Research Archive

being a Director offers you more flexible work than the corporate or professional services life
you’re approaching retirement and foresee that a portfolio of Directorships could contribute to a reasonable income and a second career
you have a skill that you know could be useful outside the confines of your job
you have a cause you’re passionate about and serving on the board is a way to contribute or give back
you have observed men filling most of the Board seats and thought – well, why not a woman, too?

I heard all these reasons and more at the recent Diversity on Boards conference in Sydney and at the Board Readiness workshop that ran the day before. These events were both organized by Women on Boards which is a not-for-profit with 6500 subscribers and which states its goal as improving the gender balance on Australian company boards.

Up to 300 professional women gathered for the Sydney sessions. We ranged from newbies keen to understand more about what being a Director truly entails, to those who came to share their significant wisdom and years of governance experience. And we all wanted to engage in the debate on whether there should be legislated quotas (a la Norway) for women on listed company Boards. That topic will have to wait for another article. In this one, I’ll tackle what I learned about being a Director, assessing potential Directorships and improving the odds of ever being offered one.

Directors’ Duties – or “Danger, Will Robinson!”

Elsewhere, we have published articles on what a Board does, in terms of its advice and governance functions. The first session at the Board Readiness workshop was a sobering reminder that serving on a Board is not all privilege, power and perks.

If I said to you that in a new role you would be responsible for ensuring compliance with a raft of financial reporting, health & safety, superannuation etc laws but that you would, given time constraints and limits to your skill set, largely have to work through others, by delegation, would you feel a faint tinge of alarm? If I added that the legislation today stretches further and wider than ever before due to governance failures (think Enron) would you start checking for the exit? And if I finished by pointing out that unpaid not-for-profit directors face the same responsibilities and burdens as those paid handsomely to sit on the largest listed companies would you grab your bag and head for the hills?

As Fiona Shand, who presented this session, said,

Take this very seriously. It is not an easy option any more.

Managing the risks

Of course, only a tiny number of Board directors end up facing civil or criminal proceedings. Most Boards function more or less competently for the benefit of their organisations. It follows that there are ways to protect yourself and minimize the risks. I’m not talking here of financial devices like putting your assets into a Trust. Instead, I’m referring to attitudes and actions that will keep you and your fellow Directors on the ‘right’ side.

Read the company’s Constitution and the Companies Act so you know what you are allowed to do as a Director. For example, you have the right to access the company’s books at all reasonable times
Do your homework. Read the Board papers with your brain in gear so that you come prepared with questions to assure yourself that management has considered the relevant angles
Don’t treat delegation as ‘set and forget’. It should be ‘set and keep checking’. Courts will look for evidence that you reviewed the processes and effectiveness of your delegated authority. Sub committees, for example, should keep minutes, and have stated terms of reference and clearly delegated authorities eg spending limits.
Regularly ask yourself if the Board’s decisions could stand up to the cold light of day on the front page of your national daily paper. If not, be prepared to speak up. It’s your reputation that is at stake!
The same “speak up” advice applies if you believe important issues have been glossed over, or if there seems to you to be a conflict of interest, for example. Speaking up can apparently form part of your defence if things unravel badly. Of course this is not a comfortable process…

[In most boardrooms,] collegiality trumped independence Warren Buffett

Due Diligence

Before you take your seat at your first Board meeting, there are practical things you can do to ensure your future success and good fit. We heard at the conference from a number of Directors who had taken the due diligence phase of assessing a potential Board position very seriously. Also bear in mind what I was told at a governance training session in NZ, run by Janine Smith of The Boardroom Practice: you don’t have to take a Directorship just because it is offered!

Here are some things to consider in your due diligence phase:

Who else is on the Board? How are they regarded? Take a good look at the Chair, too. S/he is critical to the Board’s interactions and style. Also, to learn good governance at the outset, you need to be on a well run Board
What does the Board composition tell you? How independent is it: what proportion of directors are non-executive and do any directors represent particular interest groups, like Private Equity investors, or the family owner? Vested interests are a major driver of Board ineffectiveness
Find out about the business, its environment and challenges, its culture. Read the annual reports, press clippings. You’re looking for ways your skills and experience could add to the Board, as well as for red flags like potential conflicts of interest and style you may have
Is there a Board induction plan to help you get up to speed quickly?
When you’re getting very close to ‘yes’, you can dig deeper. Ask to see minutes, audit reports, the strategic plan. And check the “D&O” which refers to the directors’ and officers’ insurance policy, an essential even in nfp. I won’t pretend I caught all the technical details on this but here’s another conference tip: the major law firms and regulatory websites often put out very helpful free guides on issues directors need to know about. So do the big insurance companies: I googled D& O in NZ and found this and this.

Building a Pathway

On your way to being offered a position, the chances are you’ll have had to put in some hard yards to research the Boards in areas you’re interested in and then to work to meet the right people. Denise Aldous shared with us her path to her current Board appointments and I’ll repeat the highlights because it makes the points so well.

Arriving back in Australia after years overseas in a CEO role, Denise discovered that her offshore experience counted for little. What to do? After careful personal reflection on her strengths, skills and interests, she concluded that a Director role would suit her strong strategic focus and that she had specific benefits to offer. Next she went on the Australian Institute of Company Directors course. I loved her rationale:

The course is a small amount to pay for realizing if being a director is what you want to do.

And then she began to tackle such issues of how high to aim? how long to try for? which Boards to target? On the last question, she broke the market into public, private, listed and not, and nfp. She classified 330 state boards in NSW alone according to her criteria set! (Only a handful made it through).

During this process, she also identified sectors of interest, such as finance. She identified a top bank as her stretch goal and then planned back, looking at the bank’s wholly owned subsidiaries, and ultimately down to the building societies and credit unions. At that last level, she selected targets and is now working hard to get in front of their current directors and to keep up relevant contacts.

Her systematic efforts to network were truly impressive: she met 2 or 3 new people every week for almost three years as a result of joining relevant business groups and organsiations, placing her CV on databases, speaking and writing, and – shudder – cold calling. And needless to say, she tracked them all, and followed up regularly.

