Working in a man's world

Chris Parry, executive chairman, of the Centre for High Performance Development, explores the challenges women face when they are reaching for the top in a male-dominated business world.

The recent Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC) report ‘Sex and Power 2007’ has once again highlighted the lack of women at the top in British life.  The imbalance stretches across all areas of business, into politics and the judiciary.  Women represent just 10% of directors at FTSE 100 companies, and barely 20% of Members of Parliament.  The EOC claims that we would need to find nearly 6,000 women who are currently ‘missing’ from the top positions of power in Britain today to shatter this ‘glass ceiling’.  So what is going on around the executive floors to prevent women from reaching the positions of power?

The first thing do is to put the capability question to bed once and for all.  Our research shows that when you look at the behaviours needed for high performance leadership in the business world – things like strategic thought, relationship building, influence, power and communication - women actually have a higher overall average capability than men.  So why aren’t the equally if not more capable people in society, running the show? 

I believe, and this is based on our experience of diversity work across many major British institutions, that the solution is two-fold; firstly, to help women work more effectively in male-dominated organisations and secondly to change the dominant culture that explicitly or implicitly discriminates against women.

A recent insight from one of our diversity programmes sheds some light on the challenges women face. A group of male managers at an investment bank were sharing with the reasons they believed women weren’t joining them at the top.  The group of 12 men was a very diverse bunch.  They were very different in their style and personality; some confident extroverts, others serious and thoughtful, one unorthodox and opinionated and others still, highly conservative.  In fact, the only thing they had in common was that they were all bankers working for the same firm. 

The group discussion turned to some of the organisation’s female employees.  These were women just one or two rungs down the career ladder from our male bankers.  One woman was criticised for not being demanding enough of people who didn’t deliver.  Another woman was described as being ‘hard-assed’ and difficult.  Perhaps this woman had listened to one of your commentators who thought the reason women weren’t making it to the top “had something to do with aggression; you could teach intelligent women to be assertive, but with men it came naturally.”

But the men in our session didn’t actually want women to ‘act like men’.  When the discussion turned what the investment bank could do to address the lack of women at the top, several said they were not in favour of anything that ‘turned the women into men’.

What became increasingly evident to me from this session was that there is a very narrow bandwidth of acceptable behaviour for many women in the workplace.  Men have greater freedom to express their different personalities as long as they deliver the goods, women are heavily scrutinised and criticised if they stray outside the narrow bandwidth of acceptable behaviour defined by their male bosses.

This is not an isolated case in my experience of boardrooms and senior teams.  It may not be expressed explicitly most of the time, but in many organisations the ‘way you need to be to get on around here’ can directly prevent women from achieving senior positions. 

So what can women do?  If they simply wait for the freedom to express their own personalities and achieve results in their own way, then the EOC could be waiting a very long time to see some better numbers for its report.  Some organisations are addressing the diversity issue seriously and at a cultural level, but they are few and far between.  While the bandwidth of acceptable behaviour grows, women will have to continue to operate in a business world that is slightly alien to their ‘natural’ behaviours. 

Our challenge is to help women understand and operate more effectively in this ‘alien’ environment while affect organisational change so that equally capable women have the freedom to express their personalities and deliver the goods to the same degree as their male colleagues.

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