Is the position of women still woefully behind male colleagues?

This year, the annual Cranfield Report declares a fall in the number of women executives for the first time.

The very disappointing statistics below suggest we need to critically appraise approaches to women's development of the last decades, so that we can learn from their successes and shortfalls, and bring a fresh perspective on what we might do next.  This is especially important as young women entering the workforce are shocked and surprised to discover that issues do still arise.

In the FTSE 100:

• 10.5% of CEOs are women,
• 33% of managers are women
• 14% of Directors are women

• 45% CEOs of Third Sector organisations
• 28% CEOs in the NHS
• 25% Top tier Civil Service
• 17% Local Authority CEOs

During the 80s and 90s particularly, fear of the ‘demographic time bomb' prompted renewed efforts to recruit and retain women.  Initiatives tended to focus on the business imperative of ensuring a stable supply of trained and competent staff and sought to minimise the wastage of women leaving employment after childbirth.

Essentially, there have been - broadly - two sorts of approaches taken by organisations to tackle the problem:

• Procedural - where organisations have assessed the policies and procedures that affect women and their participation in work. Changes have included improved maternity provision, flexitime, childcare, the right to return, part-time working and so on. 

• Personal - where attention has been focussed on developing the personal skills and competence of women for the workplace. This typically features elements such as assertiveness training, power and influence, communication skills and presentation skills. 

As useful and important as these approaches are, and they have indeed increased options and choices for many women, the glass ceiling remains firmly intact in almost all sectors. 

Our recent work, with women aspiring to and already occupying leadership positions in both the public and private sectors, is revealing.  The challenges they identify are much the same for women today as they were 20 years ago.  Women talk about the difficulties they face in combining motherhood with a demanding career - and how tricky it can be to talk about this; they reveal some of the ‘unreconstructed' views they face about women in the workplace; they highlight the organisational norms and behaviours which still feel excluding; and they cite the absence of a variety of female role models.  So why is that 30 years of initiatives have had only partial success?

The conundrum now is that - in spite of all the work done - women themselves do not always feel more enabled to progress to leadership positions.  Motherhood is a critical point in time but it is not always about this. Significantly, women who are not necessarily balancing parenting and work responsibilities also talk about the difficulties in breaking through into the top ranks. 

We believe that organisations who are aiming to make a transformational shift in women's experience of their organisation and their roles within it must take a three-pronged approach.

Developing leadership and personal effectiveness

Whilst conventional leadership development applies across the sexes, we believe there is a case for specific leadership development for women.  Although some commentators have said that we need to move on from women-only development ("We did that in the 70s and 80s!") still we find that when women meet to learn together they are often able to discuss and deal with those issues they would otherwise feel vulnerable discussing amongst men.  

This is particularly true in relation to their experiences as mothers or carers - such responsibility still sits largely on women's shoulders and even when women have more equitable shared responsibilities with their partners, they still appreciate sharing the dilemmas and challenges of combining motherhood with their career. 

We have also found that a looking at our Authority Presence and Impact model through a gender lens has proved enlightening.

Authority is something we develop through our experiences, our education and training, our background and reflects the past that we bring to the current challenge.  Presence describes our capacity to ‘occupy the leadership space', in the moment, to be appropriately noticed and to gain respect.   It is strongly dependent on our ability to build rapport and to relate effectively with a wide range of other people in the present.  Impact describes our ability to change the course of events; for example, in a meeting, when we intervene to improve the outcome, or to enable people to reframe the way they think about the situation or problem they face.  It is a future orientated dimension.

Authority

Women often underestimate the importance of ‘authority markers', often downplaying their role in leading successful projects, preferring instead to promote their team.  Whilst this is much appreciated by colleagues it can mitigate against developing an authoritative personal and career history.  

Presence

Whilst women are often very good at the ‘soft skills' of developing rapport and relating well to people, we find that this is typically more comfortably demonstrated in traditional female roles. The capacity to display presence in a wider range of scenarios becomes crucial in moving up the leadership ladder.

Impact

We're all familiar with the New Yorker cartoon, set round a Board table, where the Chairman is saying to the only female member "Thank you, Miss Jones, good point.  And perhaps now a man would like to make it...."  Impact is closely connected to the capacity to give and receive feedback with empathy and assertion;  and also the capacity to sense, respond to and change the mood in the moment, through matching (and mismatching) the prevailing ‘energy'.  We find that whilst many women are good at ‘reading' atmospheres, their ability to handle conflict and dissonance in the moment can often be significantly enhanced.

Scrutinising and improving policies         

Some organisations have made great strides in developing family friendly policies to allow people more flexible working arrangements.  What has struck us, however, is that organisations can be very ‘inconsistent' in actually publicising and promoting the opportunities. 

Whilst public sector organisations can be more systematic in this, we noticed that at the ‘top of the shop' there was a certain unwillingness to reveal the extent to which people took up flexible arrangements, so that women looking up the organisation tended to only see the archetypal leadership model - long hours, taking work home, emails from home in the middle of the night, few part time or job share arrangements.  So the result is that flexible working is seen to be available up to middle tiers at best and not feasible for the most senior positions.  What women leaders (and indeed men) negotiate for themselves becomes private, personalised, and invisible. 

Having policies is one thing: enabling them to be used and seen to be used throughout the organisation is the next step.

Transforming Culture

However, initiatives which focus only on personal effectiveness and internal policies and procedures only partially tackle today's problem.  What's more, they subtly problematise women themselves by focussing on the individuals' issues, taking for granted the organisation norms and culture which sustain inequalities across the organisation and the wider system. 

The most progressive organisations increasingly recognise that it is their ‘culture' which influences the experience of women.  What's more, reviewing and reflecting on this reveals important lessons about the organisation's ability to handle diversity and differentiation in all aspects of its business.

Two particular examples of the ‘unhelpful' cultures, which women cite are:

• the ‘gentleman's club' culture, (often found in professional services firms, the top civil service and local authorities) where decisions appear to be taken by a mysterious elite behind closed doors according to secret rules;

• the ‘entrepreneurial' culture, (often found in intense organisations, like hospitals and highly competitive sales and technical organisations), where long hours and a ‘work hard/play hard' attitude revolves round office life.

Increasingly clients and customers expect personal relationships, products designed to meet their particular needs, tailored services which recognise their specific circumstances.  Successful organisations will be those who can respond to this.  In the world of tomorrow, the way in which organisations handle difference and diversity within, becomes a clear indicator of how capable they are of genuinely working differently with their clients and customers.  It is not enough to ‘talk the talk' of personalised service and tailored products if staff simply don't experience this on the inside - and therefore struggle to convey this through their relationships with their customers, clients and each other.

Adding in the cultural frame places women's development programmes in quite a different light.  It becomes the business of the whole organisation and not just those who might directly benefit.  When organisation leaders reflect on and evaluate women's experiences, it  provides important insights into how well an organisation ‘does difference' in all aspects of it's work - through recruitment, retention, promotion, development and - critically - the extent to which it can meet the higher ambitions of its customers and clients through authentic relationships and differentiated, truly client-centred products and services.

Taken together, these three aspects to an approach for women's (and organisation) development - personal leadership effectiveness; improving policies; and transforming culture - builds on the good work done in the last decades with a new systemic framework to meet the continuing challenges that all women face.