The results from all her hard work are flowing in. Most recently she was appointed to the Cronulla Sharks Board, to complement her positions on Uniting Care NSW/ACT, Kea Australia, the Enterprise Challenge Fund and as a lay member on one of the NSW Bar Association’s Professional Conduct Committees. A last, great piece of advice:

Don’t give up the day job…Most Directors don’t start with the lucrative top Board roles. You have to put in a lot of effort at the voluntary level first.

Advocates

Erica Smythe similarly shared her journey through several resource company Boards (she is now Chair of Tora Energy) and not-for-profit Boards in diabetes, an area of particular personal interest for her. Erica has 7 Board positions, “4 that pay and 3 that don’t”.

She showed us an animated Powerpoint slide that tracked all her Board appointments back to the organisations in her past from which had come the advocates who recommended her. Thus, a man who had sat opposite her in negotiations over a railway line years ago and who later moved on to the nominating committee for the University of WA, remembered her favourably and put her forward for the University’s Senate.

Erica’s key message was about the importance of advocates in your path to the Board. You may not always know who they are but the chances are that they will have seen you in action somewhere and been impressed. They are therefore prepared to risk their reputation in putting you forward. As Erica expressed it,

The interactions you have today create your future. Positive and negative impressions about your attitude and experience remain with people, even after the detail fades.

Final Thoughts

The key lesson I took from the conference is that being on a Board is no sinecure. It can involve a lot of hard work, considerable potential risk and little financial reward. That being the case, the next Board I aim for will necessarily be one that sits squarely in a cause I care about or an industry that fascinates me. And when I reflect on the governance positions I’ve held or still hold – the Montessori Trust, the primary school Board, my consulting business and now Professionelle – I have to say that (more by accident than design!) I have met my own criteria.

The many wonderful women I shared time with at the conference also seem to believe that there is very real benefit in sitting on Boards. My sense is that most of them think first and foremost about what they can bring to the organisation, rather than the other way around. To support this, let me end by sharing a piece of as-yet unpublished research by Renee Adams, who spoke at the conference, and Patricia Funk called, “Beyond the Glass Ceiling: Does Gender Matter?”

The core issue it addressed was: do the women who have broken the glass ceiling and made it onto a Board look very like their male colleagues in the values and attitudes they hold?

The answer is no. Women directors hold different values and attitudes to male directors. Women directors are:

More benevolent
More universal (tolerant and protective of the welfare of all people and nature)
Less hedonistic (seeking pleasure and sensual gratification for self)
Less concerned with power, security and conformity
More interested in stimulation (novelty and challenge)
Less risk averse (yes!)

It’s good to have the research confirm what we instinctively intuit!

The R Word versus the F Word

(or Is the Recession Killing Flexibility at Work?)

By Sarah Wilshaw-Sparkes

8 August 2009

“The Injuns are comin’! Circle the wagons!”

When the environment is full of threats, as it is right now, it’s a natural instinct to hunker down. We worry what might go wrong rather than right, and as control slips from our fingers we desperately try to regain it. Managers or employees, it makes no difference.

Who’s Winning?

flexible work So is the R Word is winning over the F Word in the workplace? Hard data (you know I love it) initially proved elusive, so I focused on comments from Professionelle members, as well as articles and blogs from overseas. I found most anecdotes and stories to be gloomy. Managers and employees were both busy circling their wagons, and flexibility at work seemed in real danger of turning back into an F Word. I was all set to say, that yes, the recession was winning.

And then, serendipitously, a comprehensive report on the issue arrived in my inbox, courtesy of the Equal Employment Opportunities Trust (EEO) here in New Zealand. Put out by the Families and Work Institute in the USA, the report is a broad, up to date survey covering 400 workplaces’ response to the recession, including how flexible work arrangements were faring.

The verdict: flexibility is alive and well, claim employers.

Good News

Specifically, 81% of employers said that they had maintained flexible work options in the economic downturn. 13% said they had increased them. Only 6% admitted to reducing these options.

About 40% of workplaces had encouraged flexible options like telecommuting and voluntary reduced hours to control costs and of these a little over a half claimed to have allowed employees “some or a lot” of input into the decisions. One example I found in my reading is Nortel Networks, who filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in January this year, and are now encouraging employees to work remotely to cut real estate expenses.

A quarter of surveyed employers had used flexible options to help them minimise lay-offs. We have a local example of this, of course, in Fisher & Paykel, the first NZ company to take up the Government’s 9 day working fortnight subsidy as a way to control wage costs and prevent redundancies.

Cost Cutting

Turnover in two thirds of companies surveyed by the Families and Work Institute
fell in the last year and, unsurprisingly, 90% of those suffering a sales decline took steps to contain costs. The top three cost control methods?

69% eliminated or cut bonuses and pay rises
64% laid off staff
61% implemented hiring freezes

Flexible work arrangements to achieve cost cuts appeared lower down the list.

29% said they had used voluntary hour reductions
22% used compressed work weeks
19% encouraged more telecommuting.

Interestingly, the report revealed that women may be doing better than men in the recession. Workplaces with predominantly female employees reported a lower incidence of layoffs, promotion freezes and involuntary hour reductions.

The Local Scene

A survey of 150 senior NZ managers by recruiting company Michael Page New Zealand and reported in the NZ Herald on August 4th indicated that “putting salaries on ice was the most common strategy companies used to avoid redundancies”.
The main strategies used to avoid job cuts here were:

Salary freeze - 42 per cent
Nothing - 19 per cent
Forced paid leave - 16 per cent
Reduced working hours - 9 per cent
Reduced office rental - 6 per cent
Salary reductions - 4 per cent
Forced unpaid leave - 2 per cent
Other - 2 per cent

How has flexibility fared in New Zealand as the recession has bitten? I turned to the EEO Trust who told me that a recent survey of theirs, yet to be released, has found that
“work-life initiatives, including flexible working options, are still important to employers with more than half the survey respondents saying they were offering more flexible working options to counter the recession.”

