The BBC screened the first of a new series about women in business last night. The program looks again at the reasons why there is not a larger representation by women in senior roles in the Britain.
It seems that the debate around whether or not motherhood is one of the primary drivers of women leaving business is set to rage on for a while yet, but our own research and conclusions suggest that there is more going on than the simple “women are leaving to have children” stereotype.
Corporations are increasingly losing their female talent. Top performing women are walking out the door of the world’s best known companies and turning their hand into entrepreneurship. In researching our book Your Loss: How to Win Back your Female Talent, we calculated that for corporations the cost of replacing lost women could be as much as £15 million per 10,000 employees. Annually.
These figures just do not add up. Why are corporations still incurring these losses? Why are they losing these women?
Senior women told us why they left their high-paying jobs and walked away from careers during their most productive years. Women yearn for a culture change in large corporations, which are run on out-dated rules and conventions, largely around the “old boy’s network”
Stereotyping and cultural bias is an every day occurrence which hampers women’s career progression. For one of our respondents, following the birth of her child, her previously unquestioned and highly productive arrangement of a day-a-week working from home suddenly came under scrutiny. Her colleagues would use air quotes when saying ‘working from home’ and exclude her on critical calls, as if she were using it as an excuse for a day off.
The only way to achieve this cultural change is to give employees responsibility for their own careers. Why should advancement and ambition be in a straight line on a graph, with a plateau at the top? Why can’t it have kinks and spurts or shifts across disciplines, according to what suits the individual? We live in a colourful world, and success does not require a straight line.
A leading headhunter in the UK advises corporations to have ‘more flexible career paths where companies can give individuals opportunities to try different skills or functions or geographies. One way of doing that, is companies giving individuals sabbaticals. The individual may or may not come back but the odds are that it will be a good thing for that company and for the individual if you take a long-term view. It could be to go and do a PhD, it could be to go and do volunteer service, or it could be to develop a business plan for something that that individual has always sought… That would have the greatest single impact because people have these sorts of entrepreneurial urges at all different stages of their career.”
Even just as critical, the women we spoke to told us that as they progressed up the career path, the passion for their jobs disappeared: ‘I decided that I wasn’t going to stay in a role where I felt zero passion. I felt that my heart was dying and I felt I was waking up in the morning just to go to work to pay bills. I wasn’t quitting to start my own business or to be an entrepreneur. I was quitting because I was no longer being authentic to myself, and I was no longer passionate about my work and my heart just felt like it was dying.’ admitted a former Plc executive, turned entrepreneur.
Our findings echo those of other studies: women desire personal fulfilment which is largely attributed to their personal development. By contrast, for men, a job is perceived as an activity which is rewarded by moving up the career ladder which is also best compensated by monetary means.
When asked what corporations could do to retain high-quality women, our survey respondents repeatedly made comments such as, ‘Talk to them regularly about what they’re looking for, really listen and be willing to act on what you hear. …Be thinking about what the right next step/role for her is ahead of time, rather than having to drum up something in a hurry when she says she’s leaving.’
48% of the women we surveyed, stated that ‘a chance to be more creative’ was one thing which welcomed them into their new entrepreneurial lives. Creativity ranked joint first alongside ‘more control and flexibility over my life’. This dual desire was unexpected even to us, but exposes a clear reason for women to leave corporate life. They feel creatively stifled. A collaborative culture leads to greater creativity through innovation and will therefore help retain high-performing women.
Corporations have gone down the route of creating Women’s Networks to help the development of their female talent. However, these groups serve largely to sideline women in minority groups. We believe it is key to utilise the power of the women’s network in creating work-groups to solve business-critical problems to support the development of the organisation. We also propose taking this one step further: deal with these Networks as a profit centre (rather than a cost centre) and invest in their activities as you would in a new business venture. As money talks, only clear and measurable ROI will get management attention – and offer an opportunity for their female talent to shine.
Our research has highlighted that 31% of women who left the corporate sphere thought that their ‘values did not align with the company’s’. In order to retain her loyalty, any organisation needs to take this into consideration. This is the intersection between a woman’s multiple roles as professional, family organiser and social nurturer. The Corporate brand and internal culture have to walk the CSR talk.
Gender-balanced Executive boardrooms are also needed. Whilst not an advocate for tokenism through quotas, something is required to break the status quo. The 30% Club model of making Chairmen accountable for the diversity on their Plc boards is a good start. This needs to be implemented at the Executive level too.
If companies don’t take action, it is their loss. Women globally will still find their voices by leaving the corporate domain and, increasingly, become entrepreneurs. However, corporations would have lost any hope of achieving diversity of thought and exacerbated their corporate blind-spots. This would be dangerous – as it is those blind-spots that led to the greatest financial crisis in modern history.