Leadership & Key Attributes of Successful UK Female Leaders

Panalists:

Elizabeth Coffey (The Change Partnership)
Meryl Bushell (BT)
Tina Gaudoin (iVillage)
Anne Quinn (BP)
Caroline Waters (BT)
Lucy P. Marcus (Marcus Venture Consulting)
Lesley Galvin (General Motors)
Serena Doshi (Live4now.com)
Gill Rider (Accenture)
Lis Astall (Accenture)

Some of the questions discussed:

What more can be done in British companies to encourage women to take on positions of power?
How can British companies take advantage of the difference in gender leadership styles to maximize goals?
How can women maximize their potential in a business environment?
How effective are women perceived to be if they don’t play the male game?
Which male leaders demonstrate characteristics that you admire and what are they?
Can you teach leadership or is it something you are born with?

Key UK & US Facts

From the FTSE Female Index, September 2000

Of the FTSE 100 companies, only 55 have a female board member.
Pearson’s has the greatest number of female board members in the FSTE 100, with 2 out of 8.
Females have only a total of 5% representation on the boards of the FTSE 100.

Quotes from Computer Economics Inc

Too many women have the view that if they kick up a fuss they might damage their career, and that the best approach is simply to be very good at what they do and be one of the boys: results should speak for themselves.
Britain is ranked 5th after Japan, US, Canada and Australia for offering the best conditions for the emergence of female entrepreneurs that will make significant economic impact using the internet in the next five years.

From The Women’s Unit – Facts and Figures 2000

Women on the web have risen from 18% to 46%, men have risen from 27% to 51%. Women focus on Products and Service information / Job information / Health and Medical information / news.
As women have become more economically active (1971 – 56%, 1999 – 72%), men have become less active (1971 – 91%, 1999 – 84%). Therefore, women are vital to the UK economy.
The percentage of women returning to work full/part-time 9-11 months after the birth of their child has increased from 45% in 1988 to 67% in 1996. A third of these are full-time.
Men work, on average, more hours than women.
Women still dominate clerical-secretarial (26% of employed women) and Personnel – Protective (17% of employed women), while men dominate Managers – Administration (19% of men employed), Craft – Other Related (17% of men employed) and Plant – Machine Operated (15% of men employed) roles.
In 1999 almost twice as many men as women were Managers and Administrators
More women than men have flexibility in their work (24.2% vs 15.1%). Hours being the largest area of flexibility for full time women and term time being the largest area of flexibility for part time women.
Men remain dominant in Info and Computer Technology (66% vs 26%).
By 1999 women’s hourly earnings were 84% of men’s, but part-timers earn 70% of what full time women earn.
In the 1997 election, 120 women were in the House of Commons (18% of total, double that elected in 1992). Of 87 ministers, 29 are women. Five of 22 cabinet ministers are women – versus a maximum of two in any post-war government previously.

The Harvard Business Review, Modest Manifesto for shattering the glass ceiling by Debra Meyerson & Joyce Fletcher

Women have made gains but as we enter the year 2000 the glass ceiling remains.
What will it take to finally shatter [the glass ceiling]? Not a revolution. Not this time. In 1962, 1977 and even 1985, the women’s movement used radical rhetoric and legal action to drive out overt discrimination, but most of the real barriers that persist today are insidious – a revolution couldn’t find them to blast away. Rather gender discrimination now is so deeply embedded in organisational life as to be virtually indiscernible. That is why we believe that the glass ceiling will be shattered in the new millennium only through a strategy that uses small wins – incremental changes aimed at biases so entrenched in the system that they’re not even noticed until they’re gone. Our research shows that the small-wins strategy is a powerful way of chipping away the barriers that hold women back without sparking the kind of sound and fury that scares people into resistance.

Marketing Business, April 2001, Quote from Miriam Catterall, Senior Lecturer at the Queen’s University of Belfast

Gender related problems are often perceived as a personal inadequacy, an admission of failure, of not being up to the challenge of working in a man’s world. Who is to say whether they might not be the product of wider structural and idealogical circumstances?
“The argument that I would put forward is that the issue of a glass ceiling is less of a problem than gender segregation,” says Catterall. “There are certain jobs, even within progressions, which tend to be seen as women’s work. This applies across all industries and progressions – it is not unique to marketing or management. Those sections that women work in can be quite high up the corporate ladder but they are almost like gender ghettos, with some seen as women’s and others as men’s work.”

The Observer, 25 March 2001, Why sexual equality is still a joke

This lack of belief in equality is starkly exposed by what has happened to women in the 25 years since the Sex Discrimination and Equal Pay Acts became law. Sadly not much, as this week’s White Paper on equal opportunities will doubtless declare. The bad fact remains – on average, women earn 18 per cent less than men.
Men dominate the old institutions of power, ranging from the judiciary to the boardroom, and they dominate the new institutions of power, ranging from the media to the informal networks of the ICT revolution.
The lack of a critical mass of senior women from whom the next generation of organisational leaders can be recruited means that the poverty of women’s representation becomes self-sustaining.

US Leadership Statistics (extract from Women.Future Take Away Materials)

Women In Business

46.5% of U. S. labor force
49.5% of managerial and professional specialty positions
11.7% of Fortune 500 board directors
12.5% of Fortune 500 corporate officers… up from 11.9% in 1999

1,622 out of 12,945
6.2% of Fortune 500 highest titles… up from 5.1% in 1999
154 of the 2,488 individuals holding clout titles: chairman, CEO, vice chairman, president, COO, SEVP, EVP
4.1% of Fortune 500 top earners… up from 3.3% in 1999
93 out of 2,255
2 Fortune 500 CEOs
Carleton S. Fiorina of Hewlett-Packard
Andrea Jung of Avon Products