Brains, but no boardrooms

More employable, better educated and now numerically equal: surely it can only be a matter of time before Irish women take charge? Well, maybe not, writes KATHY SHERIDAN

IN THE civil war surrounding George Lee’s resignation from the Dáil this week, his supporters focused on the “broken” system. By this reckoning, the Don Quixote of Dublin South did not flounce off in a fit of petulance, but for a cause far greater than himself. It was the “system” that had let him down.

Any woman who has ever tangled with the same political system eyed the sensational coverage with disbelief. Having been parachuted into one of the safest seats in Ireland, with instant recognition, multiple media platforms at his command, and a guaranteed front-bench career, was this man seriously complaining that the system had stripped him of a voice?

Imagine the debate had he been a woman. In fact, let’s imagine he’s a woman. How far would he have got? Female representation in the Dáil – which has never exceeded 14 per cent – has actually fallen since 1990 and is now on a par with Djibouti. And no, the lower ranks are not heaving with women poised to pounce. Despite the media focus on sexy, young, female local election candidates last year, the number who actually made it through fell to 16 per cent, from 17 per cent in 2004.

Meanwhile, as Saipan II raged on this week, the Central Statistics Office (CSO) was disseminating new figures showing that Ireland – uniquely in the EU family – has achieved a “perfect” gender balance: 100 men to every 100 women. And the signs suggest that the future is female. The unemployment rate for women is much lower than that of men – just over half, in fact. More than half of women aged 25 to 34 achieved a third-level education last year, 14 per cent more than men in the same age group.

“The implications of that are pretty serious down the line,” whistled an impressed thirtysomething male, suggesting that, give or take 15 to 20 years, the feminisation of Irish boardrooms should be complete.

It seems logical. With that employability, superior education and consequent (surely?) superior earning power, it can only be a matter of time before women rule. But how to explain that political deficit for a start? Ah, politics is different, claimed our male friend; that has a whole other set of challenges. Take a look at business, he suggested, surely that presents a different picture?

So let's take accountancy, once a thoroughly male-dominated profession which, to its credit, was admitting women and men in equal numbers all of 20 years ago. Last year, more than half of the student admissions to the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Ireland (ICAI) were women. So the feminisation of the Big Four's boardrooms – KPMG, PWC, Ernst Young and Deloitte – must be well in hand then? Far from it, according to The Minority Report, a study by Prof Patricia Barker, now of Dublin City University and previously a partner in a Manchester accountancy practice. Despite that 54 per cent entry rate, the total female membership of the ICAI stands at 30 per cent. Put another way, seven out of 10 members are men. So women are getting in – but getting out just as fast.

The imbalance might be explicable if equal access had only opened up in recent years and membership was dominated by men from another era. However, nearly 70 per cent of the membership is under the age of 45.

But the hardy women who stay – and have “proved” themselves worthy – are surely ensconced in the elite positions? Not so. Barker’s study of the Big Four’s boardrooms in the English-speaking world, including Ireland, shows that just 16 per cent of those who make it to partner level are women.

The problem is not unique to accountancy or Ireland, of course. In the UK, where 52 per cent of all accountancy students are female, only 9 per cent in the top 60 firms are female. In the legal professions in Ireland, women also outnumber men at entry level, but in the large legal practices only one has a female managing partner and only in two do women make up more than 30 per cent of the partners.

As for medicine, there was much wry amusement last year when it was decreed that the girls had gone quite far enough in challenging the boys for limited college places.

“From the profession’s point of view, a 50/50 mix is desirable,” said Prof Sean McCann. Indeed. Swift and decisive measures were taken – by means of the new HPAT test – to restore the “balance”.

In the UK too, although nearly 70 per cent of women have achieved further or higher education (compared to 50 per cent of men), there has been no commensurate advance towards equal pay or towards more proportionate numbers in senior business and political roles.

The numbers of women MPs, cabinet members, health service and local authority chief executives, senior police officers and judges and heads of professional bodies have fallen. Women hold just 11 per cent of FTSE 100 directorships.

DOES IT MATTER?Many accept it as a fact of life, this winnowing of bright, diligent, well-educated women who have babies and step out to a different drumbeat. And heaven knows, the media is alive with the happy sighs of once high-flying career women bowing out "to have a life". Whether society can afford to be so blasé about it is another matter. The remarkable absence of female faces in elite banking circles became a talking point during the bonfire of the vanities. Would the global economy have melted had Lehman Brothers been Lehman Sisters? Such a question may be an over-statement of the case, but it may also reveal a germ of truth.

