By Tina Vasquez (Los Angeles)
A new report from the Conference Board of Canada, an independent non-profit applied research organization, has found that the percentage of Canadian women in senior management positions has changed very little and that men are two to three times as likely to hold a senior executive position. Ruth Wright, the Conference Board of Canada’s associate director of leadership and human resources research, oversaw the report Women in Senior Management: Where Are They? And, she said, many were shocked by its findings.
The few women who rise to senior levels often attract substantial media attention, which may give readers the false impression that barriers to women’s advancement are a thing of the past.
“People were very surprised by the findings. I think many assumed that there would have been significant shifts since our original study, Closing the Gap, 14 years ago. This is an example of why this type of research is so important – it starts the conversation that gets people wondering what the problem is and hopefully, this leads to enlightened management,” Wright said.
The Conference Board of Canada based its findings on data spanning two decades, from 1987 to 2009, which revealed that the presence of Canadian women in senior management positions flatlined during that time, despite a major bump in the number of women in the workforce. As of 2009, 48 percent of Canada’s workforce is comprised of women, yet only 0.32 percent (26,000 of more than 8 million working women) held senior management positions. While the absolute number of women in senior management rose from less than 15,000 in 1987, females are still significantly underrepresented at the senior executive level compared to males.
The report found similar results at the middle-management levels – which includes directors and managers – that frequently provide the feeder pool for future executives. Men have consistently been 1.5 times more likely than women to hold middle management positions over the past 22 years. In 2009, 911,000 men were working in middle management positions (over 10 percent of all men employed), compared to 543,000 women (7 percent of all women employed).
Anne Golden, The Conference Board of Canada’s president and chief executive officer, pointed out that between 1987 and 2009, the proportion of women in middle management rose by about 4 percent. “At that rate, it will take approximately 151 years before the proportion of men and women at the management level is equal,” Golden wrote on the Board’s site.
Delegate Better Now – Four Ways to Perfect Your Skills
Industry Leaders, LeadershipWhat’s one difference between a manager and a leader? Leadership is about looking outward at your organization, rather than only back at your team. It’s the same thing with delegation – to be really great at it, you need to do it with purpose, looking back at your team, and looking broadly at the organization. It’s not just about doling out work, but it means really thinking about why you’re delegating a task, how it can help you and your team grow, and how it can better position you to be more effective for your organization.
“Sometimes leaders hesitate when it comes to asking for help,” began Mary Edwards, Managing Director and Senior Executive, Health and Public Service at Accenture. “But I think it’s important for every leader to have effective delegation skills.”
For Edwards, delegation is not just a way to get through the day, it’s a way to help her team build skills and make sure she has time and energy left to do the work that can help her company grow. Here are her top four tips on how to become a great delegator – and a great leader.
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What You Seize is What You Get
Expert AnswersToday’s work environment is tougher than ever. The pressure to find or keep a managerial level position is immense. The pressure to deliver high performance and maintain a leadership role is intense. For many women, the challenges are coupled with the added pressures of striving to maintain personal or family balance. Yet that needn’t be seen as a sign of weakness. Women continue to want to achieve more professionally, and continue to show their abilities to do that well; there’s no weakness evident. Yet we need to be stronger than ever to survive. Today, survival is based on success. And that success can be achieved by those who go after it. In other words, success is achieved by those who see opportunities and who seize them.
In today’s tight job market, it is the person with the confidence and the qualifications who gets the job. Even though women are still, unfortunately, being paid less, companies are not rushing to hire women as a way to keep payrolls down. They are relying on what they think they need: strength during tough times. It’s time for us to get in touch with our inner strength and project that to the world.
According to the Pew Research Center, men outpace women in getting jobs. And women are getting laid off more so than men, at least in some industries. In financial services, long a male-dominated world, from 2007 to 2010, 12.5% of women in the financial industry lost their jobs, compared with 8.8% of men, per the Economic Policy Institute. It would seem that part of the problem comes from women being seen as weak, perhaps indecisive, and not standing up for themselves. Women are not making a strong enough case for the value they are bringing to their organizations… perhaps because they do not see it themselves. Clarity of vision is needed, internally and externally. Then action.
This is a time for bold action, for being decisive, and for standing up against fear or uncertainty. If what you see was what you got, we now know that what you see and seize is what you get. If times are tough, so are we and here’s how.
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Voice of Experience: Dr. Sonja Koerner, Partner, Risk, Financial Services, Ernst & Young
Voices of ExperienceAccording to Dr. Sonja Koerner, Partner, Risk, Financial Services at Ernst & Young, women in senior roles in the industry need to see themselves as role models.
