Michael Harrison: Forget quotas, Britain needs to change its corporate culture

A talented female acquaintance of mine who served on the executive committee of more than one blue-chip company decided to quit her well-paid work in the corporate world not so long ago.

She cited two reasons: first, the role was incompatible with having a sensible home life which allowed her to see her family during the week; second, she had so few shared interests with the male clique that made up the rest of the committees that even socialising with them after work was a chore.

Paying her more would not have solved the problem. If anything, it would have made it worse because she would have felt obliged to spend yet more time at work. She would have much preferred to take a big fat pay cut in return for a happier and more flexible work-life balance.

Another female friend used to sit on the executive committee of a FTSE 250 company. She became so bored with being mansplained to and so frustrated at not being taken seriously unless and until a male colleague repeated her exact words, that she and a fellow female committee member invented a private parlour game: whenever one of them said anything, the other would furiously agree with her. Needless to say, the irony completely bypassed their male colleagues.

I’m not saying these two cases are representative of a woman’s lot in the higher echelons of British business. But they do bring an interesting perspective to the findings of executive headhunting firm Spencer Stuart’s latest snapshot of corporate Britain’s composition.

Its highly respected UK Board Index makes worrying reading for supporters of gender diversity: fewer women leading FTSE 100 companies; proportionately fewer women in executive positions — either at board level or one rung below; and double the number of all-male ExCos compared with a year before. The Government’s target is for women to make up a third of all FTSE 350 boards and ExCos by 2020. If Spencer Stuart is correct, then the pipeline is shrinking, not expanding.

What these two examples demonstrate, however, is the danger of pursuing targets on sex equality — or equal pay for that matter — for the sake of it. In many ways, the factors which deter women from climbing the greasy corporate pole are much the same ones that put off plenty of talented men with a more rounded sense of what matters in life. So setting arbitrary quotas is not necessarily the answer.

Nor is over-reliance on role models. Spencer Stuart’s research confirms what we intuitively know makes sense: that in companies with a female chief executive, women are more likely to be better represented at senior management levels. But not every talented woman can be, or maybe even wants to be, another Carolyn McCall at ITV, Emma Walmsley at GlaxoSmithKline or Severn Trent’s Liv Garfield.

For every female CEO who has inspired a new generation of women executives, there is another whose lifestyle few would want to emulate.

And if you are a woman with a good business brain, why wouldn’t your role model be entrepreneurs like Martha Lane Fox or Oprah Winfrey rather than Royal Mail’s Moya Greene or Kingfisher’s Véronique Laury?