Recently, a group of women reacted unfavorably to some words of career wisdom delivered by former GE Master and Commander Jack Welch. Welch had told women at the The Wall Street Journal‘s Women in the Economy conference that they should “over deliver,” that “performance is it,” and that while diversity and mentorship programs are all well and good, they’re not how women get ahead. (He also likened women’s employee groups to “victim’s units.”) Not terribly surprisingly, he was criticized for failing to acknowledge an overall gender bias with regard to women in the workplace. At that time, we asked rhetorically, “How about supporting women’s careers by getting women who’ve been there to deliver the career advice for women?” (Also around that time, we reacted unfavorably to some other career advice for women written in The Wall Street Journal.)

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Now we have some answers. The Journal‘s John Bussey turned to the 18 female CEOs of Fortune 500 companies to ask them what they thought about the personal and workplace factors that have fueled their careers, and the “myths about the advancement of women” they’ve encountered in their time on the job. Bussy points out that those 18 female CEOs, a record number, comprise just 3.6% of total of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. So, what did they say? 

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WellPoint CEO Angela Braly told Bussy, ”The most important factor in determining whether you will succeed isn’t your gender, it’s you. Be open to opportunity and take risks. In fact, take the worst, the messiest, the most challenging assignment you can find, and then take control.” Braly and another CEO, KeyCorp’s Beth Mooney, support the somewhat controversial tip put forth in the other Journal piece, “Nine Rules Women Must Follow to Get Ahead,” that women should “Do work no one else wants to do.” Mooney told Bussy, “I have stepped up to many ‘ugly’ assignments that others didn’t want.” (This advice is only problematic, in my opinion, if it exclusively applies to women.)

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Xerox CEO Ursula Burns said that leaders should take risks. Others advised women to always pursue new skills, to know when to leave a job, to be willing to “tack sideways” or backward on a career track for the right reasons, and to be strategic. Also, be confident and “incredibly comfortable in your own skin,” said Gannett’s Gracia Martore, ”and the only way to do that is to be confident in who you are.” Stand out from the crowd, ask for what you want,and don’t wait to get noticed. Also, don’t be afraid to brag about yourself: ”For a lot of women, they think the myth is true, that if they just do a good job and work hard, they’ll get recognized. That’s not the case,” says Maggie Wilderotter, CEO of Frontier Communications. While a lot of that advice really plays for either gender, maybe that’s the point—good career advice should apply to either gender.

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Despite Welch’s comments on mentorship programs, the female CEOs said mentors had been pretty important to their careers, whether those mentorships were formalized or not. And, oh yeah, work hard, don’t complain, and, by the way, all is not fair in the workplace: 

“My experiences with gender bias are probably the norm,” says Ms. Bresch of Mylan. “What I found was that expectations of women were simply lower, and this resulted in being overlooked for certain opportunities. Now as a leader, I strive to create an environment different than the one I faced, an environment where good ideas can come from anyone—young, old, men, women, assistant, executive—and opportunities are open to everyone.”

Another strike against Welch had been his comment back in 2009 that “there’s no such thing as work-life balance,” and that women who take time off for families might have “a nice life” but weren’t likely to reach the top. In an apparent rebuttal to that, Corn Products CEO Ilene Gordan argued that it is possible to have a family and a successful career, and, in fact, doing one may actually serve the other: ”The skills that make a good business leader—organization, drive, trust, delegation and compassion—also go a long way to balance the responsibilities of work and family life.”

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Isn’t it nice to hear it from a woman?

By Linda Stern

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Securities and Exchange Commission is taking its own sweet time coming up with a rule that would make all investment advisers put their clients’ interest first.

Almost a year and a half after saying it was going to pursue this so-called “fiduciary standard,” the agency seems stuck. That’s because it is trying to contort the standard in such a way that brokers who are paid commissions to sell products could fit under that definition.

For many individual investors seeking guidance, that defies logic. How can an adviser put my needs first, if he is paid to sell only one shelf-full of products? And paid more to sell some than others?

It’s no wonder that the financial services industry remains among the least trusted the United States, according to an annual survey by public relations firm Edelman. Fewer than half of consumers said they trusted financial services firms, and more than half of them said they think financial companies need more government regulation.

