When Women Make Me Weep - Building Gender Balanced Business

There are times when promoting the cause of women gets sticky. When you just want to bury your gendered head in your hands.

The worst is when women step up and very publicly do some of those things the guys always accuse us of. Like seeing Russia from your front door, or sleeping with Berlusconi. For me, the worst is when women of particular privilege invite their Cinderella sisters to ‘just eat cake’.

So, it is with regret that I read the Financial Times on July 3rd (Women in the Boardroom). In this article, Lucy Kellaway reviewed a book by a couple of other women media stars (Womenomics: Write your own rules for success, by Claire Shipman and Katty Kay). Quite the triptych one would think. One from the FT, one from the BBC and one from ABC. A glorious success story one would like to applaud. Three well known, well paid women writing about other women.

Lost opportunity
Yet it is nothing but opportunity lost. The book being reviewed echoes some of the themes set out in the book, Why Women Mean Business, that I co-authored with Alison Mailtand and uses our and other women’s trademarked term of ‘womenomics’ for their title.

Shipman and Kay’s argument misuses the term by telling the wrong people the wrong things. So, instead of understanding that there is systemic work to do to make organisations adapt to 21st century market and talent realities, the authors jump a few steps and announce that women have unprecedented power to ask for whatever they want. They didn’t know, I suppose, that the book would be published in the worst economic crisis in our lifetimes. The result, however, is embarrassing at best, and simply confirms in most businessmen’s minds that women are deeply unrealistic.

The problem is that the authors are extrapolating from their own privileged lives. They got flexibility and managed to conciliate work and family issues by working part time, so others should be able to do the same.

Gender issue questioned
Lucy Kellaway tears into both the book and the topic with her usual and oft-repeated response. That far from hindering her career, being a woman has offered opportunities that she would never have had otherwise. She has sat on the board of a motor insurance company, the Admiral Group, since 2006 –- a position she says would never have been offered to her if she had been a man. That may be the case, and one can only empathise with the prospective male board directors who saw a journalist appointed to running a corporation in their place. Her conclusion, however, is that this so-called twaddle about gender issues is so passé. She made it, so others should be able to do the same.

When we finally get some women into important positions in the media, one would hope that they might lend a helping hand to a topic recognised by many of their male colleagues as important and world-shifting. Why is it that it takes men like Bob Herbert or Nicolas Kristof at the New York Times or Richard Donkin at the Financial Times to recognize and write about the inequalities that remain between men and women and the opportunities of better balance?

Ask the CEOs
Last year, a significant number of FTSE-100 Chairmen and CEOs (all men) wrote to the Daily Telegraph to stress the business case for having more women on boards. “We are convinced it is essential to accelerate the progress of women into senior positions, given the UK’s need to deploy the best talent available. This need is greater than ever in the current economic climate.” They also said, “Women contribute to properly balanced boards, and from our personal experience we are clear that their participation has a beneficial impact on the character and culture of the board.”

This group included such figures as Roger Carr, chairman, Cadbury and Centrica plc; Dominic Casserley, managing partner UK & Ireland McKinsey & Company; Niall Fitzgerald KBE deputy chairman, Thomson Reuters plc; and Sir Philip Hampton, chairman, J Sainsbury.

On our website, www.20-first.com, we interview countless other global business leaders with the same views, who are acting on this insight with commitment and determination, convinced it will have a major impact on the bottom line.

Have they all been hoodwinked? Are they mad? I don’t think so. Perhaps, Ms. Kellaway would like to engage in a debate with some of them to challenge their strong views that women do matter.

Queen Bee syndrome
The attitude of some women is one of the tricky areas in this whole area. We see it inside companies, too. Some women today are embarrassed by the gender issue. They don’t want to be promoted because they are women (and don’t see that the alternative is often not being promoted because they are women). So they steer clear of the topic.

These are the so-called Queen Bees. Happy to buzz to individual success, often pleasingly surrounded by a majority of men. Yet what we really need are Queens. The kind that combine privilege with responsibility and empathy.

As Bob Herbert wrote in The New York Times of July 4th: “The deregulation that we were told would be great for the economy was being applied to the culture as a whole. Women could be treated as sex objects again as misogyny, hardly limited to hip-hop, went mainstream.“

And misogyny isn’t just wielded by men. It’s just a lot more wounding when it comes from women of influence.