The Great Debate UK

Lack of women’s voices on FTSE boards unacceptable

Alison Steed is a multi-award winning journalist and commentator on financial issues, and she is also the owner of the personal finance website for women and families www.MyMoneyDiva.com. The opinions expressed are her own. Thomson Reuters will host an International Women’s Day follow-the-sun live blog on March 8, 2011

The fact that today sees 100 years of International Women’s Day is testament to just how influential this celebration of women’s empowerment around the world is. To think that within the last century women were being abused by the authorities for the belief in their cause – that women should be given the vote in both the UK and U.S. – when now it would seem abhorrent to not allow this. How far we have come.

But the reality is, there is still some way to go. The Lord Davies report into women in the boardroom could ultimately be the biggest fillip to women being given the same voice in the corporate world as they now have in most places in the wider world.

The idea that even though women make up more than half of the population in the UK, yet around half of FTSE 250 companies do not have a single woman on their boards, and just one sixth of FTSE 100 companies have a woman on the board, is not acceptable.

Lord Davies of Abersoch has told firms to more than double the number of women sitting on boards before 2015, otherwise they face the prospect of quotas which will force the issue.

While this would achieve an aim, I am not sure it is the best way to achieve the result – far better that the companies are promoting women on merit, rather than having to push women through to comply with a new regulation. I am not in favour of someone doing a job for the sake of it, but we all know women in corporate roles who are not only more than capable of taking on a board position, but would actually improve the performance of the company no end. So why are they not getting the chance?

Success against the statistical likelihood of failure

Sandra Giannone Ezell is Managing Partner of Bowman and Brooke LLP’s Richmond, Virginia, office and a trial lawyer. The opinions expressed are her own.Thomson Reuters is hosting a live blog on March 8, 2011 to mark the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day.

I was honoured to be asked to share my voice in this forum on this auspicious day that celebrates the International Day of the Woman.  I can be found most days, growing my trial practice, running my office, delivering speeches, making it rain and blogging on TheLegalDivas.com.

By night, I am a mother to four, a wife and, life permitting, an intermittent sports fan.  I thought about what I could possibly add to this that would stand out in celebration of the distance that women have travelled to actually attain success in the legal profession, or any profession, in the last 50 years.

I started out in my profession more than 20 years ago and at that time, in my law school class, as in most law school classes, then and now, the distribution of women to men was even, if not slightly more women.  At every single mile marker along the way, however, that ratio has shifted.  And while the actual numbers have changed the more than two decades that I have been doing this, the trends have not.

If you compare the number of first year associates to mid-year associates, the numbers begin to skew in favor of men.  If you look at senior associates, depending on the time frame and the study, women are represented at about 50 percent of men.

Once you work your way into the partnership ranks within an organization, there are fewer and fewer women, with ownership being vested in 15 percent women to men in our nation’s law firms.  Firm leadership, the executive and management committees, we have single digit representation.

Sarah Brown calls for action against maternal mortality

Sarah Brown is Global Patron of the White Ribbon Alliance and author of Behind the Black Door published by Ebury Publishing on March 3, 2011. Follow her on Twitter @SarahBrownUK The opinions expressed are her own. Thomson Reuters will host an International Women’s Day follow-the-sun live blog on March 8, 2011.

To mark the 100th International Women’s Day it is as good a place as any to start with U.N. Women’s objective to seek a pathway to decent work for women.

Back in 1911, the very first International Women’s Day was held to protest unfair wages and poor conditions of work for women.  Today, much of the focus lies similarly in seeking equal treatment, repairing injustices and opening up the opportunity for women to improve their lives in the poorest parts of the world.

As U.N. Women’s Executive Director Michele Bachelet said just last week, “Women’s strength, women’s industry, women’s wisdom are humankind’s greatest untapped resource”.

As we aim also to tackle the great injustice of high maternal mortality and to improve infant and child survival and health, we should draw on all that women have to offer.

So let’s find a way to put more women in to dignified work and simultaneously reach towards a great unmet need.  That need is more trained health workers – 3.5 million of them in fact.

Join the quiet revolution – Kristin Davis

Kristin Davis, star of the show and movie Sex and the City, is an Oxfam Global Ambassador. The opinions expressed are her own. Thomson Reuters will host an International Women’s Day follow-the-sun live blog on March 8, 2011.

International Women’s Day is special. In China, women get the day off work. In Bosnia and Italy, women receive gifts of flowers. In Cameroon, women dance in the streets. What will you do to make March 8, a special day?

For 100 years, the world has marked International Women’s Day by celebrating women’s economic, political and social accomplishments. This March 8, we are coming together again to mark this special day by calling attention to the inequality and discrimination that is still a daily fact of life for millions of women.

There have been dramatic changes since 1911, when more than a million people around the world took to the streets to protest discrimination against women and to demand that women be allowed to get an education, have the right to work, to vote and to hold public office. But there’s a still a way to go.  There isn’t a single country which can claim its women are treated equally to men, but it is across the developing world where discrimination and inequality have the most dramatic consequences.

