Promotion of Women in Business

Helen Grant Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd March 2011 Westminster Hall

[Mrs Helen Grant (Maidstone and The Weald) (Con)]

Balance is the centrepiece of science; it is the fulcrum of philosophy; and it is stability in society—light and dark, hot and cold, yin and yang. We need to balance the resources at our disposal in order to exist and grow. Good business managers embrace balance in so many ways—risk and return, investment and innovation, supply and demand. However, an imbalance that is common in business, the professions and politics is the one between men and women in senior positions.

That imbalance is often labelled a gender equality issue, but actually it is a business performance issue. Men and women bring different things to the business table, which are not mutually exclusive. Women can be great at multi-tasking; men can be cool under pressure and very spontaneous. Both have different attitudes towards risk and confrontation. However, if we put the two together, it is no surprise that gender-balanced businesses are more stable, more sustainable and more profitable. Those involved with such businesses tend to make better decisions about people, risk and customers. Let us not forget that women make 80% of consumer purchase decisions in many countries.

If we can share the best of what we have as men and women, our diversity will enrich us all. There are many barriers to progress. Business is a man’s world built by men and, because people tend to recruit in their own image, male imbalance prevails. In the home, women are still the primary carers, and the struggle to juggle domestic duties and a demanding job can be a major hurdle. Silly stereotypes have been created in relation to both domains. Men are characterised as being confident, aggressive and direct, while women are characterised as being kind, warm and gentle, and therefore as perhaps not having quite what it takes to tackle tough business decisions. The truth could not be further from the myth. However, even today, some people still argue that gender difference in attainment is simply because of personal choice, aspiration and preference.

Some Governments have already taken action. Eight years ago, Norway passed legislation requiring all public and state-owned company boards to be 40% female. Spain and France are now following suit. Norway has achieved its quota, but succession is now a problem. Board members typically come from senior management in private companies. However, in Norway, only 6% of those posts are held by women. Clearly, a root-and-branch approach is still required.

[Gareth Johnson (Dartford) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate. I know that the issue is very important to her. I hope that she agrees that we are striving for a quality of fairness. Does she also agree that we need to ensure that such fairness is not patronising to women and does not replace one form of apparent discrimination with another?

[Mrs Grant]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point—I could not agree more. I shall cover that issue later. I am grateful for his intervention.

In Britain, we have much to do. Only 5% of FTSE 100 companies have a female chief executive, and only 12% of board directors are women. Our Government have promised to promote gender equality, and I am encouraged by coalition policies on flexible working and parental leave. Lord Davies of Abersoch is leading a review on women on boards, and his report has just been published. He has got it just about right and is seeking to accelerate glacial rates of change without causing global warming. Recommendations include encouraging head-hunters to put more women on shortlists, requiring chairmen to explain why boards lack female representation, inviting investors to take more responsibility in holding their plcs to account on matters of gender balance and, importantly, introducing voluntary targets to raise the number of female directors in Britain’s biggest companies while not ruling out quotas.

Enforced quotas worry me. I am really, really sceptical about them, because such positive discrimination can demean a woman’s real value among her peers and alienate men. Some would also say that quotas treat symptoms, not causes, and there is some truth in that. Surely our aspiration must be the creation of fair, real and equal opportunities, where meritocracy wins the day. Change is coming, and whether it comes eventually through quotas or by more gentle pressure will be a matter for serious and ongoing debate. Even without legislation, some British companies are already committed to gender balance and a variety of methods are being used. Mentoring and sponsorship, setting targets and using best practice illuminated by the light of transparency can all work very well. Part-time working arrangements can improve female retention. In fact, any family-friendly strategy that allows women just a little more flexibility, especially when their children are young, can pay big dividends—and word gets around because women talk. On an individual level, women can help themselves, too. We may need to be more assertive in our approach and not be afraid to take credit for our achievements.

[David Simpson (Upper Bann) (DUP)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on obtaining the debate. I promised my wife that I would be here this morning, because she is a business woman—it is more than my life is worth not to be. Although we perhaps have an issue around Government policy, does she agree that dealing with the matter should start earlier in life and that our colleges and universities could help to encourage women in entrepreneurship, so that things are more equal across the boardroom table?

[Mrs Grant]

The hon. Gentleman makes a very important intervention—I am sure that his wife will be proud. I could not agree more. Part of dealing with the problem is considering how to ensure that our girls—our young ladies—have much brighter, bigger, bolder, ambitious career advice when they are at school and university. The sky should be the limit—I agree with him completely.

