their female talent. As I listened, I discovered that I was far from alone: everyone was struggling, no matter how hard and how long they had been trying. So much effort, yet so little to show for it. It seemed pretty clear that we must all be doing something wrong.
One of the attendees was Baroness Mary Goudie, a Labour peer. We agreed that we wanted to ‘do something’ to break the deadlock. The approach needed a complete rethink.
Of course, it’s usually much easier to identify a problem than to come up with the solution. There was no reason to believe that the objective of having many more women in senior roles was simply unattainable: there were plenty of ambitious women, plenty of companies keen to see them progress. As I searched for a way forward, I read widely about whether any companies had managed to achieve better progress. I also researched organisational behaviour more generally, and the theories about differences in the ways men and women typically work. The more I thought about it, the more obvious it seemed that most of us were rushing to try to motivate under-represented talent without really understanding what was on these employees’ minds, or how our efforts would fit in with the rest of their experiences at work.
I came across a number of interesting practical ideas. One was an effort by Deutsche Telekom to ensure that there were at least 30% women at all levels of seniority. I liked that specific, numeric target and realised that most of us were making a mistake in not setting clear goals. We needed to measure our progress (or lack of it) and have a way of tracking women’s advancement just like our other business objectives. The literature I was reading on group behaviour suggested that 30% was a point at which critical mass was reached – and that resonated with me personally. As I thought about my own experiences, being the only woman in the room made me feel self-conscious and I chose my interventions carefully on those occasions. If there were several items on the agenda where I might have a different opinion from the rest of the group, I would speak up about just one or two. If there were three women out of ten people, I was just another person in the room and felt confident to speak freely.
The way in which Deutsche Telekom was promoting its ambition was also appealing: ‘Taking on more women in management positions is not about the enforcement of misconstrued egalitarianism,’ said the company’s then chief executive, René Obermann. ‘Having a greater number of women at the top will quite simply enable us to operate better.’ Not only was the statement striking in deliberately distancing the move from political correctness and towards the business case, but it was all the more impactful coming from a man.
I realised that women talking to women about women’s issues was never going to get us very far. We can encourage each other and feel less alone, but we are likely to need those in leadership positions – mostly men – to help us actually succeed, to open those doors that may be half-closed. This is nothing to be embarrassed about: men on the way up in their careers have long had champions or sponsors in more senior positions, who act as a sounding board, give them a reference, or even line them up for the next role.
But it still wasn’t obvious how to pull these thoughts into an action plan, so Mary and I invited almost all the senior businesswomen we knew to a lunch to solicit their input. Over forty came along. I stood up and suggested we needed a new approach if we were to break the deadlock and see more women fulfil their potential in our businesses. Some of those present made it clear afterwards that they did not want to be part of a specific women’s initiative, expressing concerns about how that would be perceived by their male peers. Later, I’m happy to say, and particularly after men had joined the campaign, a number of those women became generous supporters. Others were sceptical about the idea that we might ever be able to find a better way forward, after so many years of disappointing progress. All they could see ahead was an extrapolation of the past.
But a new opportunity was arising just as we were having these discussions. We needed a vision, not a spreadsheet. The giant, cataclysmic dislocation of the global financial crisis had thrown up a new possibility for us to explore. As analysts, regulators and policy-makers pored over the wreckage of the financial collapse, it seemed obvious with hindsight that bank boards and management teams comprised almost entirely of conventional, middle-aged, affluent men were inherently flawed. The directors might be individually brilliant, but if they were cut from the same cloth, educated similarly and moved in the same social circles, they were far more likely to back each other’s opinions than to challenge them.
‘Groupthink’ is far from a new concept: the term was devised in 1952 by American William Whyte, who used it to refer to similar people not just agreeing with each other but more perniciously believing that they are ‘right and good’ as well, and so excluding dissenting voices. It’s not an unusual phenomenon; many catastrophes long before the 2008 financial crisis have been blamed at least in part on groupthink, including the January 1986 space shuttle Challenger disaster, when the shuttle broke up within two minutes of take-off, killing the seven crew members. The analysis of what went wrong showed how the inconvenient truth spoken by engineers concerned about the risks of launching in unusually cold conditions was disregarded by NASA managers in their ‘go fever’. A decade earlier, psychologist Irving Janis had studied American foreign policy disasters and identified eight symptoms of groupthink. The symptoms include the illusion of invulnerability, minds closed to warnings, the stereotyping of dissenters as stupid or biased, and pressure on group members to conform or be silent.
Sadly, it seems hard to learn from our mistakes. The subject matter was different in the financial crisis but the hallmarks of groupthink were present again. By early 2010, the realisation was growing that the boardroom, described by former fund manager Lord Myners in 2008 as ‘a retirement home for the great and the good’, needed a big shake-up. The door was ajar for different ‘types’ of people to become directors and an obvious place to start was to address the scarcity of women on boards.
In 2008, fewer than 12% of the directors at the UK’s top 100 listed companies were women. Almost a quarter of those companies had all-male boards. Royal Bank of Scotland had just one female director out of eighteen at the time of its ill-fated acquisition of ABN AMRO that precipitated the bank’s downfall. Many of these board members had very similar backgrounds, too – in fact, studying a picture of the 17 male directors at the time is like playing a game of ‘spot the difference’. It may be hard to believe, but the boards of the next 250 biggest UK listed companies, the FTSE 250, were even more male-dominated. In 2008 less than half of FTSE-250 companies had any female directors at all and the average representation was just 7%. Besides risking groupthink, 93% men is clearly not representative of society or (almost) any company’s customer base.
This was a big, emerging and brand-new opportunity, so I persevered with the idea of doing something different, despite the lukewarm feedback. I arranged a smaller lunch for 14 women out of the group of 40 who had responded positively. We were meeting on a Monday; the Friday before, I suddenly felt anxious that we might have yet another inconclusive conversation. I emailed attendees, suggesting the specific idea of the 30% Club. Over Monday’s lunch we agreed on a simple, narrow but ambitious goal: to reach 30% women on UK company boards over the following five years through voluntary, business-led change. The members of the Club needed to be the chairmen of the boards, since these were their boards and they had the authority to change things.
Of course, they were almost exclusively chairmen – at the time, just a single FTSE-100 company, Land Securities, had a female chair, Dame Alison Carnwath. Dame Alison has been a fantastic supporter of the 30% Club – but we needed more than one. So that very same afternoon, we tested out the 30% Club idea on two highly regarded and prominent FTSE-100 chairmen: Sir Roger Carr, then chairman of Centrica, and Sir Win Bischoff, then chairman of Lloyds Bank. Would they support a campaign led by chairmen aimed at reaching 30% women on boards? Both immediately said yes. In their own words, ‘when we have women on our boards, the dynamic is better, the decision-making is better – but there are too few of them’.
Sir Roger’s and Sir Win’s evangelism transformed the thinking around the issue. There were many dissenters and sceptics to start with, but the endorsement of these leading, male captains of industry made others sit up and take note. Maybe, just maybe, the under-representation of women on boards was about more than ‘just’ fairness? A new dynamic began to develop, encouraging