36% of interim executives are now women; Let's make some noise! By Karen Drury, Interim Manager
After reading Interim Partners' (IP) last newsletter and finding no articles written by women interims or women directors I wrote irritably: "Don't you HAVE any women in senior positions?" To my amazement - and slight discomfiture - IPs' Managing Director, Doug Baird rang me and threw down a gauntlet. He asked me politely if I'd care to put pen to paper to make the case for women raising their profile in interim management? So here I am creating a 'first' for us females.
It's not that women aren't in interim positions; they are. According to a recent IPSOS Mori poll for the Interim Management Association, there has been an increase of over a quarter in the number of women in interim management from last year. Women now make up more than a third of interims, defying the stereotype of interims as 'pale, male and stale!'
However, given that women make up 50% of the workforce (12.7 million jobs compared with 12.8 jobs held by men according to Demos), shouldn't there be an equal number of interims?
Well yes, perhaps, in a parallel universe. In the UK in real life, however, almost a quarter of women do administrative or secretarial work, while men are four times more likely to be managers or senior officials. Women, in work or not, still shoulder a disproportionate amount of work in the home - as carers, managing the household, and maintaining social networks. As a result, many choose work, which, while more flexible, is also less likely to be at a senior level. Add to this the UK's gender pay gap - the highest in Europe - and the high cost of childcare, and there are suddenly a myriad of different reasons why women with children should not enter, or return to the workplace.
And the situation hardly differs whether you work in the private or public sector. There have been well-publicised headlines about the snails' pace progression of women into senior roles. According to the 2008 Equality and Human Rights Commission report Sex and Power, at the current rate of change, it will take 200 years for women to be equally represented in Parliament, another 27 years to achieve equality in top management in the Civil Service and 73 years to achieve an equal number of female directors of FTSE 100 companies. Currently, one fifth of FTSE 100 companies have all male boards, and of all FTSE 100 directors, only 12.2% are female.
As building an interim career is dependent on substantial senior management experience, the lower number of women interims is suddenly not so surprising.
So what cataclysmic events could change this sorry reality? There are a number of interim websites set up specifically for women and the organisations behind these seem to think that it's not about opportunity. They say there are fewer glass ceilings for women in interim work - but it's about women putting themselves forward, particularly to a growing number of public sector employers.
So far, so good, but what exactly are these public sector opportunities?
According to the Municipal Year Book Gender Survey 2008, women are well represented in some areas, such as Children's Services (women have 46.7% of all senior jobs in Children's Services and 55.2% in children's Social Services*).
But even as a complete outsider, Children's Services strikes me as a bit of a poisoned chalice:
- Children's Services is highly visible, highly political, highly emotive for the public - and thus sells newspapers
- Increasingly scrutinised: Ofsted has recently reported that while more than two thirds of councils are performing at the highest two levels overall, with 10 being outstanding, nine councils were judged to be performing poorly overall. These local authorities have been named in national and local media, intensifying the spotlight on them. And website Oneplace allows people to see not only how well their local public services are performing, but how well they compare with similar authorities.
- As social services staff come under increasing pressure from new compliance regimes and a negative reputation fuelled by the media, they leave. Currently recruiter Hays has 350 vacancies for qualified social workers. With increasing referrals (an outcome of the Baby P case) and more unfilled vacancies, the service becomes even more pressurised
- With increasing public and government scrutiny, the ability to make a very fast, tangible difference is essential - making the assignment more than ordinarily high risk.
These are the issues facing recruiters of such positions, and for those interims (female or male) who have the experience and the resolve to take on such a role, the rewards are likely to be high. But given all the above, is this the kind of job that anyone, let alone a woman juggling her family, household and trying to get the next assignment would want?
Don't get me wrong. I'm not arguing for preferential treatment for women interims, because this would hardly advance the cause of women in the workforce. But with all women's talent, all their knowledge and experience, shouldn't something be done to use it?
My view is that interim assignments suffer from the same inequalities that the traditional career, and this is one of the reasons that there are more than twice the number of men in interim management than women. To change this needs a change of thinking which acknowledges the current status quo for women; shorter contracts, more flexible hours, a focus perhaps on the outcomes to be achieved rather than just the individual to do it.
Feminists believe that the whole system of work is discriminatory because it is constructed from a male perspective of almost everything - structure, style, even the very concepts of performance and success. However, women have always worked - some more successfully than others - within this.
The arena of interim management should provide an alternative landscape for women to use their talents but, like the permanent job scene, needs some creative redesigning to facilitate this. With the recession ensuring that everyone is rethinking their business and service models, this may just be the time to do it.
Karen Drury is an occasional communications and change communications interim.
*Figures collated appear to have taken into account both the new structure for Children's Services and the old.