourne, a self-proclaimed eternal optimist, sees a successful future for women willing to dig deep to find their passion, and then to follow that passion to success. For her, it’s the differences between men and women that will keep business growing.

“We [women] are different [from men] by nature and different by nurture,” she said. “You take the combination of men and women and it is powerful.”