Why does this point need to be made, decades after women entered the modern workplace in their droves? Most business leaders are still male, and most male chief executives, chairmen or managers have a wife. And it’s the wife who sorts out the school uniforms, who does the weekly supermarket shop, who gets the call from school when a child needs to go home sick, and all this allows the man a relatively stress-free path to the top. Good for them. The downside for their female employees is that when a woman says, ‘My daughter’s not well, I’ve got to go home,’ there is little understanding. Women fear, with reason, they will meet a stony response, which makes them believe they can’t combine a career with a family.
It’s certainly far harder for women than for men to combine a career with children. Some of my male colleagues feel no compunction about going for a golfing weekend, or a boys’ weekend, or a team-building weekend, or they don’t bother to go and watch their son play football on a Saturday because they want a lie-in. Meanwhile I spend all my time at work or with my family. I could never say to my family, ‘I’m going on a pampering weekend’ – I just wouldn’t feel comfortable thinking it, let alone saying it. The reality is that women who run companies are under far more scrutiny from their families about what they’re doing when they’re not with them than any of their male counterparts.
And in a way, this is understandable. In many cases women are more connected to their children than men are. But that does mean men don’t tend to carry the same level of guilt. So women will want to be perfect mothers but perhaps they also want to run a business. And companies will increasingly have to accommodate that, because if they don’t, women will leave and set up on their own: that way they can run the company the way they want to.
I do recognise that, in many ways, combining work and a family is easier for someone like me than it is for a woman who has a rigid nine-to-five job. I have reached the point in my career where I can be flexible. If there’s a crisis at home and I need to be with my children, I can be – I’m the boss. But it wasn’t always like that. I definitely didn’t feel there was much flexibility when I had to go to work after three days’ maternity leave. In fact, I was miserable.
That decision gets a mention in pretty much every newspaper profile of me, so I’m going to explain it once and for all. It was a mix of feeling scared, of not wanting to let anyone down, of feeling guilty for having had a baby in the first place and – if I’m being honest – not wanting this enormous change in my personal life to get in the way of the job I had to do. Most importantly, I was determined my employers wouldn’t think I was incapable of carrying on as normal now that I had a baby. Looking back, all these years later, I still don’t know how I did it! Up all night with a baby and at work all day. What I now appreciate, and didn’t understand then, was that a career spans a lifetime, and that taking a few months off would not have harmed mine.
Nowadays, far more women are setting up businesses from their kitchen tables than ever before because they say to themselves: ‘I won’t work in a job that doesn’t respect the fact that I have a family. I want both so I’ll create my own flexible way of working.’ And I’ll be intrigued to see how many businesses are started by women rather than men over the next few years. It could become a big problem for businesses that will not accommodate women’s needs.
The answer, I believe, is to have more women in the boardroom. The more women leaders we have, the better conditions will become for all working women. I don’t believe in setting quotas, but I do believe that any public company that has no woman on the board should publish the reasons why. It would be sure to make very interesting reading. If a company came back and said, ‘We have interviewed ten women and have not been able to find someone appropriate because the skills missing are this, this and this,’ it would tell us a great deal about which skills we’re not teaching young girls that they need to survive and thrive in a corporate world. Equally, if a company came back and admitted, ‘We haven’t interviewed any women for a position on our board,’ that would be an embarrassing insight into the type of company it really was.
The suits in the boardrooms are not the only ones who have to change. It annoys me so much that the Government talks about getting more women into work, then doesn’t help. Every woman who has to pay for childcare should be able to claim that cost as an allowance against tax: you can’t work unless your kids are taken care of. It would make sense economically, too. Creating tax breaks for childcare would mean more revenue for the Government: at the moment, many mothers pay cash in hand for care. It would also mean that mothers could afford better childcare, which would allow them the peace of mind to focus on their work.
While I’m on my soapbox, another issue is particularly close to my heart: that young women should feel free to enter professions that have traditionally been seen as male. If my daughter wants to be a painter and decorator, a scientist or an engineer, I want that to seem like a perfectly natural choice. A generation of people still finds it weird that women would want a job in such an area. Those barriers need to come down. There should be a completely open path for young women to do whatever they want to do.
Too many young women pick up a magazine and see a host of glamorous models, with wardrobes full of handbags, married to footballers. They think that’s what you have to aspire to, that such things give a woman value. Rubbish. When I meet young girls who tell me their ambition is to marry a footballer I always say, ‘Why? Your ambition should be to own a football club!’
There can be nothing more soul-destroying than having a job you hate, even if you have never considered yourself a career woman. We need to encourage young women to open their minds to the possibilities of what they can achieve. Becoming an entrepreneur is nothing to do with your education. It’s about your spirit. It’s about your desire. A burning spark inside you that’s your pride. If you have an idea, and the energy to see it into a business, you’re an entrepreneur. I meet a lot of people with great ideas, but they lack the energy and determination to see them through. But if you’re determined, with a steely core and a can-do attitude, you’re an entrepreneur.
Sadly, since I started out, it’s become vital to have a degree. My first job was with Saatchi & Saatchi, the legendary advertising agency. I joined them, aged 18, straight from school, and I don’t think that could happen now. I don’t think you’d get near a company like Saatchi’s today without a degree, which is a great shame.
It seems to me that all companies are now looking for the same type of person – someone who has been to the right university and who has the right degree. That means there’s little diversity within organisations, which can cause problems. You don’t have people from different backgrounds with different experiences.
To me, it seems obvious that one of the problems behind the banking crisis was that the boardrooms were all full of people from similar backgrounds who followed each other off the edge of the cliff. Really good companies encourage their employees to question – ‘Why aren’t we doing this? What’s going on here?’ And that comes from having people who come from different backgrounds and look at things from different angles, to whom different issues are important. And, yes, that might mean not everyone has a 2:1 degree from Oxbridge or a redbrick university in their pocket.
I fear that talented people with great personal qualities won’t get a chance. Not everyone wants to go to university, but many companies believe that if you have a university degree you’re far more intelligent than someone who hasn’t. That’s not always the case. Life experience gives you the ability to think for yourself, the energy to provide for yourself and the desire to champion yourself.
Added to that, there’s also a snobbery about which university you’ve been to. Young people could spend all that money and find that companies still turn their noses up at them because they’ve been to the wrong institution or chosen the wrong course. Despite all the talk about the glass ceiling, I think the biggest obstacle to entry into an organisation is the HR director. When you apply to a company now your CV goes into one of two piles – university, yes; non-university, no. And that definitely