The Gender Blog

Earlier this month,  I went along to the UK launch of the book on the left: “How Women Mean Business”,  by Avivah Wittenberg-Cox.

In the spirit of full disclosure,  I should probably mention that I’ve known Avivah for three years; I organised the corporate sponsorship of her previous book’s launches in London, New York and Toronto back in 2008 (it’s called “Why Women Mean Business“,  is co-authored with Alison Maitland and is still the most compelling book out there if you need cold hard FACTS to assist you make a business case for gender diversity)  - and I also contributed an in-book endorsement to the cover of this volume (referenced  elsewhere on the blog under Recommended reading).

So,  moving on – it’s a great book and my review of it and the Nomura-hosted launch event is now on-line here at The Glass Hammer.

Last week, I wrote about  this year’s Women in Banking and Finance (WIBF) awards.

And at last year’s awards, three fabulous things happened to me.

I arrived knowing nobody bar the Chair, Christine Lawrence,  and found myself at a mixed table of assorted women,  all of whom were there, in much the same way as at a wedding (“bride or groom?”)  because we weren’t affiliated with one of the big banks who’d bought a table of ten.

My three great things were as follows:

On my right, I was seated next to Pauline Crawford of Corporate Heart: a magical, energising, powerhouse of a woman, who has since become a great friend and a true inspiration to me.

On my left I met Christina Ioannidis of Aquitude and we immediately established that we knew some people in common; she admired my shoes,  I admired her necklace and,  as women do,  we bonded.

My third great thing was that,  at Pauline’s urging,  everyone at the table bought raffle tickets in support of WIBF’s chosen charity – and both Pauline and I won!   Pauline won a three course dinner (with wine) for six people at a five star hotel and I won a designer dress from No. 35 - a dress which I have since worn all over the world and which never ever fails to generate wonderful compliments whenever it has an outing.

Pauline and Christina were both at this year’s event,  and nobody at my table won a raffle prize, unfortunately. But Christina reminded us that she is running a brief survey via her website, aimed at understanding more about what compels 21st century women to set up their own businesses;  if you’d like to take part,  please follow the link here:

www.breakinggenderstereotypes.com

- and I’ll cover the findings later this year once available.

And,  if you’d like to follow Christina and Pauline on Twitter,  you can do so by clicking on their names.

This time last week,  I was at the Dorchester hotel in central London, wandering around the pre-lunch reception with a glass (of water!) in one hand and my trusty notebook in the other, interviewing women who were there to participate in the Women in Banking & Finance (WIBF) annual awards lunch.

Here’s a link to my article about it,  as featured in The Glass Hammer.

Check it out for a very useful footwear based tip …

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Tomorrow is the 100^th celebration of International Women’s Day,  and I’ve been really interested to note the extent to which it, as an event, has gained popularity and awareness over the last couple of years.  One of the first projects I ever undertook when I started working in gender diversity around five years ago was a global survey in order to understand which countries celebrated (or even,  were aware of ) IWD and I remember that the results made quite depressing reading. My colleagues (and these were people in senior diversity and HR roles) hadn’t even heard of IWD in countries such as the US, Canada and Australia; it’s commemorated on a different day altogether in South Africa (there it’s “National Women’s WEEK” each August, as I witnessed at events in Jo’burg and Cape Town in 2008) and in the UK it was celebrated but in a very low key way,  with only a few corporates getting on board and doing something to mark the economic, political and social achievements of women past, present and future.

It was (and is) marked in a big way in countries like Russia and China,  where it’s a public holiday,  and quite a few western European countries also make it a social occasion,  with activities tied into fund raising for women’s charities,  but there was no sense at all of it being a global multi-media event.

