Business podcast:Women in business
Current Account special: to mark International Women’s Day 2011, John Collins talks to Emer Jameson, managing director of yourlocal.ie and Nicola Byrne, founder of 11890, about the issues facing women in business.
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Business podcast: March 10th
John Collins talks women in business with Emer Jameson, yourlocal.ie and Nicola Byrne, 11890, IDA chief Barry O’Leary on attracting investment, Maura Quinn on training for directors, while Suzanne Lynch discusses Greencore’s failed merger with Northern Foods.
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The joy of sex quotas
Mere days after the Fine Gael parliamentary party rejected quotas on the number of women candidates it selects, Europe’s biggest telecoms firm, Deutsche Telekom, has announced a quota system of its own: at least 30 per cent of its upper and middle management positions will be held by women by 2015.
Meanwhile, the UK’s equalities minister Harriet Harman is making noises that British companies should be compelled to disclose what they are doing to improve gender equality at management level and the Conservative leader David Cameron is flirting with the idea of quotas for candidates who are female and from ethnic minorities.
Spain and France have also brought in laws aiming to boost the number of women on company boards, while Italy and Netherlands are mulling similar measures. All are following in the footsteps of Norway, which has a legal requirement that 40 per cent of a listed company’s directors must be women.
So why the scepticism about affirmative action here? There’s been little official mention of gender balance at senior levels since 1991, when the State set a gleefully ignored target for 40 per cent of directors on State boards to be free of a Y-chromosome. Leading the charge against a very modest proposal for 20-25 per cent of the party’s local and European candidates to be women, Fine Gael TD Lucinda Creighton last week remarked that quotas were “a very easy solution to a very complex problem”, before listing the reasons why politics might be unattractive to women, including long hours and childcare.
This seems like a very strange argument, not least because very easy solutions to very complex problems – unfashionable though they may be in Ireland – are surely a good thing.
The anti-quotas brigade usually cites a charming desire for people to be appointed to a particular job “on merit”. However, quotas are only ever suggested in the first place because the individuals claiming first dibs on a range of powerful positions are deemed to have profited from decades of convenient prejudices with regard to their sex, race and/or social class. Although nobody ever wants to admit this about themselves, there are few people who ever got where they are solely “on merit”. Witness last week’s edition of the BBC’s Question Time, on which Labour MP Caroline Flint argued in favour of quotas but was anxious to assert that she had not herself been the beneficiary of one.
The second argument against gender quotas is that there simply aren’t enough suitably qualified (and bothered) women around to fill them. In Ireland, where only one major listed company (Irish Life & Permanent) has a woman (Gillian Bowler) chairing the board and female chief executives are still a novelty, quotas at boardroom level would undoubtedly lead to the same female faces popping up everywhere. But how is that so different to the current situation, where the same male faces collect part-time non-executive directorships (and six-figure payments) like scouting badges?
In 2002, when Norway’s government first declared war on the old boys’ network, businesses objected that they couldn’t find enough suitably qualified women. But the Norwegian government had done its research and replied that there were armies of high qualified women available for boardroom posts if only company executives looked beyond their own social circle. Gender quotas for Irish companies may force boardrooms to embark on a frantic headhunt for female directors. But rather than resulting in the appointment of underqualified women, this could actually bring in badly needed fresh talent, denting the decades of entrenched corporate cronyism that has built up in Irish business.
Those in favour of quotas recognise the paradox. To convince sufficient numbers of women that politics or big business is a viable option for them, there needs to be a critical mass of role models: women who have dared to delegate childcare responsibilities to their partners and maybe even embraced long hours’ culture. But achieving even a hint of gender balance where none exists is extremely difficult to do without some measure of affirmative action.
It’s hard not to conclude that many of those against quotas are simply rather happy with things the way they are. But quotas are not, as Creighton says, “window dressing to make us sound progressive”. As the examples of Norway and Deutsche Telekom show, they are a means by which progress can be achieved.
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Mind the gap
Ireland is closing the gender gap, according to the World Economic Forum (WEF), which has ranked the Irish in eighth spot in its Global Gender Gap Index for 2008. But don’t make an emergency call for the smelling salts just yet – this doesn’t make Ireland a land of equals.
It just means that we are catching up with other western economies on some measures of equality such as economic participation and political empowerment. The term you are looking for is “coming from a low base”.
According to the WEF, which sandwiches Ireland’s gender progress between that of Denmark and the Netherlands, we have improved our standing for the third consecutive year – after coming ninth in the 2007 index and tenth in 2006 – largely because of a rise in the percentage of women among the nation’s legislators, senior officials and managers. This has increased from 29 per cent in 2007 to – hang on to your hats – a whopping 31 per cent this year. The continued term of Mary McAleese as President also drives up our political empowerment stats, which feels like cheating somehow.
Despite Ireland’s equality baby steps, we’re still lagging our closest geographical neighbour, the UK, in the “economic participation and opportunity” category, with female labour force participation, estimated income and proportion of legislators, senior officials and managers all distinctively more modest. We do, however, have more female “professional and technical” workers than male ones. But on average, in Ireland a woman who does similar work to a man takes home just 71 per cent of his salary, according to the WEF. The other 29 per cent is for free.
As Ireland’s recession status solidifies, what happens next is anybody’s guess. On the one hand, female employment has held up better than male employment so far, as most of the recession’s job casualties have been in the male-dominated construction sector. On the other hand, it is part-time and casual service sector workers (who tend to be female) that could be first in line to get their P45s when business goes bad.
For its part, the WEF stressed today that it is vital that women’s economic participation does not shrink in the current crisis, saying its index tracks a “strong correlation between the gender gap and national competitiveness”. But ominously, with a smaller gap to close than Ireland, the UK’s progress has stalled, pushing it back two spots to 13th in the WEF’s rankings. And as the WEF notes, no country in the world has actually achieved gender equality.
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Gender balance; Budget Families
A reader writes:
Once again I scan the budget family profiles in the Irish times to see if you will break tradition and feature a family where the woman earns more than the man, but once again I am disappointed. Surely madam editor has pointed out to you by now that such a rara avis does occur in
Ireland!
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