learn from the past and present and so approach the future confidently, with full knowledge of the challenges they will have to face
clarify how they may contribute fully to managing their organizations, businesses and communities as they strive to survive and flourish in the next century.
There is a feeling of optimism about the future for women in business. This revolves around an increasing compatibility between the sexes in the workplace, rather than the unrealistic expectation that male and female managers will ever be equal in numbers. The domestic factor of female employees with families is the main reason for this, although ‘family-friendly’ employment policies are gaining some ground. It is also significant that more and more women are either setting up their own small businesses, or becoming self-employed, as an alternative to having to fit into a corporate culture which is, for many, an alien way of working.
Demographic pressures and trends, education, male views of sharing family responsibilities, among other issues, are all building towards a peak that suggests we are on the brink of a fundamental change in the role women will play in the world of management. Women must prepare themselves to make full use of these changes and the consequent opportunities to take their appropriate places as directors and managers. They will introduce female perspectives and behaviours to complement those currently held in traditional, male-dominated organizations and bring a much-needed balance to the corporate world, thus enabling it to be more successful in its competitive environment.
Women are now in a position to excel as they grow in confidence and begin to understand the benefits of diversity in the workplace. As one manager says, ‘All successful women need to share their experiences – tips on success, motivation and confidence, as well as revealing failures – so all women will see it is not an easy ladder to climb’. They will, however, see that it is possible to climb that ladder.
Networking and the need for coaches and mentors have also been mentioned time and time again as an important way of building up a store of experiences which may be used to increase confidence in two ways: first, that to employ behaviours with which you feel comfortable is the best approach and, second, that you have learned and absorbed all the skills and knowledge required to do the job.
What I hope will prove interesting and helpful are the comments and opinions of women who have found themselves in a variety of situations and how they have dealt with them. They are typical of the many thousands of women managers throughout the country who have a strong feeling of their worth and who are beginning to make their presence felt.
Through the examples of case studies and interviews, through long discussions with friends and work colleagues, through articles in various publications and from my own experiences as an employee, manager, teacher, developer, trainer, and consultant to organizations, my aim in this book is threefold:
1 to look at what has happened to women managers in the past so that we may learn from their experiences
2 to set the benchmarks of where women managers are now and where they would like/expect to be as we approach the next century (because only if we do that will we know later if any change has actually taken place)
3 to suggest ways in which women may prepare themselves for the different environments of the next century
It is crucial that women
become aware of the major challenges facing management
understand what qualities and skills managers will need to deal with those challenges
discuss what women, in particular, will bring to the different organizational structures and cultures
work with men to achieve the balance and strength that diversity brings
Having learned from the past and present, women can approach the future confidently knowing what challenges they will have to face, and how they can contribute fully to managing their organizations, businesses and communities in the next century.
WOMEN AT WORK: THE WAY IN, THE WAY UP AND THE WAY FORWARD
The career paths of a great many of today’s women managers often seem to have their beginnings rooted in a haphazard past. In the early 1960s, when I sat my A levels and wondered what I was going to do next, the career counsellors at my grammar school concluded that I was not university material and suggested I went to secretarial college. The choice was that or teacher training college or becoming a nurse. I believed the counsellors when they said I wasn’t clever enough to go to university, and having no idea of what the future might hold and feeling relieved to have got that far anyway, I went along with the idea of doing a one-year secretarial course in London.
For me the secretarial route proved to be an excellent way of moving into junior management and large numbers of my contemporaries (many of whom are now public figures) followed the same path. Today many parents actively dissuade their daughters from taking a secretarial course, primarily because they still perceive the role of secretary as the demeaning stereotype, or because they believe it has no prospects for a ‘proper’ job. Perhaps with more people learning keyboard skills within a job, good secretarial training – and the accompanying self-organization skills – are not seen to be as important in the workplace as they once were.
Another traditional way into management was via personnel and training and, until recently, many senior women in the private sector represented the human resources field. Some took the secretarial administration route, while others began as graduate trainees, choosing personnel as their preferred specialism. While personnel was somehow understood to be less ‘difficult’ than other areas of a company, and the ‘sharing and caring’ skills of personnel were always seen to be the preserve of women, it is now quite usual to find women managers in all other aspects of business, such as engineering, finance, law and marketing.
In the public sector, the health service has a markedly different male/female ratio among its managers from that of the private sector. This does not automatically mean that women have an easier time moving up the career structure, but it does indicate that they are probably more experienced at working with male colleagues who are, in turn, more used to working with women. ‘One of the reasons I have enjoyed working in the NHS is because I have always felt that equal recognition is given to good managers, regardless of their sex. There are excellent managers of both sexes in the NHS – it is very much up to the individuals to create their own opportunities.’
Many of the women managers I have met from the NHS, or local authorities, have spent the greater part of their working lives within the same organization, but have regularly changed jobs within it. They have gained invaluable experience from this, especially in learning how to keep an eye open for appropriate openings and in seizing any available opportunity for advancement and personal development.
As I mentioned in the introduction, there are increasing numbers of women who will no longer tolerate a strictly male management environment. But, having challenged the ‘jobs for the boys’ culture and moved up the corporate ladder, then many women, halfway through their careers, opt out.
Why do so many women having made it to middle management fail to take their careers and their management skills any further up the corporate ladder? The explanations for this include: lack of confidence and not pushing themselves forward; career breaks; the glass ceiling; not going on courses; being late developers (recognizing their abilities at a later stage than their male contemporaries); and being unwilling to play internal politics or ‘men’s games’.
The main points characterizing women’s current positions as managers, particularly those over 35, seem to be:
career counselling, coaching and mentoring were not nearly as sophisticated in the early 1960s–70s as they are now
the range of available jobs has