Tag Archives: Business

The City needs a quota for men

All together now

‘Top City women say time has come to impose quotas for female promotion,’ reports the FT today. 

The paper polled more than 30 ‘top City employers’, finding just 19.5% of senior roles (managing director or equivalent) are held by women. This is despite ‘a balanced gender intake’.

While the report quotes some senior women in the City who say it’s time to impose female quotas to ensure more women are represented at the top level, the reservations of a junior female City employee are used to represent opposition to the idea.

‘Quotas cause women to question whether they’ve been promoted by merit,’ the 30-year-old is reported as saying. ‘This comes from their peers and from the women themselves, and is hugely destructive.’

Her objection is not a new one when it comes to arguing the toss about quotas which aim to boost the presence of any minority group. Widely held as it is, it is rarely challenged.

So let’s look at this another way, using labels that don’t burden women by calling their achievements into question.

Let’s say an organisation employs equal numbers of men and women, but, as in the FT study, more than 80% of those at the top are male. Using similar logic to that applied by those who fret that quota-filling women will have their abilities questioned, we must surmise that 37.5%, or three in every eight, of the senior men in the City fear their promotions were not merited.

More than this, unless we believe that men are generally more able than women, some such males have indeed been over-promoted, given the equally split male/female intake.

Yet we do not read quotes from senior City men describing a ‘hugely destructive’ sense that they have risen above their station.

What then if Square Mile employers were to introduce ‘men quotas’? Rather than using fixed targets to boost the number of senior women, why not seek to reduce the number of senior men to 50% and remove the perceived stigma from women who, if the FT’s numbers are to be believed, already have enough trouble getting to the top?

Gender equality is too frequently seen as a ‘women’s matter’. Reframing both the arguments and the interventions used to encourage parity may not work. It may be shouted down as semantics. But isn’t it worth a try?

More chairs, please

Gloomy news for genchair stackder equality campaigners in last Thursday’s FT. The newspaper reports a slowdown in female appointments to FTSE 100 boards, according to new data from the Professional Boards Forum.

Key findings include:

  • just 12 per cent of directors appointed in the two months to 1 May are women, compared with 50 per cent in 2012
  • the proportion of women on FTSE 100 boards hasn’t budged from 17.4% since last August
  • a minute 5.6% of the group’s executive directors are women

It’s worth adding that all (four) women appointed to FTSE 100 boards in the two months to 1 May are white. Not that race, class or disability (and that’s just for starters) seem to enter the ‘diversity’ debate much – at least not when it comes to getting women on FTSE 100 boards.

Sadly, that state of affairs is hardly surprising when you consider the hash the very people pushing for change seem to be making of getting their message across.

Let’s begin with the Professional Boards Forum itself. Besides tracking the number of female board appointments to fill bleak column inches, the forum’s proclaimed mission is to ‘help chairmen find outstanding women non-executive directors’.

That’s right. Their raison d’etre is to help ‘chairMEN’.

Now I used to be one of those ‘chairman/shnairman’ type people, who’d shrug and say ‘it’s just shorthand, everyone knows it doesn’t mean it has to be a man’. But then I realised that, really, using a gender neutral term like ‘chair’ was probably preferable given that it didn’t invisibilise around half the human race.

Perhaps the PBF should have a think about that. What’s not to like about ditching an outmoded and sexist term which undermines their whole argument?

The media might also want to have rethink. The FT’s style is to refer to ‘chairmen’ and ‘chairwomen’, according to the sex of the office holder. A quick search reveals the BBC, The Telegraph, The Economist, The New Statesman, The Independent, The Guardian, The Express and The Mirror do likewise.

Clearly this is better than the forum’s approach, recognising as it does that both men and women can – and do – head boards. Yet it’s still problematic, not least because the rule is applied inconsistently, with women chairs frequently referred to as men. In a recent diary piece I wrote for The Telegraph, for example, Lady Barbara Judge appeared as ‘chairman of the Pensions Protection Fund’, despite being ‘chair’ in my original copy. Does anyone know of a male chair who is routinely referred to as ‘chairwoman’?

And even if the ‘chairman/woman’ rule is always followed, what about the people who identify as neither male, or female? Reinforcing gender binaries is not the way to go for those seeking genuine diversity – however remote that goal may seem at times.

Language matters. The words we choose have the power to include or exclude, to encourage or dissuade, to foster change or to promote more of the same.  By adopting the gender-neutral ‘chair’, groups like the PFB and the media have the opportunity to set a new, inclusive tone which sends the message that seats at the boardroom table are not just reserved for men.