BY MARK B. SOLOMON, SENIOR EDITOR
WOMEN IN LOGISTICS
specialreport
the
“old girl”
network
It’s been a long slog, but women are finally making
headway in assuming logistics leadership roles.
THE YEAR WAS 1990, AND DIANE GIBSON, CO-FOUNDER OF
startup Craters & Freighters, was working at her Denver headquarters
when a sales representative from American Airlines walked in the office.
Gibson recalls that the male sales rep asked, “Where are the bosses?”—
a reference to Gibson’s two male co-founders. “I bit my lip, held my
tongue, and told him, ‘They’ll be back shortly,’” she says with a laugh.
Fast-forward two decades. Gibson’s original partners are long gone,
one leaving in 1994 in a dispute over the company’s direction and the
other bought out by Gibson in 1995 after he refused to agree to expand
beyond Denver.
Today, Craters & Freighters, which manages the movements of specialized commodities described by Gibson as “too large, too outsized,
and too weird,” does $45 million a year in sales, has 60 franchised offices
covering 85 percent of the United States, and is looking to expand internationally. Gibson has steered the company solo for 15 years.
If it were any other field, Gibson’s story would not be unique. Across
many industries, it is commonplace for women to hold leadership positions. But the upper echelon of the supply chain ranks—whether it is
transportation, logistics, or warehousing and distribution—has
remained the near-exclusive domain of men.
In some ways, little has changed. A survey of “women in transporta-
tion and warehousing” released earlier this year by Catalyst, a New
York-based organization that promotes women’s advancement in busi-
ness, found no female CEOs at the companies polled. Only 11 percent
of the firms had women board members and 12. 6 percent had what
Catalyst termed female “executive officers.”
The status quo is sometimes felt beyond the numbers. “In my career,
it’s not been uncommon to walk in the room and hear someone say, ‘Oh,
someone from marketing is here,’” says Kristin Muhlner, CEO of
Rollstream Inc., a McLean, Va.-based supply chain software developer.
Muhlner, whose background is in engineering and not distribution, said
