I struggle to find men to work for me, says John Lewis chief White
THE chairman of John Lewis has admitted she has struggled to find men who will work for her as she revealed she had been criticised for attempting to change the “strong male culture” at the retailer.
Dame Sharon White said she has found it “quite hard to recruit men” at John Lewis Partnership (JLP) since her push to “rebalance” the organisation away from its masculine “command and control” culture.
Speaking at an International Women’s Day event at King’s College London, Dame Sharon said she had also faced a backlash for recruiting and promoting women. She said: “I definitely had emails saying, oh my goodness, there are too many [women],” referring specifically to when she brought on a female deputy chairman at the John Lewis and Waitrose-owner in late 2020.
More than 60pc of leadership positions at JLP are filled by women, compared to 40pc of director posts across FTSE 350 companies.
Dame Sharon said: “I do find it quite hard to recruit men. One of my issues around gender in the workplace is how do we make sure we can have a decent balance.”
The 55-year-old took charge of JLP in 2020, taking over from Sir Charlie Mayfield. She said the organisation had been through phases of being “very command and control, and I would say a very strongly male culture, which we’re now rebalancing”.
The Waitrose leadership in particular had been “all male and all white”, she said.
“It’s a very democratic organisation, so I’ve got a balance between in some ways being quite directive and influential in terms of recruitment but also being sensitive in how I’m trying to facilitate a conversation where the organisation and also our customers feel there’s not a disjuncture between who we are and who we show out to our customers.”
Dame Sharon was a former senior civil servant and joined JLP from media regulator Ofcom.
She said she was concerned about the growing backlash against feminism among young men.
She blamed a failure to have “healthy” conversations about the importance of gender equality with boys and teenagers. Addressing the rise of misogyny on social media, she said: “I think we’re confusing the channel with the debate.
“The channels and the actions of social media mean that things go viral.
“I think the issue is what’s the conversation we’re having with our teenage boys.
“In the absence of having a healthy balanced positive conversation with them, these boys are absorbing and attracted to misogyny that they don’t recognise as misogyny.
“It’s not a regulatory issue. I am much more interested in who’s filling the gap.”
The comments by the head of one of Britain’s biggest retailers come after figures earlier this week showed that Britain had slipped down global gender equality rankings as rising childcare costs keep more mothers out of the workforce.
The UK now ranks behind Poland and Hungary for gender equality, according to the report from PWC, which found the gender pay gap in the UK has grown by 2.4 percentage points to 14.4pc over the last year.
Separate figures from Ipsos earlier this week suggested that two out of every five Britons believed that championing women’s equality meant that men were being discriminated against.