NUN BUT THE BRAVE

By CALVIN TRILLIN

Sister Doris Gormley is director of corporate social responsibility for the Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia. This spring, after receiving a proxy statement from a large Silicon Valley corporation called Cypress Semiconductor, she sent back a courteous, three-paragraph form letter explaining her order's belief that corporations should include qualified women and minorities on their boards. In return, she received a six-page lecture from Cypress CEO T.J. Rodgers, who said, among other things, that views such as hers were "immoral." So much for my assumption that every little American boy is raised to be particularly polite to nuns.

Sister Doris reacted calmly, remarking to the Wall Street Journal that her letter may have arrived when Rodgers was "feeling extremely vulnerable around these issues." One reason little American boys are raised to be particularly polite to nuns is that nuns have a reputation for being able to put you down in a single sentence while sounding as if they're expressing concern.

Apparently, Rodgers was not simply throwing a snit at the end of a bad day. He is known as a ceo who treasures a reputation for outspokenness. His letter, which argues that virtually all people who are qualified to be directors of a major high-tech company happen to be white males and that putting people on the board for any other reason is stupid, was distributed to shareholders in the first-quarter report. The response, he says, has been overwhelming and almost totally favorable. Sister Doris' mail has also suggested that she should, as we used to say, stick to her knitting.

After a decade or so of nonfiction best sellers portraying the directors of large corporations as freeloaders or pawns of the ceo or distracted celebrities or public relations ornaments or assorted varieties of windbag, there is something almost touching in the fact that so many Americans still believe corporate directorship to be a calling requiring such a high level of skill and experience that the inclusion of a woman on a board could put the entire operation in peril.

Judging from what we've been told by business writers in recent years, the real problem CEOs have with putting women on the board may be that a female director, unaccustomed to feeding at the deep end of the corporate trough, is less likely than old clubhouse buddies to take a broad view of executive compensation.

Someone like Sister Doris, for instance, might have wondered out loud if it was seemly last year for Rodgers to make millions by selling off 200,000 shares of Cypress, some of it acquired at a bargain with stock options, as the company's stock began a decline that eventually left it at half its value. (And how did shareholders represented by such breathtakingly qualified directors come to get such a drubbing? Beats me.)

On a radio interview I heard last week, Rodgers was as combative as ever toward Sister Doris, pointing out the absence of women in the College of Cardinals and remarking that do-gooders of her sort should "butt out" of business affairs that don't concern them. But as I interpreted what he was saying--with someone like Rodgers you sort of have to read between the blusters--he is, in fact, cooperating with two organizations that responded to the dust-up by offering to help him find a qualified woman for his board. "Always be particularly polite to nuns," one little boy I know was told, "because in the end they're going to win anyway, and you're just going to look foolish."