IMANE KURDI Are women destined to be kept below men in the workforce? Would the world not function a little better if those who represent 50 percent of its population also represented a similar proportion of those running the show, because let's face it, getting women into work is relatively easy, the hard part is to give them the opportunities they deserve to rise up to the top and take their seats in boardrooms and ministerial posts that make the difference. The Arab world is bottom of the class in this subject. The World Economic Forum in its latest global gender gap index class Saudi Arabia as 131, just above Syria at 132, and none of our neighbors fare much better. The Kingdom scores an abysmal 0.34 on economic participation and empowerment of women. But since it is a work in progress, let us look at those who are ahead of us. Top of the class are the Nordic countries: Iceland is number 1, followed by Finland, Norway and Sweden. But the country that interests me today is the United Kingdom which is ranked a respectable 18, close to the USA at 22. And yet even in Britain things are not looking good. A recent survey of 38,843 managers by the Chartered Management Institute came up with some startling conclusions: Women executives continue to hit a glass ceiling as they climb the career ladder, are paid significantly less than men and are more likely to be made redundant. These are separate but related issues. The first is that of pay. How shocking that to this day a woman doing the same job as a man is paid significantly less. The survey calculates that over a typical career where both a man and a woman start working at 25 and continue on to 60, a man will make £1.516 million and a woman £1.092 million, that's a difference of more than £400,000! Then the famous glass ceiling. The British situation illustrates it very well. At the bottom echelons, women make up 69 percent of executives, by the time you reach department heads, the figure goes down to 40 percent and then right down as you hit the top to 24 percent of chief executives. There may be a number of reasons why women's careers progress less far than those of men, the most obvious one being motherhood. Taking time out for maternity leave puts the brakes on many a woman's career and many women also do not want to carry on with a very demanding job once they have children to look after. Unlike men, they often give the home priority over work. Remember the British MP who left a parliamentary meeting with a “Sorry, I have to go pick up my kids from school”? A man would have found someone to go pick them up for him, probably his wife. But rather than seeing this as the problem, we should see this as part of the solution; women need to be able to balance work and family. By providing more resources for women to do that, we help women to contribute their fair share, not just for a sense of social justice, but because women provide a vital contribution to a country's economy. When so many are kept from fulfilling their potential, the country as a whole is deprived of their contribution. Or to put it another way, if a woman leaves the workforce at mid-career, all the experience she has gained is taken out of the workforce with her. But most of all, women bring a different perspective to the boardroom, and frankly we could do with a world that is run with a little less testosterone! The EU is considering introducing a law that would make it compulsory to fill 40 percent of boardroom seats with women. As an illustration, the current figure in the UK is 9 percent and less than 15 percent in the EU as a whole. Clearly this would be an ambitious target, but are quotas a good idea? When François Hollande became President of France this year, one of the first promises he fulfilled was that of male-female parity in his council of ministers. I admit that I felt a little uncomfortable as the list of ministers was announced; there were women in there whom no one had ever heard of, or who were very young for the job they were tasked with or who simply – at first sight – gave the impression of being chosen not for their competence but for their gender. And that is the problem with quotas, they give the impression that people are not there on merit but because of a category they fulfill, be that gender, race or ethnicity. The old argument is that you should always pick the best person for the job, whoever that may be. But is that really what happens? Are all those male chief executives there because they were the best or because they were the best-placed? Is it not the case that career advancement is due not just to merit but also to opportunity, networking, image, attitude, ambition and all kinds of other little things that mean a man will be more likely to be picked than a woman? Quotas clearly are only part of the answer, but let us not be fools and claim that men make better bosses than women; they've just had longer to train for the part. — Imane Kurdi is a Saudi writer on European affairs. She can be reached at [email protected]
