Last week I attended a really excellent conference in London called Opportunities For Women. It’s a career development event aimed at ‘bridgers’: talented mid-level women actively seeking a bridge upwards. (You can check out the Opportunities for Women site for the full list of speakers).
The conference covered a lot of ground, but one recurring theme was the challenge of getting women into the Board room. In Women on Boards 2011, a report from an enquiry headed by Lord Davies, there is a telling quote:
‘At the current rate of change it will take over 70 years to achieve gender-balanced boardrooms in the UK’.
Think about it. 70 years. That’s an entire lifetime.
This, despite the fact that there is strong evidence to suggest that ‘companies with a strong female representation at board and top management level perform better than those without, and that gender-diverse boards have a positive impact on performance’. It’s also despite the fact that women in UK represent 46% of the workforce, and are believed to take control of 70% of the purchasing decisions in the household.
Oh, and we hold nearly 50% of the UK’s wealth.
Now I’m not about to summarise the entire report for you, but one little titbit that stuck in my mind was that one of the skills apparently (and possibly unnecessarily) required for main Board membership is a track-record of significant financial responsibility.
In my work coaching career women, a number of clients raise this very issue as one of the barriers to progress. It’s chicken and egg: I can’t get promoted because I haven’t demonstrated any financial and budgetary skills, but the only way to get these skills is to get promoted.
But hang on a minute, how do the guys get the experience? After all, we women are responsible for a huge proportion of the household spend: surely some of us, at least, have developed financial management skills in a domestic situation? In fact, given the figures, a woman is more likely to have financial skills than a man.
The Grameen Bank was set up to provide micro-funding to enterprises to the poorest parts of Bangladesh. Women used to receive 95% of the funding. To a large extent this is to encourage diversity of opportunity. However, some years ago I attended a talk by Muhammed Yunus, founder of Grameen, who said women also had a much better repayment record than men: they were better at organising and managing the finances.
I think one of the reasons women are perceived as lacking the necessary financial skills is because we tend to undervalue our own achievements. I have coached single mothers, successfully running complex family finances, including keeping pace with a mortgage and negotiating a path through the complexities of the various tax and benefits systems, who don’t think they have financial skills.
We’re also much worse than men at asking for what we want. There’s plenty of research to demonstrate this. A woman will argue she can’t possibly go for a job because she doesn’t have all the required skills. A man will figure that if he has a few of the required skills, it’s definitely worth going for it.
So a woman won’t even ask for opportunities to develop these famous financial and budgeting skills, because she assumes either that she doesn’t yet deserve such an opportunity, or because she will get a refusal. So many of the women I have worked with just ‘know’ there’s no point in asking. But, as the saying goes, if you don’t ask you don’t get. And the ones, who have the courage to ask, often find they are pleasantly surprised.
I also wonder – and I have no real evidence to back this up – whether women become allergic to numbers as a result of poor teaching at school, or because the women in their family tell them maths is difficult.
Again drawing on my experience as a coach, men are often better at appreciating how transferrable their skills are. ‘Captain of my school football team’ becomes ‘demonstrated leadership qualities from an early age’. ‘Treasurer of the University Drama Society’ translates into ‘Financial Management and Budgetary Responsibility’.
So what can we do about it?
The first thing is to think laterally about the financial skills experience you do have. If you’ve been responsible for the family fortunes, or you’ve run the finance of a club, society, charity or whatever, then what have you learned from that, and how can you utilise it in a job application or interview?
Assuming you do have some skills, then there is probably some merit in acquiring a little education so you can speak the language. For example, Cash Flow Management is a fancy name for managing what’s coming in and what’s going out at what time. Forecasting means taking an educated guess about how the future will pan out financially over the next week, month, quarter (that’s 3 months), six months or year.
There are several useful books in the For Dummies series, which are written by a woman, Lita Epstein, which can teach you the jargon. For example, Reading Financial Reports for Dummies. It doesn’t have to be over-complicated.
If you genuinely don’t have any financial skills and awareness, and you really can’t acquire them on the job, then you can either get some formal training, or find someone to shadow. Formal training might include signing up for a distance learning or evening school programme. Shadowing might involve helping someone who does a finance-related job. One client of mine volunteered to help the treasurer of her local church, which not only developed her financial skills, but also earned her brownie points with the other church members.
What do you think? I’d love to hear your reactions. Please feel free to comment here or on the facebook page.