In the meantime, the financial advice industry is moving on without the SEC. Traditional brokers are leaving the field and instead becoming independent registered investment advisers who must adhere to a traditional fiduciary standard.

“The wirehouses (big brokerage companies)are losing their grip on high net worth investors,” Tom Nally, a senior executive at TD Ameritrade, recently told a meeting of independent advisers. TD Ameritrade is a brokerage company that holds assets and does trades for clients of many independent advisers.

Nally told members of the National Association of Personal Financial Advisers, or NAPFA, meeting in Chicago that his firm has seen an 11 percent increase in the number of ‘breakaway brokers’ since last year.

But the move by more advisers to a fee-driven model is just one small step forward and hasn’t really answered many questions for individual investors. One reason is that a fiduciary is good to have, but it is just one piece of the vetting process.

Another reason is that advisers themselves have clouded the waters, with more than a dozen different designations and several different business models.

“The real challenge is that consumers still don’t know the difference between a real fiduciary and a salesman because of the convoluted and deceptive use of titles by many financial services firms,” Brightscope’s Mike Alfred wrote recently in Forbes. His company publishes data on advisers for consumers to use to compare them.

So, yes, start with a fiduciary adviser, but then take it from there. Here’s how to find an investment adviser now.

– Refuse to play semantics. Many advisers now call themselves “fee-based.” That’s not the same as fee-only. It may just mean that they charge you fees AND sell products to you that then kick back extra to them. Ask, “Are you making money from anyone but me on my account?” Ask them if they are “fee-only.”

Some companies are what’s called dually-registered: They have investment advisers registered with the SEC but also do trading that has them registered as a broker with FINRA, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.

Sometimes these dual registrants are just in transition from brokers to advisers. But it’s better to keep those functions separate. “Don’t go to a dually-registered adviser,” says John Ritter, a Cincinnati, fee-only adviser and chairman of NAPFA’s public policy committee. Use an adviser that is fee-only and a fiduciary.

– Go for a brand-name custodian. It’s fine to have a one-person company giving you investment advice or even making trades for you. But don’t let them hold your money directly. That’s the mistake that clients of Bernie Madoff (who was nominally a fiduciary) made. Make sure that your account is housed at a brand name SIPC-backed brokerage firm, like an Ameritrade or a Charles Schwab or the like.

– Don’t overpay. Even when they take fees instead of commissions, the big brokerage houses charge more than the independents, says Cerulli Associates, a research firm. On average, the big brokers charge about 1.1 percent of assets to manage an account; the independents charge 0.9 percent, says Tyler Cloherty, a Cerulli analyst.

Even those amounts may be high if you’re just getting generic mutual fund-picking advice, and if you’re willing to do your own trades. If you have a $1 million portfolio and are paying an adviser 1 percent, that’s $10,000 a year for investing advice. “What exactly are you getting for that?” asks Sheryl Garrett, a Shawnee Mission, Kansas, adviser who only bills hourly or by the project. She says she typically gives a year’s worth of investment planning for clients for roughly $2,000 or $3,000 a year.

– Benchmark those returns. You might have an honest and caring and affordable financial adviser, but if she’s managing your money, is she doing any better than you could do on your own with a couple of generic mutual funds? That’s hard to tell, because there’s no standard way in which advisers publish their results.

Next week, Brightscope and Spaulding Group, a performance measurement company, will announce plans to create a uniform performance standard for advisers. Their idea is that they will create a way for advisers to measure and report the performance of the investments they manage in a way that will allow clients and potential customers to compare them. That could take a while, of course.

In the meantime? If you are investing for retirement, find a proxy by which you can measure your adviser. Look at a low-cost target date retirement fund for your age group, or use a web site that allows you to monitor “play” portfolios to create a no-brainer portfolio of low-cost stock and bond funds.

For example, you could check your adviser’s performance against that of the Vanguard Target Retirement Fund at h ttps://personal.vanguard.com/us/funds/vanguard/TargetRetirementList.

Or you can create and follow a fake portfolio at Yahoo Finance (h ttp://www.yahoo.com) or Morningstar (ht tp://www.morningstar.com.

Over time, of course, your money manager should provide higher returns, net of fees, than the DIY approach.

