Skirting the Issue: Why Women Aren't Making it to the Board

(MoneyWatch) 

It's nearly the second decade of the 21st
century. Isn't it surprising, then, to see so few women sitting
around the boardroom table, particularly in executive positions?

You’d be forgiven for assuming
matters are improving, but a handful of recent reports would prove otherwise.
Research from
href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2009/aug/23/women-directors-gender-gap-survey">Co-operative Asset Management and The Observer newspaper found just 242 of 2,742 seats on FTSE-350 boards occupied by women. Out of 970
executive board positions, women hold 34.

In the FTSE-100, there are fewer women at
executive director level and, thanks to the recession, the overall number of
women on FTSE-100 boards is the same as 2008, according to this year’s Female FTSE report by Cranfield School of Management.

Even in industries that are traditionally
more popular among women employees — the law, media and education —
the higher up the corporate ladder you climb, the more men outnumber women,
according to the government’s Equalities Office Women in
Senior Positions,2009.

Only 19 percent of partners in top 100 UK
law firms are women, and although 73 percent of jobs in education are filled
by women, they hold only 56.2 percent of manager or senior official positions,
according to the Equalities Office report Women in Senior Positions.

Then there is the imbalance in pay, which
the Office for National Statistics puts at an average of 12 per cent. For
company directors, the gap is even wider. The latest
href="http://press.iod.com/newsdetails.aspx?ref=308&m=2&mi=62&ms">Institute of Directors and
Croner Reward survey, published in November, found women executive and non-executive directors earn 22 per cent less, on
average, than men in the same positions, and raising questions around how merit
is rewarded in UK workplaces.

Diversity matters up top

Consultancy McKinsey is just one
organisation to have linked higher performing businesses with diversity at
board level. Its study Women Matter 2, published in 2008 found that companies with a better balance of men and women at the top more
competitive than rivals with male-dominated boards.

McKinsey also identified nine behavioural
traits that mark out a good leader and found women scored higher than male
peers in five:

• People development
• Defining expectations/rewarding
  achievements
• Being a role model
• Being inspiring
• Building a team atmosphere.

Given the weight of evidence, the question
remains, what has gone so wrong that women are still effectively excluded from
leadership roles. Where — and why — do these barriers appear?

Starting order

Gender is immaterial at graduate
recruitment level, argues recruitment specialist Anthony Hesketh of the
Lancaster University Management School. But, in the book he co-authored, “Mismanaging
Talent”, he acknowledges that the brightest and best are not only
judged on their abilities and past achievements but by a more subjective
measure of their likely fit, based on the recruiters’ own
preconceptions of worth.

This works more against diversity generally
than women specifically, but if senior roles are already dominated by men, it
follows that recruiters’ model their ideal candidate on men. This
persists higher up the business: leadership role selectors also tend to react
more positively to candidates who reflect their values and ways of communicating.
In short, a selection board of men may be more likely to react positively to a
male candidate than a woman.

Management consultancy Hay Group director
Jon Dymond suggests that women ‘plateau’, having been
selected with skills that are needed lower down in the hierarchy —
skills that make them brilliant executors, but not necessarily great strategists.
This doesn’t, though, explain why they don’t go on to
acquire strategic experience.

Bad timing

It is later in executives’
careers that women are deselected from the pool of potential leaders. Some argue
the tipping point is generally in the early to mid-thirties, when promising
individuals are selected by company as future leaders. This is also when many
women are considering whether or not to start a family. Inadvertently, the
timing of the leadership selection procedure puts women at a disadvantage.

“The ideal worker is based on
the notion of the uninterrupted career — a full-time job pattern. It’s
all based on supporting a certain type of person, which often does not exist,”
says Dr Elisabeth Kelan, a lecturer in the Department of Management at King’s
College London.

Is this the problem then? Surely if this
were the only time when women were finding themselves sidelined from fast-track
careers, it would be more obvious and easier to repair.

Getting the right chances

The more likely scenario is less straightforward,
as talent management specialist DDI found in its research,
href="http://www.ddiworld.com/pdf/GenderReport09_tr_ddi.pdf">“Holding
Women Back”. During its research into the global employment situation, it found that that
men and women were on an equal footing at early-stage employment and followed
parallel paths into early management. But by executive level, the number of
women filling senior posts had halved to one in five. Organisational support,
weak for both sexes as they change jobs, decreases more for women as they move
up the career ladder, and DDI found a male bias embedded in HR policies that
promote talent and identify future leaders.

The achievements most valued in potential
leaders are those that grow the business. Roles that keep the engine running
are only noticed when something goes wrong. The real heroes in most companies
are the deal-makers, the people who bring new business to the table, rather
than those whose roles promote organic growth, says Stuart Cross, founder of
Morgan Cross management consultancy. Recruiters for board-level roles look for
a wide range of experience — those who’ve worked with
partners, developed a network and have done at least one overseas posting will
be particularly valued. Yet it’s assumed women are unwilling or
unsuitable for projects that take them away from families for an extended
period.

