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ОглавлениеWOMEN AT WORK: THE WAY IN, THE WAY UP AND THE WAY FORWARD
The career paths of a great many of today’s women managers often seem to have their beginnings rooted in a haphazard past. In the early 1960s, when I sat my A levels and wondered what I was going to do next, the career counsellors at my grammar school concluded that I was not university material and suggested I went to secretarial college. The choice was that or teacher training college or becoming a nurse. I believed the counsellors when they said I wasn’t clever enough to go to university, and having no idea of what the future might hold and feeling relieved to have got that far anyway, I went along with the idea of doing a one-year secretarial course in London.
For me the secretarial route proved to be an excellent way of moving into junior management and large numbers of my contemporaries (many of whom are now public figures) followed the same path. Today many parents actively dissuade their daughters from taking a secretarial course, primarily because they still perceive the role of secretary as the demeaning stereotype, or because they believe it has no prospects for a ‘proper’ job. Perhaps with more people learning keyboard skills within a job, good secretarial training – and the accompanying self-organization skills – are not seen to be as important in the workplace as they once were.
Another traditional way into management was via personnel and training and, until recently, many senior women in the private sector represented the human resources field. Some took the secretarial administration route, while others began as graduate trainees, choosing personnel as their preferred specialism. While personnel was somehow understood to be less ‘difficult’ than other areas of a company, and the ‘sharing and caring’ skills of personnel were always seen to be the preserve of women, it is now quite usual to find women managers in all other aspects of business, such as engineering, finance, law and marketing.
In the public sector, the health service has a markedly different male/female ratio among its managers from that of the private sector. This does not automatically mean that women have an easier time moving up the career structure, but it does indicate that they are probably more experienced at working with male colleagues who are, in turn, more used to working with women. ‘One of the reasons I have enjoyed working in the NHS is because I have always felt that equal recognition is given to good managers, regardless of their sex. There are excellent managers of both sexes in the NHS – it is very much up to the individuals to create their own opportunities.’
Many of the women managers I have met from the NHS, or local authorities, have spent the greater part of their working lives within the same organization, but have regularly changed jobs within it. They have gained invaluable experience from this, especially in learning how to keep an eye open for appropriate openings and in seizing any available opportunity for advancement and personal development.
As I mentioned in the introduction, there are increasing numbers of women who will no longer tolerate a strictly male management environment. But, having challenged the ‘jobs for the boys’ culture and moved up the corporate ladder, then many women, halfway through their careers, opt out.
Why do so many women having made it to middle management fail to take their careers and their management skills any further up the corporate ladder? The explanations for this include: lack of confidence and not pushing themselves forward; career breaks; the glass ceiling; not going on courses; being late developers (recognizing their abilities at a later stage than their male contemporaries); and being unwilling to play internal politics or ‘men’s games’.
The main points characterizing women’s current positions as managers, particularly those over 35, seem to be:
career counselling, coaching and mentoring were not nearly as sophisticated in the early 1960s–70s as they are now
the range of available jobs has broadened out immeasurably due to change in society’s attitudes generally, self-confidence and aspirations of individuals
for many managers in their late thirties/forties/fifties, the career path to management is haphazard/snakes and ladders, with the necessary skills being picked up along the way
nowadays, careers are and have to be better planned, with the emphasis on an open mind. This means focusing on acquiring skills through experience and training rather than aiming for a particular job level in one particular industry
Women managers identify four main reasons for late entry into managerial roles, or for slow progress in achieving their career goals:
Attitudes of organizations and managers (male and female)
Lack of career guidance/career goals
Family pressures and expectations
Personal limitations
Attitudes of organizations and managers
Not surprisingly, women have found it particularly hard to progress within traditionally male-dominated cultures and organizational structures. They talk of ‘men and their perceptions of who and what is needed and the way to do things’. One human resources specialist spoke of ‘a company culture which is particularly hierarchical, conservative and control-oriented. This has made life difficult for me, given that my career has been about valuing human resources as a strategic and developmental activity.’
Women may come up against male prejudices at work in all manner of guises. Organizations which operate graduate traineeships and management schemes for ‘high fliers’ often tend to favour male Oxbridge graduates. One woman who was employed by such a company realized that being female and coming from an ex-polytechnic was so abhorrent to one of the male managers that he consequently successfully obstructed her progress within the company.
