why have women left management?

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Dr David Paul, feminine leadership, Gina Lazenby, where are the women leaders?, where are the women on boards?, women in business, women in management, women leaders, women leaving management, women on boards

The third video in the series of conversations on Feminine Leadership with Dr David Paul…

While I was in Australia a report was issued by the Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency presenting census data from the last decade showing what little progress women have made in the upper ranks of corporate Australia. Subsequent media coverage trumpeted the headline:  ‘Reform Key to Women’s Progress.’ Unless something radically different is done, most commentators were saying that change is just never going to happen.

 

63% of the top 500 companies had no female senior execs at all
63% of the top 500 companies (on the Australian Stock Exchange) had no female senior execs. None. And Australia trails its overseas peers with only 9.2% of female board directors (in ASX500 companies). Compare with the UK which has just 13.2% of females on the boards of the top 250 FTSE companies and 16.5% in the USA on Fortune 500 company boards.
The CEO of ANZ Bank Mike Smith was quoted as saying  ”More radical approaches are called for … to drive more women into senior leadership positions … Businesses need to take the time to understand what is needed and  take direct action to ensure more women thrive and advance in our workplaces”.

It is clear that companies need to implement structural change to appoint and develop strong pipelines of female talent.  When a top male leadership team wakes up to the shifts happening across the planet and decides to appoint women they find the queue of women waiting outside the boardroom door has gone. Those who were actually waiting for a boardroom place probably weren’t standing in the line anyway, but they became impatient and left .. some went downstairs and elsewhere in the organisation to part-time roles so they could juggle family life, others walked out the building, some even left their industry … all so that they could find other creative, flexible, more rewarding and nourishing ways to express themselves and make a living.

Why are there less women in management waiting for those top positions?
I asked Dr David Paul why he thought there were less women in management and therefore not waiting in the pipeline of talent for the top jobs. His response is captured  in third video in the second series of conversations on Feminine Leadership.

David said that women have realised that they don’t want to play the male political game anymore, they just want to do the job, get on with it and get home. They don’t want to spend every night working late as many executives are unreasonably expected to do. The masculine culture does not work for them so they seek employment elsewhere often starting their own enterprises. Certainly in the UK & USA, women are behind more start-ups than men. David says this is a huge loss of talent which also impacts the culture of a business when senior and promising women leave.

“There’s a huge gap and now we’ve gone back to the military style of leadership which is, you’ve got a general at the top and we’ve got all the forces down below. Whereas now, we’ve passed that metaphor. We need to say, “How can we partner? How can we expand? How can we grow together?  I think part of the problem with women’s slow progress, with some of the articles that we’re seeing, is that men are fearful of what do we have to give up. Women are fearful of what do we have to give in to?”

What we need in order to see more women stay in management is a whole culture change. Even the chief executive of the ANZ, Mike Smith, is talking about taking a radical approach. We need to involve women in creating a culture change. What’s up for reinvention is the whole nature of work and finding a way to make it a more nourishing and compassionate workspace for women and men.

David continued, “I have a feeling that if women were at senior levels, they would say, “Let’s all take a pay cut at the senior levels but let’s keep the people that we have.” I’m not talking about the corporate deadwood. I’m talking about people who actually add value to the organisation.   I think we need to smash the notion of thinking outside the box, as well. What we need to do is smash the box and start with a completely new shape and say, “What can we create together?”

The article headline in The Australian newspaper says “Reform key to women’s progress”. Let’s take this a step further and turn this the other way round … women ARE the key to reform. Do you agree?

Dr David Paul is a Sydney-based expert in global leadership and complex change.

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More women needed on Boards

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Dr David Paul, feminine leadership, Gina Lazenby, women on boards, women's confidence

Here is the second video in the series on Feminine Leadership taken from my discussions in Sydney with Dr David Paul, a professor of, and expert in, leadership and complex change.    I’ve had really great feedback from the first one that went out last week: thank you for sharing all your positive comments with me.

This segment of our conversation is where we talk about getting more women onto company boards and later David shares some practical ways that women can have more influence in creating the change that the world needs.

Much has been written about the glass ceiling that is keeping women out of the top echelons of power in corporations.  In March this year, the UK’s Cranfield School of Management said that the percentage of women on the boards of the UK’s 100 largest-listed companies had risen over the past year to a record 15.6%, from 12.5% the year before. Numbers are inching forward it seems but still painfully low although in Germany and Australia numbers have gone down and in Italy half the companies still have no female directors at all.

I think there are many reasons why women are not there in greater numbers and it’s not just because the influential chairmen and male directors don’t invite them. Apart from the fewer opportunities, I think that there are less women ready and available at that level for selection.

In the video David talks about women not feeling confident. It’s a sentiment echoed by Financial Times columnist Heather MacGregor who wrote an article earlier this year in the FT magazine about eight women role models who successfully developed careers that have led them to Board level. Heather said that women often ask “Am I capable?” a question she says, most men wouldn’t even think of asking!  Lyn Wood, a high-flying exec in Australia was quoted in the Sunday Life news magazine as saying that “women lack the confidence to aim for the top job ….. if you don’t believe in yourself others won’t either”.

Why do we doubt ourselves? I hear it all the time when I talk with women in women’s gatherings all over the world. It’s not every woman but it seems that no matter how successful a woman can be, many still have a nagging self doubt. I think in a world where the male gender has been, and in many respects still is, more important than the female and where opportunities for women, particularly in government and corporations, are only available when men give way or allow us to rise.  This seems to gives men an in-born sense of entitlement (both conscious and unconscious) that most of us women just don’t feel. Elizabeth Broderick, Australia’s Sex Discrimination Commissioner, talks about a “belief barrier” in Australia of deeply ingrained cultural beliefs “that a good mum should be at home with the kids, and that the ideal worker is available 24/7, has no visible caring responsibilities and is usually male”.

WATCH VIDEO:  Gina Lazenby in conversation with Dr David Paul, 2nd video in the series of seven

You read anywhere the advice given by other women about how they rose to the top and they will talk about sacrifice, difficult choices and the need to work hard and prove their competence. When you hear that you know that women are trying to fit in to a corporate world that was designed over the last century by men and for men (all of whom had the support of wives back home until the last few decades). Women may be working within that system now in huge numbers but we did not create the culture – we are simply adapting to a masculine culture which I don’t believe serves the women or the men who have to operate inside it. People seem to survive corporate life, but few really thrive in it. Time and again in our women’s circles, talented, professional women share how they opted out because they could not cope with the culture and could not align with the values. All that is bound to undermine us and dent our confidence.

I could write so much more here but right now I am really interested to hear of your experience and whether you feel confidence has ever been an issue for you? Has a lack of self-belief ever shown up in your life, and how?  It has certainly been an issue for me and during these last few years I have been exploring its roots as I have questioned what it is I am here to do. I’ve been examining how I have developed a set of soft skills which aren’t always visible and are therefore don’t seem to be valued. That makes it hard for me to fully appreciate what I am good at!

Does that resonate for you at all?

David goes on to talk about the need for women to initiate transformative conversations to accelerate change.  He shares some practical ways in which we can do that. He reinforces that necessary changes usually only take effect when initiated at the grassroots level which forces the leadership at the top to listen and follow. Right now, when the world is looking for new answers, he says the new ideas will come from women.  So there is a clear message here for us to raise our own levels of self belief and lead from our inner power. WATCH THE VIDEO