Even Alex Lankester was surprised to be offered the job as international
marketing director of Wiley-Blackwell, a large publishing house that
produces scientific books and scholarly journals.
It was not that she felt underqualified; she had already worked as head of
marketing for a rival publisher based in the Far East. It was rather that as
she walked – or hobbled, as she puts it – into the interview, she was nearly
nine months pregnant with twins.
“I said, ‘Well, you can see the situation. It’s your choice whether you want
me’,” she explained. “But they were brilliant. It probably helped that I was
first interviewed by a woman with four children, so it was a no-brainer for
her. But I was interviewed by men, too, and no one seemed to think the fact
that I was pregnant posed a problem.”
Lankester, 38, started the job when Max and Leo, now 2½, were two months old:
“It was tough because I had to do a lot of travelling – I was always to and
fro from New York – but the company was very supportive and tried to let me
work from London where possible,” she said.
Lankester’s experience is in stark contrast to the worrying study of women at
work published by the Equality and Human Rights Commission last week. It
reported the biggest fall in numbers of women in power in the five years
that the research has been running.
The numbers are borne out by research for The Sunday Times Best Companies to
Work For: over the past two years the number of mid-sized companies among
the top 100 where at least a third of senior managers are female has dropped
sharply, from 40 to 31.
Fewer than 9% of senior judges are women and 11% of the directors of FTSE 100
firms. Fewer than 20% of MPs are women, putting us behind what we think of
as some of the most misogynistic nations (27.7% of Afghanistan’s
parliamentarians are women and 25.5% of Iraq’s).
In a vivid analogy the commission suggested that at current rates it would
take 200 years – 12 years fewer than it would take a snail to crawl the
length of the Great Wall of China – before we have equal numbers of men and
women in parliament.
Along with MPs and judges, there are suddenly fewer female editors of national
newspapers, fewer female senior police officers and local authority chief
executives. And all this has happened when girls are outperforming boys at
every stage of secondary school and women make up the majority of university
students.
Nicola Brewer, chief executive of the commission, believes the study
demonstrates that, against all expectation, things are getting tougher for
ambitious women. “It shows progress has stalled. The glass ceiling is
visible now – it’s no longer glass, but a concrete barrier,” she said.
Where does that leave Lankester? Anyone recruited to a key post while nine
months pregnant must be a star in the making, destined for the top. But last
January she jumped ship to help to found 2degrees-network.com, an
environmental consultancy near her home in Oxford. She did not bow out of
corporate culture because it was oppressive or because the hours were too
long (she still has a full-time nanny).
“I was just up for a different sort of challenge,” she said. “The environment
is the key issue of the moment. Banking or law might be different but I
never encountered a glass ceiling in publishing – far from it.”
Are women still discriminated against in the workplace? Or perhaps the
commission is measuring the wrong thing – an outdated set of “influential”
professions that no longer hold an irresistible allure for smart women now
that e-commerce has opened up a vast range of opportunities. Are women
making a choice not to try for the traditional top jobs?
MANY of the “mum-trepreneurs” who have started more than a million businesses
in Britain over the past few years, some with huge turnovers, are women who
could have made it to the boardroom but instead have created work for
themselves that can be woven around their families.
The inflexibity of the “old” professions perhaps means that women are turning
against them rather than being frustrated in attempts to get to the top.
The problems come, most obviously, once children enter the picture. Indeed,
some commentators suggested last week that it is not a glass ceiling that
affects women’s career prospects but a “maternity ceiling”.
“There’s no doubt that if you want to make it to the top you have to make
sacrifices. The demands are such that some people find them unacceptable,”
said Joy Kingsley, senior partner at Pannone, a 780-strong legal firm in
Manchester.
“I’ve made compromises. I’m not saying I regret it but the reality is that you
can’t be at every school event. There probably is a bias against putting
part-time workers in top jobs, whether that’s fair or not.”
Kingsley says the commission’s figures did not surprise her as “over the years
the pressures of work have become greater, not less great”. Pannone, the
only legal firm to make it into The Sunday Times Best Companies to Work For
top 10, has a high number of female partners “but we are fortunate in that
we have a big family law department that offers regular hours. In corporate
departments, lawyers are sometimes expected to work through the night”.
In a recent study of “extreme jobs” Sylvia Ann Hewlett, an American economist,
concluded that jobs had become more pressurised across the board in recent
years – for both men and women. Hewlett, who has tracked what she calls “the
hidden brain drain” of women dropping out of the labour market in both
Britain and America, says that 70-hour weeks, communications tools such as
the BlackBerry and other sorts of technologies that were supposed to make
work more flexible, have actually made it more all-consuming.
