Last month, ahead of International Women’s Day, we launched an on-line survey which invited responses to questions around the impact of the global recession on women, the workplace and the future of work.
The full results of the survey will be released on April 2nd, and I’ll cover them in more detail next week. We received over 1000 responses from around the world, with questionnaires being submitted from Europe, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, China and India. Many thanks to all Gender Agenda readers who took the time to complete the survey, and to our friends at The Glass Hammer, Emberin and The Thin Pink Line for featuring the survey on their websites.
Some of the headline findings include:
10% of the respondents predict that uncertainty about financial and work issues will cause people to delay having a family over the next three years.
Examining the more immediate impacts of the recession, 40% of respondents said that they believe women’s roles were changing, with many of them expecting women to become the primary earner.
One in three believes women’s role as the primary carer will have changed when the recession is over.
Over half of the respondents worked in roles in the legal, banking, finance and professional services industries.
41% were between 25-35, and 33% between 36-45.
50% of the respondents said they were the primary earner, with no current caring responsibilities.
More results and thoughts on what they could mean for women and the future of work next week.
Finally: a news story which saw my two of my interests – books and gender – collide. I live in a house which has been described as resembling “a bookshop with added furniture”, so I was interested to see an article in my weekend newspaper which referenced gender differences in reading. Follow the link and see if you are a Page Turner, a Slow Worm, a Serial Shelver or a Double Booker (or perhaps, like me, a blend, ie, an avid reader who has shelves of unread books and, in the constant pursuit of reading some of them, often has two or more books on the go at the same time).
One of my next blog musings will be on the topic of diversity in the downturn, following on from an Opportunity Now workshop which I’ve just attended.
Regular readers of the Gender Agenda will recall that, in 2008, PwC was a very proud global corporate sponsor of the ground breaking book, “Why Women Mean Business” by Avivah Wittenberg-Cox and Alison Maitland. Our global CEO, Sam DiPiazza, endorsed the book with this cover quotation:
“This book ably illustrates that the companies which succeed in the 21st century will be those that realise the full potential of women…”
- And we hosted very successful and lively book launches to support the publication in London, New York and Toronto.
Here on the blog, I gave away three copies of the book to the readers who sent me the most compelling stories of life as a woman in business, and we ran articles from Dale in Brussels, Paula in London and Blanka in Prague.
So much has happened since then, such as the publication of the “Leaking Pipeline” report and the production and launch of the “Closing the Gender Gap” film and so I was pleasantly surprised to learn from the authors that WWMB will be published in paperback in May; this news gave me quite the “oh, don’t they grow up so FAST?” moment.
Paula sent me an unofficial review of the book last week, in which she commented that:
“… it is the most inspiring book I have read. I intend to give a copy of it to all my girlfriends for their birthdays! As someone who spent years being told to work on 'impact', it was fantastic to read that the way forward is not to 'fix' the women with assertiveness-training, but to fix the company by making sure it values both female and male attributes. It was amazingly reassuring to hear that generally women are motivated by 'making a difference' and would improve diversity by putting 'greater emphasis on appreciating individual uniqueness' and that other people find it 'just so tiring trying to be yourself'. Recently a male peer asked me "Why do you persist in being different when you know it will hinder your career progression?”
I 'persist in being different' because I am different, because that difference is precisely where I add value, because I get more satisfaction from making a difference than I do from being rewarded for the difference I make. Obviously I would like to be rewarded too, but I couldn't ever be happy conforming to the mould and adding no value just to be rewarded.”
For more on fixing the company rather than fixing the woman, check out Avivah’s website, Women-omics and be sure to look out for the paperback of WWMB, which will feature some updates and revisions when it comes out in a few months’ time.
If you’re interested in the benefits and the impact of coaching upon both women and men, you may like to run your eye over a recently published report entitled: "Encouraging Women into Senior Management Positions: How Coaching Can Help". This report comes from the UK-based Institute for Employment Studies and features interviewees from the UK, USA, Germany, Greece and Sweden. What caught my eye about this publication was that it acknowledges a few elephants in the corner, such as:
Do women want to progress to board level – or are they choosing not to - and are the barriers sometimes of their own making and/or not perceived to be an issue?
Coaching at a very early stage of one’s career can play a huge role in obtaining those key, stepping stone roles (as opposed to assuming, as I have read elsewhere, that coaching only has a part to play once one is already at a relatively senior level in the organisation);
If men are currently the “gate keepers” to the key roles, then coaching them into recognising what impact they can have on moving women into these roles is vital.
Members of my internal PwC mailing list will already have seen a copy of the report; it is also available for purchasable download via this link.
Mentioning books (just for a change…) I had a very happenstance moment last week. I was in the office, preparing for an extremely important presentation to a judging panel, which I gave, together with two of the members of the Gender Advisory Council. I’ll be able to tell you some more about this Big Event in a few weeks’ time, but, suffice to say, it was quite a big deal and we were all very anxious to do well and to deliver our messages and our material to the panel in the allocated 30 minute slot.
Just I was going through the slides for no more than the 99th time, the post was delivered and I opened up a package containing a copy of “Speak Up! A Woman’s Guide to Presenting Like a Pro” by Cyndi Maxey and Kevin E O’Connor. Unfortunately, as fast a reader as I am, I simply could not power-read it in time to do so ahead of our presentation, and so the book remains on my towering “to be read” pile. But I will read it and post a review here once I’ve done so.