During my research, I heard numerous examples whereby male managers had deliberately excluded women colleagues from management team meetings, or had discussed important issues away from formal meetings so that women were not involved. Such feelings of discomfort and threat or fear of the unknown are experienced by many men when they face working closely with women – possibly for the first time – and they may employ tactics such as using their stronger, louder voices to drown out female colleagues in an attempt to halt their contributions. It is not unusual for the credit of a woman’s work to be taken by her male boss or colleague, but it is becoming less acceptable to excuse such behaviour on the grounds of male feelings of jealousy or vulnerability, or because men are assumed to be following their instincts to dominate, protect and provide.
One woman’s experience was:
‘There were two male managers who were in competition with each other over my work and resources and over who wanted to use my achievements to advance themselves. They always managed to keep themselves promoted ahead of me so my work could keep pushing them forward.’
A chilling example of some male managers’ attitudes is given by a woman working in the NHS:
‘I was aware there were helpful females in my own organization, but I was actively prevented by male managers from gaining legitimate access to them.’
One common experience shared by women managers is the failure to secure a deserved promotion or a higher level job, knowing that, in spite of the official reasons given, it came down to the fact that they were not male. Specific examples of this emerged from an ambitious local government officer who felt strongly that she would have reached the position of Chief Executive by now if she were a man, and another manager who was told: ‘On the face of it you have everything the job needs, but, you see, it wouldn’t do to have a woman. We’re not ready for that yet’. That was in 1986.
In spite of legislation, these practices still exist, albeit covertly, because employees in less enlightened and open organizations are aware that they could be subjected to charges of sexual discrimination, harassment and so on.
One of this book’s case study interviewees, Carol, had always said that she had rarely come across discrimination, probably because she never expected it, but she does have one personal example which she relates: ‘When the children were younger, I employed a nanny and one day, when she was ill, I grabbed some work and told my boss I had to collect the children. I did the work at home, but when I went back into the office the next day he said, “This is a problem. How do I know that this isn’t going to happen again?” I said, “How dare you. You gave one of the men in the department a week off work because his wife had hurt her back. You were all sympathy for him. The person who was looking after the children was ill – it’s the same situation”. He then saw my point and no more was said.’
Another interviewee, Judy, qualified as a barrister in the late 1970s but found that, in addition to there being too many barristers on the market, there were problems in being a woman in the law. She did not fit in with the stereotype set by the men – nor did she want to. Most of all she disliked the lack of sensitivity towards clients – what she called the ‘legal equivalent of a bedside manner’. When she tried to change the attitudes of those she worked with, she was totally ignored and moved from the legal department of her organization into a management training role. In spite of her many successes, ‘I was starting to experience problems with a boss who was finding my innovative approach both disconcerting and a threat. He realized that women’s issues was a topical subject that he should address but, although I was the only woman in my team with relevant experience of these, I was never asked to contribute’.
At the top of organizations, the unwillingness to appoint women to the board is commonplace. The experience of one director who was not promoted to her board despite seven years on the Group Executive Committee is not unusual. Private sector organizations, in particular, are seen as traditionally conservative, with chairmen appointing fellow board members in their own image – same background, same sex, same education, same professional training, same age. This lack of diversity, however, is now becoming subject to scrutiny and criticism, especially following publications such as the Cadbury Committee report which recommends the widespread use of non-executive, or independent, directors on boards. Growing numbers of experienced, professional women are proving valuable additions to boards across a wide range of business activities.
Yet it is not just the male managers who prove obstructive. Those women who, in the past, felt they could progress within their organizations only by becoming ‘honorary men’ affected other women in two ways. First, as many of them adopted the ‘I reached this position through my own efforts. Why should I help you?’ attitude, they positively impeded their junior colleagues’ progress. Second, this approach deterred many other women from moving forward as it was not seen as an acceptable way of behaving. The role model presented by these power-dressing, aggressive female managers was not perceived as a positive one and other women did not, therefore, feel inclined to apply for more senior jobs.
