By Sarah Murray
Published: 16:57pm May 25, 2011
While the numbers of women reaching junior and middle management levels are rising, efforts to increase their representation at senior management levels appear to have stalled.
Although flexible working, awareness raising, mentoring and training can play a role in changing this, many argue that a bigger obstacle – unconscious bias – is harder to overcome.
"The glass ceiling has been pushed up but there's still a significant absence of women in top positions," says Susan Vinnicombe, professor of organisational behaviour and diversity management at Cranfield School of Management.
At board level, the figures are startling. In the UK, for example, a recent review by Lord Davies, former minister of trade, found that women occupied just one in eight of the country's board seats at the 100 largest companies. Catalyst, a US lobby group, found that in 2010, women held 15.7 per cent of board seats in Fortune 500 companies.
Senior women fare better in emerging markets. In Thailand, among privately held companies, 30 per cent of chief executives are female, while in mainland China the figure is 19 per cent, with Taiwan at 18 per cent and Vietnam 16 per cent, according to the 2011 Grant Thornton International Business Report.
Part of this may be because of the high numbers of Asian companies run by families, siblings and husband and wife teams, says Singapore-based Karen Fawcett, group head of transaction banking at Standard Chartered Bank.
"Anecdotally, the higher number of state-owned enterprises in emerging markets also appears to offer an alternative environment where a greater proportion of women flourish," says Ms Fawcett.
And she adds a further point. "The integrated and extended family system and availability of childcare options [in Asia] provide support and open up more choices for women who want successful careers."
Certainly in mature markets, much attention has focused on work-life balance and providing women with the support they need when taking time away from work to have children.
While support at home is important for new mothers, so is staying in touch with the world of work, says Charlotte Sweeney, head of diversity and inclusion for the Emea region at Nomura. "Even if they don't take much time out, we all know how quickly the world changes," she says.
At Nomura, women are consulted before going on maternity leave on how they want to be communicated with during their time away – whether by regular daily e-mails or through a weekly summary of the most important developments at the bank and in the industry.
"It's about women having conversations with their line manager before they go off on maternity leave to talk about how to work together on keeping up to date to make it as easy as possible to come back," says Ms Sweeney.
When it comes to filling more senior positions with women, companies are also looking further down the line. Without a pipeline of strong female candidates, companies have a small female leadership pool from which to select senior staff.
Here, critical mass is not sufficient, argues Cynthia Trudell, senior vice-president of human resources and chief personnel officer at PepsiCo. "The mix of candidates in the pipeline is critical," she says.
"Where these women are in the organisation is really important. So if your critical mass is in finance, HR, and legal, the chances of women rising to the senior ranks of the company are less likely than if you have a mix of women in sales, operations and marketing as well."
Corporate leaders also cite training and mentoring programmes, and giving women "air-time" with senior teams, as important strategies for helping women advance.
But while there is evidence that companies are developing such initiatives and are introducing more flexible working, the number of women in senior positions and on boards remains low. Many argue that while structural barriers can be removed, the more subtle obstacles women face are harder to erode.
Top of the list is what many refer to as unconscious bias. "That's a real challenge for companies," says Ms Sweeney. "Unconscious bias is where we apply our attitudes, thoughts and values, without realising, to the decision-making process. The challenge is making everyone aware of this and the potential impacts."
Lucy Marcus, chief executive of Marcus Venture Consulting, agrees. "We feel a sense of kinship with people who are like ourselves," she says. "It's less risky to hire the familiar."
Unconscious bias is hard to avoid, so companies need to formulate strategies to ensure this human characteristic does not lead to imbalances in the gender make-up of their boards and senior teams. Training and awareness raising can play a role in helping individuals understand what influences them, ensuring it does not adversely affect their decisions.
However, companies that are most effectively tackling unconscious bias are doing something in addition to this – they are turning to data. "They analyse it over and over again," says Ilene Lang, president and chief executive of Catalyst. "And when they see disparities that statistically represent gender differences, they go in, look at the detail and make adjustments."
This could involve analysing the language used in a performance review. "For a man it might say 'assertive, strong, driver for results' and for a similar woman it might say 'aggressive, sharp elbows'," says Ms Lang. "So they look for a code that betrays unintentional bias and do training around it to make sure they have consistent standards."
One way to tackle gender bias is to impose legally mandated quotas, an approach taken by Norway, which requires 40 per cent of board seats to be occupied by women. Spain passed a similar law in 2007 and France is introducing a quota system, too.
But Prof Vinnicombe does not believe this is the best way forward. "In the Davies report, we did not go for quotas because we feel we need to reform the whole system of choosing women directors," she says. Prof Vinnicombe was on the report's steering committee.
She argues instead for greater transparency in recruitment and promotion practices. She cites the differences between senior female representation in the public and private sectors as evidence. In most developed countries, between 35 and 40 per cent of public sector directors are female – far higher (with the exception of Norway) than in the private sector in those countries.
Prof Vinnicombe believes this can be partly explained by the fact the public sector uses more open procedures in recruitment and promotion than the private sector, where she describes senior appointment processes as "deeply secretive".
"In that situation of non-disclosure, it's easier for individuals to gravitate to people who are like themselves," she says. "It's human nature. So in organisations you have to set up processes that minimise natural biases."
As transparency becomes a fact of life rather than a choice for the business world, creating diverse senior teams is not just a case of corporate responsibility. Ms Marcus argues that if companies fail to promote diversity at senior levels, it can affect their reputation.
"It's like a canary in the mine to an investor and suggests the company is not looking to the future."
Career profile: Helen Wyatt
Helen Wyatt is senior vice president, responsible for HR at Unilever, in charge of all product and global HR functions and leading on diversity. She has been with the company for four years, and previously held HR positions at HP and Motorola.
She told Dina Medland:
“I’ve been very fortunate that I’ve been able to achieve things, but I’ve also been able to be authentic and be myself. Early on I got feedback that I needed to ‘toughen up’ and be more assertive.
“I found I could just as easily get results by focusing on my own approach which involved maintaining the relationship, defining the problem and achieving results. It was just as effective, if not more so, than that adopted by some of my more confrontational colleagues.
“Motorola was incredibly results-oriented. which was very helpful to me. A couple of mentors taught me well on the importance of building up a network and strong relationships.
“Apart from authenticity, I think that as a woman – and I have three children – you do have to be incredibly well organised. I’ve always worked a full week. I’ve been lucky in that working for technology companies meant people did not consider ‘presence in the office’ as a high priority, and e-mails could be cleared wherever you were. In another world, such as financial services, that can be a real challenge.
“You have to find your own way of succeeding in an organisation, but I do believe that performance-oriented organisations with very clear goals suit women well. I haven’t had a sense in any of the three organisations in which I’ve worked that HR is a ‘touchy-feely’ profession only for women, and I’ve worked with some excellent men.
“I believe strongly in the value of mentoring. It has been happening since the dawn of time in the corporate world for men but for some strange reason not for women. Research done at Unilever with Insead showed that men tend to identify between one and three people early on in their careers as mentors, while women feel alone and uncertain about how to go about it. We’re making sure we change that at Unilever today.”
Source - Financial Times
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