Women’s Hour also picked up on this and ran a feature on it, interviewing an amazing women who’s GP husband killed her two children out of spite and revenge. I’d really like to see male journalists and psychologists debating this genre of family violence which seems to come from men who in every other respect have been ‘great dads’. Far too often the events are reported with little comment. In my book I discuss how some organizations are grappling with the epidemic that is domestic abuse and violence. Time for some straight talking.

Anyway on a much cheerier note was that….

Last week I was reminded of the talent, energy and commitment of women. I was at the Inspirational Women of the Year Awards and it was a spellbinding and humbling evening. Women’s work so often goes unnoticed, much of it done out of the public world of status and money – the two things as a society we usually hold most dear. What was on display last night was women’s incredible organizational ability and their skill of making things happen if they believed in them. Charity has long been dependent on women’s time and effort and it is fantastic that we have an occasion to recognise some of their achievements. The event was sponsored by the Daily Mail as well as  Bhs and the excellent charity,  Wellbeing of Women. Owner of Bhs Sir Philip Green presented the Inspiration Woman of the Year award to Emma Hope for her work helping ex- offenders get back to work.  The evening was special in another way. On our table we had two men and ten women and most of the other thirty tables had similar ratios – perhaps some with a few more men. I was sitting with Vanessa Feltz and Eve Pollard, both strong and high achieving women and we commented on how unusual it was to be in the majority as women at a gala event such as this one. There was a real sense of celebration and support in the room. On the table next to me was Katie Piper, a truly inspirational young woman, not only surviving a hideous attack of acid being thrown over her face, but now thriving as a tv personality, charity boss, writer amongst other things. She looked sensational. Take a look at her life and work on her website KATIE PIPER FOUNDATION

And this week on  January 24^th  I did a shoot with my gorgeous daughter, Caggie,  for the Cosmopolitan fortieth anniversary edition, April but out in March. COSMO – FORTY YEARS  The magazine is celebrating its anniversary with a focus on feminism – breathing new life into a concept that has been anathematised in the media.  I wrote in my book that feminism was coming back albeit in a different guise and so this fantastic news.  A whole generation missed out on the history and understanding of what feminism in the sixties and seventies achieved.  All kinds of women are being photographed for the Cosmo feminist edition wearing tee shirts saying “I use the F Word”. Feminism is BACK!

Last week I was invited on to Women’s Hour to discuss the six month monitoring report on Women on Boards published by Cranfield School of Management. The report revealed that since the review, 21 women have been appointed to board positions out of a possible 93. This represents 22.5% of all new appointments, some way short of the 33% recommended in the Davies report. The number of women now holding FTSE 100 board directorships is 155 out of a total of 1,092 positions (14.2%).  This is up from the 12.5% published in the 2010 Female FTSE report from Cranfield (December 2010). The FTSE 250 has seen 28 (18%) out of a possible 158 new FTSE 250 board appointments go to women.   One hundred and thirty three FTSE 250 boards now have female-held directorships.  For the first time, it is a minority of FTSE 250 companies who have all-male boards.

What, I was asked, was my reaction to the interim report? Here are some of my thoughts in full.

Of course any increase in the number of women on boards is to be welcomed. The news is encouraging but it shouldn’t be any less than this, given the amount of pressure that has been put on companies to improve their figures. The Davies Review published in March this year spelled out what it expected of companies and that if action wasn’t voluntary, quotas may follow. On top of a letter from Lord Davies, company chairmen have also received a letter from Vince Cable and Theresa May and those who have failed to take adequate action will now be receiving a further ‘reminder’ from David Cameron himself.  To call any action taken since March ‘voluntary’ is ridiculous. The vast majority of business men and women in the UK, even those pushing for change are against quotas, and this stance itself needs to be examined.

Diversity of boards has been on the agenda for many years but it has taken the threat of quotas – and the threat of quotas coming from Europe is very real – to really get things going. So I am in favour of quotas even if we don’t have to have them.

The fear, expressed by the anti-quota camp is that women will be chosen even if they are not up to the job. But we know from experience that many men are chosen who are not that talented and have made dreadful mistakes. Why do we perpetuate the myth that only a tiny number of people can take on these roles. Many of those who sat on bank boards and were responsible for the banking crisis are now happily sitting on other FTSE 100 boards. There has been very little accountability of the behaviours and lack of good governance that led to disastrous decisions being made which have almost bankrupted our country. Yet we fuss and fret that fifty  or so women may be put on boards through a quota system.