Retention Tool

One aspect the US Families and Work Institute report did not address was the extent to which employers are now offering flexible work as an affordable alternative to pay rises and bonuses. This was a strong theme in the anecdotes I found.

Flexible work has always been in part a retention tool. These days some firms seem to be offering flexible options not only to reward staff but also to de-stress them at a time when many are carrying heavier workloads. One commentator on the Wall Street Journal’s The Juggle blog covered several of these themes:

Actually, I feel like I have more flexibility now than I did two years ago before the downturn because the golden handcuffs are off. My comp has been cut in half, and my bank is trying to be more flexible with the people that are still here since they can’t pay them as much money. I actually do have to travel a lot more due to all of the layoffs, but I find that no one is questioning my arrangement to work one day a week from home or to flip that day around when I have to travel on other days. I see more of the remaining staff with flex arrangements now - compressed week, one or two days from home or even working 4 days.

Silent Fright

Call me a sceptic, but I can’t help wondering if so many employers found it easy to say they were maintaining policies to offer flexible work simply because so few employees were asking for such arrangements!

Earlier this year, Dr Philippa Reed, Chief Executive of the EEO Trust, mentioned to me that local manufacturers were receiving fewer applications for flexible arrangements. It’s a fair guess that employees have grown reluctant to ask for flexible options at the same rate they had a year or two ago. Why stick your head over the parapet to be shot at?

A March 2009 Washington Post article describes a “silent fright” among workers, who feel they must not complain, nor ask for anything, but just keep on delivering above and beyond their role in order to try “to become indispensable”.

Mismatched Expectations

Are those employers who say they are continuing to offer flexible work in fact offering options that employees value and need? When I wrote about flexibility back at Professionelle’s launch most NZ employees were underwhelmed by employers’ common but minor gestures such as permission to "occasionally vary start times to deal with non-work problems" and "use personal sick leave to care for an ill person". Significant options, like permission to work from home regularly, were much less freely available. I wonder if something similar might be going on in the US.

5 Full Days

Reading between the lines of the Families and Work report, I can also see potential for second order effects that in fact undermine flexibility. For example, layoffs mean more work for those who are left. The pressure to bulk remaining roles up to full time, 5 days a week is inevitable.

Some mothers returning to work in the last 12 months have told Professionelle that their roles have been disestablished while they have been away, or that they have been increasingly marginalised since returning. Others have found the ground shifting under their feet. One Professionelle member wrote:

I have received a restructure proposal from my boss ahead of meeting with him. He had stressed that I needed to return to work ready to commit to long hours but I foolishly requested a little more maternity leave provided my employer could find cover …Suddenly, my position is no longer achievable in the 4 day working week I have worked for several years now. It now requires a full time employee. The injustice of it makes me want to scream!

Face Time

Presenteeism may be on the rise, too. Not only are some roles apparently reverting to 5 days a week, but those days need to be spent in full view in the office. With layoffs and paycuts as key company responses to the recession, presenteeism is a logical reaction by managers. To offset the stresses they are under, they feel less trust in subordinates and more need to control them. Telecommuting and compressed working weeks can look like perks and favours rather than effective ways to engage employees to do their best work.
Sylvia Ann Hewlett, founding president of the Center for Work-Life Policy, has surveyed women executives at top Wall Street firms. In reports in the Washington Post and Forbes magazine, Hewlett says that since late 2008 many more women executives report feeling high levels of anxiety - 89% in 2008 versus 36% in 2007. A major reason is an increased emphasis on face time. Hewlett said,

Leaving the jacket on the back of your chair 14 hours a day is part of the campaign to prove you are indispensable, so whatever flex arrangement you had, it’s very hard to take that any more.

What to Do?

Let’s be practical. The pressures of our home lives and the need to juggle haven’t dissolved with the recession. It’s possible that you will need to front up to your boss to negotiate for a flexible arrangement. How do you increase your chance of success? We found the following advice in a March 2009 article in Forbes magazine:

By explaining how the change would benefit the company fiscally, remaining responsive outside of the workplace and maximizing visibility in the office, flextime can still champion through a bad market.

Ward Gaffney knows this firsthand. On becoming a mom, Ward Gaffney, a national director for coaching at PricewaterhouseCoopers, felt her work schedule needed to change in order to accommodate her new family obligations. However, she was nervous about approaching her manager and worried that she might be perceived as less committed. Plus, she notes, a lot of her "talented friends" were losing their jobs.

Ward Gaffney's approach was as follows: First she consulted her mentor to figure out a strategy. Next, she outlined a plan and made an appointment with her boss to discuss the proposition. In the meeting, she told her boss that her level of commitment and ambition hadn't changed and explained how she would continue to meet company needs. Ward Gaffney hoped her boss, a father of four, would understand. In fact, she was surprised by how receptive he was to her ideas.

The result? Ward Gaffney now works from home one day a week and limits travel to the east coast. "I’m excited about the challenge of balancing all of this," she says.

Of course, not everyone can get up the guts to approach her manager. And some career experts believe this is not a smart time to ask for flexibility at all…

Better Odds

A final thought: are there some jobs which may be better suited to flexible working arrangements, and with a better-than-even chance of getting your boss to a ‘yes’?

These are the three criteria that shine through:

A job that lends itself to clear, measurable objectives and outputs
A job that you have cutting edge skills in
A job you have demonstrated yourself to be able to deliver on

Beyond these you’ll need a special boss (calm, imaginative and supportive) and a dose of good luck!

What do you think?

Am I being too negative in my gutfeel that the recession has the upper hand? And am I looking for too many fishhooks in the apparently good news from the Family and Work Institute? I’d love to hear your experiences. Please tell me what you think.

Your Feedback

I have found that flexibility in the workplace is non-existent. I worked for Fonterra and before going on maternity leave spent some time investigating the option of working from home. I liased with the IT guys who all said that it could be done with a dedicated phone and satellite broadband connection. For the cost of $80 a month they decided that they wanted someone in the office! Comments received from Managers were that they didn’t want to set a precedent. Before going on maternity leave I informed my managers that I was expecting a special needs child so after 14 weeks maternity leave, having to resign because I couldn’t put my baby into daycare was even harder. I am very good at what I do and to be treated like this hurt.