For a start, women are quicker to blow the whistle on questionable practices. For example, Marta Andreasen, briefly the EU’s chief accountant for its €100 billion budget, exposed a staggering lack of accountability. Sherron Watkins exposed the sham behind Enron’s balance sheet. At home, Olivia Green revealed all about Irish Nationwide’s intriguing lending practices in the boom.

But perhaps what these women lack is that powerful masculine punch, those values that impel men to take those thrilling gambles and speculative runs where winner takes all? After all, who wants to take accounting advice, still less investment guidance, from mimsy, risk-averse women? An inconvenient truth is that female fund managers outperformed men last year, according to the Chicago-based Hedge Fund Research. In the financial crisis, hedge funds run by women fell by only half as much as those managed by men. In fact, women investment managers performed better over the decade, with an average annual return of more than 9 per cent, while hedge funds overall delivered 5.82 per cent.

In Iceland, a country that imploded courtesy of a reckless, overwhelmingly male banking and business culture, women are at the forefront of the clean-up. Audur Capital, the female-focused securities company, was one of the few to survive the crisis. They have “five core feminine values”, says co-founder Halla Tómasdóttir, the chief of which is not to invest in anything they do not understand.

All-male boards now look old-fashioned, too cosy and, frankly, a little dangerous. Research from Exeter University has found that companies are more likely to appoint women during a crisis, because they are perceived to be more consensual and less abrasive (qualities rather less valued in more buccaneering times). But the danger, of course, is that if women take on these roles in riskier times, they have more chance of becoming associated with failure.

AS MANY PEOPLElook around for a more balanced social order, old questions are taking on a more significant edge. Why do so many bright, expensively educated women head for the hills when they start a family? Is there something in the culture that militates against a third way, combining career and children? Are women simply not up to mixing it with men at elite levels? Do they have to behave like men to get to the top?

An intriguing feature of Prof Barker’s study is a psychological test – the Bem Sex Role Inventory – assessing whether or not the 19 women who progressed to partner level in the Big Four accountancy firms in Ireland possessed predominantly “male” characteristics. Twelve of the 17, or 71 per cent, were found to do so. Whether these characteristics are innate or painfully acquired to meet the existing corporate culture is important. Either way, it proves that in order to succeed, women do indeed have to exhibit male behaviour.

And yet, when Barker probed, some old stumbling blocks emerged. The women showed a lack of self-confidence, a need for reassurance not apparent in their male peers, and, in contrast to their male colleagues, a marked reluctance to market themselves.

Another factor was networking. While Big Four male partners talked frustratedly about women’s inability to engage socially with clients, the women talked about how inviting a man to dinner, a match or a round of golf could be misinterpreted. Some women with families even suggested that time was better invested in family than in day-long networking events.

“I sometimes sit in a meeting with clients and male colleagues,” said one. “And the clients are starting to get really fidgety and there’s some bloke wittering on about how fantastic he is and suggesting getting tickets for the game but not actually getting into the nitty-gritty and the detail of the business in hand.”

With that kind of clash, can the future be female? “I suspect not, not unless women are able to redefine the workplace,” says Barker. “It’s not that they can’t do it but that they exercise choice. At a certain point, they look and say, ‘I just don’t like it’. They want everything – a family, career, time for themselves.”

The culture of “presenteeism” (being seen to be at your desk from 7am to 7pm), the notion that it’s suspect for a man to take family leave, the fact that part-timers are taken less seriously than those working full-time – all these will prevail, Barker says, until women achieve critical mass.

The solution, she feels, is part-time work. But those who choose that path (overwhelmingly women) pay a heavy price, apart from being taken less seriously. The gender pay gap is alive and well, according to this week's CSO's figures. Even after adjustment for men's longer working hours, women's hourly earnings were 87 per cent of men's. The National Women's Council (NWC) points to a radical new dynamic in Irish families, in which many women are now the breadwinners. "But it's no great victory", says Orla O'Connor of the NWC. "The pressure is on [working women], especially in lower-income families, to manage the burden of enormous personal debt andto bring in the money."

A partner in a professional firm can afford to hire help. For those at less exalted levels, the NWC’s well-documented CSO and OECD figures, produced last October, show that women still spend three times as much time as men on care and household work. Barker is philosophical on that score. Women have to do it for themselves, she says, and “looking for men to have an understanding of what we’re really talking about is a waste of time. Men just don’t get it. My daughter is only one generation away from the marriage bar when the mammy was always there to iron the shirts . . . Men were brought up in that environment and that’s what they get. Now, looking back, I think we all need to put less hours into our work and more into getting the balance right.”

The Minority Interest: Women who Succeed in the Accountancy Profession, by Patricia Barker, is published by Chartered Accountants Ireland