Working mothers who skip boozy dinners to see family don’t get top jobs, says CBI chief
WOMEN executives miss chances to get ahead because they can’t face boozy male-dominated business dinners, the head of the CBI has claimed.
Instead of networking at latenight events, female bosses with children would rather be at home with their families, said Carolyn Fairbairn.
Many feel isolated by the male bonding that goes on at alcoholfuelled functions lasting into the small hours.
The 54-year-old married mother of three said even corporate events are too male-oriented – and is now calling for more early evening business meetings where participants ‘have a nice glass of wine and then go home’.
Mrs Fairbairn, the first woman director-general of the business lobby group, said: ‘I have noticed in my career that quite a lot of things are set up around business life that happen outside work that don’t include women that easily. One example that is quite obvious is the business dinner.
‘A lot of women – and I was one of them, because I was bringing up three kids – just want to go home. And we wonder why business dinners are 95 per cent men.’ She added that corporate enter- taining was often also male-oriented. She added: ‘I went to the Rugby World Cup final and I looked around and I could see the men thinking, “How did she get in here?”
‘A lot of the friendship building, the networks, the support that frankly becomes really important when you start getting to the top are being formed in ways that exclude women.
‘Here at the CBI I have said, “let’s have a look at other ways of doing things – can we have early evening events where we have a nice glass of wine and a nice presentation and then we all go home? A lot of men would just like to go home as well.’
Cambridge graduate Mrs Fairbairn described the difficulties faced by women executives as they rise to senior positions in their forties.
‘A lot of women do brilliantly in their twenties and thirties and my observation is when they get into their forties and right up towards the top of their professions – and this includes some of my close friends – they have actually looked at it and they have thought, “I don’t really want to do this”,’ she said.
‘It is very hard. ‘It becomes quite lonely at the top. It becomes more isolated and your networks and connections and friendships in business life really start to matter.’
Mrs Fairbairn lives in Winchester with her husband Peter Chittick, one of the founders of the upmarket Hotel du Vin chain. The couple have two daughters, aged 19 and 20, and a 16-year-old son.
She said she managed to balance family life with a corporate career when her children were younger by being ‘completely ruthless’ about switching off from the office in the evenings and at the weekends.
Her husband, she says, ‘has flexibility and that has helped enormously... That is a really big part of making this work – having a partnership that makes it possible.’ She said her two daughters ‘don’t see themselves as in any way disadvantaged compared with men’ and that her children are proud of her achievements.
Mrs Fairbairn, a former director of Lloyds Bank and FTSE 100 outsourcing group Capita, was also a strategy director at the BBC and ITV.
But she said the fact it has taken so long for the CBI – which is 50 years old this year – to recruit her its first woman at the top ‘is a reflection of British business.’
The proportion of female directors of elite FTSE 100 firms now stands at 26.1 per cent following a four-year government-backed drive to help women break the glass ceiling.
But only 10 per cent of chief executives are female and there are only five at FTSE 100 firms.
They are Carolyn McCall at easyJet, Alison Cooper at Imperial Tobacco, Veronique Laury at retail group Kingfisher, Moya Greene at Royal Mail and Liv Garfield at water company Severn Trent. Alison Brittain, a friend of Mrs Fairbairn’s, will take over as chief executive of hospitality group Whitbread from January.
‘That is the next challenge, more women becoming CEOs, that is the next frontier,’ Mrs Fairbairn said.
She added that she is ‘proud’ to be the first female director-general of the CBI, adding: ‘British business is really changing. I hope I will be first in a long line.’
‘Glass of wine and go home’