Business misses the female touch

Former Sunday Telegraph editor Patience Wheatcroft will find herself in a minority when she takes up her appointment, announced yesterday, as a non-executive of Barclays Bank. As at almost every other company in the UK, women are under-represented on Barclays' board just one other non-exec at the bank is a woman.

Nor is this a problem only in the UK. Despite a series of warnings over the past 15 years about the lack of representation at the top of business, women have failed to break through in almost every country in Europe. Indeed, the latest research on women at the top, at first glance, makes for depressing reading.

Far from powering through the glass ceiling, women take up just 8.5 per cent of seats in corporate boardrooms in Europe's biggest 300 companies, according to a study from the European Professional Women's Network and the consultancy firm Mercer.

There are wide discrepancies across the Continent. Scandinavian countries, which have legal quotient for board members, lead the way: women comprise 28.8 per cent of the boards of Norwegian companies and 22.8 per cent in Sweden.

Spain and Italy drag the European average down, with just 4.1 per cent and 1.9 per cent representation respectively, while there are no women on the board of companies in Gibraltar, Luxembourg and Portugal. The UK comes fifth in the league table, with a little more than 11 per cent female board members.

The types of positions held also varies massively with gender, according to the researchers. Only 11 per cent of the top 100 women hold executive board positions compared with 35 per cent of men, and a tiny 8 per cent of the women are heads of committees, versus 27 per cent for their male counterparts.

Mirella Visser, who with Annalisa Gigante co-wrote Women on Boards Moving Mountains, which analyses the research, said: "Change is possible and makes business sense, but without concrete steps and proactive decision making, the current rate of growth of female board members indicates it will take until 2065 to reach parity."

The authors have identified a number of key issues holding women back. Ms Visser said women tend to have a lower profile than their male counterparts. "Visibility is an issue for women and we didn't expect to find this," she said, adding this was, perhaps, due to a "reluctance on the part of those who have made it to become high profile".

"Women have a natural inclination to be more modest, but it can also be seen as aggressive when women do put themselves forward," she said. As a consequence, finding information on women's backgrounds through "Googling" was much more difficult than for men. "Not being present on the web might seriously harm career opportunities," Ms Visser said.

Another crucial difference was whether or not the candidates had carried out a managerial role before progressing to board position. Some 57 per cent of wo-men had line management positions compared to 84 per cent of men. And expatriate experience was another stumbling block. Male board members had an average of two expatriate assignments compared to 1.5 for women.

Peninah Thomson, a partner at executive coaching company Praesta, agrees that two of the main issues holding women back are visibility and experience. "For some women, there is still a reluctance to put their heads above the parapet," she said. "But being a board member is a visible entity. It is not anonymous. Women have to step forward."

Many chairmen wished to propel women to the board but found there was not a big enough pool of women with the required operational experience, she added. Women were getting stuck in functional jobs, such as human resources or marketing, and were not getting the breadth of experience which would come from rotating around a company in different managerial roles. The fact that HR and marketing roles no longer command board posts at many firms has not helped women either.

"Companies need to be more creative and take risks," she said. "It would be possible to help women get the experience they need before they start families." However, women themselves must also learn to take risks, she said. "Women tend to need to have 95 per cent of job requirements before they apply for a position while men need only 75 per cent," she said.

Certainly, things are moving in the right direction, albeit slowly. Ms Thomson is the director of the FTSE 100 Cross-Company Mentoring Programme in the UK, which pairs leading men with women within their companies to aid their progress.

The programme started two and a half years ago and has 29 FTSE 100 chairmen and two chief executives. So far, five women who have been mentored have been appointed on to the executive committee of their companies and seven have become non-executive directors, two of which were in FTSE 250 companies.

Ms Thomson said: "The fact that these chairmen are willing to give up their time voluntarily means they want to be helpful and make change happen." However, it may not be such a priority for middle-managers, she added. "I don't think it is so high up their agenda," she said.

Research from Cranfield University published last month showed that one in five new appointments to FTSE 100 boards last year went to women. Furthermore, there has been a surge of 40 per cent in the number of women holding jobs on executive committees who are responsible for running companies day to day. These are often incubators for future board members. J Sainsbury is top of the league with three female directors in a board of 10 and women making up one-fifth of the executive committee.

To make life easier for women who wish to juggle family with a high-flying career, the Equality and Human Rights Commission has been calling for an extension of the right to request flexible working and the availability of more high quality, well-paid flexible and part time work.

Far from children being the main factor in holding women back, it is the inflexibility of the regime of many companies in allowing a family life that is at fault. This lack of flexibility is driving many women to set up their own businesses it is estimated that between 34 and 42 per cent of the UK small business stock is owned or co-owned by women.

A little more than one million women in the UK are self-employed and the number has increased by 18 per cent in just five years.

Women may want to spend time with their families but this does not mean they wish to miss out on a fulfilling career. Companies are making moves to encourage high-flying women to stay with them, but there is still an awful lot of work to be done.

Britain's female FTSE 100 bosses

The UK's glass ceiling is as tough as ever. Just a handful of women have made it to the dizzy heights of FTSE 100 leadership. Dame Marjorie Scardino became the first female chief executive in the top flight index after becoming the head of publishing group Pearson, which owns the 'Financial Times', in 1997. She is ranked 17th on the Forbes list of the 100 most powerful women in the world.

Despite Dame Marjorie being the highest-paid female last year, her 2.1m salary was 25 per cent lower than the average for FTSE 100 bosses.

Dame Marjorie was joined in the FTSE 100 this year by Cynthia Carroll, who caused a stir at the beginning when she was appointed as the new chief executive of Anglo American, becoming the first female to head a leading mining company. She is encouraging innovation at the miner and has bought stakes in an iron-ore mine in Brazil and two copper projects.

Clara Furse, the Canadian-born boss of the London Stock Exchange, recently joined the top flight leaders after the exchange jumped into the blue chip gauge last week for the first time in its 300-year history. As a fierce defender of the exchanges independence, she thwarted a takeover attempt by Nasdaq, leaving it with two competing Gulf states Dubai and Qatar as its main shareholders. Baroness Hogg, left, the economist and journalist, is the lone female chairman of a leading company over at venture capital firm 3i.

Among the FTSE 250 female leaders are Dorothy Thompson, head of electricity generator Drax, which was briefly in the FTSE 100 last year before dropping out in September, Angela Ahrendts, in charge of iconic British fashion house Burberry, Sly Bailey, who is at the helm of media group Trinity Mirror and Kate Swann, the chief executive of high street retailer WH Smith. Meanwhile, luxury goods brand Theo Fennell yesterday announced the appointment of Pamela Harper as chief executive. Previously at Burberry and Herms, she is also a non-executive director of Western & Oriental.

Karen Attwood