I’ve combined being an employee and an employer over the years, and have juggled large amounts of \"out of the office\" time, usually because of work-required travel. Whilst I agree that there are \"doing\" tasks and definitely sales related roles that donrsquo;t require you to appear in person, simply being present in the office means that you can get involved in things as they occur. I can, and fully intended to work from home more this year, but in actual fact while the technology allows me to appear to be at my office desk, I miss out on the ad-hoc discussions, drop-by meetings, \"brilliant ideas\" moments and other components that make up a working team. Please keep in mind that the last 1-2 years have been pretty darn tough on employers as well as on employees. Sometimes a decision that seems unfair or illogical may be for valid reasons from their perspective.

7 Bites at the Work-Life Balance Elephant

By Sarah Wilshaw-Sparkes

26th May 2008

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time…

In early April this year we held another networking breakfast discussion. This time the topic was work-life balance. Doors opened at 7am, a fact that promoted a few of our guests to point out how little the early start was doing for balance in their lives! We took their point on board and as a consequence our next facilitated networking session will be a lunch time session!

Work Life Balance Work-life balance is a tough beast to deal with. It’s been around since at least the dot com days, yet it still struggles to gain respectability. Indeed, flexibility in work arrangements can be spelt another way, as many women know only too well: “c-a-r-e-e-r d-e-a-d e-n-d”.

At interviews, work life balance and flexibility is the proverbial elephant in the middle of the room. You can ask about salary, you can ask about professional development opportunities, but how comfortable – even in the boom years – were you with asking, “Tell me what flexibility I can expect in how I structure my work?” You might as well have waved a flag that read, “Not committed.”

At Professionelle, we disagree with a notion we sometimes hear, namely that work-life balance is a dead issue. We know it isn’t because our members often tell us about their triumphs both little and large in this area. In fact, when we ask you all what actually ‘works’, your stories more often than not are about exactly that, flexibility and making it all fit together.

As working mothers ourselves, Galia and I know first hand how important that is. With the flexibility we’ve created for ourselves we are now able to manage our own businesses, be active in our children’s schools, and to try and stay fit (as well as all other things we all do). Having both had careers where ‘face time’ was really important, we have a first hand understanding of just how much can get done and how productive we can be with a flexible work arrangement and the autonomy to structure the time to suit ourselves.

So it is clear to us at Professionelle that the work-life balance challenge is alive and well and something we need to go on working at. As part of that effort, we organised the breakfast to explore solutions to this issue, sure that the women present would have fresh insights and hard won wisdom to share. And they did!

Here’s how the women at our breakfast tackle the work-life balance elephant, one bite at a time:

Bite 1. Check out potential employers from the outside

Stack the odds in your favour by identifying supportive employers whose values and priorities are compatible with yours. That alignment was the ‘magic wand’ element for many of our attendees.

Even from the outside, you can do a substantial amount of due diligence:

Look at who has won prizes at the EEO Trust’s annual Work & Life Awards
Review publications and surveys like The Best Places to Work
Check out the company’s website. Does it say anything about work-life balance and flexibility? What does it say its values are?
Try to gauge how many of the senior management and board are women. It’s an acid test – unsupportive workplaces do not build a significant cadre of senior women
Is the welfare officer a senior manager?
Use your networks. What are people saying about the company?

Our particpants also recommended that once you’re in an interview you can gain more clues. How does the interviewer come across? Does s/he share any examples of flexibility? Are you invited to talk to current members of staff, or kept at arms’ length? However, our attendees had differing views on whether you should simply ask about flexibility in an interview, based on very mixed experiences!

Bite 2. Ask for flexibility – when the time is right

Our attendees strongly shared the view that once you’ve proved yourself as a employee, it becomes easier to arrange more flexible arrangements. Numerous women in the room reported that once they had been with an employer for a period of time, and had built credibility and established a strong track record, they had the confidence to request a new approach to how they did their job. As one said, “You feel you have more degrees of freedom to act.” Indeed, some reported that once they were established, their employers would begin to ask them what they wanted, in order to keep them happy and engaged.

Note that these experiences predated the recent New Zealand legislation requiring employers to give fair consideration to requests for flexibility.

One guest, Gill South, the author of a newly published book on working women “Because We’re Worth It”, expressed frustration that women seemed to have prove themselves first.

Blokes would just ask! The sports fanatics get permission for time off to train. That sort of thing seems acceptable.

Although most of us agreed with Gill’s sentiments, we still think it is fair to say that - especially in the current financial climate -most women would feel it is prudent to negotiate greater flexibility from the advantaged position of a valued employee.

Bite 3. Take responsibility and be proactive

Through the discussions around the tables it became clear that a big part of asking for flexible arrangements is thinking it through and presenting options to the organisation. The women at our breakfast felt that we need to take control if we want things to happen. We are all so different that even the most supportive bosses can’t know what is right for us. “As individuals we really need to look at our own role,” said one participant. “Where we are, and what we need.” That can also mean grappling with the “inner enemies” of guilt and fear of taking action!

According to our attendees, some companies offer coaching to help people reflect on their goals and paths to them. The availability of coaching is another sign of supportive cultures of organisations who see this “as a valuable tool to help employees thrive, rather than as a way to address weaknesses”.

Bite 4. Push the message that work life balance is for EVERYONE

We had working mums at our breakfast, and we also had plenty of women who were not mums. Children or not, it was universally agreed that work-life balance must not be seen as simply “part time work for mums.”

Look around, said our breakfast guests – some people will be dealing with ageing parents, too, so care is not just about small children. There are also people wanting to study, to run marathons, to volunteer overseas. And of course these people are as likely to be men as women.

We have to get away from it being a working-mums-with-little-kids-problem. If it isn’t broadened, there’ll be a backlash. We need solutions for everyone.

