Dame Helen Alexander
Quietly determined CBI president who promoted a one-third target for women in the boardroom
DAME HELEN ALEXANDER, who has died aged 60, was the first and so far only female president of the Confederation of British Industry, and a champion of the cause of women in the boardroom.
Helen Alexander made her own senior business career as chief executive from 1997 to 2008 of the Economist, presiding over sustained rises in circulation and profits and driving the magazine’s digital developments. Her reputation there was that of a calm, thoughtful and kindly boss with “a leadership style that lacked fireworks and did not seek fame” – but who nevertheless ran “a tight ship with stretching targets”, as one colleague put it.
If the print media industry was relatively open to the rise of female talent – Helen Alexander’s Economist predecessor Marjorie Scardino was also a pioneer in that respect – many other sectors were slower to begin dismantling the “glass ceiling”. But in her portfolio of non-executive appointments, Helen Alexander’s quietly determined style enabled her also to make a mark in maledominated boardrooms such as those of the gas supplier Centrica and the aero-engine maker Rolls-royce, for both of which she undertook the challenging task of chairing the remuneration committees that set senior executives’ pay.
A tireless networker in corporate circles, she became vice president of the CBI in 2008 and succeeded to the presidency in May 2009 for a twoyear term – becoming the voice of big business, in the media and vis-à-vis government ministers, at a moment when business generally seemed to have lost the trust of the wider public in the aftermath of the financial crisis, and was itself still in shock. “Few of us have ever experienced more uncertain times,” she told an interviewer. But she found the criticism of her peers unwarranted: “People are trying to do the right thing, focused on getting through an extremely tough time.”
The CBI under her leadership was more progressive than other business organisations in supporting the 25 per cent target for women on FTSE100 company boards that was proposed by Lord Davies of Abersoch’s review in 2011 – and in calling for a “comply or explain” policy which would oblige companies to say why they could not find sufficient female candidates.
In 2016 – despite the advance of cancer – Helen Alexander returned to the fray to co-chair, with the former RBS chairman Sir Philip Hampton, a review which significantly raised the benchmark for boardroom equality by recommending a one-third target for women not only as directors of all large and medium-sized Ftse-listed companies but in senior executive positions below board level, to be achieved by 2020.
Helen Anne Alexander was born on February 10 1957 into a very international family. Her father Bernard was a Mancunian lawyer, of German and Belgian descent, who worked for the United Nations secretariat in New York and Geneva – where Helen was born.
Her mother Tania, born in St Petersburg and brought up in Estonia, was the daughter of Moura Zakrevsky, a Ukrainian femme fatale who was a lover of the writers Maxim Gorky and HG Wells; Tania became a translator of Russian literature and an adviser on period Russian detail to stage and film directors such as Ken Loach and Jonathan Miller. Helen’s older sister Natasha married the sinologist and diplomat David Wilson (now Lord Wilson of Tillyorn), who became governor of Hong Kong.
In 1958, when Bernard left the UN to become an executive of the Bowater paper company, the family returned from Switzerland to make their home in London and the village of Great Haseley in Oxfordshire. Helen was educated at St Paul’s Girls’ School, where she was head girl, and Hertford College, Oxford, where she read Geography.
She embarked on a career in book publishing, first with Gerald Duckworth and then with Faber and Faber. After five years she made up her mind to study for an MBA, and it was the then chief executive of the Economist, David Gordon, who persuaded her first to apply to Insead, the international business school at Fontainebleau, and secondly to spend her mid-course internship at the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). After graduating from Insead in 1985, she joined the magazine as a marketing manager and was promoted two years later to circulation director, a job which suited her diligent eye for detail.
When the American-born Marjorie Scardino was promoted to chief executive, Helen Alexander succeeded her as managing director responsible for the EIU – and succeeded her again in 1997, after Scardino left to run the Pearson publishing group. When one influential shareholder tried to unseat Helen Alexander, proposing to replace her with a (male) outside hire of more aggressive demeanour, the magazine’s board resolutely backed her to stay.
While still at the Economist, Helen Alexander began to build a portfolio of boardroom appointments as a nonexecutive director of Northern Foods and British Telecom. In later years she chaired the Port of London Authority and two ventures in the field of business events and communications, UBM and Incisive Media. She was deputy chairman of the online insurer Esure, an adviser to the US private equity firm Bain Capital and a director of the UK arm of the Chinese telecoms giant Huawei.
She also found time to be a trustee of the Tate Gallery and the World Wide Web Foundation created by Sir Tim Berners-lee, and a long-serving governor of St Paul’s Girls’ School. Latterly, she served as chancellor of the University of Southampton and chair of the business advisory council of the Said Business School at Oxford. A fluent French speaker, she was a leading light of the annual Colloque, a high-level Anglo-french networking event – and a recipient of the French Legion d’honneur in 2015.
Helen Alexander was appointed CBE in 2004 and DBE in 2011.
She married, in 1985, Tim Suter, who was a BBC news editor and later an executive of the broadcasting regulator Ofcom; he survives her with their two sons and a daughter.
Dame Helen Alexander, born February 10 1957, died August 5 2017