A female friend of the authors says she has encountered this disrespect so many times that she now has a comeback. “Do you know,” she says to the male colleague who has stolen her thunder. “I totally agree. My idea sounds so much better coming from you.” Most women will recognise this as one of the many minor irritations they encounter working in a man’s world. Selective male deafness to women’s ideas is no big deal on its own, but when you add it to all the other ways in which female executives may find themselves ignored or passed over by their male colleagues, it is easy to see how organisational cultures can — unwittingly, perhaps — favour men over women.
From there, it is but a short step to understanding how so many fewer women make it to the top. At a senior management level, and particularly on the board, women are hugely outnumbered by men. Only one in ten of the FTSE 100 board members is female, according to Cranfield University’s Female FTSE Report 2004. And the vast majority of these are non-executive, so they have not been promoted through the ranks of their company.
“So what?” you may ask. Well, you don’t have to subscribe to any arbitrary notion of equality to believe that this is a bad thing. A business is supposed to maximise returns to its shareholders, and there is obvious business logic in having a diverse board. For a start, the customer is not king: she is queen. In the US (where the market has been better analysed), women are the chief instigators in 80 to 90 per cent of purchases of new homes, holidays, furnishings, DIY, bank accounts and healthcare. For cars, the figure is 61 per cent, and even in consumer electronics, they are instigators in half the cases.
As Tom Peters, the management guru who did that research, puts it: “If a board does not at all resemble the market being served then something big is badly wrong.” Perhaps not surprisingly, therefore, companies with more women on their boards tend to perform better too. The Cranfield study found that the 69 FTSE 100 companies that had female directors had an average return on equity of 13.8 per cent, compared with only 9.9 per cent for the 31 businesses with all-male boards.
These findings could, of course, be skewed by the sectors in which the companies operate. But a similar study in America looked at performance within sectors and found the same disparity. If companies are choosing only men as directors, they are depriving themselves of half the available talent. Many chairmen will claim, though, that there are too few women to choose from at just below board level.
It is certainly true that most companies show an attrition of women from entry level to senior management. At Aviva, for instance, women make up 40 per cent of junior management but just 19 per cent of senior jobs. Given that women have babies and men don’t, this is perhaps predictable. But the rate of attrition varies hugely, which suggests that good companies can succeed in holding on to their talented women. At ITV, for instance, the ratio only falls from 43 per cent to 36 per cent.
Many women leave corporate life precisely because they feel that their employers undervalue them and they have no chance of reaching the top. The lesson from A Woman’s Place is that — with a bit of corporate will — this can change. And the companies that achieve this change will gain what all businesses want: a competitive advantage over their rivals.
A Woman’s Place is in the Boardroom by Peninah Thomson and Jacey Graham, Palgrave Macmillan, £25.
Master of nothing's route to nowhere
Only some ghastly, dehumanised moron would want to get rid of the Routemaster bus. Not my words, but those of Ken Livingstone, in 2001, the man who — guess what? — is now getting rid of the Routemaster bus.
It should not surprise anyone that Livingstone has executed such a shameless U-turn. Shameless U-turns are his stock in trade. But it is extraordinary that a city could be prepared to ditch one of its most famous and best-loved icons. It is as if Venice were to abolish the gondola.
Routemasters are quicker (because passengers don’t have to pay the driver) and more convenient, because people can hop on and off at traffic lights. On paper, they are more expensive, because they have conductors as well as drivers. In practice, though, loads of passengers don’t bother to buy tickets on the new bendy buses. Why else would the bendy 73 route have been rechristened the “seventy-free”?
One and a half cup
My column last week about the doughnut theory of life — one is too few, two are too many — seems to have struck a chord with readers. John Duggan does not like playing a full round of golf and would like to be able to go straight from the 14th to the 19th hole. Jean Smith yearns for a three-quarter pint of lager — which, according to Ted Cooke-Yarborough, used to be regularly served to the Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle with his dinner in Christ Church hall.
Any other ideas?
maryann.sieghart@thetimes.co.uk