In fact, the attendees felt that as long as the issues remain bracketed in top management’s minds with the needs of working mums, work life balance would struggle to gain traction. And that meant women and men alike would continue to feel constrained asking for work arrangements that deliver it.

We all, in very different ways and at different times, need flexibility to pursue things that matter to us. It’s essential that we encourage the firms we work with and for to frame the policies in a broad and inclusive way, and to publicise them in the same vein.

Bite 5. Promote the business case for work-life balance

Those of you who’ve been with us for a while will know that we always dig into the business case that supports major efforts to enhance the positions and role of professional working women. We’re not alone! Philippa Reed, Chief Executive of the EEO Trust was with us, discussing this important issue and listening to other womens’ perspectives. Organisations like the EEO Trust, the Ministry of Women’s Affairs - and we at Professionelle! - are all working to build the business case and raise companies’ consciousness.

Many of the attendees agreed that this is a a very powerful part of the argument for work life balance. We know from taking the message about the business case for “women at the top” to large organisations that the value comes not only from informing senior management. It also comes from energising women at all levels to ‘walk tall’ and to grow in confidence in talking about the issues. Knowing there is data to support the profit argument, as well as the equity argument, makes a big difference.

At the breakfast we briefly presented recent Australasian research on the business case for work life balance, including evidence gathered by the EEO Trust here in NZ. It’s certainly a message we can still do more to promote. As a taster here is a sample of what we referred to at the breakfast:

The EEO Trust locally has found that those respondent companies who
• have a work-life policy or strategy also have lower staff turnover
• give extra paid parental leave report higher rates of return from parental leave.
• actively supporting health and wellness also lose less time to injury.

From overseas, Stewart Friedman on HBR’s Publications site talks about how people are more fulfilled and resilient when they can improve performance in more than just the work sphere of their lives. He also says that in his 20 years of research and coaching he has seen satisfaction and (self reported) performance rise across all work and life areas “when you bring the whole person to work”.

Bite 6. Celebrate different role models and tell the whole story

Another suggestion was for stories that show a range of role models pursuing flexible arrangements. Consistent with the idea that work-life balance is for everyone, and not just young mums, one attendee suggested that the stories should encompass individuals who didn’t have children and who nevertheless still valued and pursued flexibility.

Very often, the start of the story is clear (“Jane opted for a 3 day part time role after she returned from 8 months maternity leave…”) but the outcome is unknown. Was the arrangement successful for both sides, our attendees wanted to know? How did it develop, and why? As someone in the room said, “Can you return to the full time arrangement of 10 days per fortnight after you’ve been at 9? How does that transition back actually work?”

Stories are an extremely powerful learning tool. Companies who want to be proactive about their flexible work solutions and work life balance initiatives would be well advised to build a repertoire of success stories that illustrate their approach. These can then be informally passed among employees, and they will also find their way into interviews as credible examples of the company ‘walking the talk’.

Bite 7. Don’t think the recession means work-life balance is off the table

Yes, it is easy to feel twice as constrained about exploring flexible work these days. We heard about employees who are actively looking for more work hours, and turning away from flexible options. Why? “People don’t want to look vulnerable,” said one participant.

Yet at our breakfast we felt that the current environment may, paradoxically, hold unprecedented opportunities for pursuing flexibility. Organisations are no longer in a position of being able to offer monetary bonuses to retain valued employees. Flexible work may be a reward that costs relatively little to the firm (a laptop and modem perhaps) but that is hugely prized by the employee. Also, as companies search for more effective ways to control costs, logic suggests they will gravitate to the use of contractors to help them flex around the ebb and flow of work.

From The Top

One last thought: it’s a generational thing. The people at the head of a number of our organisations haven’t truly experienced or needed to understand the pressures that lead to a need for balance and flexibility. It is starting to change: some of the older leaders are beginning to experience it vicariously through their daughters as they see them grapple with the challenges – but there’s still a way to go.

Any organisation’s appetite for flexibility and its attitudes towards it all flow from the top down. They always will.

How Do Professionelle’s Networking Discussions Work?

These special sessions give professional women a chance to get to know one another in the course of sharing their experiences and opinions on a significant topic. We kick the session off with a short presentation on the topic and then hand it over to the groups of women sitting round tables. Each table has a sheet with two questions as prompts for discussion. After about 45 minutes we bring the group back together so each table can briefly present findings. And then we write them up and feed them back to the wider Professionelle community!

Redundancy: Not the End, But a New Beginning

By Sarah Wilshaw-Sparkes

April 27th 2009 (this article first appeared in the NZ Herald's Career Portfolio on January 21 2009)

“A sudden meeting on a Thursday afternoon with your boss. You know it can’t be good news. It made me nervous…” Shelley is talking four weeks after first hearing that her coaching role at one of New Zealand’s banks was one proposed for disestablishment. A month on, she’s not at all gloomy and even rates herself as “fortunate”.

She had seen it coming for nearly two years, as her department steadily shrank and she found herself training others to do parts of her job in smaller, better tailored roles. “I’ve actually wanted it to happen for the last six months. It’s been soul-destroying working in a poorly designed role.” She agrees with the business logic behind the proposal, too, unlike some of her colleagues who have reacted very badly to news of their jobs being removed.

Take Control - Fast

Another big plus for Shelley is the bank’s offer of free access to career transition services. “I’ve realised I love coaching and probably want to stay in this type of work.” She’s looking forward to external, independent advice on planning her search process and polishing her CV, a document she has hardly touched in eight years. While Shelley waits for that appointment, she’s begun calling people in the training industry to put out feelers. Pre-Christmas, her contacts are too busy to be receptive, but taking action has made her feel confident. “Don’t let things be out of your control”, she advises. “Get back your sense of control as fast as you can.”

Take Time, Too!

Getting past the shock of redundancy is a crucial step in turning the situation to your advantage. “There are myriad responses to the news but it’s usually a jolt. The psychological contract you had with your employer, of giving your loyalty, time and skills, is displaced. Until the smoke clears, you can’t develop your sense of confidence on why you are a great candidate,” says Jude Manuel, Business Development Director at career transition specialists, DBM New Zealand. “You have to give yourself time to work through the emotion or it will spill out at inopportune moments, like in a social setting that could have provided useful contacts, or even in an interview with a prospective employer.”