The Cranfield Report also showed that fourteen out of the 21 FTSE 100 new appointees (67%) and 20 out of the 28 FTSE 250 new appointees (72%)  had no prior FTSE 100 or FTSE 250 board experience, suggesting that  the appointment process is beginning to open up to new women. The much repeated explanation for the paucity of women on boards has been that there aren’t enough qualified women available to fulfil board positions. I have heard this myself from the mouth of chief executives.  This is now being revealed as the myth it always was.

The Higgs Report’s (2003) call for a broader range of skills, backed up by specific call for more diversity from the Tyson Report (2003) seems to have gone unheeded.  There was a strong focus on diversity in this wider sense for about a year following the reports and I believe this was instrumental in my joining Singer & Friedlander, a FTSE 250 bank as a non-executive in early 2003. My background was not particularly corporate at all but the board was demanding a member with a different set of skills and experience. Whilst the new women board appointees this year are a great addition to the diversity of boards by dint of their gender, none come from the public sector, the charity sector or academia, although it is cheering that three have come from Human Resources.

Is it not ironic that when boards were bigger and there was arguably more room to have a wider range of skills, they were almost all male and now there is an opportunity for women to join the top table, the number of places has shrunk? One of the legacies of the credit crisis has to my mind been a move to more  conservative thinking when choosing non-executive directors. Even though all those bankers didn’t manage to prevent the banking crisis, nine times out of then it is financial skills that are given priority over any others.

Group think is not just about gender. Research has shown that women and men think more like each other than not if they have the same professional experience. Sticking to women who have financial backgrounds or come from the same industry as they company whose board they are joining shows that companies are still playing safe.

The topic is newsworthy because of the political attention it is gaining but let’s not forget that it is not Boards themselves that change organisational cultures. They are too distant from the everyday management of an organization In some ways adding women onto boards is an easy win for companies.  Increasing the numbers of women in senior management is where the emphasis for organisational change and this requires much more attention and work. What is worrying is that whilst there is political pressure to put women on boards, companies are in reality cutting their diversity programmes left right and centre.

There is evidence in the Cranfield interim report that there is far more reluctance to deal with the low levels of senior management. Less than one third (28%) of the FTSE 100 companies reported on the gender composition of their senior executive committees ….and even fewer FTSE 250 did so. Only 4% of the FTSE 100 companies had set gender targets for their executive committee levels and none of the FTSE 250 had, even though Davies had recommended that they do so.  The resistance to change is clear. My book Women’s Work Men’s Cultures reveals and discusses this persistant resistance that inhibits women’s progress to senior positions.

This last couple of years has seen a huge increase in public interest in the paucity of women in senior positions in both business and politics in our country. The various reviews following the financial crisis – the Walker Review 2010, the Treasury Report on Women in the City 2010, and the recent Davies Review on Women on Boards 2011 have all pointed to the need for women to be better represented at the top of our organisations. One of the causes of such public concern has been the credit crisis and whether more women would have prevented it (from this we may as well extend the argument and extrapolate that if we and other countries had more women in power the world may be a better run place, with fewer wars full stop). The other reason that senior business figures have joined in the debate is the by now very real threat of quotas for the board composition with regard to gender, coming from Europe. CBI: put women on boards or face EU quotas

Whilst there have been key activists trying to put women’s inequality on the corporate agenda for decades, it is only relatively recently that a key number of senior businessmen are now putting themselves forward to help in the quest for better representation of women on boards and (see for example the FTSE100  Cross Company Mentoring Scheme or the 30 percent club)

The attention of  top businessmen has focused  on the boardroom but has also provided a forum for a debate on of a much bigger issue around women’s role in society. It is important that women themselves set the parameters of this discourse and my book points to the ways in which change can be curtailed if problems are only partially expressed. The continuing surprised and scratching of heads as to the paucity of women at the top  shows some lack of awareness from  what are otherwise very intelligent men and women.

