Gender parity in family business: How long till we get there?

When Charlotte Lamp was growing up in the 1950s and ’60s, no female family members worked in her family’s business, Port Blakely. The company, which is based in the Pacific Northwest and has been owned by the Eddy family since 1903, owns and manages working forests and markets renewable forest products.

Lamp’s brothers had summer jobs at Port Blakely, but “I was not allowed to, because I was a girl,” she says. In college, Lamp was a biology major and chemistry minor with a number of elective courses in field biology areas, but still she was barred from working in the forests. Although she didn’t realize it at the time, some of her female cousins also wished they could work in the company.

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About the Author(s)

Barbara Spector

Barbara Spector is Family Business Magazine's editor-at-large.


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