She recommends grabbing outplacement support with both hands if it is offered, because it can help people move through the emotion faster. One practical method her firm uses is to gather affected people together. “It’s very valuable. They say, ‘Gosh, it’s not just me, it’s not personal, it was a business decision.’ And these forums are a great networking tool, too!” Next come three steps to finding a new role or direction. Manuel lists out preparation through self assessment; focus through targeting relevant roles and skills; achievement through negotiating the new job offer.

Clean Sheet

The self assessment step is critical. “Start with a clean sheet,” recommends Eugene Ng, a director of H2R Consulting. “There are even career option exercises you can buy online. The thing is to see this as the chance to do something new. To do what you enjoy, not what you’re trained to do or what you’re good at.”

Self-assessment should range widely, encompassing work style preferences and financial expectations because not everyone will end up in a traditional job. “A lot of people go into contracting or become owner operators. We’ve been seeing this since the early nineties when there weren’t enough jobs for everyone and people set up their own consultancies,” says Ng. “I’ve seen examples across many industries of redundancy becoming an opportunity. People were pushed out of their comfort zones and they’ve never looked back.”

Values

Take time to reflect on your values, too. “Were your personal values aligned with your old employer’s?” asks Robyn Webb, who delivers career management and transition services at professional services firm, Pohlen Kean. “You can get so busy, you don’t notice the company going down a path that you’re uncomfortable with. Your value set becomes really useful later in your opportunity search. It helps you identify target organisations. It’s great for when an interviewer invites you to ask questions. And if you have multiple offers on the table, it’s a way to assess them.” A values-driven approach can lead to candidates to look first for aligned companies rather than pursuing a specific role. “It’s about getting the order right. What can I offer? Who do I want to offer it to? Then exploring with that company what roles they have.”

DIY

Not everyone can access career transition services. The fundamental process is the same, however, whether you use experts or take a DIY approach. Webb’s advice for those handling redundancy alone is to find a mentor; this could be a business colleague, a friend or family member. Mentors can assist the emotional healing, and can also highlight opportunities and open their networks to help create new contacts. Candidates should leverage their own work and social networks, too, partly to uncover the jobs that are never advertised, but also to find out more about companies that appeal.

How long will it take to find a new opportunity? That depends in part on seniority, says Manuel of DBM New Zealand. Senior roles are subject to a more rigorous process that takes longer. Also, the initial self assessment is usually more complex because with more experiences to draw on, there are more future paths to consider. An industry rule of thumb for time between roles offered by Ng at H2R Consulting is that it is similar to the time taken to sell a house.

Remember that new opportunities can lie far outside traditional employment. My business partner, Galia BarHava-Monteith, developed the concept for Professionelle.co.nz after being made redundant from a local corporate. Searching for tools to support her next steps thinking, she found a reference to the Reflected Best Self exercise in the Harvard Business Review. This exercise costs $US6 and is available online. Using it, she gathered specific stories from friends and colleagues about times they had seen her at her very best. Combining these with perspectives from mentors, and with intuition about the rising interest in professional women, she tailored her own self employed role in a unique business.

How to Stand Out

Some employees are landing in the job market alongside many others from the same background and skill set. It is still possible to stand out from the crowd. “Look for transferable skills and don’t focus on the technically specific skills of your previous industry. Good candidates stand out by the quality of their CVs and their interview skills – you need to practise these,” recommends Ng. “Candidates can also help themselves with recruitment consultants by being clear about the role they want to go for. The most successful candidates think things through to specific roles that are right for them. The less successful leave the thinking up to others.” Another key CV element is to highlight your quantifiable achievements. “People want achievers on their team,” says Manuel of DBM New Zealand.

A Kick

And finally, what of Shelley’s plans? “I’m going to have a holiday, switch off from the old career, and start fresh in January. People who come through redundancy best will be those prepared to see it as a blessing. This is the kick up the butt I needed a year ago!”

Your Feedback

Like many of you, I, too, have been made redundant and it’s without question the reason that I’m in business for myself. I cannot imagine when I would have found the courage on my own to take a step that was "definitely part of the plan" (what plan? of course there wasn’t one, more an idea that I could do something great one day...) However, simply hearing that others have been there (as comforting as this is) isn’t what I wanted to say.

My top tip for you right now is this: get connected. One of the challenges that women face, in my experience, is in not being connected to the right people. I believe this reticence is due to our confidence levels - not that dwelling on the why will be useful here! So here’s my offer to any women reading this: if you want to talk about how to get connected or how to make a leap forward toward the next great step in your career please feel free to get in touch.

If you’re not so inclined (notice the reticence - case in point ladies!!) then start connecting with people you know and make a request of them for their time, advice or introductions. You know, people are generous - you would gladly support them and you know what, they feel the same back (most of them!). All the best (and I do mean the best)! Tara Lorigan

Great article. As a young HR professional, I was made redundant after managing the process of winding down the corporate team of the company I worked for. For me it was a great opportunity to be on both sides of the process at the same time and really understand what people were going through. I believe it has made me a better HR professional. Now I keep my personal experience and learning in the front of my mind when dealing with similar situations. There is so much to learn about yourself in these situations and the opportunity to experience outplacement support was priceless.

In response to the gloom and doom of the Lane Walker Rudkin debacle I thought you might be interested in the positive side of the clothing industry. I will follow this with a forwarded email announcing the launch of our new label. You will see we are doing this in quite a different manner to the traditional fashion launch. (Click to view Hopetown's clip http://www.hopetown.co.nz )

A Mentoring Morning

By Sarah Wilshaw-Sparkes

9th March 2009

Making it Work

Is mentoring important to women’s careers? 100% of respondents in Professionelle’s survey on that topic a little over a year ago agreed. Perhaps that’s why our first public networking breakfast, held in February 2009 and based around a facilitated discussion on mentoring, sold out so quickly!

