Lemondrop

Top companies in Britain want to use the worldwide financial crisis to get more women in key leadership positions, but their U.S. counterparts don't seem to have caught on.

Male leaders of some of Britain's 100 top businesses say there hasn't been a big enough increase of women in power seats in recent years, even though the number of top companies held by women has doubled since 2000.

They hope to up the numbers through the FTSE 100 Cross-Company Mentoring Program, which involves 32 companies working to get senior businesswomen to the top. It's now being duplicated in France, Belgium, Canada and Iceland.

Unfortunately, male business bigwigs in the States have remained pretty silent on the issue of advancing female leadership. Thankfully, there are groups like the White House Project (WHP), which is run by female global-business leaders who want to encourage the trend.

The WHP will soon release a study on women in power that contends that only 20 percent of U.S. leaders were born with two X chromosomes (like Pepsi CEO Indra Nooyi, pictured). We're also ranked 69th in the world in terms of female political representation -- lower even than Iraq. Ouch. The group agrees now is the time to help women rise up through the ranks.

Says Marie Wilson of the WHP, "Focusing on bringing women into leadership in this critical time is not a distraction from solving our problems, it is solving our problems."

Tell us: How do you feel about your career future in these tough economic times?