Women Who Succeed

Strangers in Paradise

Susan Durbin

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137328250
• eBook ISBN: 9781137328267
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Etica aziendale
• Index: Business

The number of women in senior management remains stubbornly low. Women Who Succeed examines the real life experiences of forty-six senior women who have 'made it' into senior management. It considers the strategies that these women adopted, the support they received and the relationships they formed in building their careers.

1

Introduction

In 1977, Rosabeth Kanter poignantly remarked that women populate organisations but practically never run them, and these words still resonate today, almost 40 years after they were written. While women have increased their numbers in the paid labour market as a whole and in junior and middle management positions and the professions in developed countries, they continue to be poorly represented at senior, decision-making levels in the UK public and private sectors. Equality between men and women has not been achieved in the United Kingdom, despite the introduction of equal opportunities legislation, higher levels of women than men with degree or higher education qualifications in the workplace (ONS, 2013) and the concerted efforts by networks and forums set up to support women in management. While better-educated women are more likely to be in full-time, paid work, this does not guarantee that they will reach the higher levels of employment, such as senior management (Walby, 1997). The situation in the United Kingdom is largely repeated elsewhere in the developed world, with few notable exceptions.

A book examining the under-representation of women in senior management necessarily has to begin with statistics on the current ‘state of play’ in the international, European and UK contexts. The statistics below focus upon gender but not its intersection with other characteristics, such as ethnic group, predominantly due to the women interviewed for this book being overwhelmingly white British and middle-aged and also because many of the available statistics do not take account of intersections beyond gender. Following the statistics section, the introduction goes on to explain the rationale behind the book, the research methods and a brief outline of each chapter.

Globally, women comprise 24 per cent of senior management roles, although this does vary by country. They are most likely to hold the senior management positions in finance, human resources, corporate affairs, marketing and sales, in that order. In the United Kingdom, 45 per cent of female executive directors are financially qualified and a total of 65 per cent have a financial background. Seventeen countries have women as head of government and the world average for women in parliament is 20 per cent (Grant Thornton, 2013). Women are best represented amongst senior and middle-level managers in the Dominican Republic (56 per cent), Panama (49 per cent), Equador (43 per cent) and the Philippines (41 per cent) and least likely to be represented in Turkey (14.3 per cent), Palestine (15.4 per cent) and Cyprus (16 per cent). The UK figure is 32 per cent. Women’s representation on boards is highest in Norway (38 per cent), Finland (30 per cent), France (30 per cent) and Sweden (29 per cent) and lowest in Japan (3 per cent), Portugal (8 per cent), India (10 per cent) and Hong Kong (10 per cent). The larger the company, the less likely it is to be headed by a woman and just 5 per cent or less of Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) of the world’s largest corporations are women (ILO, 2015).

Within the European Union (EU) itself, women account for 45 per cent of those employed and 56 per cent in tertiary education, but their level of representation declines dramatically once in senior positions. In January 2012, women occupied 13.7 per cent of board seats of publicly listed companies in the EU member states, which has risen steadily from 8.5 per cent in 2003. They also comprised 3.4 per cent of chairpersons or presidents in the 600 largest companies listed in the EU; 25 per cent of the seats on boards of large listed companies in Finland, Latvia and Sweden; and just 10 per cent in Ireland, Greece, Estonia, Italy, Portugal, Luxembourg and Hungary (European Commission, 2012).

In the United Kingdom, women comprise just under half of the paid workforce aged 16–64, with 67 per cent of women in paid employment, almost half of these in part-time work. While the most common occupational category for men and women is ‘professional’, gender segregation persists with women most likely to be found in nursing and men in programming and software development. Men are also more likely to be in professional occupations most associated with higher levels of pay. In the labour market overall, women predominate in caring, leisure/other services, administration/secretarial and sales and customer services and men amongst management/senior officials, process, plant and machine operatives and skilled trades (ONS, 2013). The number of women occupying management positions is greater than it has ever been, their numbers more than trebling between 1994 and 2005, although occupational segregation persists in management (Wilson, 2011). Women comprise 33 per cent of managers, directors and senior officials; 47 per cent of professional, associate and technical jobs; and 54 per cent of all other occupations in the United Kingdom (Women’s Business Council, 2013). Overall, the United Kingdom ranks 41st in the world in its employment of women managers, at a figure of 34 per cent (ILO, 2015).