(The Stern Advice column appears weekly, and at additional times as warranted. Linda Stern can be reached at linda.stern@thomsonreuters.com; She tweets at http://www.twitter.com/lindastern .; Read more of her work at http://blogs.reuters.com/linda-stern; Editing by Dan Grebler)

On Monday, President Obama addressed the graduating class at Barnard College, the all-female “sister school” to his alma mater, Columbia. Overly generic or even blatantly sexist career advice to women—in particular, men giving women outmoded or seemingly fear-mongering “tips” that ignore the current context and gender biases inherent in the employment environment—has come under special fire of late, perhaps prompted by discussions of a “war on women.” Take the recent example of Jack Welch, who offended an array of women executives at a recent gathering with his male-centric advice so much that some of those women actually walked out.

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There’s something to be said, indeed, for choosing a male role model to talk to graduating female seniors aspiring to careers in which they’ll surely compete with both men and other women, and some might even say that a man’s not really the right person for that job. Some did exactly that when The New York Times‘ Jill Abramson was bumped to give the commencement spot to Obama. But he is the leader of the free world, and it seems, as evidenced by the cheering and photos, that by and large the Barnard community was pretty happy to have him there offering up his advice for their successful futures. Maybe it’s also because of the kind of advice he gave. 

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Obama made three key points, all in a light-hearted vein typical for a college graduation speech, but with an emphasis on the ladies, as relevant to his audience. ABC’s Devin Dwyer sums up three key pieces of Obama’s advice:

• “Don’t just get involved. Fight for your seat at the table.  Better yet, fight for a seat at the head of the table.”
  • “Never underestimate the power of your example.”
  • ”Persevere. Nothing worthwhile is easy.”

Expounding on these three points, Obama reminded the graduates that they should be role models and bold activists, that they can be stylish and powerful, and that others before them have done it, too—like Michelle Obama, and his own mom, a single parent, women who kept striving for their goals and dreams despite setbacks. Obama also drew attention to the realities of the job market, currently harsh for both men and women graduating, acknowledging that “in many ways you have it even tougher than we did,” but telling the graduates they they’re tougher, too, than those who came before. The speech is part tough love and facing facts—but with plenty of pro-woman empowerment language. For example, Obama says, “Of course, as young women, you’re also going to grapple with some unique challenges, like whether you’ll be able to earn equal pay for equal work; whether you’ll be able to balance the demands of your job and your family; whether you’ll be able to fully control decisions about your own health.” Obama gets adorable dad points for invoking Sasha and Malia, the thought of whose graduation he says brings him to tears, and cements his female-friendly status by referring to powerful ladies (and former commencement speakers) Hillary Clinton, Sheryl Sandberg, and Meryl Streep. And extra credit for this: “We know we are better off when women are treated fairly and equally in every aspect of American life—whether it’s the salary you earn or the health decisions you make,” he says. The Obama campaign has made it a point to put women at the forefront, and Obama does it well in this speech. 

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In comparison, former GE “master and commander” Jack Welch told women in 2009 that ”there’s no such thing as work-life balance,” and that taking time off for family “can offer a nice life” but probably means you’re killing your chances at getting to the top of your career. More recently, he told women to “over deliver,” and that “performance is it!” These soundbites are not all that different from what Obama said: Persevere, fight for your seat at the table, and the like…but they do seem to indicate a boys-club mentality that Obama is free from. (If Obama had said, “fight harder than the boys for your seat at the table,” that would be different). Further, Welch knocks diversity and mentorship programs as nice, maybe, but “not how women get ahead”; with his talk of examples and activism, it would seem that Obama would firmly support such programs.

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As one executive commented on Welch’s advice, “He showed no recognition that the culture shapes the performance metrics, and the culture is that of white men.” With Obama, there does seem to be a recognition of the realities of the society that we’re in as well as an acknowledgement that those realities are evolving. Maybe that’s the simplest way to compare the advice of these two. Obama’s is advice for a changing world; Welch’s exists firmly in the sphere that he succeeded in—which is a sphere that most of today’s working women hope to change, not to adapt to. 

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Worse than Welch’s old-fashioned advice, however, may be the truly generic advice given to women to “get ahead” in the male workplace, like learning to take up golf and wearing the right powersuit, as described in a recent piece in The Wall Street Journal. It’s fair to say that Obama’s speech went miles, and probably decades, beyond both of those old tropes, regardless of anyone’s politics.