I’ve already looked at Chapter 10, on surviving “… When the Audience Is Just Not That Into You” which struck me as an apt metaphor for the kind of event when you have to deliver a tough message. This section also references how to handle a technology failure mid-presentation, which is definitely advice I could have used a couple of weeks ago …
Until next time Cleo
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Earlier this week, I was part of a panel (and an audience of 100+ men and women) who gathered at PwC’s London offices to celebrate International Women’s Day – which falls this Sunday, 8th March – with an event entitled “Taking Control of Your Destiny”.
It was great to see friends, old and new, in the audience, including Nicki and Jane from The Glass Hammer and clients from many business areas, both corporate and the public sector. In addition to it being the first ever PwC Women event that we had opened up to our clients, it was also the first time that we had been simultaneously web-cast … more on that shortly. Oh, and look out for TGH’s report on the event, it should be up on their site very soon.
Our guest speaker was the charismatic and inspirational Gita Patel of Stargate Capital Investment Group – accountant, banker, and entrepreneur - who opened up with a quote from Michelle Obama:
“Each of us is here today by way of our own improbable journey”.
Gita’s own journey began in Kenya in the 1960s as one of five daughters. They were living a “normal” happy and ordered life, until the day that her mother asked Gita to begin packing – with the specific request that she pack up their lives into two suitcases. The next day, the family fled to Britain and so Gita began her life here, as one of the first Asian women to become a chartered accountant. She worked for Arthur Andersen and then NatWest bank and was pursuing a well trodden corporate pathway, until the day that her sister asked her a life changing question:
“What’s your legacy?”
Gita’s response to this challenge was to go on to found venture capital firm Stargate Capital and, later, Trapezia – the latter specifically to take advantage of the female business sector. Her mission was and is to improve access to capital and investment funding for women and she knew that, in order to make a difference, she would need to innovate. She told us how she views the internet as a “liberating force for women” where stereotypes are not in play, and how her next venture will be to build a collaborative on-line platform in order to connect female entrepreneurs with each other and with the marketplace.
She concluded with sharing her views on geese with us. Yes, you did read that correctly. No, it’s not a typo. Geese.
Gita’s theory is that we can all take lessons from the way geese behave as both a flock and individually, in terms of support and leadership behaviours. We hit the press with this analogy – here’s what the London paper City AM had to say this morning:
Gita closed by telling us that geese always honk to support each other! So, as I took to the podium (as is always my lot, I tend to speak alongside incredible people; one day I’m sharing a platform with a supermodel in South Africa, the next I speak after Gita and her geese…) I thanked Gita with a honk of my own and then went into a brief description, on the theme of destiny, of the making of “Closing the Gender Gap” last year, and how, as I’ve previously referenced here, I’m pretty sure that being an Executive Producer of films is in no way my destiny.
Everything was going along as smoothly as a flock of geese in flight, until we got to the technical bit, wherein we showed our 8 minute “Davos” edit of the film.
Having, I hope, whetted the audience’s appetite with my descriptions of trying to make a film against the changing economic backdrop which is our current global environment, we then went into … a large blank screen, as the technical team frantically tried to get the film to play. Meanwhile, those watching the webcast were viewing it as scheduled! We eventually got it running in the “live” environment and so the London audience managed to see the last half of the film.
We ended with a very lively panel debate, in which Gita and I were joined by UK tax partner Pam Jackson and PwC UK board members Kevin Ellis and Richard Collier-Keywood. We took questions from both the on-site audience and the webcast viewers and the discussions ranged across some of the early results from our on-line survey on women and the global recession (and here I must just add in a quick plea – if you haven’t yet taken the survey, please do so, via either the link in this paragraph or by way of the attractive terracotta button on the top right of the screen. The survey is open until close of business UK time on Tuesday 10th March. Thank you.) Through to the panel’s views on quotas and the different leadership skills and styles brought to the workplace by men and women.
The closing question was around the panel’s views on what specific actions people could take to enhance their careers. Gita and Pam both urged courage, bravery and audacity – if you have an idea, speak up, suggest it and argue your case. Pam also reminded us that:
“Good things come to those who go out and help themselves, rather than those who wait" – which has since become my mantra. I interviewed Pam for “The Leaking Pipeline” report in the summer of 2007 and those words really resonated with me, then and now.
Richard and Kevin spoke to the significance of role models and networks, and I suggested the importance of Being Your Own Brand (a life lesson from Maureen Frank). We can’t all be entrepreneurs, CEOs or media superstars; but we can all be brilliant at something and, whatever that “something” is, it should be our personal stamp of authenticity and radiance – a guarantee to our colleagues, as I often think of it. I made a similar analogy when I spoke at the NASSCOM event in India last year, referring to myself then as being a “safe pair of hands” and it amuses me hugely that I continue to receive emails in which this is mentioned.
We ended with a networking reception, at which the issue of the equation of:
Networking = Good but Lack of Time = Bad
- so how do we match the two dichotomies?
was raised. More thoughts on that next time.
Until then – Happy Women’s Day,
Cleo
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