Mars and Venus

Syd Jackson, CEO of Manufacturer’s Life Insurance Co., was the most playful chief executive officer I’ve ever met. The first time I interviewed him in 1984 he plunked his six-foot-three frame down on his carpeted office floor and bounced around like a boy demonstrating how he received his artillery training.
Using his coffee table for a landscape he added various items from his desk to act as mock-up artillery pieces and potential targets.
Beyond his fun-loving side, Jackson was one of the first CEOs in Canada to actively promote women with three among his top executives. “It’s not an impressive number, but it’s a dramatic change,” Jackson told me.
They included Jalynn Bennett who joined Manulife in 1965 with an economics degree from the University of Toronto. Her first role was answering the phone in the investment department. No man would have been offered that job. No man would have taken that job, if offered.
By 1985 Bennett was vice-president of corporate development at Manulife. From 1989 to 1994 she served as a director of the Bank of Canada. She also served on several corporate boards including CIBC, Teck Resources and Cadillac Fairview.
In 1991 Bennett was nominated along with four other women for membership in the all-male York Club. Among those against the idea was Bennett’s uncle, Len Lumbers, former chairman of Noranda Manufacturing. He was outvoted. Women were admitted for the first time since the club was founded in 1909.
Two years later, when Bennett joined the Toronto Club, she was that august institution’s first female member as well.
Madame Pauline Vanier, wife of Governor General Georges Vanier, was the first woman named to a bank board. At her initial board meeting in 1967 she supposedly turned to Bank of Montreal Chairman and CEO Arnold Hart who was sitting beside her and said, “How am I doing so far?” “Fine,” he replied, “but it goes like this.” He reached for the sheet in front of her and turned it around. It had been upside down. Businessmen gleefully retold that tale, true or not, even after much time had passed.
Women can also be their own worst enemies. There are many successful women who refuse to help younger female colleagues get ahead. I agree with the late U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who once said, “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.”