Deal-makers — those people close
big customer wins, buy-outs or joint ventures, have to be ultra-committed. Cross
says: “There are a lot more men doing deal-making than women. You
need a lot of energy to pull a deal off. It consumes a huge amount of time and
effort and there are lots of stories of midnight meetings.” Could
this be incompatible with the way women like to do business? Certainly, women
who want to honour family or relationship commitments would find it unappealing
to sell their soul to the company so completely.

What has gone before

Maybe the problem is that we assess
leadership styles based on our experiences of the way good business has been
done in the past, regardless of how well these models will perform in the future,
observes Alison Maitland, co-author with Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, of “Why
Women Mean Business”.

There is also a lack of transparency —
for both sexes — when it comes to senior-level appointments in too
many businesses. This makes it difficult for failed candidates to identify with
any certainty where they are falling down. “There is a question on
whether companies are genuinely interested in diversity. Interviews are run by
homogenous group. It’s simply human nature — we like people
who are like ourselves,” says Elizabeth Marx, partner at senior
selection specialists Heidrick & Struggles.

Your own worst enemy

It’s clear then, the accusation
of the boys sticking to their own has weight, if on a less conscious level than
anyone would like to admit. But women also disadvantage themselves through
their own outlook — albeit after years of disappointment and
socialisation.

Women tend to deselect themselves as
candidates if they feel they don’t fit a job description perfectly. Men,
on the other hand, are more likely to feel they have a chance even if they only
have a few of the job requirements.

The way women use language can make them
seem timid or incapable of leadership, adds Maitland. Women are more likely to
be self-deprecating because they are conscious of making the rest of the group
feel at ease. Men may be happy to spar with each other without feeling
intimidated in a group. Certain terms have different meaning for women and men
— ‘office politics’ may be used by men comfortably and
without any negative connotation, whereas women prefer to refer to the same
activities as gaining ‘profile’ or ‘visibility’.

Since boardroom cultures have been
developed for a male dominated environment, they may disadvantage alternative
business leadership styles, which may appear timid or indecisive in comparison.

One of the ways in which this manifest
itself is negotiating with superiors over pay and conditions, says Judith
Clegg, founder of entrepreneur events company The Glasshouse. Women are often
uncomfortable negotiating for pay, for fear appearing grasping and self-centred.
Men are viewed as ambitious and assertive if they press for more money.

More choices, and taking them

So there is not just one, but a series of
setbacks for women that Maitland calls ‘gender asbestos’ —
gradually wearing women down so that in the end many may look for alternative
ways to productively exert their energies.

A recent YouGov report commissioned by the
Centre for Policy Studies,
href="http://www.cps.org.uk/cps_catalog/what%20women%20want.pdf">“What Women Want”,
found only 12 per cent of mothers in the UK want to work full-time.

For many men, the corporate arena is the
only place they feel they can earn the respect of their peers (how many men are
admired for being excellent fathers for instance?). Women, arguably, have more
choices — and a number are opting to take them, in the form of flexible
working or entrepreneurship.

What needs to be done

Nevertheless, real change needs to come from
within business. The argument that time will even out board-level imbalances no
longer holds water. Some believe that the natural course of things needs a
regulatory push, citing the example of Norway, where 40 per cent of board
positions must be filled by women.

Other practices need to be put into place,
too. The time-frame when young managers are selected for the fast track to
leadership roles needs to be widened to take family plans into account. The “Holding
Women Back” report recommends that the selection process for entry
into this fast track, which is often operated behind closed doors and without
even the knowledge of those selected, be made transparent for the sake of both
men and women.

Maitland advises companies to consider the
language used internally and advocates the case for training in a
gender-centric ‘bilingualism’, so that men know how to
communicate better to women and vice-versa. Marx, meanwhile, calls on women to
learn negotiating skills and to have self-confidence when pushing for higher
roles.

Maitland says: “I thought things
would have changed dramatically years ago. But, I’m optimistic. The
weight of evidence is becoming huge. Companies which address the gender
imbalance are going to have a massive competitive advantage. There are real
cultural barriers that need to be tackled head-on. Otherwise the systems and
processes in place will perpetuate themselves.”

Going it alone

If women do find it impossibly difficult to
reach levels of leadership within corporate structures, one way they can rectify
this is to start up their own company. Judith Clegg, founder of entrepreneurial
events company The Glasshouse, believes entrepreneurship can give women the
flexibility to balance a leadership role with family commitments. The
challenges are no less demanding, but how you tackle them is up to you.

Clegg maintains investors are likely to
acknowledge the extra barriers women entrepreneurs have been faced with and see
the extra experience they have as a result as a useful tool in building and
running a start-up company.

She says:”You have a lead if you
have had a baby. It’s easier as a woman to stand out to investors and
get noticed. You could argue that you’ve already had to make
sacrifices, had to overcome some barriers and demonstrated the extra emotional
strength and commitment.”