US women have winning attitude

CONSIDER the following two female candidates for nomination to, say, the board of a large British company. First up is a fund manager at one of the City's oldest and most-distinguished institutions.

This woman - let's call her Kate - boasts an uncanny ability to outperform the market but, by her own admission, operates on far too little sleep and is often distracted by her two young children. A bit of a cynic, Kate once told a promising young female trainee that women may only advance in business by acting like a man.

Then there's the American challenger, Barbara. She launched a budget airline, led a management buy-out of the operation, then sold it on for more than three times what she paid. A pleasant and likable woman, she also has two young children, but rarely mentions them when conducting business. Barbara, modelled on Barbara Cassani, the former head of Go, is the clearly the more impressive candidate, and not just because Kate is a work of fiction.

Kate Reddy is the heroine of Allison Pearson's I Don't Know How She Does It - a popular novel bemoaning the predicament of high-achieving British working mothers.

Who wants a Kate, constantly bleating about her work-life balance, when you can have a Barbara? It may be the positive attitude of American women that accounts for much of their success in business here.

No longer the wide-eyed innocents of Henry James novels, American women are making inroads in boardrooms on this side of the Atlantic.

From Cassani, to Shell's chief financial officer Judith Boynton, to Pearson's Marjorie Scardino, the first chief executive of a FTSE 100 company, Americans aren't knocking on the glass ceiling - they're cracking it.

New Yorker Rose Marie Bravo, chief executive of Burberry, was one of Britain's highest-paid executives last year.

Clara Furse, the £1m-a-year chief executive of the London Stock Exchange, also has a North-American flavour. She is Canadian-British.

Other American women at the top of British companies include Laurel Powers Freeling, head of Marks & Spencer's financial services division.

'They can teach us an awful lot,' said Ruth Lea, former head of the policy unit at the Institute of Directors. 'They're not easily put off and that's how you have to be.'

Lea laments the whinging that characterises some of the local talent - particularly now that the issue of work-life balance has become so fashionable. She worries that such an attitude might be damaging women's prospects.

A higher proportion of American women attend university and carry on to study business at the graduate level. Some 35% of students at Harvard Business School are female, up from just 2% in 1965. More than one-third of the Class of 2005 at Stanford Business School and at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania - America's most elite business schools - are women.

By contrast, just 23% of London Business School students are female, and some of those are American.

Funnily enough, the dean of the London Business School is one Laura D'Andrea Tyson, a former head of America's Council of Economic Advisors and one of the highest-ranked women in the Clinton government.

But these high-profile Americans have a way to go before they help change the composition of the pale, male, stale British boardroom. Just over 5% of directors of FTSE 100 companies are women, says independent research firm Eiris.

By contrast, 87% of America's biggest companies boast at least one female board member, according to the Catalyst Census of Women Board Directors. Most of the US businesswomen here are extraordinarily well groomed, paying far more attention to their appearance than most of our Kate Reddys. Perhaps a good manicure and a well-cut suit may explain their advances. Then again, perhaps British women should import some American-style attitude.

Laurie Laird is an American-born journalist living in Britain.