I was interested to hear one fifty-year-old executive, who is the only woman at her level in the organization, say that she feels she has little in common with other, much younger, female managers and that there are none anywhere near her age or experience. Because of her position she naturally has more contact with her male peers on a day-to-day basis, but she feels she is missing out by not working with other women. One disadvantage of the recent fashion for ‘down-sizing’ and ‘right-sizing’ is that there are signs of a small, but significant, counter-trend where some women have been forced out of top-level posts and those who remain may well find themselves in a similar situation of becoming isolated and lonely. Other women say that in such cases it is the duty of the older female manager to act as a mentor or coach to others as a way of helping them through the organization, as well as keeping in touch with the issues that affect the younger women – such as, how to communicate their opinions and needs in a positive, assertive manner, while maintaining their womenliness; combining home and work; influencing the corporate culture so that men and women value what they each bring to the workplace.
Very few companies provide adequate if any childcare arrangements for their employees. This has a considerable effect on working mothers, who wish to pursue their career but who are not prepared to settle for unsatisfactory childcare facilities in order to continue working. Susan Hay, who founded her own workplace nursery consultancy because she could not find suitable childcare for her own children, has ten years’ experience in this field and knows that the position of working women has been hindered because of the lack of investment in childcare by organizations. ‘Access to childcare, as well as the cost and varying quality of it, has been a major influence on the development and expansion of part-time work for women. This often means that women are working below their abilities because the better jobs are full-time jobs. There is also a tendency for higher-level jobs to be in the key cities and this is not always compatible with acceptable childcare provision.’
The growing importance of childcare issues was underlined in November 1997, when the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, announced the establishment over the next five years of 300,000 ‘After School Clubs’, which will offer places to up to one million children.
Case study – Alison
Alison, 41, is married with no children. She trained as a nurse and worked as a medical secretary, before moving into the field of management education and training. She was the founding director of a medical charity; set up a management consultancy; founded her own charity, Action on Depression; and is Director of the British Vascular Foundation. She was a former Chairman of City Women’s Network, and has served on the Women’s Advisory Panel of Opportunity 2000 and on the board of Fair Play for Women. She is a trained counsellor; Fellow of the RSA; a member of the National Association of Chief Executives of National Voluntary Organizations; and also sits on the board of The International Alliance (a global organization of senior women’s networks).
‘My girls’ public school had few expectations for its pupils and after leaving I became a nurse. I wanted to live in London and to be self-supporting after all the financial sacrifices my parents had made to pay my school fees, but I couldn’t stand the rigid hierarchy at the hospital where I worked and felt totally unstretched intellectually. I realized that I should have read medicine, not nursing, but financially it was not possible to give up work to take the necessary A levels, nor did I have the confidence to make the switch. After qualifying, I became a staff nurse at Guy’s, but at the back of my mind was always the niggling thought – “Is the rest of my life going to be like this?”
‘I decided to give myself a year away from hospitals to see what was happening in the outside world and thought again about studying medicine. I have always regretted not doing it. With the misguided idea that becoming a secretary would be a clear route into management, I enrolled for a six-week typing course and invented my own shorthand. I boldly put myself forward as a medical secretary and went to work in a hospital where I was tucked away in a back office with only the occasional consultant for company. This was not at all exciting – there wasn’t even the patient contact that I had so enjoyed as a nurse. So, making yet another mistake, I joined a firm of accountants because I thought it would be fun in the City. It was very jolly there, but my boss fell in love with me and, as I wasn’t interested and three years of accountants was ample, I left to help set up a private medical screening facility. It was the first of its kind and I soon realized that I actually possessed some entrepreneurial talents and obviously enjoyed starting new projects. However, once it was up and running successfully, I thought, “Where do we go from here? All this experience, no clear career path, no way to use the experience, so what should I do next?”
