Men hold 95 per cent of board seats in Ireland's top 100 companies. But excluding women may be bad for business, writes Kathy Sheridan.
What is it with women? They comprise just half the population but they take up well over half the places on nearly all the top-flight university courses and - as was confirmed this week - are also the top performers there. Name any business and women constitute well over half of its customer base and usually a whole lot more. They have the casting vote, for instance, in up to 94 per cent of home furnishing, holiday, home and medical insurance choices. They can speak, drive cars, use cutlery, wash themselves, dress appropriately, and are welcome in all but the most obtuse company.
Yet the other sex holds 95 per cent of the board seats in Ireland's top 100 companies. Which means that women - those star college achievers, decision-makers, spenders and social animals - are left with 5 per cent. That translates to 40 board seats out of 810.
Consider this. The first woman director appointed by Nike, the sportswear giant, suggested a line of women's sports shoes. Obvious, you may be thinking. Yet no-one else had thought of it. The line now accounts for a third of the company's sales.
In the US, where women now have 12 per cent of board seats, there is early evidence of a connection between the presence of women on boards and greater profitability. The top 20 companies there have twice as many women directors as those ranked between 80 and 100. Seventeen of the top 20 UK companies have women directors, while only half of the bottom 20 in the FTSE 100 do.
In the 100 most comparable Irish companies, 20 of the top 50 have women directors, while only 12 of those ranked between 50 and 100 do. The wonder is that shareholders are not out with placards and petrol bombs, screaming for change.
"It absolutely has to change", says independent consultant Liz McKeever, formerly deputy managing director of Amárach Consulting and previously a senior employee with AIB. "You only have to look at the markets these businesses are serving. Many are involved in areas where the major decision-makers and purchasers are women. Surely one of the key things for an organisation in helping it to be better placed to meet the needs of the employees, customers and stakeholders is to have a board that reflects that diversity?"
But if change is what the shareholders want, they will have to scream - very loud. When those Irish boards with no women were asked if their company intended to appoint any in the future, a fascinating 30 per cent of them gave a straight no. Only 17 per cent answered yes and more than half wouldn't say.
This is the conundrum that jumps out of a new report from which all this information is culled. Women and Corporate Governance in Ireland, commissioned by the Irish chapter of the International Women's Forum, comprises two studies, one a quantitative analysis by a team led by Dr Yvonne Galligan from Queen's University, the other qualitative research by Dr Maureen Gaffney in which she and others talked in depth with six CEOs of major financially successful companies.
The top business people (five men and a woman) interviewed in the latter study seem entirely sanguine about the situation.
"There is an absolute reliance on the part of the CEOS and chairs," Gaffney told The Irish Times, "that this is a 'pipeline problem', that it's only a matter of time before women will rise through the ranks of corporations to CEO or very senior executive positions. The view is that, any day now, women will be released from those pipes. But the figures on that are just as depressing. Oh sure, in the US, the number of women CEOs in Fortune 500 companies has trebled since 1995. What that actually means is that it's gone up from two women to six - and that took seven years."
What is going on? Is the old-school white boys' network still clinging to power? Or is it that the high-flying women get so far, make a face and bail out, by choice?
So let's just get one thing out of the way. Is there male prejudice against women? One Irish CEO in Gaffney's trawl is blunt: "There is a fair degree of prejudice around the place . . . And most of that is underground."
Apart from that minor matter, the divergence of views between male CEOS/chairs and women directors in this report is remarkable. While 42 per cent of the male bosses believe there are too few women qualified for board service, only 21 per cent of the women directors agree with them. Some 70 per cent of the men believe that the reason women are absent from boards is that they have not been coming up the ranks for long enough; only 43 per cent of the women believe that. And although only 13 per cent of the male bosses believe that "companies not knowing where to look for a woman director" is the problem, 57 per cent of the women hold that view.
The chairman is the one with the power, and despite increasing willingness to use executive search services such as The Boardroom Centre (affiliated to the Institute of Directors in Ireland), appointments still seem to come down to who he knows.
Women's network organisations are not the thing, at all at all.
"Too sensitive, too indirect," says one CEO.
"You create an expectation," said another.
"Men are scared of women's networks," said a third.
