Women on Top – Why are women underrepresented at the top?

Businesses with women at the top perform at least as well as those run by men, but there are large obstacles to female advancement still exist. Progress on equality has slowed in this area: at the present rate, it is estimated that it will take 65 years before there is equality in the boardroom. Why are women, despite being the equals of men, still underrepresented at the top?

The word CEO conjures up the image of a white middle-aged man -a man with a loyal female deputy who keeps his home, has his children and stands at his elbow during corporate functions. This simplistic stereotype is, in this case, backed up by research. In Sex and Power: Who Runs Britain? The Equal Opportunities Commission (now the Commission for Equality and Human Rights (CEHR» highlighted the fact that just ten percent of the directors of FTSE100 firms are women. The Commission noted that change has been' painfully slow' for several decades and that the UK is outranked by Afghanistan, Iraq and Rwanda in terms of female representation in Parliament.

The situation appears even bleaker for ethnic minority women; though they account for 5.2 percent of the population and 3.9 percent of the labour market, they make up a miniscule 0.4percent of FTSE100 directors and 0.3 percent of Parliament.

LIES, DAMNED LIES AND STATISTICS
So why are there so few women in top jobs? A 2003 article in The Times by Elizabeth Judge, called Women on Board: Help or Hindrance? attempted to answer this very question. Citing research from the Cranfield School of Management (that showed female appointments had increased in the FTSE 100 but that female-heavy companies had 'underperformed') she stated that the appointment of women to UK boards has 'wreaked havoc on companies' performance'.

The simple reason, therefore, that there are few women at the top must be because they just aren't as good at it as men: perhaps they're too emotional, have poor judgement under pressure or are too concerned about having children, housekeeping and socialising to truly commit to the company and focus on the job at hand? If this simple answer is correct then we can all go back to acting out our narrowly defined
gendered roles.

Fortunately, as is generally the case, the simple answer does not have a place in this complex world. One great result of Elizabeth Judge's article was that it catalysed Dr Michelle Ryan and Professor Alex Haslam, academics from the School of Psychology at the University of Exeter, into looking behind both the Cranfield statistics and Judge's conclusions to see if women truly were worse at leading than men.

What they discovered was intriguing. Where Judge had earlier found female fault, they found a further obstacle for women to overcome. Using the metaphor of the 'glass cliff' to explain the phenomenon, Ryan and Haslam discovered that when women were promoted to leadership roles (having already overcome the 'glass ceiling' to reach their current positions) the roles were generally risky or precarious ones; companies appointing women had by and large experienced 'consistently poorer performance in the five months preceding the appointment than those who appointed only men.'

In these glass cliff positions, the risks of failure (and so falling off the cliff) are so much greater explaining the reason behind The Times statistics and the hasty conclusions reached in The Times article. Actually, women aren't causing poor performance; instead, they are put in positions of influence when a company's performance is poor. Glass cliff positions can reflect badly on the individual at the helm during the rocky time, as Judge's article all too well illustrates. The added demands and stresses piled on the incumbents of such positions could also go some way to explain why women generally stay in top management jobs for less time than men.

WOMEN, DON'T KNOW YOUR LIMITS
Ryan and Haslam found that on average women had greater success in turning around failing organisations than did men in similar situations. The problem has been that these are the only 'top' jobs women are getting. Women are employed not in some progressive move, but as fire fighters who come in and deal with tough circumstances with little reward in comparison to their male counterparts.

The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) report publishing this research concluded that 'research into glass cliffs serves to underline two important points: that "opportunity" is not the same as "equal opportunity'; and that having a more inclusive playing field doesn't necessarily mean that the field is any more level.'

How is this current state of affairs to be changed? Counter intuitively, purely increasing the number of women in top jobs may be no solution at all. In a recent opinion piece ‘Wake up. Feminism is more than just capitalism with tits’, Zoe Williams used the phrase 'men with tits' to describe the results of a pure numbers-led approach -whereby we perceive that having some high profile women in positions of power is satisfactory, even if they must perform as 'men' at work and still fulfil 'female' obligations at home. Her point is that this does little to change the status quo
-with the added demands and restrictions it places on women -and diminishes us all.

According to the Equal Opportunities Commission, there is still a huge 'chores gap': women still spend 78 percent more time than men doing housework. Not only this, the CIPD has noted that, 'A man who takes the afternoon off to see his son's sports day is seen as a great dad, and admired for putting family commitments high on his agenda. A woman who takes the afternoon off to take her daughter to the orthodontist is seen as not having an effective back-up nanny or childcare system in place.'

If gender roles aren't examined, then it ends up working against women. In both ways: at work they must act like a man to progress but still suffer being undermined whenever they seek to gain the benefits, and then at home find themselves still doing the majority of the' woman's work' too.

This 'essentialisation' of men and women as different (as if we could, with the vast diversity of human experiences and societies know if and what differences truly exist) -of limiting what we think men and women should be and do in society-always plays into the hands of the conservatives, the ones who want men to act 'like men' and women to act 'like women'.

As opposed to blindly seeking to fulfil job quotas ('eight women needed there, six there... '), it's much more constructive to look at changing organisational cultures. Much better to rethink how gendered are our expectations of people. When we think we know what constitutes the 'best person for the job' perhaps it's time to think again. There are always sets of value judgements underlying 'best' and 'worst' -and when best means 'most like me' or' most likely to fit into the current organisation' then there is most definitely room for fresh ideas.

In the current environment, talk about increasing flexible working possibilities
for women is counterproductive: it still capitulates to the idea that women should be homemakers or full-time mothers as well as full-time workers. Both men and women should have equal opportunities for flexible working: with opportunity comes responsibility. Why is so little expected of men and child rearing that they are only given two weeks statutory paternity leave, 'to support the mother following birth',
where as women can take up to a year's maternity leave. A system such as this reinforces traditional divisions between the sexes, diminishing the nurturing expectations placed on men and increasing them on women. Recent research commissioned by Citrix Online has shown that some employers have become increasingly hesitant to employ women since the latest raft of maternity leave legislation.

If women have to act like men at the top then equality will never be achieved. Being a woman will bear against them at some point. Dianah Worman, CIPD Diversity Adviser, points out that, 'The "glass cliff" is not specific to women but also affects those who do not meet the standard idea of a heterosexual, white male workforce...simply seeking to fix the numbers through targets, will not deliver lasting results in creating a more diverse workforce.

We cannot and should not depend on legislation as the only lever for making progress. Research shows that leading edge employers on diversity don't just
seek to comply with the law but tailor good employment and working practices to support business goals.'

Getting away from macho work cultures concerned with internal politics between privileged members of a narrow demographic is imperative. Instead work environments should be driven by output and fresh approaches as this is good for business as well as for society. By questioning and then removing tired and old fashioned expectations and restrictions in the work place, we can begin to make the stereotype of the white middle-aged CEO a meaningless thing of the past.