‘I was twenty-seven, had spent ten years in London and was bored, footloose and fancy free. I had the urge to go abroad again (as the daughter of a naval officer, I travelled a great deal), so I stuck a pin in a map and hit Hong Kong. I had no job planned, nowhere to live and not much money, but six weeks later I was on a plane. Hong Kong is a sink-or-swim place and there is nothing so motivating as having no money. The most useful thing that happened was being introduced to a residential club for business-women, the Helena May, where a group of us shared experiences, jobs, contacts and so on. I nursed for a short while, but felt even more exploited than I had done in the UK, so was soon looking for something else. Through the Helena May network, I went to a cocktail party and met a businessman who ran training courses and who had been badly let down by one of his tutors – who should have been running a programme in China, but had been taken ill. After talking for a while, he asked if I would like to take the tutor’s place – “Can you be on the 8.30 flight tomorrow morning?” Having agreed, I found myself in what felt like the middle of nowhere with sixty hand-picked Chinese executives who were there to learn about Western management methods. It was exciting, frustrating and I loved it. I developed a great love of China, in spite of developing malnutrition, surviving banquets of three-snake casserole and sea cucumber, and went on to learn Mandarin at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Later, I was headhunted to set up the Asian arm of an American computer company and my boss delegated everything so I ran the whole show.
‘Between contracts working in China and return trips to Hong Kong for much needed R&R, I went to a tea party and met my husband. We were married in England while still living in Hong Kong – so don’t ever complain about organizing a big wedding, unless you’ve arranged it from a distance of 8000 miles! I was thirty-three and keen to stay in Hong Kong, but my husband wanted to come home. I had been away for five or six years and felt very out of touch – the sort of things I had been doing were not to be found in the UK. My first mistake was to work with a bunch of cowboys who were establishing a rehabilitation centre. When I realized what they were up to, the matron and I left on the same day.
‘When I later became founding director of a medical charity, the entrepreneurial side of me enjoyed that very much, but the experience was marred by the macho power games always going on. There was only one woman on the board, and there were many conflicts of interests. It is a myth that charity trustees are driven only by altruism. Aware of a crying need for specialists who understand the voluntary sector, two colleagues and I set up a consultancy which offers advice to charities on strategic planning, marketing, trustee selection, training and forth. I did this for three years and am still actively involved, but I missed the hands-on operational side of work and decided to return to being a charity director. In 1995 I was recruited to head up the British Vascular Foundation. Raising funds, launching appeals and so forth – all these involve my skills as a businesswoman and marketing professional.’
Lack of career guidance and career goals
What goals? All too often, at the beginning of their working lives, women have not set themselves clear goals; or, in the case of many women over the past three decades, ‘did not recognize I was setting out on a career’. Although the situation has improved over the last ten years, I still hear many women talking about their schools and the expectations (or lack of them) for the female pupils. The family environment and the school careers advice often reinforced the idea that some kind of professional training (nursing, secretarial, teaching), or perhaps university, would be followed by marriage, homemaking and motherhood as sure as night follows day. What was rare was the chance to look beyond that scenario and consider the different options, including following a life-long career, of not necessarily getting married, of possibly not having children, of changing track if the first choice didn’t work out, or of pursuing several different types of employment.
The paradox here is that in the 1960s and 1970s, when this attitude was still prevalent, there were plenty of jobs for everyone. As Beverley points out, ‘One of the most significant changes from when I was at school and the present day is that we knew we could get a job. That doesn’t happen now.’
Theresa went to ‘a wonderful girls’ school where everyone assumed you would all do very well – which usually meant working for a few years, marrying and having children. If you were outrageously clever, you might carry on doing something as long as the children didn’t suffer. I knew of only one woman who went out to work. She was something in the Treasury and this was much derided. It probably meant that the children didn’t have puddings during the week!’ Theresa also talks about the conflicting assumptions made by the school and the outside world. ‘Until I was sixteen I was under the delusion that you set your sights on Cambridge or somewhere like that, but I was told that Cambridge was not the sort of place that girls went to. It was full of boys and not right for girls. That was the prevailing wisdom and before I heard that it had never crossed my mind that boys and girls were treated differently’.
Julia was privately educated in the 1970s at a school which assumed that women would have a career, and university was both expected and encouraged. Paradoxically, it was Oxford which let her down. She found the University and the Career advisers to be of virtually no help in offering her guidance about what she should do after her degree.
Alison, on the other hand, also privately educated, fared differently again. She found that her school had few expectations for its pupils beyond working as a secretary, teacher or nurse and waiting for Mr Right to come along.
Women who went to mixed-sex schools reported on different experiences. One woman mentioned that she was fortunate enough to be one of seven particularly bright girls in her year and they were encouraged to perform well in class and in exams. She is not so sure that the same would have happened if she had been the only girl with academic aspirations in her form.
