Women in senior roles - help men to help women get there!
Reshma Ramachandran
Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer | Digital Transformation | Non Executive Board Director | Private Equity
Despite studies showing that women representation at senior levels in the organization helps boost the performance (Women Matter, Mc Kinsey 2007), there isn’t a rapid increase in the number of women at senior management levels. There is progress, but not fast enough. Why aren’t organizations changing this number asymmetry soon enough? One of the reasons is that there aren’t enough women to assume leadership roles. In order to have women who can take on these roles, we have to move back in time in the career progression.
Half of the world’s population is women (World Bank data, 2017). Close to half of the university graduates are women in developed and some of the developing countries. What happens thereafter? Entry level jobs and then middle management roles have to be covered in this journey before women can be promoted to senior management roles. I haven’t found enough research that shows the number decline but this figure describes fairly well the loss in number of women at the middle management levels.
So what happens between entry levels to middle management roles? There are several reasons why the numbers diminishes as you go up the pyramid. Childbirth being one of the reasons.
Children, especially the first child changes the equilibrium in our lives. There are two means of help – self-help and external help. Self-help is a topic for another discussion. External help comes from society of which organizations are a part. When organizations claim they are supporting women with and after childbirth, we often start with maternity leaves. While I strongly believe that is a start, I equally believe that organizations need to help men to help women. Equal paternity leave should come in as a norm to enable more new mothers to come back to work. And not just come back to work, but to take up equally challenging roles as a new dad. Children need care, they will fall sick without notice, they will have to be taken for vaccinations and play dates – things no matter what, will not change. What should change is the societal expectation on the mother to cater to these needs. Some of the countries like Sweden have established this into the culture where the parental responsibility is shared between the mother and father and both of them enjoy equal share of time off to cater to the parental obligations.
To have equal women as men at senior management levels can be achieved not only by having more females choosing STEM disciplines at university, by not only creating the ambition in women to rise above the glass ceiling but also when organizations & society comes together in expecting equal share from the father in parenting.