We have always believed that one way Professionelle can make a significant difference to professional women is by tapping into the wisdom of our whole community. When we then take those insights and feed them forward to other women and to employers via articles, workshops, networking and talks, we ensure that the knowledge of what works for working women circulates for everyone’s benefit. The recent breakfast and this follow-up piece are examples of that process.

With fifty professional women in the room, and questions shared among the tables, we had a wonderful opportunity to first to present our perspectives and then to hear back from everyone. We also invited further reflections by email after the event, and I’ll be quoting from those responses in this article.

To see what an event like this is like - and the calibre of the women who attend! - watch the 3 minute video below.

Diversity and Congruence

Without fail, Professionelle’s get-togethers bring a diverse group of professional working women together. And this breakfast was no exception. In fact, this time we had a wide range of ages and more ethnicities than before. Work-wise, we had contractors, small business owners, full time and part timers, as well as women from not-for-profit organisations, the media, financial services, professional services and corporates. To ensure women got the most out of mixing and mingling, we pre-arranged the seating arrangements and ensured no more than three women from the same organisation shared a table. Our members really do value this mix:

Thank you for organizing the networking breakfast last week. It was really good. As with the workshop I attended last year, I was very impressed with the diverse range of professional women that attended.

Perhaps it’s surprising then, amid such diversity, how much congruence there was in the responses to the discussion questions. Or perhaps it’s not surprising - professional women who gravitate to Professionelle seem to share some key attitudes and values, as I’ll highlight further on.

We’ll Go Informal, Thanks

I was struck by how many tables wove into their responses an emphasis on preferring informal to formal mentoring programmes. Informal refers here to the mechanism for a mentor and mentee to find each other. One table reported:

Arranged meetings between mentor and mentee don’t typically have chemistry.

Our view, confirmed by research, is that women want to find a mentor who “inspires” them, “someone they want to be like” … factors that HR cannot be expected to be able to predict. Like our members we think that rather than pre-assigning people to this important relationship, HR departments could instead create opportunities for a mix of seniorities and departments get together – much as we were doing at this breakfast! – and to design the interactions to break down the usual peer groupings.

The seniors tend to stick together. You need to get the mix going at mixed tables.

One example of an informal mixed-seniority meeting was from Air New Zealand where, we heard, Rob Fyfe holds internal lunches, at which he talks informally with a small group of employees.

A beautifully simple example of what a company can do to facilitate people finding each other came from Vero. New hires are given coffee cards that they can redeem at a local café; the idea is that they can invite senior managers for a chat and a coffee to find out both about their roles and them as people.

Providing staff profiles on the organisation’s intranet could also help identify individuals who could become mentors (or mentees!) When accompanied by clearly signals that no formal mentoring programme will be offered, these tools give motivated new hires valuable support as they set out to find someone with “a generosity of spirit” to help them advance.

Navigating the Workplace

As we said in our introductory words at the breakfast, research shows that mentors – especially from the same company – provide most value to mentees’ careers by helping them navigate the politics and inner workings of their organisation. One table agreed, commenting, “It can take 7 to 10 years to get clarity on ‘how things get done around here’.”

I suspect that for some new graduates the word ‘mentor’ in fact conjures up an Obi-Wan-Kenobi figure, more suited to knightly quests than to navigating organisational realities. For these people, in particular, HR departments can help by providing information on what mentoring is, and how to get the most from it. Another valuable intervention was felt to be senior women leading by example in talking about their mentors, and the value they had gained from such relationships.

Goal-Driven

It was widely agreed that a successful approach to a mentor, and a predictor of a successful relationship, involved the mentee being proactive. The two main parts to this were:

Active research of who might make a good mentor, and what links might need to be forged to meet them.
“Put yourself into places where you might meet them. BNI, Professionelle. Bring about a situation to meet them.”
Careful preparation beforehand in thinking about your goals. “Identify your needs and what you’re looking to get from the relationship. Then you’ll have a frame of reference to discuss when you meet the potential mentor. Another table offered: “Your purpose matters. Are you looking to develop skills? Do you want sponsorship to push you up the organisation?”

One member wrote to us afterwards and described a “failed” formal mentoring relationship. It was, she said:

…a situation of me as mentor for a junior lawyer. She didn't really understand why she wanted a mentor or what I could help her with or what direction she was headed in. In hindsight, maybe I could have helped her more with those questions, but I'm not really a career counsellor.If someone wants to achieve the same sort of things that I have achieved, I'm more than happy to show them the ropes.

So, I guess that this is another example of where the mentees need to know what path they want to be on and the mentors need to be in a position to guide them on that path.

We’re Worth It!

Another table that also tackled the how-to-make-a-practical-approach issue reminded us that the value from a mentoring relationship can flow to a mentor as much as to a mentee (Galia wrote about research that confirms this too). In particular, the table advised,

Don’t assume that people will be too busy to mentor you or that you have little to offer someone so senior. People in senior roles can get isolated. You bring them that vital perspective from another part of the organisation and from a different generation. You can share your learnings with them.

Look Outwards

While many people appeared to have had good experience with internal mentors, there were risks associated with them.

Trust and being able to talk in complete confidence were seen as essential attributes of a relationship – but potentially difficult when there was a working relationship that also needed managing.
Competition between mentors and rising mentees was another caveat
External mentors could sometimes bring a fresher point of view, untainted by being within the politics of the organisation.

Things Change

Careers progress and goals change. One member described an excellent mentoring relationship that ran out of steam when her goals fundamentally shifted. As a result of some of the things she heard at our breakfast meeting, she is now proactively looking for a mentor to help her tackle a new set of objectives. She wrote:

My first mentoring relationship was with a young-ish female partner at my firm. We got on very well and she liked my work and went out of her way to ensure that I progressed through the firm’s ranks. She did all sorts of great things for me, including getting me onto important jobs ... making sure that I worked with the real dealmakers in the firm ... getting me "in" with her group of other young-ish partners... giving me tips on how to deal with "quiet times" so that it didn't look like a period of underachievement.

