HOW TO GET MORE WOMEN INTO MANAGEMENT

Kate Mingay: I think it’s going to be really hard to change. It’s the same for men in those kind of positions as it is for women. One of my closest friends her husband has a board level position and he works ridiculous hours. How his children are older he will normally get to see them before they go to bed, but certainly when they were younger he wouldn’t see them from one day to the next. And, you know, after five years of doing that his wife’s like ‘hello, you still have a family, you’ve missed them growing up’, you know, and it is a problem and unfortunately I really don’t know how you will ever – if you’re going to go for that kind of position I think you do have to be fairly driven, male or female, you’ve got to be fairly driven, and odds are that you’re going to find more chaps who have that kind of drive to succeed than you will do women.

Martina Hornickova: That’s the biggest question of all basically, do you want to sacrifice your family life for your career, that’s the question everyone asks themselves. And if you want to do that, you’re willing to do that, you can go places. Every woman can have as high a career, as good a career as guys can, but do they really want to? I wouldn’t want to be the best in the world and not have a life or not have a private life and children and everything. So I think it’s the choice, and most guys, as I said, they want to have children, they want to have family life, so they’d obviously rather see more of the woman at home in the evening having dinner with them rather than sitting in the office and being some important managing director. So that’s what it’s about – it’s either, is it going to be a family? Or is it going to be a career? So I, somehow I think it must be very, very difficult to have both if you’re really in high places and talking about directors and managing directors of big companies. It’s not a job from 9 to 5 basically.

Cobi Smith: Hello and welcome to the SETwomen podcast, I’m Cobi Smith. You’ve just heard from Kate Mingay, who runs a chemical distribution company, followed by Martina Hornickova, who runs a software business. They were talking about why there are less women in management – not only in science, engineering and technology, but in most industries.

Bev Hurley: In employment it’s quite different from being in enterprise, and there’s a world of difference between going along, doing your job really well and getting a pay cheque at the end of the month, than being responsible for putting the pay cheques into your employees’. It all kind of gets mixed up together actually, but when you have to go and sell enough to generate revenue and profit so that you can pay staff and to have more profit to put in towards growth, that’s a kind of a bit of a relentless treadmill I think. Unless you’ve got a world-beating product, the cure for cancer, when people will just, you know, bite your arm off as soon as you get out the door. And most businesses aren’t like that, you know, most SET businesses run by women are often small-scale consulting sort of enterprises, and for those women who are commercialising science or technology, which is where there may be some big money, then they come across the dilemmas of the whole childcare, husbands, joint careers, all that sort of stuff. So I think making it easier when you get to the top is good, but it will have much more impact on women in employment than it does in enterprise.

Cobi Smith: That’s Bev Hurley, CEO of two companies, one focused on marketing science and technology. She points out that women aren’t necessarily motivated to run businesses for financial gain – and their achievements in running businesses aren’t necessarily measured by profit either.

Bev Hurley: Growth means so many different things. Growth could mean working two days a week instead of one day a week, or full time instead of part time, or hiring their first person instead of being a one-man band. These are all things that women say ‘yeah, you know, I’m growing my business’, and that’s entirely flexible with child care and running a micro company and staying at that level, it’s fantastic for women to do that, that’s a real area of achievement, where a woman can manage exactly how much she does, work around the kids when they’ve gone to bed. Especially with technology, I mean it’s just such a huge enabler of getting that balance. But there’s an enormous gulf between those sorts of businesses and the 20 million pound turnover companies.

Agnes Aubert: There’s obviously the legacy of the fact that I mean, probably our mother’s generation, certainly our grandmother’s generation, their place was at home to look after the family, which means that that’s not a place where you earn money. So I think it’s part of a legacy of that, you know, it’s difficult to get away from home for some women. And even though they have a job, they still find their home is a priority. There’s also the fact that for women who decide to have children you have to stop part of your life to have the children, and then often after that there is this idea that you actually particularly fancy spending some time with them, so maybe moving from a full-time job into a part-time job, which means that in terms of career progression it’s a little bit trickier, so that’s also another aspect. And I mean some women are not particularly interested in earning money for the sake of earning more and more as they go along. You know a career can be something else besides earning. It can be personal fulfilment. It can be other achievements. So women are I think maybe less driven by finding highly paid jobs. They might have other considerations when it comes to finding a job.

That was Agnes Aubert, who runs an IT training company. Here’s entrepreneurial zoologist Kate Jackson.

Kate Jackson: I think the way we’re encouraged to look at being an entrepreneur encourages men to get involved and discourages women, because the whole Dragon’s Den sort of ethos is it’s all about making as much money as you can, and you know, making as much money as you can then cutting out from that company and selling that one on and buy a new company, and I don’t think that’s really how women’s, you know, minds work. As much as you want to put a lot of effort into a project and see it through, or certainly for me, you know, I’m not interested in it in a business sense in terms of making as much money as possible, I’m interested in what I’m doing, that what I’m doing is doing a good thing, that it’s sustainable, you know, the ethics behind it are totally different and the reasons behind it are different to that mindset and I think women see business as being about that sort of mindset and actually it’s not, or it doesn’t have to be.  

