No room at the top

Date: 24/05/06

The findings of a survey released last week by the Dublin-based European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions help to explain why female representation in the upper echelons of corporate life is still dismally low.

The survey, Working time and work-life balance in European companies, which investigates practices in over 21,000 European workplaces, shows that, while many women with family obligations actively choose to work part-time, many end up doing so because of a lack of appropriate alternatives.

A significant proportion of employees questioned (41%) believed that working part-time has a negative impact on career prospects.

It seems that large numbers of educated, professional women with family obligations still run the risk of getting stuck in the 'mummy track', a career move often characterised by intensified part-time hours, lower-status and the pay to match. Figures released by the EU to mark International Women's Day in March bear this out - despite out-performing their male counterparts academically, European women still get lower pay and fewer top jobs.

In Western Europe's top 200 companies (by revenue), women occupy only 8% of corporate boardroom seats, according to a 2005 report commissioned by the Paris-based European Professional Women's Network (EPWN). More disturbing still is the percentage of women at senior management level in these same companies - a paltry 5%. This hardly bodes well for an increase in female participation at board level.

Inequality of opportunity persists, despite the flurry of do-gooder diversity programmes designed to address the issue that are trumpeted by high-profile companies across Europe.

In 21st-century companies, "diverse talent" is "promoted from within" and female employees, dubbed "agents of change", are "empowered" in environments which "celebrate inclusiveness", to quote from a blur of corporate websites. Casting an eye at recent statistics, all of the well-meaning but tiresome human resources speak begins to sound rather stale.

"It's a semantic minefield," says Margaret Milan, president of the EPWN. "You hear that women are better team players, better at multi-tasking, more nurturing. I know of women who are absolutely not nurturing. I know of men who have nurtured teams beautifully.

"There are as many different styles of women managers as there are male managers."

Milan points out that we need to be careful about getting "bogged down with preconceived ideas", particularly when it comes to associations with diversity's much-maligned elder sister, positive discrimination. "Where the conversation gets interesting is when it moves away from gender issues, looking at all sorts of different management styles within organisations," she says. "People are now talking more about inclusion rather than diversity, although you have to be careful about buzzwords," she concedes. "Companies are more interested now in benefiting from [people with] different skills and backgrounds."

Alexandra Jones, associate director of the London-based Work Foundation believes that businesses need to think laterally in order to increase female representation at senior level. "One of the big problems is that diversity programmes tend to be isolated, only focusing on recruiting more women at senior management level. They don't always address some of the wider issues like working hours, performance management and retention...it's about changing work organisation, work culture and what we see as high performance in the workplace. Until these change, it will be a struggle."

Milan agrees that changes in the way we work could bring more women to the boardroom. "Business is hard-nosed and competitive and that will always be the case," says Milan. "But, there are different ways of doing business. I see more and more people working in network structures...more and more people are going to work like this, women and men. We're going to see an evolution in the way people work, a disconnection between time and place, instead of people being tied to the office for long hours."

Amid all the scepticism aimed at corporate diversity initiatives, it seems that there could be cause for optimism. If traditional working conditions have thus far been a hindrance to women's progress at work, then perhaps there is reason to believe that flexible working methods facilitated by new technologies could change the ways that performance and merit are measured, thus ensuring that more women retain a stake in high-level corporate life. Such reforms would not only be the business of women.

As Milan points out, "Increasingly, younger men don't want to sacrifice life and family to the corporation as their fathers did. They are also leading the revolution to change corporate working culture."

• Lorraine Mallinder is a freelance journalist based in Brussels.

Major analysis feature on the under-representation of women on European company boards.