Still not enough women at the top in the City
The launch of the first Women in the City Awards took place in, as you might expect, the City of London this morning. Val Singh, deputy director of the international centre for women business leaders at Cranfield School of Management spoke at the launch and revealed some grim stats about the state of female representation within upper tiers of management.
Among FTSE100 companies only 4% of executive directors are female. (She could have added that only 1% of CFOs are female: Helen Weir of Lloyds TSB). Some 12% of top team members are female, at least, suggesting a pipeline that may push up the alarming top table statistic a little in the coming years. This rises to 16% among FTSE250 companies.
Interestingly Singh recently interviewed chief executives and chairmen of many of these companies about what they wanted to see from their female executives and the answer certainly wasn't for them to act more like their male colleagues. 'They want women on the board who are honest about their emotional intelligence,' she said. 'They want women who are brave enough and honest enough to say when they feel something isn't right.'
Speaking at the same event, author and entrepreneur Margaret Heffernan offered her views on why the launch of the awards matters. 'You can get the job - we've shown that. You can get the title and sometimes you can even get the salary. What's difficult to get is clout so when as a woman you open your mouth, everybody shuts up and listens.' Awards help, she added.
More troublingly I can't imagine when we publish the 2007 Top 50 survey of accountancy firms next month we'll see any female senior partners at all, now that Moores Rowland has been taken over by Mazars. Moores'
senior partner Fiona Hotston Moore will takle a place on the Mazars borad but will no longer lead a firm.
Addition: It's not confined to accountancy, of course: a colleague points out that the UK's equality watchdog came under fire yesterday for paying female staff an average of nearly £2,000 a year less than male workers.
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