Fast forward to this year,  and I’ve seen references all over the press,  even in the mass market tabloid papers – where it perhaps has most impact in terms of readership numbers.  From the official IWD website,  you can see that Reuters are on-board as a media partner and there are things happening all over the world,  including in many of the countries where just a few short years ago IWD was a relative non-event. I’ve been invited to celebrations in London, New York and Bangalore; of course,  I am actually going to the London one,  which is being hosted by Plan and the Africa All Party Parliamentary Group at the House of Commons and is a lunch thing to “Celebrate the Potential of Young African Women.”  Click here to read more about what Plan are doing to help girls in Africa and elsewhere complete their education.

I’m then legging it across town to join in the Fawcett Society’s photo shoot, which they’re organising to support their new pre-Election campaign, “What About Women?”. We all have to wear our FS “This is what a feminist looks like” t-shirt,  so I really hope the weather warms up a bit …

My favourite TV channel (it shows “Mad Men”!) is BBC4,  who are truly brilliant at creating themed programming strands: a week of shows from the BBC archive on any one of a number of concepts; prog rock, India, advertising, blues music and Islam, to name but a few recent memorable groupings.

Starting tomorrow,  and this surely has to be to commemorate IWD,  even though they’re not explicitly saying so,  is a week of programmes about women and feminism – most of which will be repeated if you miss them tomorrow night and/or are also showing on BBC2.  I’m setting Sky+  for the all-female audienced version of “Question Time” later in the week (still only ONE woman on the panel itself, though – why? Click here  to suggest more female panellists) and for Vanessa Engle’s three part documentary series on the impact of feminism called, simply, “Women”.

Part one is set in the 70s and is about what were then known (usually disparagingly) as “women’s libbers”.  Also from that era is Monday night’s repeat of a documentary on the 1976 Grunwick strike,  now regarded as a key moment in union history and one at which female and Asian workers first tested and protested their employment rights.

Check out the BBC4 listings (or iPlayer) if you’re in the UK,  there’s some great stuff in there from the amazing BBC archive.

Happy St David’s Day – and, to those in India, Happy Holi!

What a week.

Monday: in Goa, wearing flip-flops, SPF40 and a big hat.

Wednesday: back in London, clad in corporate attire, feeling extremely chilly – and attending a big corporate LGBT bash at British Telecom’s offices near St Paul’s.

The event, chaired by the rather fabulous Michelle Bridgman (a nose at her website confirmed what I suspected on the day – she’s done a lot of stand up comedy: “Are there any straight people here? We’ll start a support group for you if so …”) was to promote LGBT History Month, which is celebrated in the UK each February, and it was also the launch of the new ILGA  website.

ILGA is the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans & Intersex Association which was born in 1978 out of a grass roots movement aimed at, as the co-Secretary General Renato Sabbadini explained, creating global change and awareness of the issues facing the LGBT community. They campaign on the two main pillars of homophobia – law and culture – and Renato hopes that their new interactive website will support their work.

As recently as 2007, homosexuality was de-criminalised in India (where BT has several major call centres), but that still leaves eighty countries in which it remains a criminal act, and a shocking FIVE in which it is punishable by death. And, to their huge credit, BT partners with ILGA and provides them with hosting and technology solutions, such as the new ILGA website; click on the link and take a look.

It’s a new tool, (accessible in French, Spanish and Portuguese as well as English) which informs people of their rights and their risks when travelling – and as such serves as a wonderful (and timely) resource for both employers and individuals. Last year, for example, I took a call from a US based gay colleague who was considering taking an overseas assignment in Singapore and who wanted to obtain the name and contact details of the co-worker who ran that office’s LGBT network. In Singapore, the punishment for being gay is life imprisonment and so of course our (then) mutual employer didn’t have a gay network; I would have found it very useful with my global diversity hat on to be able to direct my co-workers to such a site, and to ensure that my colleagues in the global mobility team were both aware of it as a resource and also had a nodding acquaintance with the issues facing our LGBT colleagues outside countries such as the US and UK.