The lack of women on the boards of Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE) companies has been brought into sharp focus by the Davies Reports (2011; 2012; 2013; 2014; 2015). Women now comprise 23.5 per cent of FTSE 100 board members, which is very close to the target of 25 per cent set in the original Davies Report in 2011 and represents a doubling of women’s representation on FTSE 100 boards from 12.5 per cent in 2011. However, the majority of these positions are non-executive (women make up 25.5 per cent of non-executive and 6.9 per cent of executive directorships in the FTSE 100), and women accounted for just 28 per cent of all board appointments in 2013/2014. Women in FTSE 250 companies make up 15.6 per cent of board directorships, up from 13.2 per cent in 2013. Again, the majority are in non-executive positions (19.6 per cent of non-executive and 5.3 per cent of executive directorships), and at 33 per cent, a slightly higher number of women accounted for board appointments to the FTSE 250 in 2013/2014. The targets set by Lord Davies do not differentiate between executive and non-executive appointments, perhaps because bodies such as Women on Boards and the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) recognise that increasing the numbers of female executive directors is a tougher challenge when compared to increasing the numbers of non-executive directors. The CIPD (2015) has called for a separate target to help increase the proportion of women in executive director positions. This would reveal the true rate of progress in the FTSE 100 and may perhaps give added impetus to the pressure on the government to reconsider its policy of ‘no quotas’ to increase the numbers of women in senior management in the United Kingdom.

The overall picture is slightly better for women managers in the public sector but falls short of gender equality. In this sector, women comprise 65 per cent of all employees, but again are poorly represented at the most senior levels (they comprise just 24 per cent of local authority chief executives) (Centre for Women and Democracy, 2014). Women also comprise just 37 per cent of ‘functional managers’, mainly within human resource management and public relations. Occupational segregation is endemic within the public sector – women comprising the majority of managers and directors in health and social medicine (66 per cent) and the minority amongst purchasing managers and directors (26.5 per cent) (Baker and Cracknell, 2014). In public life, following the recent general election (May, 2015), women now comprise almost one in three MPs in the House of Commons (29 per cent of the new intake), which is a rise from 22 per cent at the last general election (2010). The 2014 report by the Centre for Women and Democracy confirmed that women comprised 23 per cent of members of parliament and cabinet ministers, 24 per cent of the House of Lords and 13 per cent of local authority leaders. Of the 114 Privy Counsellors appointed since 2010, just 17 are women. Women also hold just 14 per cent of seats on influential cabinet committees; fewer than one-third are members of departmental boards in Whitehall; just 13 of the 85 policy tsars appointed since 2010 are women; and six cabinet committees have no women on them (Sunday Times, 2014). At the current rate of progress, a child born today in the United Kingdom will be drawing her pension before she has any chance of being equally represented in parliament (Centre for Women and Democracy, 2014).

Turning to earnings and the gender pay gap, which is strongly correlated with occupational gender segregation, the United Kingdom has the eighth highest women’s employment rate but the sixth highest gender pay gap in the EU. The gender pay gap stands at 32 per cent for those employed as chief executives and senior officials in the United Kingdom (Government Equalities Office, 2013). Men dominate in the top 10 per cent of earners, but the pay gap decreases for those under the age of 30, indicating that the pay gap grows the older women become. Men are more likely to be employed in jobs classified as higher skilled than women and those professions associated with higher levels of pay (ONS, 2013). The gender pay gap is exacerbated at the higher levels where women in top management positions earn around 30 per cent less than their male colleagues. As well as base salaries being lower for women, they also receive lower levels of variable pay, such as bonuses and stock options. Interestingly, the gender pay gap is high when companies are doing well and has a tendency to be reversed when companies are doing less well (Ryan et al., 2008).

Why a book about senior women?

Why does senior management continue to be male dominated, and why should this concern us? Senior managers as decision-makers tend to have access to power in organisations, especially resource power (Kanter, 1977), make key business decisions and also important decisions about the running and funding of public services. Women’s relative absence from this decision-making process means that business management is ‘male-centric’ and that the voices of women are not heard at these levels. Many have argued, for example Davidson and Burke (2011), that having more women making decisions should help to change the character of those decisions and that those decisions would be more likely to take women’s needs into account. It could also be argued that the current economic crisis is the result of poor business decisions made predominantly by men running large companies and the resultant austerity measures, introduced by governments around the globe, are disproportionately affecting women. Would having more women in decision-making positions have led to a different outcome, through better governance and less risk taking? It is impossible to definitively answer this question retrospectively but perhaps the outcome may have been different had more women been present on the boards of those companies. The argument that boards with female representation are ‘better for business’ is explored in Chapter 2.

