The national public discourse is still largely conducted by a monocultural middle-class masculine elite
Britain's boardrooms are white and male. So, predominantly, is parliament and government, and so are the people who run television and newspapers, as well as those who perform, manage the arts or sit as senior judges. The national public discourse is still largely conducted by a monocultural middle-class masculine elite. Often this is treated as a challenge for women. As half the workforce they are the most obviously disadvantaged. But it might be easier to change if it was seen less as a question of gender and more as matter of diversity.
The statistics are familiar enough: plenty of women go out into the workplace on level terms with men, only to fall away in the middle years, leaving the boardrooms – spokesmen claim – struggling to find women of experience to promote. Enlightened management insists the shortage of women is not for want of trying: flexible working, career breaks, they've tried it all and ungrateful women still walk away. Under pressure from Europe and the government (and worried that quotas might be imposed), some City companies have started to think creatively about the real barriers that hold women back. The findings of qualitative surveys like the ones done for the Women Matter series by McKinsey consultants tell a more complex story than the one about work-life balance.
More women are being taken on at the bottom. In the law, medicine, journalism and the City, women are recruited in equal numbers. It's the second or third round of promotions where women begin to fall away. The McKinsey work found it wasn't lack of ambition that stops women, more a lack of confidence in being able to fulfil that ambition, and not enough role models showing them the way. Mentoring, coaching and sponsorship are all important to stop women taking another job, or going in another direction. So is dealing with embedded prejudices among senior managers about the risk of employing women. But above all what matters is counting and measuring, knowing how many women start, what happens to them and why they leave. This is just as true for minorities as for gender. It's about the way powerful networks replicate themselves. Understanding that could help break down the monoculture at the top and create a real diversity.
There was disappointment when the government-commissioned Davies report failed to recommend quotas to drive up the number of women in the boardroom (the Equality and Human Rights Commission reckons it will take 70 years to win parity at the current rate). But it has good ideas about mentoring and monitoring. The next battle is to make sure that they are about not just women, but class and ethnicity too.