Another talked of being very competitive and sporty when at a mixed school and about how she was more likely to be found playing hockey with the boys than netball with the girls. This was frowned upon by the staff and she had to work extra hard to be allowed to enjoy the things she wanted to do as opposed to the things that others thought she ought to do.
Nearly all the women I spoke to mentioned the lack of a range of possibilities offered to them by careers advisers. Sarah who, against great difficulties, did well in her O and A levels, looks back with disappointment at the advice she was given. ‘No one ever mentioned PR to me. I also wish that someone had suggested being a magazine editor – I would have loved to have aimed for that.’
The lack of appropriate career guidance at school is still cited as one of the most common obstacles to making the most appropriate job choice for the future, although the service does seem to be improving in some schools. The Institute of Management’s 1997 report (A Question of Balance – see here) found that 25% of the managers in the survey felt that their careers had been hindered in some way by a lack of appropriate guidance. When young people are faced with making important, life-shaping decisions about their futures, the range of choices must seem overwhelming. Well-known and recognized job titles, professions, trades and industries are joined by a whole host of other options which are not so familiar and about which little information is given. But, with the increasing use of computer-based questionnaires to help students find out more about their strengths and weaknesses and to point them in the direction of possible careers and, with easy access to databases, it is now comparatively simple to discover which subjects they need to study to follow a particular interest.
It is not difficult to find out which universities and colleges have the best reputations for specific subjects, or how the relevant courses and their faculties differ from one another. Inevitably, however, there is a limit to the depth of available information and students are often unaware of the entire range of possibilities offered by their preferred subjects. Because of this they are not always able to choose the most appropriate courses, or the ones which would suit them best. It seems to me that the present, rather limited approach to careers guidance is not helpful, particularly now when the possibilities of pursuing a job for life are not high.
The world of work is changing very quickly – much more rapidly than most adults from the conventional world of the professions and nine to five jobs realize. The traditional concept of a ‘career’ is disappearing and many representatives of the present and future student generations are more than likely to change direction several times during their working lives. The idea of a portfolio career – not relying on one single area of work or skill to generate income – is growing in popularity: especially when employees no longer feel they can rely on a company to provide them with the security that used to be seen as an employer’s duty to the workforce. Changes in companies’ policies which lead to redundancies or redeployment of resources mean that people are becoming used to the idea of additional training or re-training in order to fill another position within the organization or to find work elsewhere. This will become quite normal and the people who will fare best in an unstable job market are those who learn to be flexible and who develop a range of skills, knowledge and experience.
To this end, career consultants are beginning to emerge who offer a complementary service which can be used alongside the more traditional mechanical approach and which begins the process of thinking about the world of work in a new and exciting way. This approach looks at what kind of organizations the students want to work with, what kind of lifestyle they aspire to, and how they will measure personal success. It concentrates less on a specific area of work or profession and more on what the individual student hopes to give to and receive from his or her working life. Students can then begin to clarify the direction they wish to follow and also take the chance to research and explore the various possibilities that open up to them.
If young people were offered an improved careers guidance service, then I’m sure that it would not be so common to hear adults making dissatisfied comments, such as:
‘My career has tended to follow the path of opportunity rather than any clearly defined strategy’, or
‘… late discovery of what I wanted to do and late discovery of my talents.’
It is interesting to look at the two apparently conflicting meanings of the word ‘career’. As a noun, it implies the existence of a systematic path through your working life. As a verb, it expresses rushing about without any apparent focus. Which definition do you follow? Do you see a case for changing from one to the other? It would seem from these two definitions that each of us can make a considered choice about the next step in our lives – at whatever point it occurs.
This is not to say that everyone needs, or is suited to a clearly defined career path, but it does seem obvious to me that some of the wasted time and talent evident in many women’s early lives could be avoided with a more thorough and knowledgeable approach to career counselling from the outset.
The same principle applies later on. For example, one manager talked of:
‘Not having clear goals in the sense of promotion, failing to recognize opportunities for advancement, not reading how the system worked.’
Traditionally, the idea of designing your future in terms of work was more likely to be found among the boys than the girls and this is recognized by women managers:
‘I was probably less focused upon my career goals than my male counterparts. I was more concerned with job achievement than job progression.’
