The Spare Sex

Though women make up over 40 per cent of the western workforce, the

firms they work for promote very few of them far. In America and Britain

alike, women hold about 2 per cent of big-company board seats. Where

women do get to run big companies, it is not by climbing the ordinary

corporate ladder. The lone female chief executive of a Fortune 500 com-

pany, Manon Sandier, of Golden West Financial, a Californian savings

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bank, shares the post with her husband. They bought the bank together.

Katharine Graham, chief executive of The Washington Post Company un-

til taking the chairmanship last year, inherited the firm from her father.

Talented women are not the only losers when companies fail to hire

them or later refuse them promotion. Assuming that most women are

potentially as good at filling executive jobs as most men (quite a big if:

we come to it later), those companies are limiting their pool of available

management talent by around half. Of recent graduates, 52 per cent in

America and 44 per cent in Europe are women. The company that fails

to recruit them now will find its pool of middle managers inferior to that

of a wiser employer in a few years’ time; likewise, which matters more,

its upper management ten years later, if (as is likely) it goes on displaying

the same bias further up the ladder.

A 1990 survey of women quitting large companies, carried out by

Wick, a Delaware consultancy, found that only 7 per cent wanted to stop

working altogether. The rest planned to join other firms, to work as free-

lance consultants, or to start their own businesses. When BP carried out

a similar exercise among graduate trainees recently, the leading reason

women gave for going was not marriage or motherhood, but dissatisfac-

tion with their career prospects. At one Johnson & Johnson unit, de-

parting female managers complained that they had felt isolated from

their male colleagues.

Could it be that this lack of esteem is justified? Given the chance,

would women really be as good at running large firms as men? Most

research on the way gender differences affect women’s careers lies within

the murky disciplines of comparative psychology and organizational be-

haviour. A lot of what it says is too contradictory or anecdotal (or some-

times obviously biased from me outset) to carry much weight. Yet some

findings ring true.

First, people who work in large organizations have an innate tenden-

cy to hire and promote those who resemble themselves. ‘Our managers

are all white, middle-aged men, and they promote in their own image,’

says one woman.

If looking odd in positions of power is women’s first big barrier to

top jobs, feeling odd in them is the second. ‘People come up to you at a

party, and say ‘Aren’t you bright?’ It isn’t a compliment’, says a female

director at a London investment bank. Men are expected to be assertive.

Women are not, and often do not feel happy being so.

Made to choose between being thought pushy and being actually self-

effacing, women tend to choose the latter. Within mixed groups, even

highly qualified women put their views less forcefully than men, and

listen much more than they talk. Strident counter-examples Margaret

Thatcher is an obvious one – leap to mind just because they are so rare.

If a firm does genuinely want to use the talents of women more effec-

tively, how should it go about it? The watershed dividing different em-

ployers’ approaches is positive discrimination. Some use quota schemes.

At Pitney Bowes, an American office-equipment manufacturer, 35 per

cent of all promotions must go to women, 15 per cent to non-whites. Some

companies even tie managers’ pay to their fulfillment of such schemes.

Positive discrimination can hurt the women it is designed to help.

Bosses compelled to hire women to fulfill some quota are unlikely to

take seriously. If you feel people are just there because you had to have

them, then you work around them, not with them. Then they feel un-

der-utilized, because they probably are’, says Nancy Green, a personnel

manager at Monsanto.

The real change in the way companies think about women manag-

ers will come when they change the way they think about jobs. Most

women want to have children. Raising a family requires time off, and

shorter working hours, for somebody, either husband or wife. To keep

good women, firms need to find ways of giving them those things, yet

using them efficiently. That normally involves letting women with small

children work flexible hours, not requiring them to relocate or travel at

a moment’s notice, or even letting them share their jobs with someone

else. In exchange, women may have to accept lower pay, or slower pro-

motion, until they return to full-time work.

1. Complete the following statistics.

a. Women make up more than... of the western workforce, but, in the

US as in the UK, hold just... of seats on the boards of large companies.

b. Women account for... of recent graduates in the US and … of re-

cent graduates in Europe.

c. A survey carried out by Wick revealed that... of women leaving

large companies left not because they wanted to stop work but because.

2. The text can be divided into some sections, give each a separate head-

ing. Read each section in turn, noting the main points. When you have fin-

ished, compare your notes in small groups.

Text 2

Read the text. What is it about? Define the topic sentence of each paragraph. Put down

key words of each paragraph.

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