When commercial real estate broker Dottie Tarleton was working on getting her commercial real estate certification in the mid-1980s—a designation known as a Certified Commercial Investment Member, or CCIM—she would typically find herself among just six or seven other women in a class of more than 100 men. The ratio didn’t improve any when she began practicing in Baton Rouge a few years later.
“I was the only woman doing this in Baton Rouge when I started out,” Tarleton, who recently celebrated her 25th anniversary as a broker with Stirling Properties, tells Business Report in a feature from the current issue. “And I was only the third woman in Louisiana to get my CCIM.”
You might assume that a quarter of a century later the number of women in commercial real estate would have increased significantly. It hasn’t—at least not in the Baton Rouge market, where men still far outweigh women by a ratio of roughly 10 to 1.
Why is there such a disparity? Even in the traditional Deep South, women have handily conquered other high-pressure, male-dominated professions. And they excel in residential real estate, where they account for more than half of all agents both locally and statewide. What makes commercial real estate so different?
It’s a question with a complicated and troubling answer. Both men and women in the industry point to several possible factors—barriers to entry, the nature of the work, temperamental differences between men and women—that suggest an element of sexism lies at the root of the issue. It’s not as though men are trying to keep women out of the business, per se. On the contrary, local male brokers say they wish more women applied for positions at their firms.
But the good-ole-boys-network that traditionally determined how deals got done still exists to an extent, and women haven’t been encouraged or particularly drawn to the field. It’s starting to change, but in Baton Rouge commercial real estate is still a man’s world.
“It’s not just as simple as gender discrimination, but I do believe in the long run there are issues that relate to gender discrimination,” says Gail Ayers, CEO of CREW Network, a national networking organization for women in commercial real estate. “I believe there are unconscious biases about what people should and shouldn’t do. I think sometimes women will buy into that ‘I can’t do that’ mentality.”
Read the full feature. Send your comments to editors@businessreport.com.