Take food as an example.  Across the globe – from New York to Nairobi – it is still women who do most of the cooking. No surprise there. But did you know that the majority of the food eaten around the globe everyday is grown by women too? And the irony is that they are more likely to go hungry!

Millions of women face a daily struggle to put food on the table because of discrimination and inequality. This doesn’t just make their already difficult lives harder, but it is also part of the reason why the number of hungry people around the globe continues to hover around one billion. 

And when crisis hits and food prices rise – as they have in recent months – it is women who go without to ensure their families have enough to eat and their children are well nourished. With increasingly unpredictable and extreme weather hitting harvests, women face an even steeper uphill struggle to feed their families.

Women and the science education question

Elisabeth Kelan is a lecturer in the Department of Management at King’s College London. The opinions expressed are her own. Thomson Reuters will host an International Women’s Day follow-the-sun live blog on March 8, 2011.

Earlier this year, research indicated that few of the contributors to online encyclopedia Wikipedia are women.

It showed that 85 percent of Wikipedia entries are written by men. This leads to a disparity in how knowledge on Wikipedia is constructed: stereotypical male interests receive more coverage than stereotypical female ones.

Is this an indication that women are not participating equally in the information and knowledge society? Do women miss out on creating the world of the future and on lucrative work?

These are some of the questions raised by the United Nations theme of the International Women’s Day ‘Equal access to education, training and science and technology: Pathway to decent work for women’.

One might presume that with more women than men in higher education in the developed world, gender disparities in education have disappeared or have moved to disfavour men rather than women.

What do women want?

Vicki Hazelden is the managing partner of international law firm Walkers’ Dublin and London offices. The opinions expressed are her own. Thomson Reuters will host an International Women’s Day follow-the-sun live blog on March 8, 2011.

Men have been asking themselves this question for generations. Are women happier when we stay at home with our children or does fulfilment lie with a nanny, a grown-up career and our own earning power?  To my surprise I’ve turned out to be one of those “career women” the news media talk about and I’m not sure I know the answer. I don’t think I am alone.

My generation were the first to launch themselves in a wholesale way into the traditionally male dominated careers – banking, law, accountancy and to make it to the top. We grew up with expectations of full time rewarding careers, equal pay and hordes of children, you CAN have it all!

I think many women have now experienced what that means in practice and recognise the wider implications of combining children and a full time job.

So what do I mean by combining children and a full time job? I was reading recently about the concept of the working mother and the one child “pet”. This single child is low impact, easy to transport and precociously sophisticated. She sits quietly with no protest with her parents in smart restaurants until 11 p.m. Mum and Dad take it in turns to get home and see the little one before bed.

There is also the working mum who — guilt-free — delegates the early years to her team of nannies and dives in at the deep end on a Monday morning to surface late on a Saturday morning for some “quality time”.

We’ve come a long way, baby – but we have far to go

Lara Pingue is a Personal Finance producer for Reuters.com.  The opinions expressed are her own. Thomson Reuters will host an International Women’s Day follow-the-sun live blog on March 8, 2011.

A coworker recently sent me a YouTube video of a 5-year-old girl declaring to the world her intention to get a job before she gets married. It’s a funny clip, filled with the kind of urgency and drama only a pre-teen girl can muster.  But something about it made me uneasy:  Isn’t getting a job before marriage a given? Since when is this decision worth broadcasting on the Internet?

It seemed fitting that this video would go viral in time for International Women’s Day, a time to look back on just how far we women have come.  Fifty years ago, would it surprise anyone if a little girl talked about landing a husband – not a job – right out of highschool or college?

I’m grateful times have changed for most of us, but we can’t be smug.  Yes, women are making impressive strides in the workplace. And yes, we’re juggling it all: marriage, kids, career and dazzling social lives. But a recent White House report on the state of women in America is a wake-up call for anyone who thinks the struggle is over.

Consider this: after all the fighting for gender equality, women are still earning 75 percent as much as their male counterparts in 2009, the White House report finds. And women’s career choices are partly to blame: we’re still working as secretaries, nurses, teachers and cashiers more than men, who are busy launching careers in science and technology and financial services – careers that pay serious cash.

And guess what else? When times get tough, women – not men — are more likely to bear the brunt of it.  In 2009, 28 percent of working women who were unmarried with children had incomes below the poverty level, compared to only six percent of male workers.

The absence of women in senior positions – a ‘wicked’ problem

Savita Kumra is a senior lecturer at Brunel Business School. The opinions expressed are her own. Thomson Reuters will host a follow-the-sun live blog on March 8, 2011 to mark the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day.

I’m not sure if it’s just me, but I get a feeling of déjà vu every time I see a headline decrying the lack of women on FTSE boards. Most recently, focus has been on the dearth of female non-executive directors on such boards and the solution of choice seems to be a number of organizations springing up to ‘mentor’ women so they are ready and able to take up these positions when the call comes.

