 FRIDAY 12 OCTOBER 2007
The clear message from this panel was that the experiences of women who are helping shape the world’s business environment depend to a great extent on where they live. Moderator Fiona Harvey drew attention to research that suggests companies with more women out-perform others. In an explanation of this, Netherlands-based Marie-Christine Lombard said women bring a “new eye,” partly because they have not been in a dominant position in the business world in the past. In this regard, women are prepared to ask fundamental questions about business processes. They can identify small improvements that make a real difference rather than feeling the need to go for “the big bang” favoured by many male counterparts. Lombard identified other key skills women can bring to the table. They are, for example, adept at client-focused work, helping to achieve improved performance by listening to and understanding clients’ needs and how these evolve. Russ Hagey, who works out of the US for the global management consultancy firm Bain & Co. said his company focused on creating an environment where talented people felt they could have a “sustainable” career encompassing different stages of life. Things like continuous learning opportunities were important in this context, as was flexibility within the organisation. The fact that 60% of the company’s women partners have worked part-time at one point of their careers helped flag up to the company the need to develop its part-time programmes. Chinese academic Dr. Li Qingyuan, reminded the audience that opportunities for women depended on cultural factors. Early on, the People’s Republic of Chairman Mao gave women equality in jobs, with equal pay. “Even in the early 1970s when a US women’s delegation came to China, they were very surprised to see women driving big buses!” Relatively speaking, especially in urban areas, today’s Chinese women don’t think that gender is a “threatening limit” on what they can do. She recalled a traditional Chinese proverb that said: ‘If you have a mix of men and women in the work place, the job is definitely less tiring.’ Li concluded: “So whenever someone wants to get a job done, they always get a mix of genders.” Asked if this translated into a real mix of gender at higher level, Li said in actuality it did not, and raised the question of how one should quantify the success of women: “Do we have to see exactly 50% of women at top level?” Speaking of Russia, another global giant, Elena Fedyashina, Executive Director of an association of that country’s most successful business women, joked that although it is famous as a country of resources, “one of Russia’s most under-used resources is its women.” Although women were reasonably well represented at the top of the corporate world in Russia, it tended to be in traditional roles – as heads of human resources or accountancy departments – rather than in decision-making roles. Only 14 per cent of chief financial officers were women, and only four percent were CEOs. Access to economic resources in a highly patriarchal society was partly to blame for this. But Fedyashina also pointed to the response of Russia’s only woman governor when she was asked what needed to be done about this: the governor replied that the mentality of the whole nation should be changed. Fedyashina responded in animated style when asked to identify which kinds of industry Russian businesswomen have found success, and whether it was in traditionally women-oriented fields like fashion. In fact, she went on to say, some of the women in her association were individuals who had restructured multi-billion-dollar state monopolies like the railways, headed huge banks or worked in IT. “We must tell the life stories of these successful women. And tell young women that it’s absolutely a full-time commitment,” she said. “There’s a conception that a successful businesswoman must be very cold, and that she spends all her time in spas and things. No, they’re working 16, 18 hours a day. And we must counter negative stereotypes – for example, that successful women have to be unmarried. No, they have families, they have their hobbies. We are telling their stories, and in this way we are changing the country a little bit towards a more positive mentality.” ___________________________ |