Women in leadership: beyond quotas to true culture change

The UK is now second in international rankings for women’s representation on FTSE 100 boards, the Department of Business report. As of early 2022, nearly 40% of board positions were held by women compared with 12.5% 10 years ago.

Then Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng said: ‘UK businesses have made enormous progress in recent years to ensure that everyone, whatever their background, can succeed on merit’.

But there’s still work needed to improve the representation of women in leadership. The same FTSE Women Leaders Review report also highlights that overall, only 1 in 3 leadership roles are held by women and only 25% of executive committee roles.

The problem is, improving representation isn’t as simple as hiring more women (and even ‘hiring more women’ isn’t itself simple).

Developing a women leadership pipeline

Board-level gender balance is good, but true representation means looking beyond the board and beyond compliance-based diversity. Talking of this ‘compliance approach’, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) recently warned financial services firms that they risk ‘cannibalising each other’ by focusing purely on the diversity of their most senior staff rather than creating a sustainable pipeline of diverse leaders.

The FCA comments: ‘Such focus, in isolation, risks creating a culture where firms attempt to ‘poach’ diverse senior talent rather than develop their own pipelines. This is not a sustainable approach and is unlikely to bring meaningful, long-lasting change’.

The principle applies irrespective of industry. Headhunting senior female talent can be a viable tactic but it shouldn’t stand alone. Rather, organisations must develop future-looking talent acquisition strategies to build a robust pipeline of female leaders.  

This requires genuine engagement with the true barriers to increasing women’s participation in leadership.

Barriers to increasing women’s participation in leadership

Census data shows women make up 51% of the UK population so at the most basic level achieving leadership gender balance is theoretically possible.

But, as the statistics we shared earlier showed, this population representation isn’t translating to leadership representation. Increasing the number of women in leadership is challenging and complex because the drop-off points through the leadership pipeline can be numerous.  

These drop-off points can be either hard or soft. Most talent acquisition teams, for instance, are rightfully focused on building fair and inclusive hiring practices. A major gender imbalance during recruitment stages is an obvious hard drop-off point with well-developed solutions. Unconscious bias training is common, for example.

But there are more invisible barriers to women’s advancement. Harvard Business Review outline the problem with common approaches to increasing representation:

‘They don’t address the often fragile process of coming to see oneself, and to be seen by others, as a leader. Becoming a leader involves much more than being put in a leadership role, acquiring new skills, and adapting one’s style to the requirements of that role. It involves a fundamental identity shift’.

Organisations looking to improve female leadership representation must be addressing subtle questions, then. Like:

• Do our capable women see themselves as leadership material, and put themselves forward for the right training and opportunities?
• Are our capable women being reliably identified and nurtured? 
• How are we ensuring we’re encouraging women towards the right leadership training and opportunities?
• Have we created a culture where female leaders are taken seriously and want to grow their career with our organisation?

This latter is crucial, given the persistence of microaggressions against women. The Way Women Work say: 

‘Gender microaggressions include sexual objectification, the use of sexist language, making assumptions based on gender, the use of sexist humour, slights, insults or using a derogatory analogy. These types of incidents inhibit women from doing their best work, being optimally productive and undermine their success’.

Increasing the number of women in leadership positions isn’t the crux of the matter here – although representation is a quantifiable objective that often makes sense to galvanise internal alignment.

But the problem is bigger than this, and more intangible. Achieving gender representation is a wider issue, about creating a culture of equity and inclusion that supports your diversity goals.  

Leadership gender balance is a cultural challenge

Accommodating women’s needs

A big part of creating a culture that champions and empowers women is providing appropriate support for women’s issues. In August 2022 research showed nine in ten women want better female health support at work, for example, so this is a clear improvement area for most organisations.

The tide is turning and awareness is increasing here. For instance, the UK government has recently awarded £1.97 million in funding to support women’s reproductive health at work, including menopause, fertility problems and pregnancy loss.

Employers that understand and accommodate women’s needs are likely better placed to engage and retain women in leadership roles.

Building equitable people processes

Building a culture of equity and inclusion is also about assessing end-to-end people processes and practices.

Most obviously, are women paid the same as men? Although the UK’s gender pay gap has been declining slowly over the past decade, women are still on average paid 15% less than men. And women won’t achieve pension parity with men until 2028, as experts warn that auto-enrolment inadvertently puts women at a disadvantage.

It’s also worth considering your policies around hybrid working, as the shift could be a double-edged sword for women.

Male managers are significantly more likely to mostly or completely work from the office, which risks perpetuating inequality based on visibility. Accordingly, Professor Rosie Campbell – director of King’s College London’s Global Institute for Women’s Leadership – talks about the need for hybrid jobs to be designed proactively rather than develop organically, ‘because existing inequalities might be reinforced’.

Growing women leadership confidence  

Organisations could also meaningfully evaluate their training and development processes, to ensure they cater for the unique challenges women can face in progressing into leadership.

Although research shows women score more highly than men for most leadership skills, women are also typically under-confident: ‘it’s highly probable that those women are far more competent than they think they are, while the male leaders are overconfident and assuming they are more competent than they are’.

Building good mentoring and training that focuses on boosting female leaders’ confidence could be a sensible avenue to encourage more women into leadership.

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Few organisations can say they’ve achieved equal leadership gender representation – not just at the board level but across management. And few would say that increasing women's participation in leadership isn’t a priority. 

But despite best intentions and some good progress, there’s still more headway needed. And there are no easy answers. As with diversity of all types, growing the number of women in leadership isn’t a numbers game, and it’s not solved with quotas. Rather, it’s about building inclusive, equitable processes where diverse people can, and want, to thrive.