Having a limited academic education, or not being educated to degree level, are the two main reasons given by women, who describe themselves as late developers or for lacking confidence in themselves and their professional capabilities.
Case study – Judy
Judy, 43, is married with two young children and is the head of a central support team in a local authority. She has a degree in business studies and also trained as a barrister. She is a non-executive director of an NHS Trust.
‘No one in my family had been to university before – they had not even thought about it – but when I realized that university was a prospect for me I was encouraged by an uncle. Money was a problem, so I was driven to aim for a university degree with sponsorship funding. My father had been a shop manager, so business was seen as highly respectable and going into business was seen as a good idea. As I was female and good with people, Personnel seemed to be the obvious route to everyone else. BP offered me a sponsorship and I accepted a four-year ‘thin sandwich’ course, with a salary on graduation which was more than my father’s. From then on my feet didn’t touch the ground. I moved every six months, including a stint working in Scotland on the North Sea operation.
‘I obtained a good degree and specialized in Industrial Relations and Employment Law. I thought about professional qualifications and, because I had done well at law, the lecturer suggested I went for the Bar which I had never even contemplated. “Why not?” I needed to try. My father advised me, “Never regret anything”, so I applied and got in – but most of my family thought I was crazy. My husband liked to show off about my aspirations to become a barrister, but he didn’t like my studying. After graduating, I moved to UK Oil to work in personnel-related research, and Industrial Relations which I really enjoyed. Around the same time, I was called to the Bar. The respect I found I was being shown at work served to reinforce what I was beginning to feel about myself – which was counter to what was happening at home. I left the house and my marriage and never looked back. In 1980, when I was twenty-six, my first case was my own divorce.
‘After I qualified, I soon realized that there were too many barristers on the market and, anyway, I knew I wanted the chance to apply my legal knowledge on a practical level and decided to remain in industry. The opportunity arose to apply for the job of Personnel Officer at the company’s research centre and later as the Training Officer for the whole site, comprising 2000 people. I now had to put into practice what I had learned in theory and I found myself in one of the most satisfying jobs I have ever had. I consolidated my own life, bought my own flat and became financially independent. Simultaneously, my relationship with an ex-colleague had become particularly special and in 1984 we decided to make it official. We had both been through divorces and the stress of this had opened up for me a sideline interest in complementary medicine, starting with reflexology.
‘“Where next?” As a lawyer, my obvious choice should have been the legal department. I enquired about the possibility of getting a commercial pupillage, but that didn’t materialize and I took the commercial lawyer’s post. Experience quickly showed that, while I was capable of doing the job, I did not fit in with the stereotype. When I tried to make changes, I was totally ignored and concluded that this job was not for me when one of my previous managers asked me directly why I was there – and I couldn’t answer. He asked me to join him in management training.
‘The two years had not been fulfilling as a job, but we had a lot to sort out on the personal side. My husband, David, moved first to Hampshire and then to Kent, so I was commuting long distance and managing three homes! By now I was expecting our first child and suddenly, in 1986, everything was starting to come together. A group of us devised the Integrated MBA and teamed up with Warwick Business School as our academic partner. We also formed a Business School Network with British Airways and offered back critique to the business schools.
‘I was beginning to experience problems with a boss who was finding my innovative approach both disconcerting and a threat. I realized that I had found the glass ceiling in this organization and decided to move on. The choice was either to take up a senior post with my local county council, or to go out on my own. I decided I needed more experience before I became a consultant, so I applied for the education job. I knew that financially it could be a major problem, but also that I would never be given the same level of responsibility in the old job. It would mean a huge drop in salary, loss of an interest-free loan, car and so on. Coincidentally, the Economist had been writing reports on MBAs and asked me to be their adviser. They also required an author for their report, Guide to Executive Programmes in Europe and the USA and I offered to do it. The payment was exactly the sum I needed to make up the shortfall in salary so I resigned – BP was stunned that I should leave after seventeen years. They made a counter offer, but I knew I had to go to the new job where I would be in charge of many more people and have greater responsibility. I also felt that BP’s professional standards had declined and that, if I did not act, they would compromise my own standards.
