Do women really want to get to the top?
Just as one woman steps up to the top job of Prime Minister, the rest of us have been put firmly back in our place, with the assertion that we have a “circular” approach to ambition and actively avoid high promotion.
According to Kevin Roberts, chairman of advertising agency Saatchi and Saatchi, the lack of women in leadership roles is not “a problem” and although only 11.5 per cent of creative directors in his industry are female, the debate over gender equality in the boardrooms he knows is “over”.
In an interview with Business Insider, published last Friday, Roberts claimed of women in the workplace: “Their ambition is not a vertical ambition, it’s this intrinsic, circular ambition to be happy.”
Although Saatchi’s parent company Publicis Groupe moved swiftly on Monday to distance itself, placing Roberts on immediate leave of absence, his suggestion that women simply aren’t interested in making it to the top (coupled with the implication that the opportunities are there for them, if they do) outraged many.
Though not all. Others murmured there was a kernel of truth in his comments: that having witnessed the “dinosaur-like”, burning-themidnight-oil, traditionally male way of making it ‘to the top’ he described, many women — and not a few men — are indeed seeking a less linear progression, and measuring their success in broader terms of happiness and family-friendly flexibility, instead.
Whatever the cause, what is unde- niable is the lack of progress on gender equality in the boardroom. According to campaign group the 30% Club, new research shows a career bottleneck for senior female executives, with the number of women at executive committee level in FTSE 100 businesses remaining virtually static, at 17 per cent, for more than two years.
This is because the workplace is plain biased, believes Baroness McGregor Smith, CEO of outsourcing experts Mitie Group PLC and the only Asian female chief executive of a FTSE 250 company. “There are still barriers to achievement, otherwise we would have equal representation at the top of business and private and public sectors.
“Women do not lack the same ambition as men. If they want to do well, they shouldn’t be held back. But the natural path to the top is not there yet.”
Moreover, mothers returning to work at any level face discrimination, found a 2015 report for the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills with one in nine dismissed, made compulsorily redundant or treated so poorly they had to quit their job. And research by Mumsnet found two thirds of the website’s users felt less employable after having a child and three quarters said it was harder to progress in their careers.
For copywriter Hannah Martin, now CEO of Talented Ladies Club, a magazine-site which supports and inspires working mothers, Roberts’ remarks brought back bad memories. In 2004, Martin was sacked from her job at a large London adver- tising agency after having a baby.
“The office culture was of play,” she says. “You spent your time playing ping pong or pool, going for three-hour lunches, and then hanging around the office drinking beer, the day ending at midnight. This is fine for single men or women, or a parent with a support network (invariably a wife) at home. But it isn’t reasonable when you have to get home for family responsibilities.
“The work could easily be done during the day time, but that went against the culture. Meetings were booked for 6pm or 7pm. So even though I had won awards for the agency, and been praised and given a bonus while I was on maternity leave, and sailed through an annual review, I was sacked two months after I came back to work.”
Martin says her case was clearly unfair dismissal but lawyers warned her she would face such drawn out legal action it would not be worth undertaking. Her minimal redundancy pay was eaten up by solicitors’ fees as it was.
“Not all ad agencies are like that one,” she says. “Within a month, I was working at another agency for 10 grand a year more and decent conditions, but that first company was far more typical in culture and attitude.”
Advertising consultant Cindy Gallop was criticised by Roberts in the interview for her campaigning on gender equality, who claimed: “I think she’s making up a lot of the stuff to create a profile, and to take applause, and to get on a soap[box].”
Gallop believes while Roberts may be the “lightning rod” for what is wrong with the industry, he is not the exception.
She says: “What is gratifying is how swiftly Publicis has moved. It is indicative of changing awareness at the top. That someone understands it is very bad business not to tap into the creative pool of women and people of colour. Especially for advertising agencies, given that women are the primary purchasers and influences in every sector.”
What of Roberts’ claims that women just don’t want to be leaders as much as men?
Gallop, founder of the IfWeRanTheWorld web platform designed to turn good intentions into action, is clear: “Never doubt women burn with passion and ambition as much as men. We want to be leaders and use our vision to shape the industry of the future. And we want to make money too.”
Hannah Martin agrees. “I don’t think women are less ambitious, but they are forced to adapt or temper those ambitions due to the realities of the working environment. My responsibilities as a mother don’t make me less ambitious.”
Her take is that the current crop of men at the top don’t want to rock any boats. “They may make token gestures but the system is working just fine for them as it is. So they post-rationalise it — and say women are way happier down below.”
Not everyone agrees that Roberts is so wrong, however. PR supremo Lynne Franks says: “I’ve been working in women’s leadership for 30 years and what he says is true. For women, career progression is not all about gaining the office with the biggest window and paper basket.
“But that doesn’t mean we aren’t leaders or can’t get to the top. Of all those in business and politics I know, Roberts is the least misogynistic; he wasn’t saying women are rubbish. He was saying women choose to behave in a different, nonmale way, and there is not a lot wrong with that.”
But novelist Polly Courtney, who wrote Golden Handcuffs based on her experiences working for City investment bank Merrill Lynch, disagrees that those women are making a free choice.
“There is a massive difference in the career trajectory of the average man and woman, which is driven by tradition,’’ she says. “I don’t know about shapes but whether men have a linear path and women a circular one, the point is that these are rigid and already carved out. It is hard to break out.”
Courtney admits her own career ambitions became “circular” in her twenties, when she decided that “there was more to life than working till 3am every day. I didn’t drop off the career ladder at the bank because I wanted a family. I wanted to be happier in general.”
But, she adds, that kind of working culture benefits nobody: “Women are educated to do more childcare, to step back from the career ladder, and be flexible. Men are taught to be breadwinners. But the truth is that many men want something different to this linear progression, too. Indeed some are made unhappy by it.”
So perhaps we should all be more open-minded about the meaning of ambition and the paths to boardroom success? Says Franks: “Achieving success is not all about power, wealth and fame; that approach has taken men along very many wrong paths.”