Quite why this is seen as the way forward; when the approach has been tried for at least 10 years is not fully explained. What is clear is that the painfully slow progress of women onto FTSE boards is a fact and as Rittel and Webber would put it, a ‘wicked’ problem whose solution is as elusive as its continued presence as an issue is frustrating.

A recently commissioned study shows that of the 1,772 non-executive positions available on FTSE 350 boards; only 204 (11.5 percent) are held by women. Of those who make it, we know from work done at Cranfield School of Management that they are more likely than their male counterparts to have titles, they are more likely to have experience in a greater number of sectors and they are more likely to have greater experience serving on minor boards before breaking into the major leagues of the FTSE.

It is thus evident the bar is set extremely high for women and whilst there is evidence that men recruit in their own image; the women who gain these positions also come with fairly standard, albeit glowing, ‘vanilla’ CV’s.  Indeed as a friend, who is head of diversity in a City based firm astutely commented ‘…even the networks who look at getting women into Director positions are very elitist and will only look at women at VERY senior positions; they are not willing to mentor talented women a little further down the food chain’. So perhaps relying on mentoring, and making progress one woman at a time, may not be the whole answer.

As with many ‘wicked’ problems, perhaps a way to approach its solution is to reframe the problem itself. I attended a seminar a couple of years ago, and an Australian colleague struck me with her novel approach to framing the usual lament; rather than focusing on the lack of women in senior positions; she talked about the problems and challenges apparent in organizations by having a ‘surplus of men’.

The future is female? A re-traditionalisation of gender

Ruth Simpson is professor in management at Brunel Business School in West London and founding member of the Centre for Research in Emotion Work and Employment Studies. The opinions expressed are her own. Thomson Reuters is hosting a live blog for the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day on March 8, 2011.

Are we in a post-feminist era or are conventional images of masculinity and femininity re-surfacing in society? I argue that rather than gender disadvantage being a thing of the past, as captured in understandings of post-feminism, gender is becoming more entrenched. In fact post-feminism itself – the belief that sexism is over – has allowed renewed disadvantage to emerge.

Post-feminism can be identified in a range of social trends. It can be seen in representations, common in the media, of the “Future is Female” celebrating the supposed assets that women bring into organizations. Women are thus seen to be the new “winners” – bringing crucial “emotional skills” to an economy characterised by attention to customer service and to “modern” organizations that are based on managing horizontal relationships rather than vertical ones and on a need for team-working rather than old-fashioned command and control.

Women are seen to have the right skills and mindset for this new working environment – to be adept at listening and communication, to be risk-aware rather than risk-taking and to be charismatic and visionary leaders. These celebratory visions are associated with Generation Y – the younger generation born after 1977 and who are just entering or who have recently enrolled in the labour market.

Members of this generation are confident, independent and seek challenging enjoyable work as well as time for play. They believe they can author their own lives through the choices they make, have a faith in meritocracy and, in terms of gender, believe that discrimination is a thing of the past.

The glass ceiling has been broken and feminism is an issue for their parents’ generation, not their own, with young women, particularly in the context of education, outperforming men. But a post-feminist faith in meritocracy and choice may mean we have become blind to issues of gender so that a new traditionalisation has crept in. A feminist consciousness has been replaced by a belief in merit, empowerment and choice. But notions of merit are not gender free.

Innovation key to workplace progress for women

-Dimitra Manis is senior vice president of talent at Thomson Reuters. The opinions expressed are her own. Reuters is hosting a “follow-the-sun” live blog on Monday, March 8, 2010, International Women’s Day. Please tune in.-

As part of this International Women’s Day celebration, we have been asked to look back over the last ten years and identify what has really changed.

From a personal perspective, the last ten years have been both challenging but fulfilling, with a growing family (two gorgeous daughters), and then changes in my professional life involving moving from Australia to France and then moving to the United States.

I consider myself blessed to have been able to build a life that worked for me both professionally and personally, with real flexibility required both at home and at work.   It is clear that the dialogue over the last ten years has shifted from a notion of “work-life balance” which is fleeting, and always challenging to achieve, to one of ‘work-life integration’, meaning ways to blend your work and life and to create a meaningful experience with both.

It is no surprise that the statistics for women starting their own businesses have taken off in the last 10 years. I also considered starting a business myself with my pastry chef skills. According to Entrepreneur.com, women own 10.6 million businesses in the U.S. alone, and employ 19.1 million workers– that is one in every seven employees.

What I’ve noticed in the last decade is that women are looking for ways to be in control of their diaries and their lives, and progressive employers are those who support them doing so.   I feel fortunate that I have landed somewhere where I can achieve this.

If you look at the definition for “career” in the Oxford English Dictionary, the word is defined as:  the course or progress through life.  Fascinating then that the majority of professionals think about careers as work-related, and forget it is life-related as well.