I come back to men. Men, too, need to become better listeners. They need to learn to hear a woman’s voice and embrace the enlightenment of a broader horizon, because when courageous women and enlightened men—we have a few of those here today—come together, there is little that cannot be achieved. The non-believers should consider the following comment made by an all-male board member:

“Our board is really effective. We all think the same way. We all have the same views. Discussions are very short and we always reach the same conclusions”.

That all sounds very happy, but is that board healthy? Balanced boards are a noble aspiration, but there is a bigger picture. Boards are central in corporate life, but senior executives and managers create the wealth. That is where gender balance can be so effective. If we can recruit more women to those senior executive positions and train, nurture, promote and encourage them, then the transition to CEO and the board should be a much more natural step. In many ways, dealing with that is more difficult than dealing with quotas.

Enlightened leaders, both male and female, cast a lengthy shadow. Our Prime Minister, David Cameron, has set himself a target of one third of Ministers to be female by 2015. Likewise, a group of powerful London businessmen are aiming at one third female boards by 2015. A few weeks ago, the Financial Times published its list of the top 50 women in world business. Those women run organisations such as PepsiCo, Kraft Foods, Yahoo! and Xerox. Their success is cause for much celebration and they stand as much-needed role models. The aspirations of those leaders encourage millions. I take great heart in their initiatives, because it says to me that there is room at the top and the door is open.

In conclusion, this is an exciting time for the promotion of women in business, the professions and politics. Government have an important role to play, but legislation alone will not fix the problem. We need chairmen, chief executives, investors and head-hunters to all take action. The Davies report is a step in the right direction. I urge the Government to accept its sensible recommendations and to reconsider the whole issue of child care. Inadequate and unaffordable child care prescribes many women to the home, or to not having children. If some improvements can be made, many capable women will be released back into the working economy as taxpayers, entrepreneurs and wealth creators, which is exactly what our country needs at this difficult time.

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[Julian Smith]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The client that I worked with that did best in this area had such considerations hard-wired into compensation and promotion at all levels in the organisation, not just at board level. To get a pipeline of candidates for board positions, one has to work right down the organisation, at every level of management. In that organisation, the key question at every performance review was, “What diversity hiring have you done in the past six months?”

A relentless focus is required in the House and at every level of government. I am not convinced that having a unit on women and equality is the right way to go. We need this to be driven from the highest level in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, and we need to showcase with awards and in every way possible those organisations that are doing the right thing.

[Mrs Grant]

Could my hon. Friend say something about how head-hunters might be incentivised?

[Julian Smith]

The role of head-hunters is important. The reason for stressing companies is that head-hunters are driven by their fees, and if the underlying companies are pushing them, that is when there is a change in the approach of the head-hunters. I was pleased that Lord Davies advocated a voluntary code for head-hunters, and some are doing great work in this area, but we will probably end up having to look more closely at this unregulated part of the business world, and push hard if they do not move quickly on their voluntary code.

On parental leave, child care and other matters that have been discussed this morning, I hope that the Government, with their moratorium on regulations for small businesses, will advocate a frank conversation between employers and female employees. My best employee relationship was with someone I could talk to about her plans for child care and family development, and we interweaved her talent and desire to build her family with the business’s needs. That employee was paid more and performed better than any other person in my company.

As well as the Government’s role, there is a strong role for Parliament. There is a strong argument for setting up a new Select Committee for the lifetime of this Parliament to focus on women and diversity. It could be wrapped up at the end of this Parliament, but in the meantime it could be used as a vehicle to demonstrate that parliamentarians in the class of 2010 will ensure that we move the issue on, drag companies in and question them. We want to ensure that the matter is nailed once and for all.

My concern and my message to business, whether head-hunters, global businesses or small businesses, is that if we are still here in 2015 having these arguments about the paltry number of women in the senior echelons of our businesses, it will be very difficult for people such as me, as a great supporter of less regulation and red tape, to stand up and say that there should not be legislation and intervention. This Parliament has an opportunity, as does business, to go for it, and to make a substantial change along the lines of what Lord Davies said, but it must be done now. We must get on with it.

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[Caroline Dinenage (Gosport) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Mrs Grant) on securing the debate, which is incredibly valuable. We have heard some excellent contributions and some interesting ideas, particularly the idea about job shares in the Cabinet.