One of the senior BT developers who worked on the site asked us to imagine how it might feel to be a gay or lesbian member of staff who wasn’t “out” to their manager and who was asked by their employer to go to a country on assignment or on a business trip where their sexuality could put them at risk – how do you, as a gay employee, have that conversation if you don’t have the information to hand which informs both you and your employer of exactly what you could be facing? And how can a manager make appropriate resourcing and deployment issues about their staff without having an up to date awareness of the risks (both potential and actual) in the countries in which the company has a presence?

Thus, on ILGA’s home page you can see a map of the world, into which you can drill via a variety of datasets (for example, female to female relationships, or age of consent laws) and then see how the map changes colour based on the legal status of that situation: so we can see that it’s illegal to be a lesbian in Algeria and Pakistan for example, legal in many other countries and “legal only in some areas” in Nigeria. You can also click on (or search for) a specific country of interest and see what the story is with regard to the law there; I clicked on India where I read about the legal background, anti-discrimination laws, asylum and immigration issues and social climate. There’s also an interactive section, aimed at mimicking the social networking component of sites such as Trip Advisor, where users are encouraged to post their stories of life in and/or visits to various countries, to enable others to gauge the mood and “gay friendliness” (or otherwise) of hotels, bars, restaurants and the country and people in general.

I was hugely impressed by both the site as a resource and also by BT’s support for ILGA. Although a lot of corporate support in the diversity space often is about chucking money at a cause or a group (and thank goodness for that), I think it does BT great credit that they’ve done so much more than that in this instance – they’ve put their massive technical and intellectual expertise to work to support this great cause and provided a genuinely useful tool which could really make a difference to both their own staff and to LGBT people worldwide. The site is so easy to use that I was readily able to demo it to a friend after the event and we were amazed at the wealth of information available; it’s clearly been an enormous project and hopefully will have an even more significant impact both as an information source but also as a risk awareness and a consciousness raising tool.

Loving your work, British Telecom.

Dangerous things happen to your diary when you mention to people that you’d be interested in receiving invitations to any diversity related events of which they are aware. My own diary exploded at the end of September and I was out and about for the next ten days or so; I actually had a period of four days where I didn’t eat a single meal at home, due to the invitations I accepted to various events tagged on to breakfast, lunch and dinner.

(Well, I say “dinner” – in fact, it was more “canapés grabbed from the hand of a passing waiter” but still – evening based food, at any rate.)

The amazing writer and author Alison Maitland (co-author of the bestselling book “Why Women Mean Business”) invited me to two events which hadn’t previously hit my radar; the first of these included breakfast at the Ritz (excellent!) and was the launch of the IDDAS report “Board Dynamics: A Female Perspective” – which featured interviews with 24 of the women, described as “an elite group of very hard working people” currently on the boards of FTSE 100 companies. It shared their views on the factors which can both help and derail women at the top level and asked them such questions as: what’s it like being the only woman on the board? What success factors do they bring to a company? What issues do they face? And, most importantly, what are their top tips for other senior women? Even if you’re not quite there, yet, I think these tips can be helpful to all women:

• Enjoy the role; have confidence in yourself and your abilities;
• Choose your board (and company) wisely;
• Work out your value add to the company;
• Prepare your initial impact statement for your first meeting;
• Get to know the business (sector, area) FAST;
• Don’t be pigeon-holed – for example, only speaking up on HR issues;
• Develop strong relationships with all the other board members.

On the same day, Alison and I then travelled to another part of London in order to participate in one of Goldman Sachs’ “diversity week” events. This was a performance of the play “Seven”, presented by the NGO “Vital Voices” – and I can only urge you to both follow the link provided here to read more about the play, view the trailer and to try to see it if the opportunity to do so ever presents itself.

It was a really astonishing piece of performance art, telling the stories of seven women from around the world (Afghanistan, northern Ireland, Nigeria, Russia, Guatemala, Pakistan and Cambodia) and providing us with glimpses into the lives of women who have overcome almost unimaginable barriers and sorrows.

