At the time of writing, in early 2015, it seemed quite likely that the Davies target, a quarter of FTSE 100 board seats to be held by women by the end of the year, would be met. This will be a considerable achievement and a powerful endorsement of the UK’s voluntary approach to increasing gender diversity at the top of our institutions. But, as with many goals, meeting the Davies target will beg questions about where we go from there.

We believe that when answering these questions we must look beyond gender and numbers.

Our preoccupation with gender leads us to focus exclusively on the problems women experience climbing organisational hierarchies. We forget that men also experience problems climbing hierarchies when ‘cronyism’ or political skill are perceived to be more important than ability in deciding who is promoted. And the dilemmas, pressures and difficult choices arising from the conflicting demands of work and home life are faced by both men and women.

Some mentors we know through the FTSE 100® Cross-Company Mentoring Programme (FTSE Programme) for female executives, who also mentor men, have told us that, if anything, their male mentees talk more than their female mentees about how hard it is to achieve a work–life balance, the tough choices they have had to make and the high price they have had to pay for advancement. Research published in 2014 by OnePoll.com found that 53% of UK fathers missed out on personal milestones, such as their children’s first steps, first words and school prize givings; two-thirds had missed at least one parents’ evening; 20% had not attended their child’s most recent sports day, a third had missed most or all their children’s Christmas plays and no less than 60% acknowledged that long working hours mean they only spent time with their children at weekends.¹

That senior women who reach positions where top-level mentoring is made available talk less about work–life balance than their male peers may be partly to do with a belief that such concern is seen as a weakness in a woman, but a strength in a man. When giving the Mary Louise Smith lecture at the Catt Center for Women in Politics in 2007 Senator Hillary Clinton recalled a newspaper agony column she had read in the early 1980s. A reader had asked ‘I’m about to get a big promotion, and I’m going to have my own office … What kind of decorations are appropriate for my office?’ The columnist wanted to know if the writer was a man or a woman. If a man he was advised to display pictures of his family, because that gives the impression of ‘a stable person with a good set of family values’. But if the reader was a woman she shouldn’t put up pictures of her family, because that gives the impression she cannot keep her mind on the job.

We suspect, also, that women tend to confront these work–life balance issues earlier in their careers, and many have come to terms with the compromises and sacrifices they’ve had to make before they qualify for top-level mentoring.

When we discuss aims and objectives, we often talk about the numbers and percentages of women on company boards. But in our preoccupation with the numerical, we risk losing sight of the fundamental: we tend to forget that the numbers of women on boards are merely imperfect proxies for the influence of women on company management and governance.

The numbers or percentages of women on company boards are not ends in themselves, which they tend to become whenever targets are set or quotas are imposed. They are, rather, the means to the end of improving the performance and governance of our companies, and the well-being of those they employ.

The energy and commitment that a growing number of individuals and organisations are investing in a collective effort to increase the influence of women in our institutions should be seen as part of a ‘big project’: finding assignments of power, roles and value-added in our society and institutions better adapted to the modern world than current assignments, and finding a balance between work and private life better adapted to the needs of the human spirit.

We will argue later in this book that, although the pressure on organisations to improve the work–life balance for their top executives has been highlighted by efforts to improve gender balance on boards, it is as much a generational as a gender issue. The younger people, men and women, who will in due course replace the incumbent elites are looking for a new contract between individuals and organisations (see Chapter 8).

Evidence that a ‘big project’ of this kind is exercising the minds of our leading thinkers was an article in the Financial Times by the influential commentator Martin Wolf.² At the beginning of the year that marked the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War on 28 July 1914 Wolf attributed that great calamity, which cost nine million lives, to ‘the failures of Europe’s political, economic and intellectual elites’. He said the same elites were failing us again today. They did not understand ‘the consequences of … financial liberalisation’ (a huge expansion of debt) and failed to recognise ‘the incentives at work and … the risks of a systemic breakdown’.

In what amounts to a disturbing warning issued in the pages of the elite’s favourite newspaper, Wolf said: ‘Complex societies rely on their elites to get things, if not right, at least not grotesquely wrong. When elites fail, the political order is likely to collapse…The elites need to do better. If they do not, rage may overwhelm us all.’

Wolf’s argument seems to be that the calamitous discontinuities of the 1914–18 war and the 2008 banking crisis were both attributable to failures of governance, and that our governance systems need to be improved if further such failures are to be avoided.

Modern societies and economies are too complex to be governable in detail. All that can be done is to nudge the macro-features of our societies and institutions in what seems the right direction.

A conspicuous macro-feature of our societies and economies is that they consist of two genders. We believe that companies and other organisations are better governed by men and women, than by men or women, and that an integral part of the ‘big project’ is to assign power, roles and created value more equally between the genders. This will help to ensure more of our available talent, ability and experience moves to places where it can create the most economic and social value, and provide protection from the risks of another disastrous systemic failure.