I endorse the comments made by my hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Andrea Leadsom). Every mum faces huge dilemmas in her everyday working life. Productive women are those who feel that their family life is respected.

I wanted to take part in the debate to talk about the untapped potential of women as entrepreneurs. As a business owner myself, I have experienced at first hand the challenges that women face in starting their own companies. It is a world dominated by men. I have experienced for myself the days of walking into a trade show or a builders merchant and it being a bit like the saloon in the wild west where everyone stops what they are doing and turns round to look at the strange being that is among them. When four of the five dragons from “Dragons’ Den” are male and men such as Richard Branson and Alan Sugar fly the flag for UK entrepreneurship, it is not surprising that less than half of businesses are started by women. The stereotype of the ambitious, ruthless male entrepreneur needs to change.

Women can bring a huge amount to business and the economy. Worldwide, women have been shown to be successful and conscientious business leaders. In microfinance initiatives in Africa, 90% of female entrepreneurs plough the profit from their businesses back into the community, compared with only 50% of the men. In the UK, we have inspirational women such as Deborah Meaden and Tamara Mellon, who prove that it is possible for women to succeed in starting their own business. With women making more than 70% of household purchasing decisions, they surely know what the market wants. So why are those inspiring business women so few and far between?

Anyone starting a business will face daunting tasks. They must win over potential investors, persuade their family that it is worth it and, perhaps more importantly, persuade themselves that they are capable of succeeding. That is often the most insurmountable hurdle for women—summoning the self-confidence to take on that task and that risk.

I am involved in a fantastic project in my constituency of Gosport. It is called AWESOME—all women entrepreneurs supporting opportunity and motivating their expertise. It brings budding female entrepreneurs together to provide a network of support. Despite having brilliant ideas, they tend to hold themselves back, perhaps due to a fear of rejection. It is almost as though they regard their business idea being rejected by a potential customer as a rejection of themselves. They have difficulty separating themselves from their business idea.

[Mrs Grant]

My hon. Friend makes a very important point about confidence. I agree that there is a fundamental confidence issue for us, which has come from years of sexism. Does my hon. Friend agree that if there were more female role models, that might help to correct the situation?

[Caroline Dinenage]

Absolutely. That is exactly right and it is the point that I was going to make and probably will in a second. Even when a woman succeeds, the challenges posed by approaching a bank or taking on greater responsibility sometimes prevent her from taking those steps and expanding the business to its full potential. I have seen so many women who have got to a certain stage and thought, “I don’t know whether I can take that final step,” and have then just stopped where they are. It is tragic to see that amazing potential go to waste, especially when our economy desperately needs the passion, hard work and vision of all entrepreneurs, but particularly female entrepreneurs. We just need to find a way of unlocking that talent.

By bringing female entrepreneurs together, as we have in Gosport, a network of moral support is created that allows a woman’s true passion for her business to shine though. Women say that they cannot do the hard sell. They say that that is the one thing they cannot do. They say, “I can’t do the hard sell. I can’t go into business.” However, when they are asked to talk about their businesses, their passion and enthusiasm for their product sells it for them. I could tell hon. Members about the number of times that I have walked out of a meeting, having subscribed to things that I did not even believe I needed—including a cat sitter when I do not even have a cat. They are incredible saleswomen, but they do not know that they are doing it.

Successful business women get involved in the group to which I am referring. They inspire confidence in those starting out and help to overcome the little barriers and difficulties that hold people back. We need to develop a network of such groups throughout the UK. They are self-started; they are not funded; and they are just self-help groups. We need to develop a network of such groups throughout the UK to ensure that in every constituency women are getting the support that they need.

Most importantly, we need to foster a culture of female leadership. We need to inspire and build self-confidence in people from a young age, whether that is done through debating clubs or programmes such as Young Enterprise. I did Young Enterprise at school. The business that we had was called Big Time and designed clocks—given my reputation for timekeeping, people find that quite surprising.

We also need to tap into the potential of the media and popular culture in promoting entrepreneurship. I visit many schools in my constituency, and nearly every time I ask the kids what they want to do when they leave school. Very rarely does a girl say to me either that she wants to start a business or that she has an entrepreneurial idea, yet so many want to be actresses, models and performers, which always staggers me. We need some more positive business role models in the media. After all, why should only Alan Sugar have an apprentice?

There will be great benefits for women and for the economy in promoting female-led business. It will bring fresh ideas and different qualities to the business world, while allowing women to set their own hours and agendas, which is what we are talking about. Entrepreneurship is not the preserve of men. It is our responsibility to ensure that women have the support and confidence to be entrepreneurs.

