Filling a Void: Cindy Kushner heads Women Executive Leadership, which serves as a matchmaker between women executives and companies looking to fill board seats. [Photo: Eileen Escarda]

Nine years ago, Miami businesswoman Ann Spector Lieff was at a crossroads. Camelot Music had just bought Specs Music, the Miami-based retail music chain that her father founded in 1948, and Lieff's 18-year reign as CEO was coming to an end. At 46, Lieff believed she was too young to retire. She thought she would like to serve on the boards of public companies, but offers were few and far between. "The phone wasn't quite ringing off the hook like it had been while I was a CEO. As a former CEO, I didn't seem to be as appealing," Lieff recalls.

When the recruiting firm she called turned her away, Lieff considered becoming a retail consultant. But later that year, through aggressive networking, she landed her first board job with the Herzfeld Caribbean Basin Fund, a management investment company pioneered by Miami closed-end fund guru Thomas Herzfeld. Today, at 55, Lieff also serves on the boards of directors of Hastings Entertainment, Birks & Mayors and Claire's Stores. She also runs a consulting firm specializing in CEO mentoring and leadership development.

The key to her success, she says, is networking. "It's disappointing we don't see more women on corporate boards, but a lot of that has to do with not having as strong of a network as men. Women need to do a better job of speaking out and asking for positions."

Lieff doesn't have a lot of female company in the boardroom. In 2006, women occupied just 106, or 8.7%, of the 1,221 board seats of Florida's top 150 public companies, according to Women Executive Leadership, a Fort Lauderdale-based non-profit that advocates women serving on corporate boards.

Read the complete list here. Companies are ranked by total revenue for 2006.

A big part of the problem for women in Florida is that there aren't many board seats in the state to begin with, says WEL's treasurer, Evelyn D'An, who's also president and founder of D'An Financial Services. "Remember that Florida is not where you will find the bulk of the Fortune 500 and Fortune 1000 companies. You'll find them in Chicago, in the bigger cities. Because they have a greater number of board seats, they'll have a larger number (of women) on their board."

WEL President Cindy Kushner says the chief complaint she hears from boards that want to pursue gender diversity is that they can't find "board-ready" women. Interested female executives, meanwhile, don't know where to start or how to assess their
opportunities.

WEL serves as a matchmaker of sorts, providing specialized training to high-level women on topics ranging from corporate governance to risk management and then connecting those high-level executives with search firms. D'An says her contacts through the group and her skill set in the accounting field landed her a spot on the board of Alico, a land management company operating in central and southwest Florida.

Mentoring is an important part of the group's mission. Evelyn Follit, a former RadioShack executive and member of WEL, sits on the boards of Catalina Marketing and Winn-Dixie. She says her path to the boardroom began in 1999, when the CEO and chairman of RadioShack instructed her and other company executives to join the board of one publicly traded company to broaden their perspective on issues. Her boss felt that they could bring back valuable lessons by looking at how other companies dealt with governance, technology or capital acquisitions.

"If you ask all of us, all of us had a wonderful mentor and several mentors throughout their careers," she says.

Kushner worries that even the modest strides women have made in Florida's boardrooms could diminish. She notes that while the number of female board members in the state increased slightly last year, the number of C-level positions held by women dropped from 7.6% in 2004 to 5.4% in 2006. That means that the pipeline for qualified women for future board positions narrowed.

Follit sees a few bright spots. She points to government reforms like the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, which involves strict auditing standards designed to improve corporate governance, as opening up doors for women. "Sarbanes has required all of us to remain financially literate, and from that perspective, it broadens the pool to include many women and minorities," Follit says. "Some of the best financial process and insight come from people who are CFOs and are on audit teams, and there is much more of a female representation." Overall, she remains optimistic: "If you peel back this onion and look at the basic business
environment in which we're all doing business, there's lots of reasons for women to get involved."

Gender Gap In 2006 ...

• 72 public companies of the top 150 in Florida had no women directors.
• Women were not represented in the boardroom or in top executive ranks in 39.2% of companies on Florida Trend's Public 150 list.
• Only six companies in Florida employed two or more women in top-level executive positions: Claire's Stores, Fresh Del Monte Produce, Office Depot, Regeneration Technologies, Chico's and Reptron Electronics.
• Women of color occupied fewer than 1% of all board seats in Florida.