“Make yourself available as a mentor,” Dr. Koerner said. She also encouraged senior women to support diversity and inclusiveness in their organizations and drive the debate around things like flexible work arrangements.
“Many women – and some men – would hugely benefit [from these programs]. We should make sure that once women sign up for them, this does not mean the end of their career progression,” she said.
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Crying in the Office: OK or No Way?
Office PoliticsA recent Bloomberg article by writer Anne Kreamer is proving to be quite controversial. In “Tears for Peers Are Newly OK in Modern Workplace,” Kreamer contends that women have distinctly female parts—their essential femininity, their nurturing impulses, and aspects of their intrinsic emotional biology, such as crying. According to Kreamer, these things are not socially-conditioned, but rather “neurobiologically hard-wired.”
While researching her latest book, Kreamer discovered that 41 percent of women and 9 percent of men reported that they had cried in the workplace during the past year. “This finding conforms to the national gender split that neurologists have found. Women, who produce higher levels of prolactin, the hormone that controls tear production, cry on average 5.3 times a month, compared with 1.4 times for men,” Kreamer wrote. “Women’s tear ducts are also anatomically different from men’s — they are smaller, which means that when women cry, tears tend to spill out and down their faces, whereas when men cry, their tears merely well up.”
She concludes by writing that tears at work aren’t necessarily a moral failing or a sign of weakness. While that may be true, claims of tears not being socially-conditioned are not only biased, but dangerous. Here’s why.
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Voice of Experience: Carole Berndt, Head of Global Treasury Solutions, EMEA, Bank of America Merrill Lynch
Voices of ExperienceAt an early stage in her career, Carole Berndt, winner of the 2011 Women in Banking and Finance’s Award for Achievement, stood on a mountain in Hong Kong and was asked to quote on the risk element of turning the side of the mountain into an airport. She duly quoted, the site was purchased and developed and is now Hong Kong’s Chep Lak Kok international airport – a story which reflects Berndt’s geographically diverse career, first in insurance and now in banking.
“I was born in the UK and in 1970 my family moved to Australia; I grew up in Sydney and went to university there. My first job was as a book keeper with an insurance company – subsequently purchased by Allianz – and they invested in me. I did accounting, then computer science, then an MBA in international business. I led the very early efforts in the e-commerce space in the 1990s for the company’s Asia region and spent considerable time in Singapore and Indonesia.
“Around the late 1990s, I became known in my company as the “grandmother of the internet” – that’s when I knew I’d become part of the furniture and life had become too easy. I was offered and took a role with Citi in Hong Kong running the project office for their e-business unit, which then become known as Global Transaction Services.”
Berndt stayed for eight years, leading the client delivery services team before moving to New York following her promotion to global head of client delivery. She was then approached by Bank of America Merrill Lynch, so with a great opportunity on offer, she relocated to London in 2010 into her current role of head of global treasury solutions for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
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Are you an Iron Butterfly? And why would you want to be one?
Expert AnswersAfter writing the book, The Soul at Work: Engaging Complexity Science for Business Success, with science writer Roger Lewin, I realized that the great majority of the very successful, complexity-science oriented leaders we interviewed were men. Their leadership style shared an unusual attribute: a dynamic balance of traditionally feminine and masculine skills and values. They focused on relationships as the core of their management model, and argued that this would lead to healthy bottom line numbers. It did. One leader we interviewed had Maslow’s pyramid on his desk, except that at the bottom of the pyramid were “relationships,” rather than need. I wondered how the interplay between feminine and masculine skills might look like in women leaders.
I ended up interviewing sixty successful women from eight countries, and from many walks of life. They included: a Noble Peace Prize laureate, a famous novelist, a federal judge, lawyers, CEOs, entrepreneurs, artists, CFO, doctors, nurses, educators, and even a wine maker in Tuscany. What, I wondered, would I find in common in these women across this great sea of diversity?
I discovered four traits: paradoxical ways, “gatherers” of community, holistic thinking, relational intelligence.
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New Report Sheds Light on Canada’s Glass Ceiling
Managing ChangeA new report from the Conference Board of Canada, an independent non-profit applied research organization, has found that the percentage of Canadian women in senior management positions has changed very little and that men are two to three times as likely to hold a senior executive position. Ruth Wright, the Conference Board of Canada’s associate director of leadership and human resources research, oversaw the report Women in Senior Management: Where Are They? And, she said, many were shocked by its findings.
The few women who rise to senior levels often attract substantial media attention, which may give readers the false impression that barriers to women’s advancement are a thing of the past.
