In Push for Gender Equality, Breaking Down the Boardroom Door

Beth A. Stewart doesn’t mind making waves.

Last year, Ms. Stewart, who runs a search firm that specializes in female directors, helped stoke the debate over board diversity by taking aim at the giant social network Facebook. As the Internet company prepared to go public in a much-hyped debut, she worked behind the scenes on a campaign to publicize the lack of women on Facebook’s board. To bolster her effort, she enlisted a women’s advocacy group, which decided to stage a protest at Facebook’s offices in New York in April.

Facing pressure from a number of sources, Facebook in June named its first female director, the company’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg. The company has since added Susan Desmond-Hellmann, the chancellor at the University of California, San Francisco, to the nine-member board.

Ms. Stewart “is a very outspoken leader in addressing the lack of gender diversity on corporate boards,” said Janice Hester-Amey, a portfolio manager at the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, which also pressed for more women on the Facebook board. “One thing that stands out about her is, she’s inside the room already,” Ms. Hester-Amey added, referring to Ms. Stewart’s corporate board work.

Ms. Stewart, 56, is on a quest — for personal and professional reasons.

Two years ago, Ms. Stewart tried to find a new directorship after General Growth Properties emerged from bankruptcy and her service on its board ended. After a six-month search for a new role, she concluded “there was no demand for women” and decided to start her own business, Trewstar.

“I saw how difficult it was for a woman to become a director,” Ms. Stewart said. “I started this business because I saw a gap in the market, and I believe I have a different approach to the other alternatives out there.”

It’s a strategy born of experience.

A graduate of Wellesley College and Harvard Business School, she left Goldman Sachs in 1992 to focus on raising five children with her husband, Mikael Salovaara, a former partner at the investment bank. But she maintained a foot in the corporate world with her board positions.

In 1993, she was named to the board of General Growth, a mall operator and one of her clients at Goldman. Her board service ended in 2010 after the bankrupt company received an equity infusion from outside investors.

In the intervening years, she added three more corporate boards to her résumé: Imperial Parking, a parking lot manager; Avatar Holdings, a residential developer; and the used-car dealer CarMax. On a part-time basis from 2001 to 2009, Ms. Stewart also ran Storetrax.com, an Internet real estate company.

To build her business, Ms. Stewart is tapping her years of connections.

In 2011, she contacted the wife of a former Goldman colleague, whose children went to the same school as hers in suburban New Jersey. The woman served on the board of trustees at Cornell with Cheryl A. Francis, a board member at the investment research firm Morningstar.

In an initial phone call with Ms. Francis, Ms. Stewart pitched Trewstar’s approach of finding qualified women through her network. Ms. Francis said Morningstar wanted a director with financial services experience in the New York area, Ms. Stewart’s home base.

When Ms. Stewart eventually met with the head of Morningstar’s nominating and governance committee, Paul Sturm, she had several potential board candidates. On April 4, Morningstar disclosed the nomination of Ms. Stewart’s candidate for the board, Gail Landis, a retired founding partner of Evercore Asset Management.

“She gave us some great ideas,” Ms. Francis said. “They were people with tremendous backgrounds without prior board experience, and my assumption is we wouldn’t have seen them in a traditional search process.”

Ms. Stewart is undertaking a similar search for Electronic Arts.

At first, Ms. Stewart shared the common misperception that 98 percent of video game players were “young men in the man cave,” said Richard A. Simonson, a board member at the game maker. In reality, he said, women are one of the fastest-growing segments of gamers, a big reason Electronic Arts wanted to keep women as part of its board after the departure of two women directors.

“I was impressed by Beth’s unrelenting focus on women only, her energy, background, drive to do the job better than anyone, so I opened a few doors for her,” said Geraldine Laybourne, the founder of Oxygen Media and a former Electronic Arts director who put her in touch with Mr. Simonson.

The search has been delayed for two months as Electronic Arts works through management changes, including the departure of its chief executive. In the meantime, Ms. Stewart is in talks with five other companies about possible searches, and just received a third formal assignment from another, a large technology company. Ms. Stewart vows to contribute one quarter of her firm’s profit to “women-focused nonprofit organizations.”

As part of her diversity efforts, Ms. Stewart is also focused on education, including helping women navigate boardroom politics.

She recently co-hosted a dinner at the law firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges, covering a range of corporate governance topics for about 18 women directors. Over salmon and chicken, Ms. Stewart threw out examples of potential obstacles and encouraged the attendees to discuss possible responses.

Her point, she said, is “to brainstorm about specific blocking and tackling techniques to overcome the subtle resistance.” At the event, she asked what a female director should do when the chief executive, hearing a suggestion to add more women to a board, responds, “We already have two women.” Some attendees proposed alternatives, including discussing the issue in a more casual setting like a social event, or going around the chief executive to a powerful board member.

Ms. Stewart “posed a couple of hypotheticals about the kinds of things you run into when trying to do a search or have a discussion about bringing women on boards,” said Holly J. Gregory, one of the Weil, Gotshal lawyers who co-hosted the event with Ms. Stewart. “They’re very subtle objections, and the issue was, how do you respond without becoming defensive?”

With her sometimes aggressive tactics in her broad efforts, Ms. Stewart understands she risks a backlash.

At the height of the Facebook campaign, she notified a Facebook official last year that a protest might be staged at a Harvard Business School commencement speech by Ms. Sandberg, unless Facebook publicly promised to add women to the board. Some Facebook officials were shocked and upset at what was taken as a threat against someone who is actually an advocate for women, said one person with knowledge of the incident.

“She can get very worked up, and that can frighten some people,” said Charlotte Laurent-Ottomane, executive director of the Thirty Percent Coalition, a group focused on gender diversity in boardrooms. “But she does bring people to the table.”

In September, Ms. Stewart met briefly in a conference room at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., to make peace with Ms. Sandberg. The Facebook executive said the board campaign had been a distraction, according to Ms. Stewart.

But Ms. Sandberg said that she, like Ms. Stewart, favored more women on boards as part of her goal of getting more women into upper management ranks. In a follow-up e-mail, Ms. Stewart said, she apologized for raising the possibility of the Harvard speech disruption. Ms. Sandberg has since offered positive suggestions and a possible candidate for another Trewstar search, Ms. Stewart said.

“I am willing to say the emperor has no clothes, which may offend some people,” Ms. Stewart said. “I take what I think is a more direct approach.”