The need for more women in decision-making positions is often couched within the ‘business case’ argument that this should lead to increased profits and improved corporate governance. Gender balance is increasingly seen as being ‘good for business’, and at management and board levels, it makes financial sense (ILO, 2015). Other business case arguments include the view that selecting leaders from a wider pool of men and women means that organisations get to tap into a wider pool of talent, especially as women now comprise just over half of all university graduates in the United Kingdom. Increased numbers of women at the top of organisations in itself would send a message to other women that it is possible for them to progress into these positions and highlights that female role models and mentors are available. According to a recent (2015) CIPD survey of HR professionals, the benefits of the improved representation of women at board level include women bringing a different perspective to the boardroom; a closer reflection of wider society and the company’s client base; improved business performance; women at the top serving as positive role models; increased innovation and creativity; and promotion of the organisation’s reputation externally as a diverse employer. Women’s under-representation at these levels has been described as ‘an issue of justice, company economic performance and democracy’ (Armstrong and Walby, 2012, p. 4). Perhaps in the future, organisations will pay increasing attention to the ‘business case’ proposition, especially as the ‘social justice’ argument, that having equal representation amongst men and women at decision-making levels is just and fair, appears to have fallen upon deaf ears. While some countries have set mandatory targets to increase the numbers of women in decision-making positions (Austria, Norway, France), the United Kingdom has taken a voluntary approach, encouraging rather than compelling companies to make their boards (and senior management tiers) more gender diverse. The question of quotas has become a hotly debated and controversial topic and will be addressed in the next chapter.

A considerable amount of research has been published on the lack of gender diversity on corporate boards and in management generally (Davidson and Burke, 2011; Kelan, 2012; Ryan et al., 2007; Wichert, 2011; Vinnicombe et al., 2008), which has greatly enhanced our understanding of the experiences and perceptions of men and women at management levels. We are also witnessing a proliferation of interest in senior women in the media, through both social media (e.g. YouTube and TED Talks) and the publication of government and EU reports. The debate on targets and quotas to increase the numbers of women in senior positions has also gained traction with a number of countries already introducing either voluntary targets or mandatory quotas, although the United Kingdom persists with voluntary targets. There are also a plethora of bodies and networks that have been set up specifically to support senior women and to encourage more women into senior management. The Female FTSE, compiled at the Cranfield University International Centre for Women Leaders, continues to make an invaluable contribution to the development of our understanding of where we are currently with these issues.

Through the existing body of research on women in management, a number of metaphors have been proposed to make sense of women’s under-representation in management and senior management, such as the ‘glass ceiling’ metaphor popularised by Hymowitz and Schellhardt in the Wall Street Journal in 1986, which describes the invisible barrier that prevents women reaching top management positions and the range of formal and informal organisational practices and processes that perpetuate it. Other popular metaphors include ‘glass walls’ that reproduce occupational segregation and create career pathway barriers that are different for men and women (ILO, 2015) and the ‘glass cliff’, where women are placed in precarious leadership positions in which they may be ‘set up to fail’ (Ryan et al., 2008). The ‘labyrinth’ has also gained currency, a metaphor proposed by Eagly and Carli (2007). They suggested that rather than women facing a barrier at a specific high level in organisations, they encounter obstacles at multiple points along their career paths, such as slower and less promotions than men, resistance to women’s leadership styles which tend to be more collaborative and less agentic and perhaps of most significance, the demands of family life faced by women. These metaphors help us to visualise the array of challenges faced by women, the ‘glass ceiling’ and ‘glass cliff’ being an integral part of this. Metaphors are a useful analytic tool to aid understanding of women’s exclusion from and journey into senior management and offer a framework to contextualise such journeys. But what of the few women who break the metaphors?