Please – see it if you can; a truly amazing piece of work.

Since I left my job earlier this month, a lot of my contacts have asked me what they can do to help – to which my reply has been: “Please keep me in the loop with the news and key events, please keep inviting me to networking meetings and interesting events!”

And, because they are all Wonderful Women, the invitations keep arriving – and hence I am off to Cass Business School this evening for an event called “21st Century Leadership: The Evolution of Corporate Culture”, described thus:

” … we will be joined by the authors of “Why Women Mean Business”, Alison Maitland and Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, who take the economic arguments for change to the heart of the corporate world. They engage business leaders on how to drive growth by drawing on the complementary strengths of men and women.

We will also hear from Julie Gilbert, ex-Senior Vice President of Best Buy, a leading US retailer of consumer electronics and founder of WOLF, an external women’s network, through which Best Buy increased its female market share by more than $3.6bn, and the number of female managers by 40%.”

I know Alison and Avivah very well from having organised the London, New York and Toronto launches of WWMB last year and am thrilled it’s now out in paperback; and Julie is also involved with the Downing Street Project and is a wonderful speaker – so, with such a strong panel, this evening will be a terrific event.

I’ve also received an email from Women in Technology, inviting me to participate in a workship entitled “Positive politics for powerful female leaders”. This focuses on the “Rules of the Game” and how to be positively political to enhance career development and satisfaction. The (fee based) workshop will be run by Michelle Brailsford of the Jupiter Consulting Group; Michelle is also President of the London chapter of the European Professional Women’s Network, so trust me when I say she knows her stuff on this one. Reproduced with permission, here’s an overview of “The Rules” – how many hold true for you?

Rule #1. Like the lottery… you have to play to win.
Learn how to ‘re-frame’ the concepts around politics so that you feel comfortable ‘playing the game’.

Rule #2. Don’t get upset, get even.
Learn how to defuse any denial or resistance you might experience related to organisational politics.

Rule #3. Treat Stakeholders as they would like to be treated.
Understand two political power styles and how to flex your style more effectively.

Rule #4. Be yourself, but be the best self you can be.
Learn how to leverage your natural style to ensure you are ‘heard’ and supported.

Rule #5. A good idea alone is not enough.
Learn how to ‘message’ appropriately.

Rule #6. Don’t light a candle to place it under a bushel basket.
Learn how to promote yourself and your team with decent boldness.

Rule #7. Past performance predicts future behaviour… for women.
Learn how to use your track record to tell stories about credibility and trustworthiness.

Rule #8. The world isn’t fair and the sooner you realise this, the better.
Learn how to ‘level the playing field’ by spending time on ‘the right things’ instead of ‘doing things right’.

Rule #9. There are friends and there are allies.
Build your network strategically.

And finally …

Rule #10. Only powerful people can effect powerful change.

And now I am off to Cass, to try and follow the rules of #9.

So, I’m back from California – what a great time. Now, let the blogging re-commence.

Why does September always feel like the start of the new school year? New courses, new teachers, new pencils and pens … old habits and memories die hard. And why, I wonder, don’t we make “September Resolutions” instead of (or perhaps as well as) ones in January? Of course, there are lots of changes for me personally this September; I finished my job of eight years on 1st September, then went on holiday and am now back to face all manner of new things.

Whilst away, I had a permanent hair straightening treatment in Santa Monica – check out Jordana Lorraine’s site for details of the really quite amazing “Brazilian Blowout” (™) treatment which has, no exaggeration, changed my life 100% for the better. This may sound like a trivial thing to mention but honestly, unless you’ve suffered with unruly, frizzy hair for your whole life as I have, it’s hard to imagine how amazing now waking up Every. Single. Day. with straight hair can be. I love it and am hugely grateful to Jordana for fitting in her desperate English client on my first day in California. Here I am, looking happy with my New Hair:

Anyway, moving on, as indeed I am … I struggled big time to get over the jet lag after this trip. Although I’ve travelled all over the place over the last three years, it’s been a while since I’ve had an eight hour time difference with which to contend and it’s taken me almost a week to get back on track.