It is one thing to imagine a better assignment of power, roles and value, a better allocation of human resources and a better way of living and working – but quite another to get to there, from where we are. By definition, elites have an enormous vested interest in the status quo and an almost instinctive compulsion to protect it from threats and challenges.

The inertia of the status quo has led in recent years to calls for statutory quotas for the proportion of women on boards. Advocates of quotas argue that the inefficiency and inequity represented by the low proportion of women on company boards has long been widely recognised, and that the glacial progress towards gender-balanced boards shows companies cannot be relied on to put their own houses in order. Government must, therefore, step in to oblige them to do so.

We understand the feelings of frustration that lead people to this view, but we do not believe statutory quotas contribute in a meaningful way to the ‘big project’. Quotas are numbers and, as already noted, people tend to get hung up on numbers. We are interested in the numbers, but we see them as proxies for progress towards the ultimate objective, which is to increase the influence of women on the management and governance of our organisations.

Moreover, mandatory quotas, like all statutory interventions, have unintended and sometimes unwelcome consequences. It is not hard to imagine, for example, mandatory quotas leading to the emergence of a group of women who relinquish their executive roles in favour of several non-executive director (NED) roles. The number of board seats occupied by women is not necessarily the same as the number of women who are directors. Since the supply of suitable (‘board-ready’) women is inelastic in the short and medium terms, women who have board experience or are board-ready will be in demand for ‘box-ticking’ purposes after the enactment of quotas and may choose to serve as NEDs on more than one board. There are signs that something of the kind is happening in Norway where listed companies have been legally obliged to have boards comprising at least 40% women and men since 2006.

The proportion of women occupying four or more Norwegian boardroom seats at listed companies is twice that of men who occupy four or more boardroom seats. The multiple directorships held by Norwegian women have led them to be described as the ‘golden skirts’.

It would, in our view, be a wasted opportunity if a consequence of statutory quotas was the emergence of a group of women whose main role was to help companies subject to a quota law comply with the quota. If, as seems probable, these professional compliance agents crowd out from boards other women who could make more substantial contributions to the ‘big project’, quota laws could be worse than a wasted opportunity; they could do real damage.

The Norwegian government’s intervention has had another unintended consequence that suggests listed companies will go to considerable lengths to avoid quotas. A significant minority of Norway’s listed companies have complied with the law, not by appointing more women to their boards but by de-listing (going private) and so escaping the reach of the quota.

Baroness Alison Wolf, Sir Roy Griffiths Professor of Public Sector Management at King’s College London, is not a fan of quotas. In an article in The Guardian in early 2015 she said that Norway’s quota ‘has done nothing whatsoever for the female labour market generally. It has had no impact on female pay and promotion prospects in the companies concerned [and] … no positive impact on company profits either: replacing privileged men with privileged women doesn’t seem to pay any “diversity” benefits. What Norway now has is a new group of “golden skirts”: a small group of women who are very rich indeed.’³

This judgement seems overly harsh and premature, but Baroness Wolf is right to point out that there is more to this issue than quotas or numbers. As we have seen, the scope of the ‘big project’ extends beyond gender balance on boards.

Whether or not one supports quotas for the number or proportion of women on boards, it is important to recognise that quotas, threats of quotas and debates about the pros and cons of quotas represent the views of the ultimate authority in democracies, the people. As Martin Wolf observed, the people are dissatisfied with the performance of elites. They want to see some new faces, new approaches and new assignments of power, influence and roles.

Quotas or the threat of quotas is their message to companies. They are saying to companies through their representatives that they’re impatient for reform within the business elite.

But quotas are not the only way. There is another, and we believe a better, way to comply with the demands of ordinary people. This uses diplomacy and negotiation, rather than force majeure, and has been made possible by a group of senior members of the business elite willing to engage in conversation across the genders and the management generations.

Among such distinguished diplomats are the FTSE 100® Cross-Company Mentoring Programme’s roll of mentors. It’s hard to exaggerate the importance of the willingness of these very distinguished business people to give a helping hand to able women as they climb up the last few rungs of organisational hierarchies. Many agreed to act as FTSE Programme mentors long before Lord Davies’s 2011 review. They have voluntarily and often repeatedly committed themselves to helping women to join the male-dominated elite. They do not talk in these terms, but it’s hard not to be impressed by the foresight and courage of a group consisting almost entirely of men who have devoted so much time to helping transfer power to a different and more diverse elite (see Appendix).

This engagement between the ruling establishment as it is now, and the ruling establishment it needs to become, will take many forms; conferences, debates in the media and parliament, opinion surveys, academic research and, above all, conversation. The FTSE Programme offers a forum for prolonged conversations across boundaries.

Although none of the conversations are specifically about the ‘big project’, they are lines of communication between groups of people on ei...