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[Anne Marie Morris]

I absolutely agree. That is absolutely right. However, the real challenge is changing that culture.

My second point builds on the idea of confidence and experience. I welcome the idea of a Select Committee, which would be a first-class way of encouraging more thought on this issue. I was delighted to hear about the FTSE 100 mentoring programme, which sounds like a first-class initiative. The challenge is to have more role models and better mentoring programmes—I agree that they should be for men and women—and to help rebalance individuals, so that they have the broad suite of skills that we all need.

In that respect, perhaps I can dwell on men for a minute. If we look at what is happening in schools, we see the reverse of that. Boys’ results are not as good as girls’. Girls are tenacious and exam focused, and they are good at the process involved in passing exams. More and more women are going into the professions, and more women than men are going into the junior level—not the top level—of medicine and law. Leaving aside the leadership issue, we therefore also have a problem with the gender balance in those professions. We need to help men to go into those professions and to compete, just as we need to help women to go into the corporate world and compete there. The gender balance in the professions and corporate life is completely different.

One of the challenges facing us is that the skills that make people successful in the corporate world are not embedded at school, and I suspect that that may be an issue for the Secretary of State for Education. The issue is which skills we need people to gain at school to help us right the imbalance that I have described. Another challenge is to ensure that we have better integration between school and the workplace. One of my frustrations is that the children we talk to about the requirement to do work experience talk about it as if it were a tick-box exercise; there is no real sense of the role they will have in the workplace. Indeed, there is still a bit of a sense that the expected option is to stay at home.

[Mrs Grant]

Does my hon. Friend agree that embedding enterprise awareness in school education would be helpful?

[Anne Marie Morris]

That would be very helpful. In the same way that we have looked at the intellectual aspects of education, including issues such as the English baccalaureate, we are now looking at the skills aspects of education through the Wolf report. I agree that we need to develop a fundamental understanding of these issues among boys and girls at school. I do not have an answer as to how we can more effectively integrate business into education, but the issue absolutely needs to be resolved.

My third point relates to child support, which is a real issue. Partly, it is about money, but is also partly about culture, expectation and provision. A number of organisations are looking at crèches, part-time working and job sharing. However, it is one thing to look at introducing such provisions and to recognise that they are the right thing to do, but another thing to work out how to make them really effective. There is a bit of a tick-box approach, with people thinking that they have ticked the box because they have a crèche. In that respect, I was really struck by the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon (Julian Smith). What is important is the ability to sit down and have a meaningful conversation about how we can work together and take on board the fact that, biologically speaking—certainly in our lifetimes—only women will have children. The question is how we make a different outlook more of a reality, and a Select Committee could probably sensibly spend some time looking at the issue.

When I was thinking about today’s debate, I remembered that we had a married man’s allowance in the old days, and I wonder whether a working mother’s allowance might be appropriate in the modern world. I put that out as a thought, and I appreciate that the piggy bank is a little empty at the minute, but such a proposal might be food for thought. We need a holistic approach to the fact that women have the babies. We need to integrate that and enable women to contribute in the workplace, which is crucial.

My final point relates to the corporate issue. I was impressed by what I read in the report to which a number of contributors have alluded. Diversity is certainly key. I agree that it would make a lot of sense to ensure that the numbers of women coming through an organisation are published in the accounts. Although I agree that we do not want more bureaucracy, such a process would not be a big issue for the top FTSE companies. We have information about the very senior women, because of the reports to Companies House, but we need to see the progression planning, and we will not get it without information about the women coming through the organisation. That is what I would describe as a nudge, rather than a push. I agree that legislation is not the answer, because we need to shape and encourage. Once organisations begin to see that there is a spotlight on the issue, it will begin to make a difference.

The real difference in corporate life will come, however, with the review of the governance code, which is important. How do we ensure that we are really talking about diversity, not trying to right the gender balance? We have to acknowledge that women want to be recognised for the different skills that we bring. I would almost like to see job descriptions that show that companies have thought through the different skills that they need and how roles might work slightly differently to encompass the broader range of skills that are available through employing women. When we look at the governance code, we could try to give some guidance on what might go into it. We are not talking just about men and women, but about the qualities of good management. If we can articulate that, it would be a good way forward. However, I am conscious of the time, so, on that note, I will conclude my contribution.