Cobi Smith: So the competitive, aggressive image of running companies and being an entrepreneur can put some women off. Here’s Sally Rose, business development manager for a biotechnology company.

Sally Rose: I’m not quite sure why there are so many men in management positions compared to women because there are so many, you know, good women lower down, why they’re not quite making it to the top. A lot of women tend to be team players and I’m not sure it’s always the team player that rises to the top. It’s more the person that shouts, in some companies.

Sylvia Knight: There can be unpleasant environments that are probably particularly damaging to women if there’s too much of this competition thing – but actually men don’t like that either in many cases. It’s just something that gets out of control and you know, there’s too much of an emphasis on status whether it’s, you know, the best parking sport or the most people to tell what to do.

Cobi Smith: That was Sylvia Knight, lead software engineer in a technology startup. Fiona Marston, CEO of a biotechnology company, doesn’t think it’s easy to change the attitudes of senior managers – if women hit a glass ceiling she suggests they find – our found – a new company.

Fiona Marston: I don’t play politics, so ultimately that’s what’s resulted my leaving companies. I don’t think I’ve ever worked with someone that I really hadn’t got on with add then found a way to change that relationship. And maybe that’s because of the level I’ve worked at. When I was more junior, yeah, I had bosses I had difficult times with, but you try and work those out because, you know, you’ve got to carry on working. When you’re right at the top and there’s nothing else above that, I think you have to make a decision either you put up and shut up and try and do your job well, or you move on.

Cobi Smith: But personalities aren’t the only problem.

Beatrice Leigh: I don’t think that their sexist I think that certain universities, I mean particularly the golden triangle, are very traditional in their approach to everything. And it’s a largely male-dominated organisation. Cambridge I know have taken great strides to try and be more user-friendly towards women. I mean, you know, the classic in the physics department, there weren’t any female loos, right? Because there weren’t any females and chemistry was the same until fairly recently, you’re hard pressed to find a female loo. You used to walk into the reception area in the chemistry department of Cambridge, which is the best chemistry department in the UK, around the walls would be all these photographs of males, very, very significant males from years ago. But I remember discussing it with Jeremy Sanders who has just stepped down as head of department, about what impression that made on the young students, either sex, coming in. And the answer is the wrong impression. I mean they’re very, very famous, it’s part of your history, but you possibly don’t want that as the first thing that the people see when they walk in the door because they’ll be intimidated. That’s now changed. So just little things like that can make the whole environment be more user-friendly I think.

Cobi Smith: That was Beatrice Leigh, CEO of a biotechnology company, on how working environments can impact the likelihood of women getting into senior management. Working cultures, personalities and work environments are all things women think could be improved to allow more women into senior management roles. But by far the most important problem they see is the incompatibility of running a family and running a business.

Jeanette Milbourn: If you’re seen as a mother who’s taken time out, in the past you were certainly seen as someone who’d given up, didn’t see work as important, which I think’s very unjust. If you’ve had a long career break people are less likely to take you back at the level you were at before. You might get a job but it would be at a lower level.

Cobi Smith: That was regulatory affairs consultant Jeanette Milbourn. Here’s physicist Berenice Mann.

Berenice Mann: I think you have to accept that you don’t have to do a job five days a week in order to be good at it and to be doing it well. You know, you have to accept that some of these positions could be run part-time – it’s very difficult for people to admit that because it’s almost like saying, well, you know, I could do this in three days if I really put my mind to it, and it’s not always true. But you know, there are plenty of ways, you could job share with someone, or you know, you could actually do a slightly lesser role but still be the manager, kind of thing, and still work – I think you’ve got to allow for the fact that people don’t always want to work you know, 12 hours a day, five days a week in order to be a manager, and I think if people are looking to go into those roles and that’s what they see as a potential they might have to do in the future that would put women off more than it would men.