One thing which was hugely helpful was absolutely HAVING to get up and get suited and booted in order to travel into central London in order to attend an event one morning earlier this week; I’m still trying to find a new pattern to my days and knowing that I had paid for my ticket was a useful motivator and gave a shape to my day. The event in question was British Telecom’s Executive Women’s Network meeting, which they had opened up to external, ticket buying guests. The meeting took the form of a “Question Time” panel event, with four panellists and a moderator doing the David Dimbleby bit.

For some reason, the not-David-Dimbleby bloke didn’t either introduce the panel or even mention their bios prior to launching in to the Q & A bit, so I’m not entirely sure of full names etc, but they were, I believe, two women from the consultancy “Everywoman”, Chris Ainslie, BT’s male, flexibly working “gender champion” and Patricia Hewitt, Labour MP, former cabinet minister and a BT non-executive director. I’d been invited to the event by my friend Pauline Crawford from Corporate Heart, so I kept her company in the front row of BT’s auditorium (and I must commend them on the seats; extremely comfortable, even for me, who usually starts to wriggle around and feel back pain in most such seating).

Most of the questions had been submitted in advance (I was too busy swishing my straight hair around in the Californian sunshine to do this) and had a common theme of examining female involvement in either the past (avoiding the credit crunch – could Lehman Sisters have had a different path?) or the future (re-building it to incorporate female strengths and talents). Patricia brought up the “sexism in the City” tagline when she argued the need for what she dubbed “cognitive diversity”, by which she meant having a variety of thoughts, strengths and skills brought to bear on a business issue, therefore leading to “less risk of things going haywire.”

She specifically cited as an example of, I assume, a lack of such cognitive diversity when referencing the “Edinburgh mafia” which, until recently, ran the Royal Bank of Scotland and brought it down so very low. I was interested to hear her mention that the major UK banks have 61 board positions between them, of which a mere FIVE are filled by women; and depressed to also learn that this is unlikely to improve anytime soon (in spite of such research as the McKinsey report on “centered leadership” which suggests that women are more likely to look at minimised loss rather than maximised gain) – due to the economic crisis causing a reduction in the range of people joining the banks’ leadership teams from non-banking backgrounds.

Pauline asked the panel for their views on the key attributes which women need to get into the boardroom, and their replies were as follows:

• You have to “really want to be there” (although I’m afraid this made me think, somewhat irreverently, of that infamous Saturday Night Live sketch from last year wherein Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin told “Hillary Clinton” that she’d nabbed the VP slot on the 2008 campaign because she “really, REALLY wanted it” – cue much grimacing from HRC).
• Ahem. Back to BT, and the panel also thought that authenticity and being yourself was vital to success –
• - as was bringing your own skills and passions to the boardroom.
• Be confident that you have the right to be there; ignore the “little voice” in the back of your head which says that perhaps you don’t (Imposter Syndrome, yes?)
• And Patricia urged us to make sure that we really “understood the finances; don’t just sit back when the numbers are being discussed”.

Other questions asked and answered were around issues of how to find (and be) a mentor, on how flexible working isn’t just a woman’s issue and how when a senior man like Chris works flexibly (he works a “compressed hours” week and hence doesn’t work on Fridays) it sends out very strong messages to both men and women as to what is both possible and acceptable within the corporate culture.

I didn’t get an opportunity to ask Patricia my own question but, with my Downing Street Project hat on, it would have been this:

“Do you foresee that the forthcoming election will see an increase in the number of female MPs from the current very low level of 19% and what will need to change for such an increase to occur?”

And I also missed out on a chance to share with Chris my own definition of a Generation Y person and how they differ from their older colleagues – but here it is.