Many of the barriers to women’s rise to the top are now being recognised and some are being addressed albeit mostly helping women play the game like men. But missing from the corporate debate is the real reason why women are under-represented. The fact  that until recently women have been excluded from public life and the legacy that this has left is rarely acknowledged.  Nor is the fact that outside the workplace women are generally not valued or respected as much as men. We only have to look at the facts to validate this claim:  lower pay,  the sexualisation and objectification of women, continued rape and domestic violence, the vast majority of whose victims are women.  The increasing sexualisation of women and girls in recent years has not gone unnoticed – see Natasha Walter’s book The Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism.  It will require more than one or two generations of formal equality for women to take their place equally beside men at the table of power.

Where we are now is a consequence of history, economics, and wider social gender relations, which are changing due to the emancipation of women which has only occurred in the past 100 years.  The wider social background sets the scene for what goes on in organisations in much the same way as industrial relations and the economy do.

The debate needs to be broadened beyond the let’s help women get to where we are (but not too many of them)…. and tied in to the systematic undervaluing of women everywhere.

Excitingly we are now seeing a revival of feminism in many forms, with thousands of young women beginning to voice their anger at the ways women are depicted in our cultures and the inequalities that still exist in and out of organisations.

We have so many more opportunities than our mothers and our grandmothers but these have been hard won. There has been opposition and resistance to all of the equality measures that have been passed over the past hundred years. We need to start talking realistically about what working life is like for women. Organisational life was not originally designed for women.  It is taking far too long to catch up with wider social changes in gender relations. Women have been trying hard to fit in and may have got as far as we can without some more radical thinking.

That’s why I’ve written my book. I think it makes a start.

Overcoming Resistance and Changing Organizational Cultures

About the Book

Corporate diversity programs often fail because of resistance in workplace culture. The author sets out an approach to real change by analysing the role of organisational cultures in marginalising women workers. Based on academic research, case studies and interviews, the author presents a new model for changing organisational culture.

Sarah Rutherford runs her own diversity consultancy company, Rutherford Associates. She is a former financial journalist and was a non-executive director of investment bank Singer & Friedlander from 2003-2006. She has published a number of articles and research reports on gender and organization- al culture, and speaks regularly on the subject to many audiences, contributing to television and radio programmes.

Contents

• Context
• Introduction
• Women in Society
• Belonging – Meanings of Organizational Culture
• The Gender Agenda
• Part I – Equal Opportunities, Diversity, Inclusion – What’s in a Word?
• Part II – The Business Case – Refocused, Renewed, Repeated?
• Part III – Gender Awareness in Organizations
• Style Matters The public/private divide
• Are you going home already? – The Long Hours Culture
• Let’s have a drink! – Informal networking and socialising
• Sex in the office
• Leaders and Men
• On the Road to Change

To save 30% (RRP: £26.00) just enter the code WDIVERSITY2011 when you buy online www.palgrave.com at before 31/08/2011

Those of us who were around in the early and mid nineties remember well what happened in that recession. Organisations which had a lot of female employees had invested heavily in equal opportunities and flexible working (called then family friendly policies) in the eighties. These included the retail banks, retailers, some insurance companies. Three years of an economic downturn and many of these initiatives, like Midland Bank’s career break schemes and workplace nurseries were scrapped. The tough times ahead will really test the integrity of companies and their commitment to change.

Over the past year there has been a 45% drop in advertised diversity positions (Nielson Market Research). Whilst the government has maintained its commitment to introduce the extension of the right to ask for flexible working, the proposed extension of maternity and paternity rights look as though they will be dropped.

In the Business of Diversity, I argued that the business case is never static. I have also always argued that the concept of diversity is contested. The bunching together of very different issues was always a risk. The next few years will be testing times for all of us economically but for those who work in the field of diversity particularly so. Some people became tired of hearing about the business case and hardly any organisations have put in place measurements to assess the business impact of diversity. This lack of investment makes diversity programmes more vulnerable to cutbacks. The business imperative for good diversity practice may not be the same as in times of economic plenty but it is still there and when budgets are being fought for and resources reduced the specific business arguments for diversity need to be refined, reiterated and repeated.

Ten leading organisations attended a workshop on diversity in a downturn organised by Rutherford Associates, facilitated by Dr Rutherford and kindly hosted by BT. The outcomes are written about in the following piece:

Diversity in a Downturn (PDF)