“Even in the toughest jobs you used to be able to shut the door and go home,”
she said. “Now clients can get to you at seven o’clock on a Sunday
morning or at 11 o’clock at night.”
The reality is that many women have choices. Hewlett’s research shows that 30%
of women in top jobs have husbands or boyfriends who earn more than they do,
while only 2% of men are in the same position. It is therefore easier for
women to drop out.
“With the credit crunch the cost-benefit analysis goes against these extremely
pressured top jobs – they look a lot less appealing if your bonus has gone
south,” said Hewlett.
The trailblazers were prepared to do anything to prove that women were every
bit as tough and efficient as men. Carol Wilson, author of Best Practice in
Performance Coaching, a motivational manual, set up Virgin Records with
Richard Branson and was a managing director at 30.
“The possibilities seemed huge,” she said. “I had friends who got up at 6am to
play with their children, were in Sainsbury’s at 9am and in the boardroom at
10am. I used to watch them and wonder how they survived. But anything it
took, women were prepared to do back then.
“I was a director of several record companies throughout the 1980s and there
were no concessions toward women with children. It’s a difficult one,
because as flexible working has come in it means women are taking a back
seat again. But I think a lot of women were disillusioned by the sheer
brutality of the workplace.”
Lindy Woodhead, the first female director of Harvey Nichols, certainly was.
“I’m just revising the paperback version of my book, Mr Selfridge, and then
I’m going to pick some plums to make spicy plum sauce,” she said. “Nothing
would tempt me back into a boardroom.”
If women who have made it to the top feel so disillusioned, maybe the big
question now is not how to smash the glass ceiling but how to persuade women
that breaking it would be worth their while. That means making the workplace
more human.
Jasmine Whitbread, chief executive of Save the Children UK, presides over an
organisation with 4,500 staff and which runs programmes in 50 countries. She
says the offer of flexible working was key to attracting the best possible
directors when she set about building her team.
“That fewer women are in top jobs is shocking, but I’m not entirely
surprised,” she said. “I see colleagues and university friends stepping off
the career ladder. I haven’t – and I haven’t come across the glass ceiling –
but I couldn’t have had the sort of career I’ve had, in the private and the
voluntary sector, if my husband hadn’t been willing to play an equal role in
looking after the children.
“No one talks about the role of men in all this but they need flexible
working, too. I’d like to see a situation where flexible working was seen as
a commitment to someone who was super-good, a sign of their value to the
organisation.”
The Commission for Equality and Human Rights suggests making this another
right enshrined in law. Brewer would like to see maternity leave recast as
“parental leave”, with both parents able to request a six-month break to
look after a child rather than just the mother being able to leave her job
for a year. There would be an incidental social benefit, she points out – a
Scandinavian study shows that men who spend time as their children’s sole
carers are 30% less likely to divorce. “We have an inflexible workplace,
mired in history, designed to fit the 8am-8pm male culture. That has to
change,” she said.
Business groups are less keen on such changes, arguing that the cost to their
members of covering parental leave is too high. The National Association of
Small Business has said that it would like “a pause in this political love
affair with flexible working”.
CAN parental leave, flexible hours and the myriad other policies being mooted
keep women at the top and inspire others to join them?
“You can blame this policy and that policy but the truth is that for most
women having children and a demanding job is like trying to ride a horse and
ride a bike at the same time,” said Siobhan Freegard, who gave up her job as
managing director of a large hospitality company when her son Sean, now 12,
was two years old.
“My husband was horrified – it halved our income. My parents and friends said,
‘You’re a career girl, you’ll hate staying at home’. But I’d tried really
hard to make it work. I loved my job but in the end I felt I was doing both
things badly. The only option was a full-time 7am-7pm nanny but I didn’t
want to wholly outsource my childcare. I met a radio producer who had a
spreadsheet outlining who had the children and when over the holidays – who
wants to live like that?”
Freegard had two more children, Aisling, 8, and Aran, 5, and although she
became to all intents and purposes a full-time mother, she did not lose the
business skills that had served her well in the boardroom. Realising how
isolated stay-at-home mothers sometimes felt, she founded Netmums, an online
forum that now has more members than the Women’s Institute, 14 full-time and
40 part-time staff.
She has done it all from home. “It’s all worked round the children and it’s
enabled me to have a proper home life,” she said.
If there is another survey of women in top jobs, chances are she will not be
on it. But what is now the definition of a top job?