A Generation Y person is someone who doesn’t have a landline. Think about it, and ask yourself how many 25 year olds you know who live independently (ie, not with the Bank of Mum & Dad) and have a landline. With the advent of the dongle bringing a portable and alternative way to access the Net, it’s not even needed for that anymore; plus most of the friends that I have in that bracket use their mobile/smart phones for most of their on-line access these days.

Perhaps, though, upon reflection, that wouldn’t have been a welcome nugget for a senior executive from one of the world leading telecom companies.

It’s good to be home!

Hello again – and a particular emphasis on the “again” bit to anyone who has followed me here from my former corporate blog, which I wrote for two years up until just over a week ago. I had a really rather wonderful send off last Wednesday and have since received hundreds of emails from friends and colleagues around the world. Thank you all; I will reply and your warmth and good wishes are much appreciated.

So, I’m now no longer employed! But, rather than use the somewhat negative sounding “unemployed”, I prefer to think of it as having a “sabbatical”. And I am currently starting my sabbatical by spending two weeks in California, where my husband (TLS) and I are taking a road trip from south to north. We started by flying to LA, where we relaxed in Santa Monica for four days, getting used to an eight hour time difference and appreciating the sublime people watching and eavesdropping opportunities.

All the women here are tiny! Perhaps you’re not allowed over the state line or, more accurately the Santa Monica city limits line, if your dress size is in double digits. I also noticed that there are three basic female “uniforms” in terms of clothing:

1) denim shorts (of the “Daisy Duke” variety); 2) floaty maxi dresses (of the Nicole Richie variety – headband, optional); 3) little short slip dresses made of floral fabric, usually worn with either flip-flops or, occasionally, gladiator sandals.

On the eavesdropping front, we picked up on the following in our first few days:

• “Some directors are directors who write and some are writers who direct, but he’s just a writer.”
• From the barman in our hotel: “I’m out of here on Monday, as a major studio has promised me a call-back on my script and I just KNOW that this is going to be my big chance …”
• From a waiter in a sushi restaurant: “I just love your accent! Maybe I should move to England, because the whole acting thing here just isn’t working out for me.”

OK, then. We then drove up the coast via the Pacific Highway, admiring views like this: – stopping in Santa Barbara and now, Monterey (hurrah for hotels with free wireless). Unfortunately, I woke up yesterday with a cold, which is less than fun in 80 degree heat but is, perhaps, what happens when you run like a hamster in a wheel and then, suddenly, STOP. I’m not normally ill when I travel (see earlier blog entry on “travel tips”) so I’m taking lots of vitamin C and hoping that this will be a short lasted affair.

Over the weekend we’ll be continuing north to the Sonoma and Napa county areas and I’m so looking forward to seeing and spending time with my wonderful friend Diane, who lives in a little town in Sonoma and whom I haven’t seen in person for seven years.

On the career front, my options seem to be many and still very much wide open. I’m still waiting for a formal decision and a start date from the multiple-interview-requiring investment bank. Last week (actually, at my leaving drinks party, which seemed very serendipitous) the recruiter called me with a verbal offer but it all seems to have gone a little quiet since then. Thanks to my wonderful network of friends, I’ve been invited to attend a couple of gatherings including British Telecom’s forthcoming “Question Time” event which will feature, amongst others, MP Patricia Hewitt (perhaps I will ask her what the Labour Party plan to do at the next election to increase the number of female British MPs from the current calamitous 19%) and a Cass Business School event on 21st century leadership which will include a panel discussion from the authors of “Why Women Mean Business”.

And I’ve also received an invitation from the Confederation of Indian Industry to travel to Bangalore next month and speak at the inaugural “Women Business Leaders’ Forum” conclave, which I would love to do but which gives me a classic Catch 22 dilemma: if I’m not working, I have the time to go but not the money; if I have by then joined the investment bank, I guess I’d have the money but not the diary space.

Decisions!

However, for today at least, my decisions are limited to what to have in my egg white omelette – and that suits me very well for the time being.