Jenny Koenig: I can see it from both points of view. You can imagine if you’re working for a small business and somebody says they’ve got to leave at three o’clock every day and an important phone call comes in at two minutes to three from a client which could mean getting the work or not getting the work, you know there’s going to be that pressure really, and if you’re not seen to be pulling your weight. You can understand why employers are very reluctant. But I think the flipside of it is that often when you’re working part-time like that, you’re doing it because you’re really motivated. You’re doing it because you want to work, not because you feel you have to or something. And so you get people who are very much more committed, so I find myself, even though I do leave at quarter to three and I pick up the kids and take them home, I might be giving them their bath and sort of ticking over in my mind about a particular problem. And I’ve just had a bit of time to think about it and settle it in and actually, by the next day I’ve come up with a much better solution than I would have had if I’d worked on it, you know, if I’d stayed at work until five o’clock and tried to finish it then. So there are different ways of working. But they are more challenging to manage and I think in the cases where I’ve seen people who are part time who are unhappy, both from the point of view of the employer and the employee, it’s usually because the whole process of going to part-time working has not been very well managed. I think we need to spend a lot more time and effort thinking about how that management process can happen. I remember going for a job interview, it was a full-time job, and I wanted to try and find out how flexible they were likely to be. And I asked them the question, ‘how do you work out somebody’s productivity?’ ‘How do you find out how hard somebody’s working? ‘What are your ways of doing it?’ And they looked at me blankly, and obviously the answer was, well, if you’re there, you’re working. But you might not be working very effectively. And something that a lot of women who work part-time will say is that actually, they’re doing as much work as they were before, they’re just a hell of a lot more efficient about it. And I get really cross when I see, you know, people who are full-time browsing the internet at work, and chatting and gossiping over coffee and all sorts of stuff and I’m in there beavering about running, being very efficient and getting the job done. I just do it in fewer hours.

Jenny Koenig there, who runs a science education consultancy. W may be getting too far ahead of ourselves here talking about working part-time. In some workplaces even full time isn’t enough. Working mothers are disadvantaged when work is about putting in the hours, rather than being productive, as Berenice Mann discovered.

Berenice Mann: There are two issues. One is, can you do a full-time job part-time? A lot of people who work part-time actually complain that they’re still doing their full-time job but in three days instead of five, or whatever it is. And I think the other issue is, in this country we have huge amounts of what I would call presenteeism, which means, you know, you’re kind of expected to be in at eight and not leave till eight. When I was there, I mean I’m sure this counted against me in some ways, my son was in nursery, and the nursery shuts at six, so there’s no way I can still be at work at six. I had to go off and pick him up, you know, leave at half past five or whatever to get to the nursery to pick him up every night without fail, you know, somebody has to do that. But I’m sure, you know, the actual big boss of that company was one of these people who expects people to be there after six and still working away ‘oh we’ve got a big project to do’, blah de blah, and quite often my team would be there working late, they’d come in very early or they’d work late and stuff, so you know, it was not particularly brilliant to feel you’re dashing off early when everyone else is still there. It doesn’t make you feel good in yourself, even though you’ve done all your work and actually they’re perfectly okay getting on with what they’re doing. And I think that’s a huge problem, I don’t know how anyone is going to address that in this country, I have plenty of friends whose husbands you know don’t get in until eight or nine at night just because that is what they’re expected to do. It doesn’t give us more productivity, we’ve actually got lower productivity than countries where they go home at six o’clock every night. It’s just people sitting at their desks basically. It probably means we don’t do efficient working during the hours we are there, if you’re doing that sort of length of time you couldn’t possibly keep up a really efficient level of working for twelve hours a day. I think that needs to be addressed more than anything else.

Cobi Smith: At least two of the women running companies I interviewed worked part-time, so it is possible. It’s just not very common. So it this something that could be changed? And if so, how?

Suzy Lynch: Show how it can work. Look, this is how it can work. It’s not just legislation, it’s actually making it clear and how you get over some of the obstacles and some real life examples would help people think. Because I think when you’ve seen somebody else do it then everybody else is more willing to give it a go. Nobody really wants to be the first to give it a go and struggle.

Fiona Marston: As long as your team around you are there to support you while you’re doing it part-time, you know, part-time permanent. I think it would be difficult for a growing company to have a part-time CEO permanently, in the early days actually you do only need a part-time CEO, in fact a company can’t afford to have you full-time, but in many instances yes, CEO positions in some respects are ideal for women if you’ve got the skill and the capability.

Cobi Smith: That was Suzy Lynch, a manufacturing consultant, followed by Fiona Martson again. And here’s Annabel Sedgwick, who runs a science communications business.

Annabel Sedgwick: Let’s give them some examples. Let’s do some case studies of companies like mine where it does work, you know it completely works. I’m obviously director, I’m managing director I’m also a director of the company and there’s another director of the company, we both work four day weeks, it works absolutely fine. We’ve got, you know, two other mums there, both of whom do flexible hours, we’ve got – everybody works flexible hours. The accounts people, they do flexible time. And let’s show these people some examples of companies where the productivity’s very high, the profits are good, the company’s growing, where there’s very low staff turnover, where the staff are generally pretty happy – very happy in fact – and show them some examples, some case studies, and say well look. In your company you’ve got all these problems. Huge staff turnover. You’re not being as profitable. You don’t feel people are being productive. People don’t knuckle down, they don’t feel motivated. The staff morale is low, blah blah blah. You need more women (laughs), and just show them how it can be done.

Cobi Smith: This has been the SETwomen podcast, funded by the East of England Development Agency and YTKO. I’m Cobi Smith, thanks for listening.

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