“People were very surprised by the findings. I think many assumed that there would have been significant shifts since our original study, Closing the Gap, 14 years ago. This is an example of why this type of research is so important – it starts the conversation that gets people wondering what the problem is and hopefully, this leads to enlightened management,” Wright said.
The Conference Board of Canada based its findings on data spanning two decades, from 1987 to 2009, which revealed that the presence of Canadian women in senior management positions flatlined during that time, despite a major bump in the number of women in the workforce. As of 2009, 48 percent of Canada’s workforce is comprised of women, yet only 0.32 percent (26,000 of more than 8 million working women) held senior management positions. While the absolute number of women in senior management rose from less than 15,000 in 1987, females are still significantly underrepresented at the senior executive level compared to males.
The report found similar results at the middle-management levels – which includes directors and managers – that frequently provide the feeder pool for future executives. Men have consistently been 1.5 times more likely than women to hold middle management positions over the past 22 years. In 2009, 911,000 men were working in middle management positions (over 10 percent of all men employed), compared to 543,000 women (7 percent of all women employed).
Anne Golden, The Conference Board of Canada’s president and chief executive officer, pointed out that between 1987 and 2009, the proportion of women in middle management rose by about 4 percent. “At that rate, it will take approximately 151 years before the proportion of men and women at the management level is equal,” Golden wrote on the Board’s site.
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What Happens If Your Sponsor Leaves the Company?
Mentors and SponsorsThe past few weeks have seen a spate of high profile departures from top companies, as senior leaders have left big jobs for greener pastures (or perhaps under less ideal circumstances). In an economic environment like this, where budgets are being cut regularly and everyone is doing more with less, job security is top of mind. Even high performing individuals need to be sure they have access to the unseen network of power within their organization, to have a sponsor advocating for them behind the scenes.
Late last year, Catalyst published groundbreaking research on the subject, explaining how sponsorship is key to narrowing the gender pay gap. Shortly thereafter, the Center for Work Life Policy followed suit, with research showing how sponsorship can help keep women in the pipeline to the top, and clarifying the two-way relationship between a sponsor and a protege.
In the months following, we’ve published advice on why you need a sponsor, how to find a sponsor, how to be a sponsor – you might call 2011 the year of the sponsor. But one question remains – what if you lose your sponsor?
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10 Ways to Take Control of Your Job Search!
Expert AnswersSome clients who first come to me for help after a long and frustrating search attribute their difficulties to something they can’t control, such as age, experience (i.e. over- or under-qualified), weight, ethnic background, gender or, less often, some other physical feature. Yes, these biases do surface at times in the job search. But, once these clients start describing their search in more detail, nine times out of ten, I see that the problem is actually in their job-search strategy or execution!
So, if you have that “out of control” feeling, here’s a checklist of 10 things to make sure you are doing, to help you get back into the driver’s seat, and on the road to the job you want.
1. Are you “positioning” yourself correctly? That is, are you focusing on how you can help your target audience? This means dropping the jargon that is only relevant to your current or last job, and using the language of your next.
2. Are you too general, or trying to be all things to all people? This strategy can be tempting because this way you don’t rule anything out. The problem with the too general approach, however, is that people are not going to take the time to figure out how you can help them. Or, they will put you in a place you don’t want to be! Having a specific resume and pitch for each job target is the way to go.
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Five Secrets to Successful Rainmaking
NewsLast week, the National Association for Female Executives (NAFE) and Flex-Time Lawyers honored the fifty best law firms for female lawyers. And while the competition was fierce, according to Deborah Epstein Henry, Founder and President, Flex-Time Lawyers and author of Law & Reorder, the legal profession still has a lot more work to do.
She said, “Our data has shown that the partnership structure has an impact on women’s success in terms of how senior they get in law firms. In firms with a one-tier structure – with just an equity partnership track – women were promoted at higher rates. The trend is moving away from the one-tier structure, and this is negatively impacting women.”
But it’s not all bad news, Henry continued. Firms are recognizing the value of flex and technology. “There is an increased recognition of the ability to work differently and use technology without negatively impacting the bottom line.”
Yet, she continued, while the policies are in place, the firm-wide culture may not fully support flex. “When you look at the usage rates, the proof is in the pudding about whether the policy is viable. A tremendous stigma still surrounds working flexibly or on a reduced hours schedule. The policies have to be gender neutral and reason-neutral, and not just about child-care.”
With a mixed environment for women in the legal profession, women need to be sure they are performing their best to get to the top, she said, and one way to do that is to bring in new clients. Henry continued, “Rainmaking is so important. It is your measure of how you will be compensated and how powerful you will be.”
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