TIME TO GIVE WOMEN A FTSE UP
The Glass Wall author Sue Unerman asks why change is flatlining, as the gaping executive gender divide in the UK’S top 100 companies is revealed
YOU ARE MORE likely to be the boss of a FTSE 100 company if you are called Dave than if you are a woman. This is the stark reality of new figures unveiled by the London Stock Exchange from its audit on how these companies are doing on targets set to have 33% female representation on boards. Currently there are only 25 women in executive roles within 22 of the companies. That figure only rises slightly, to 30, if you extend the parameters to the FTSE 250.
Last week, the first woman to be president of the New York Stock Exchange in its 233-year history gave an interview. Stacey Cunningham, 43, said very strongly that she doesn’t want her gender to be an issue – and yet, as noble as that viewpoint is, the stats show that it still is and we have to confront it head on.
The lack of diversity in senior management in the UK is estimated to cost industry £125bn*. In times like ours, with Brexit on the horizon and so much competitive pressure on the UK, surely you’d expect a proven case of diversity on boards increasing business profitability, to be making a difference in the gender make up of boards?
Since co-writing a book in 2016, with Kathryn Jacob OBE, on what we call the ‘glass wall’ separating men and women at work, we’ve hosted over 100 talks and been at the heart of the debate about how to get business to change. But overall there just isn’t enough action. In too many companies there just isn’t any real fairness about how the workplace functions for women.
Why do we talk about a wall instead of a ceiling? The ‘glass ceiling’ implies that everything is fine until you reach a certain level of seniority. It often isn’t. The truth is that women may hit a glass wall at any stage of their careers.
Women and men can see through the glass wall but often they don’t speak the same language or have the same cultural expectations. Women can see the meetings that they should have been invited to, but somehow have not been. Or the casual conversations that accelerate careers but from which they are excluded. And those glass walls tend to be in-built if there is no tradition of women in senior positions and the board is all middle-aged white men in suits – which is what all but 32 of the FTSE 100 companies seem to be. In fact, 10 of those boards are completely male.
There are glass walls built from managers’ nervousness around maternity leave (whatever the official company policy) or the inability to understand that not everyone finds the same jokes or ‘locker room’ humour funny. A quip from the CEO about, ‘ Would you like to sit on my lap?’ when there are too few chairs in your first boardroom meeting for example (and, yes, a woman we met told us this actually happened in the last 12 months), the conflict between confrontation or weakly laughing along, are realities we hear about when we talk to women in the corporate world – even now in 2018.
If you find yourself in that situation, get yourself an ally. It could be another woman but gender isn’t a prerequisite here. Agree with a colleague who is ‘woke’ that you’ll speak up for each other in this kind of situation. And ask for a private conversation with someone sympathetic in senior management (this does not have to be your line manager and in fact it’s probably better to build a network beyond this) and ask for their advice and whether they’ll sponsor or mentor your progression. If the culture is really hideous and totally unreconstructed, then get yourself out of there. You’re too good to have to put up with that.
There is a continuing failure of businesses to allow women to be different, and still to succeed, relative to men. Every company in that FTSE 100 needs to reach their target – and more so – by smashing that glass wall if we’re ever going to reach parity further down the chain. ‘ The Glass Wall: Success Strategies For Women At Work And Businesses That Mean Business,’ by Sue Unerman and Kathryn Jacob OBE is out now (£9.99, Profile Books)