Margaret Hennig; Broke Ground And Ceilings For Female Executives, 63

[DGH]

.

Margaret Henning died of heart failure, Wednesday, January 28, 3004,
at the age of 63.

As co-founder and co-dean of the first MBA program designed
specifically for women, Margaret Hennig helped propel hundreds beyond
the corporate "glass ceiling."

"She was influential in the careers of many women executives, both in
New England and nationally," said Anne Jardim, who cofounded the
Simmons Graduate School of Management with Dr. Hennig in 1974.

Dr. Hennig and Jardim also co-wrote "The Managerial Woman," a study of
successful women executives first published in 1977. Publicized mainly
by word of mouth, it became a New York Times bestseller.

"She was able to say to women students that `yes you can' and `this is
why,' " said Jardim of Dr. Hennig.

Dr. Hennig, a charismatic speaker with a melodious voice, was born in
Ridgewood, N.J. From age 14 until she was 22, she spent summers
working in a postcard factory. That experience, she said in a 1995
Globe story, set the course for her lifetime commitment to workplace
quality of life.

"I learned early on that most managers did not care about the lives of
people they controlled, and I saw that work for most people was not
rewarding," she said. "People came into those doors, and they were
expected to leave everything behind: sickness, depression, marital
problems, financial worries. They were expected to be pleasant,
upbeat, thankful, and work like hell. ... Every kid growing up should
have a blue-collar work experience."

After graduating from Simmons College, Dr. Hennig in 1963 entered
Harvard Business School, where she earned a master's degree in
business administration and a doctorate.

For her doctoral thesis she studied 25 of the 125 women listed as
officers of Fortune 500 companies and found that they were either only
children or the eldest girl in all-girl families, for whom their
father's approval was a significant factor in the freedom they felt to
pursue management careers.

She began teaching at Harvard Business School, where Jardim was also a
member of the faculty. When the school's administration did not
respond to their complaints about the lack of case studies on women
managers and the paucity of women's restrooms, they concluded that
women were second-class citizens at the school. They decided to create
an MBA program exclusively for women, with an emphasis on behavioral
studies of female corporate managers, hoping to encourage others to
enter the "foreign territory."

"She was so far ahead of her time," Jardim said.

With the help of a $25,000 grant from Harvard and financial aid from
other sources, Simmons Graduate School of Management opened in 1974.
Dr. Hennig and Jardim were co-deans of the program until they stepped
down simultaneously in 1997.

Peg Doherty, a retired senior vice president of human resources at
Houghton Mifflin Co., was a member of one of her first classes.

"She was a large woman who carried a lot of presence as she walked
around that amphitheater, telling it like it was," Doherty said.

Doherty pointed out that there were few female executives in the early
1970s and what an inspiration Dr. Hennig and her colleagues were.

"The program changed my life," she said. "Margaret educated a lot of
women, and she educated a lot of companies, too. She showed them what
their woman employees could become."

Dr. Hennig, who lived in Wellesley, leaves her companion, Dr.
Catherine Nelson, and a brother, Richard Hennig of Georgetown, South
Carolina.