This book focuses upon a group of women who have (and continue) to travel through ‘the labyrinth’ and have broken through the glass ceiling into senior positions or the boards of their companies in UK public and private sector organisations, making them highly visible in an otherwise male-dominated world. It offers insights into these women’s lives and enhances our awareness of their day-to-day realities. Are these exceptional women because they happen to inhabit the powerful, predominantly male world of senior management? The majority of the women interviewed for this book would not describe themselves in this way; many express their surprise (and pleasure) at having achieved such senior positions. The book brings to the fore these women’s experiences, achievements, plans and aspirations for the future. It offers a unique comparison between women working in the public and private sectors, and as the reader will discover, the journey to senior management has often been different, depending upon the sector in which the interviewee is employed. After establishing the routes these women have taken into senior management, the challenges they have faced and the strategies they have deployed along the way, the focus will be upon the support they have received and the relationships/friendships they formed (e.g. through mentors, role models and networks) which have been critical to success for many.

It is important to examine these key sources of support because becoming a senior manager does not happen based simply on merit alone; rather, it happens because individuals are identified and selected by others, often within the inner circles of senior management. Becoming a senior manager does not involve individuals working in isolation (Wichert, 2011), although feelings of isolation are often experienced by senior women (Kanter, 1977). Leadership is ‘relational’ (Stead and Elliott, 2009) and involves a ‘leadership web’ which comprises relationships to others that lead to enhanced spheres of influence. Women are a heterogeneous group and their experiences of being mentored, connecting with role models and getting involved in networks/actively networking may well be different depending upon the sector in which they work. This has obvious implications for the design, setting up and operation of networks and mentoring schemes developed to support women. One size does not fit all, and this book may go some way in helping and guiding organisations currently involved in designing and setting up formal mentoring schemes and networks for women.

As a feminist academic committed to gender equality for women in all aspects of social, political and economic life, I have spent the past 18 years researching the under-representation of women in management, senior management and the professions. This was initially in contact centres and later in management/senior management in a broad range of public and private sector organisations, as well as professional organisations and, more recently, with specific reference to engineering and science. Time and time again, women have told me inspiring stories about how they have progressed, the challenges and barriers they have faced and from whom they gained their support and strength to succeed. This book shares some of those insights from a sample of 46 senior female managers: 23 employed in public and 23 in private sector organisations in the United Kingdom. I am grateful to those women, and all the other women I have interviewed, for their time and willingness to take part in these interviews and for sharing their valuable experiences and insights. This book is written for those women and also for a number of other audiences – academics who are interested in the issues around gender inequalities at management levels and the ways women can and do break through the ‘glass ceiling’; women managers who want to understand what it takes to get to senior levels and to share other women’s experiences of doing so; organisations who would like to (and should) do more to support women into senior positions and further support those women already there; the government, for example, through the previous coalition government’s commissioning of the Davies Report (2011); and male managers, who work alongside women but enjoy a different (and often more privileged) experience than their female colleagues. These male managers need to raise their awareness and understanding in terms of the challenges faced by their female colleagues and consider what they can do to prevent women continuing to be the outsiders.

As this book goes to press, the latest Davies Report (March, 2015) reveals that the number of women on FTSE 100 boards has almost doubled from 12.5 per cent in 2011 to 23.5 per cent in 2015 and that there are now four female FTSE 100 chief executives. The media has recently reported the appointment of Inga Beale, who has become the first CEO of Lloyds of London insurance in its 300-year history. Jill McDonald, the ex-boss of McDonald’s UK, has been hired as the next chief executive of Halfords, a London-listed company, increasing the number of female chief executives at FTSE 250 companies to ten (The Guardian, 24 March 2015). But the fact that we continue to contextualise these appointments through the media as potentially unusual and rare may in itself reinforce the status quo of male domination in senior management. Only when we reach the situation when we do not feel the need to comment on the appointment of a woman because she is a woman will we have reached the point where women are routinely both accepted and established within business and public services as senior decision-makers. This feels a long way off and is unlikely to happen in my own lifetime. There is progress, but it is extremely slow. Perhaps it is time for the introduction of mandatory quotas in the United Kingdom. It is time to move the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Strangers in Paradise? Women, Work and Management
• 3. Through the Glass Ceiling and Beyond: Getting In/Getting On
• 4. Who Supports Senior Women? The Role of Mentors
• 5. Who Inspires Senior Women? Role Models
• 6. Who Connects with Senior Women? Networking
• 7. Conclusions and Future Directions
• References
• Index