I am 50 this week. What would be my best present? More women.
I am 50 this week. I am taking much comfort from recent headlines declaring that “over 50 year olds are back in vogue at work”. Apparently Mcdonalds and Halfords have fired up big recruitment campaigns to entice older workers back from partial retirement or to consider a change of sector later in life.
This is good news and I don't say so from an entirely selfish perspective. An exodus of older employees post pandemic is one of the reasons we are facing such a significant skills shortage and tightening of the labour force. However, there is another underutilized segment of the population that is also on my mind as I hurtle towards my birthday - women.
I wish it was still not necessary to write about the chronic lack of progress in the many aspects of business life that affects women, but it is. I am sure you have a sense of the dearth of female executives just by reading this paper. There are masses of data but two points haunt me. Firstly, I saw Vivian Hunt, a very impressive and rare senior black executive at McKinsey present their research on how long it will take by sector for women to be at parity with men. As someone who has built my career around technology, I was monumentally depressed when she revealed that under current trends this will never happen in the sector. And yet this is one of the fastest growing and most powerful forces globally. Secondly, I follow the money - only 2% of venture capital funding goes to women in the UK. Yet estimates suggest £13 trillion would be added to the global economy if there was increased equality for women at work. The issue is not just one of justice but also of good business.
As I hit my significant milestone, I am thinking about the question I have been asked more than any other through the decades. “I get the equality issue, I want to do something about it, but what?”
There is no silver bullet. If only I could have replied to all the questions with “do this one thing” but that is not reality. The truth is that the work required to change the metrics is detailed, often mundane and does not lend itself to quick wins or immediate press releases. Here are three suggestions.
Firstly, it is worth looking carefully at every part of the lifecycle of your business. For example, how you write job specs. It has been shown that men apply more to jobs where a list of skills is detailed, but women apply more to jobs where the problems you want to solve are detailed. A tech startup I know changed the job advert from “must know python, java and c++” to “will be working on solving inefficiencies in the documentation and storage of complex healthcare records”. They saw a 30% increase in applications from women.
I have never forgotten the ex-boss of the National Grid, Steve Holliday, telling me how they improved their numbers of senior women. They found that women were failing to get promotions and bonuses because of the way the appraisal system worked. Women were consistently marking themselves lower in achievement of their objectives - even when they had reached a hard target such as a sales number, often citing collaboration “I didn’t achieve this without help”.This underscoring had consequences through the whole chain and meant women were not being seen as successful and not being promoted. It is vital to look in detail at the data in your business and make sure you are drawing the right conclusions from it.
Secondly, although I am not a massive fan of business maxims, “you can't be what you can't see” has always rung true to me. If you have no women on your board or your executive team and you do not go into the forums where women are considering career development, then you are at a disadvantage. There are so many incredible networks right now - there is more organized discussion and action than at any time I can remember so it is important to engage. There are small informal networks like EQL:HER and ‘Adas list’ or there are professional commercial services such as ‘25x25’ who work intensely with companies. Getting involved and getting into new networks is key. There has never been a better time to connect into all the energy around the issue.
Finally, with the world of hybrid work firmly here to stay, there should be multiple opportunities to offer the flexibility that many women value. There can be no better inspiration for this than the extraordinary company of several thousand women built by Dame Stephanie `Stevie’ Shirley in the late 1980s. Way before a pandemic forced us to be more creative, Stevie set up a business employing only women, all working from home and all writing code. No wishy washy projects for her team - they were responsible for the black box software in Concorde and the Polaris submarine. Stevie is a remarkable entrepreneur, who showed what was possible but who is not nearly famous enough and far less copied than she should have been.
Recently I mentored a brilliant woman who had designed a new product for elderly care. Her pitch was great. At the end of the presentation she gave to investors, there were no questions. There was just one comment “Can I say what a lovely voice you have?”.
Having survived half a century, I too have just one comment - what would actually be lovely would be if we didn’t have to write articles like this anymore.