But even when they do go the executive search route, says Rosemary Wilson of The Boardroom Centre (the only named source in the report), "I'd say the implicit expectation would be that it's a man for>womando they have any preference, or does it matter. They always alwayswoman
Wilson recalls looking at CVs with a man who came across a woman's name batch,'Why are they so fearful? She believes it's because "women would be more forthright. Men . . . if they see pressure coming, I think they'd be enough, don't upset things here too much' . . . I think they might feel that a woman would be more incisive and will ask the awkward question and stick with it".
So amid a great deal of solemn discussion from the CEOs about the need for "a successful track record in business", comes the less definable touchy-feely stuff, such as an "ability to understand the culture". This, no doubt, is a first cousin to "networking skills". Male networks.
""nd because women have their own networks, they haven't penetrated these networks."
Another CEO cut to the chase: "Why so few women ? The 'clubby' reason. Look at golf, the huge number of men on those corporate golf outings. That is quite a factor." (Think of Portmarnock.)
chambers of commerce, the Irish Business and Institute of Public Administration and the Irish Management Institute.
activeAnother says that women have to be more up-front in making their interest in board membership known: "Women are not pushy enough and don't put themselves forward aggressively, unlike men. This is very typical. In career moves, men promote themselves; women are diffident as to their talents."
But wait, before anyone races off to promote herself, here's another CEO. "If I'm interested in becoming a non-executive director of a company, the last thing I do is express an interest. What you do is, you target the company, then find out what network works to nominate people in that company - and you cosy up to that network. You do it very carefully and very subtly through third parties. Women may - I say, may - not understand the subtleties of how that "What's a woman to do? Especially one who - given how society works - may be nailed to 10-hour days at work and commuting several more hours to a couple of small children and a high-flying husband with networking needs of his own? Afternoon's golf, anyone?
"You must be joking," snorts a once high-flying corporate Irish woman, who has now joined forces with another defector to form a company. "They would have driven me mental if I'd stayed. All the talk was about flexibility, yet once you attained a particular level you couldn't avail of it. Then you'd see the women boning up on Ballintarry GAA so they could talk about it to the men,and learning to play golf. Becoming clones, so as to fit into the 'culture'. I found all that very alienating. I once told someone that 'I don't play golf, I don't have time for it' and a few thought that was really very funny because in that "In other studies, successful American women said they had to find a style with which male managers were comfortable, always steering the delicate line being perceived as not ballsy enough or being a ball-breaker - the old double standard. Gaffney recalls the classic psychological study in which identical scripts were handed to a male actor and judgremember) to be pushy and aggressive.
There are other double standards. Male deference to the CEO is expected, while female deference is taken as weakness. If women try to adopt the masculine traits and communication style associated with effectiveness, they are not seen as genuine.
Add to that the view of 99 per cent of American woman executives that they must work a lot harder than men. CEOs elsewhere admit that women managers are subjected to competency testing more often than men.
In the end, perhaps, it comes down to the world-view of the sexes and whether women see corporate culture as something worth buying into. Maureen Rice, a highly successful English woman, has written about jumping off the corporate carousel she had grown to hate because of its "hierarchy of half-wits, its waste of time politics and its thought control".
"If you're not driving your own life, somebody is driving it for you", says Liz McKeever. "I see successful women who reach a point where they're asking whether they want the whole corporate thing. It's about an attitude and style of working. A company may have all the various things in place like parental leave, flexible hours and so on, but it's just as much about mindset.
"If you feel that the company is genuinely behind those measures and doesn't see them as an inconvenience for its business, chances are you will avail of them and feel comfortable about them, not - and this can be the woman's fault too - feel guilty about taking them. That's how companies will bring women through the ranks and not lose them."
It is surely significant that, on average, one-fifth of women An Irish CEO in Gaffney's study takes the simple view. For women, he says, it's "down to personal choice . . . That's a factor that people are afraid to say: that there is a mothering factor there that's very powerful. It takes a lot of women out of the loop. For a man to make that choice would be taboo, and I think that's wrong. Ultimately it comes back to the gene pool [of qualified women]".
So is this where it ends? Is the battle lost, not just for the child-rearing years but for all time, not because of prejudice or the Portmarnock claque but because of the "mothering factor"?
Maureen Gaffney gives that one short shrift. "In the era of lifelong learning and competitive advantage, women do makes choices because they want to or because they have to," she says. "And they them so they end up doing something like voluntary work. This is fantastic and needs to be done, but it needn't all be done by women. Men think that women are put in the world to make it better - but women have