My experience in helping to solve a much narrower, simpler problem, the under-representation of women on UK corporate boards, showed me (just as the chance to be Newton’s CEO had done) how dislocations can create rare moments of opportunity to seize. Today, if we tap into our own, feminine brand of power, women can contribute much-needed new thinking to solve our problems – and become more powerful in the process. I was definitely on the outside of the real power base when it came to making changes in the boardroom, but was able to become effective by being empathetic and constructive in my approach. I reached out, rather than fought. Girl power, if you like, but not as we may have thought of it before. This is not about adopting the trappings of male power, but about redefining power, changing rather than mimicking the power structures that we have been largely excluded from in the past. Many decades ago, Simone de Beauvoir argued, ‘The point is not for women simply to take the power out of men’s hands, since that wouldn’t change anything about the world. It’s a question precisely of destroying that notion of power.’
It’s been a long wait, but this is our moment to show the strength of feminine power.
Chapter 3
The 30% Club: the strength of feminine power
When you start to develop your powers of
empathy and imagination, the whole world opens up
to you.
SUSAN SARANDON
Having been appointed in rather unorthodox and dramatic fashion to be Newton’s chief executive, I focused on delivering the results that were proof that I was up to the job. Achieving strong results – both investment and financial performance – requires the right team, and with Newton’s motto that ‘No one has a monopoly on great ideas’, my colleagues and I made a deliberate effort to develop diversity of thought and perspective. Just as on a football pitch, the best investment teams are not necessarily groups of the most highly qualified individuals; the interaction between team members plays a vital role.
In common with the rest of the fund management industry, although Newton had a strong meritocracy there were relatively few senior women. I wanted to do something to specifically address this. Young women – both at Newton and in other firms – were often approaching me to ask my advice, usually about combining career and family life, and I was happy to talk one-to-one. It seemed an obvious next step to try to help on a bigger scale. With the encouragement of my Boston-based boss, Ron O’Hanley, I launched a women’s initiative for our parent company’s European businesses in 2005.
This initiative – like most other companies’ gender diversity efforts at the time – centred on networking events, often a talk from a high profile woman. The feedback was always ‘how inspiring’ but in fact no one seemed inspired to actually do anything differently. Over the next few years, we saw little change in the representation of women at senior levels – and no real evidence that this was likely to change any time soon.
Discouraged, I was about to give up when I was invited to give one of those talks myself at Goldman Sachs, as part of their 2009 Diversity Week. Afterwards Goldman hosted a discussion for 15 men and women from different organisations, and everyone shared what they were doing to encourage their female talent. As I listened, I discovered that I was far from alone: everyone was struggling, no matter how hard and how long they had been trying. So much effort, yet so little to show for it. It seemed pretty clear that we must all be doing something wrong.
One of the attendees was Baroness Mary Goudie, a Labour peer. We agreed that we wanted to ‘do something’ to break the deadlock. The approach needed a complete rethink.
Of course, it’s usually much easier to identify a problem than to come up with the solution. There was no reason to believe that the objective of having many more women in senior roles was simply unattainable: there were plenty of ambitious women, plenty of companies keen to see them progress. As I searched for a way forward, I read widely to see whether any companies or countries had managed to achieve better results. I also researched organisational behaviour more generally, and the theories about differences in the ways men and women typically work. The more I thought about it, the more obvious it seemed that most of us were rushing to try to motivate people from under-represented groups without really understanding what was on their minds, or how our diversity efforts would fit in with the rest of their experiences at work.
I came across a number of interesting practical ideas. One was an effort by Deutsche Telekom to ensure that there were at least 30% women at all levels of seniority. I liked that specific, numeric target and realised that most of us were making a mistake in not setting clear goals. We needed to measure our progress (or lack of it) and have a way of tracking women’s advancement just like our other business objectives. The literature I was reading on group behaviour suggested that 30% was a point at which critical mass was reached – and that resonated with me personally. As I thought about my own experiences, being the only woman in the room made me feel self-conscious and I chose my interventions carefully on those occasions. If there were several items on the agenda where I might have a different opinion from the rest of the group, I would speak up about just one or two. If there were three women out of ten people, I was just another person in the room and felt confident to speak freely.
The way in which Deutsche Telekom was promoting its ambition was also appealing: ‘Taking on more women in management positions is not about the enforcement of misconstrued egalitarianism,’ said the company’s then chief executive, René Obermann. ‘Having a greater number of women at the top will quite simply enable us to operate better.’ Not only was the statement striking in deliberately distancing the move from political correctness and towards the business case, but it was all the more impactful coming from a man.
I realised that women talking to women about women’s issues was never going to get us very far. We can encourage each other and feel less alone, but we are likely to need those in leadership positions – mostly men – to help us actually succeed, to open those doors that may be half-closed. This is nothing to be embarrassed about: men on the way up in their careers have long had champions or sponsors in more senior positions, who act as a sounding board, give them a reference, or even line them up for the next role.
But it still wasn’t obvious how to pull these thoughts into an action plan, so Mary and I invited almost all the senior businesswomen we knew to a lunch to solicit their input. Over forty came along. I stood up and suggested we needed a new approach if we were to break the deadlock and see more women fulfil their potential in our businesses. Some of those present made it clear afterwards that they did not want to be part of a specific women’s initiative, expressing concerns about how that would be perceived by their male peers. Later, I’m happy to say, and particularly after men had joined the campaign, a number of those women became generous supporters. Others were sceptical about the idea that we might ever be able to find a better way forward, after so many years of disappointing progress. All they could see ahead was an extrapolation of the past.
But a new opportunity was arising just as we were having these discussions. As is so often the case, what we actually needed was a vision, not a spreadsheet. The cataclysmic global financial crisis had thrown up a new possibility for us to explore. As analysts, regulators and policy-makers pored over the wreckage of the financial collapse, it seemed obvious with hindsight that bank boards and management teams comprised almost entirely of conventional, middle-aged, affluent men were inherently flawed. The directors might be individually brilliant, but if they were cut from the same cloth, educated similarly and moved in the same social circles, they were far more likely to back each other’s opinions than to challenge them.
‘Groupthink’ is far from a new concept: the term was devised in 1952 by American William Whyte, who used it to refer to similar people not just agreeing with each other but more perniciously