She was a legend, and under her guidance I progressed very quickly. However, it all turned out a bit hopeless when I decided that becoming a partner at that firm was not one of my goals - in fact it was something that I wanted to run as far from as possible. She still thinks that I should be at the firm and doesn't understand why I left. Fortunately it hasn't affected our friendship, but as a professional mentor she is no longer very helpful.

[Before the breakfast meeting] I guess that I had pretty much given up faith on mentoring as a concept. I had reached the conclusion that mentoring was more beneficial to people who are starting out than to people who had already reached a level of seniority in their career. Needless to say, I have changed my mind over the last 10 days or so while thinking about the content that was discussed.

My conclusion after the breakfast mentoring session is that I need a mentor whose experience is aligned with the direction I want to head. My primary goal is to create my own client base of people that come to me, rather than to a branded firm. I have given a lot of thought to it and have set up a lunch with a friend who has been very successful as a sole-practitioner accountant - she could be a potential mentor for me. Even if that doesn't work out, it has become a lot clearer in my mind what sort of mentor I now need.

One insight is that even the best mentor is unlikely to be able to advise you in all stages of your career. In fact, it isn’t unusual to have two or three mentors at one time, each meeting a different group of objectives or needs.

Galia also had the inkling of an idea as she listened at the breakfast to mentoring stories like the one above. She’s still working on it, but it flows from the realisation that there are several broad reasons to take on a mentor and these will tend to correlate with particular career and life stages. It may be possible therefore to develop a diagnostic questionnaire that helps women identify what could be right for them. Once it’s off the drawing board, Galia will be keen to test drive it with breakfast attendees.

Self Starters

I’ll finish by reflecting on a common thread that seems to mark out ‘Professionelles’: they are action-oriented. They don’t wait for opportunities, they go looking for them. Such searching, of course, is what brought many to our site in the first place!

This trait may explain why we heard such clear themes at the breakfast around proactivity and responsibility.

I also think that women in general – and I can speak for professional women in particular - place real value on having personal connections. It isn’t “all business”, the people really matter. In a mentoring relationship that personal connection doesn’t mean the sessions have to become shoulders-to-cry-on or cheerleading-ego-pumps. Instead, it makes it easier to build trust in the other’s commitment to the relationship and to absolute confidentiality.

Governance and the Girls

Compiled by Sarah Wilshaw-Sparkes

8 April 2008

Our Professionelle community is becoming a marvellous clippings service! We have received a number of articles in recent weeks, chiefly around women’s under-representation on Boards and the reasons for it.

Do women offer weaker business qualifications and have less business experience?

Is it the old boy’s club or, to put it more charitably, that we all gravitate to people who look like us and so as a consequence, we instinctively trust more?

Are women less visible, or are they just less interested in applying for directorships?

Below, we’ve précised three recent press reports and articles that each shed some light on the matter.

Newly Appointed Directors: How Do Men and Women Differ?

The notion that women don’t have the right stuff to serve on boards no longer holds true, the evidence shows. This is one finding of a recent study, “Newly Appointed Directors in the Boardroom: How Do Men and Women Differ?” The researchers were Dr. Siri Terjesen of the Neeley School of Business at Texas Christian University, and Dr. Val Singh and Dr. Susan Vinnicombe, both of Cranfield University in the United Kingdom.

“It has long been assumed that women possess less business experience than men, and that’s the number-one myth we debunked,” says Dr. Terjesen, herself a corporate board member. “Women have plenty of experience, although they often have different types of experience than men,” she says.

Several striking differences were revealed between newly appointed male and female corporate directors in terms of their career paths and skill sets. Female directors:

were much more likely to have MBA degrees and were twice as likely to have earned their degrees from elite institutions.
had much more experience than men—-by 62.5 percent to 38.9 percent--on other types of boards.
had a higher likelihood of having a portfolio of career experiences than did the men by 41.7% to 27.8% The men typically had been more singularly focused.

Women say yes more often to different things, "Dr Terjesen explained. "This provides a diverse set of career skills they can bring to their boards.”

Such diversity is becoming increasingly valued, in part due to new regulatory and competitive pressures that are driving corporations to seek directors from outside their own usually homogeneous talent pools.

“Earlier research shows that companies with more women on their boards tend to perform better,” Dr. Terjesen says.

Boards Without Broads

Director Magazine (June 2008) carries an article presenting the figures on the dearth of diversity in New Zealand boardrooms, investigating the drivers and exploring ways to redress the balance. It includes a synopsis of recent research and a variety of interviews. Those who spoke to the magazine include Nicki Crauford of Institute of Directors, Jens Mueller of Waikato School of Management and a director of www.finddirectors.com, and Carmel Fisher of Fisher Funds.

The following short excerpt - under ten per cent of the article, we don’t want to infringe copyright! – is taken from another interview, this time with Anne Urlwin, a director with Meridian Energy. Meridian is a very rare beast: it is a large company with gender parity in the boardroom. Anne has sat on boards for the last twenty years and currently holds seven directorships.

“I think women on boards is about the contribution they bring to the diversity of skills, experience and perspective that all boards need. They won’t get that if the shareholders who appoint those directors don’t tap into the widest possible director candidate pool and I think that pool increasingly includes some very capable women.”

But for a variety of reasons those women are not very visible in more formal networks. She’s not sure how she would have become a professional director if her first appointment (to the initial commercial board of Trust Bank Canterbury) had not given her the opportunity to prove herself and to participate in forums that increased her visibility.

“It can be hard for anyone to get that initial foot in the door.”

As to whether the blokey nature of boards tends to be self-perpetuating, she suggests “it’s human nature for all of us to choose someone like ourselves.” They are the people you see most of so they tend to look like the biggest candidate pool and also offer an element of safety.

“Boards do need to work as a team so while you need that creative tension - there needs to be challenge and debate – it must be done constructively with all members what they are there for and respecting each others’ views.”

The risk of having someone who is disruptive, time-consuming or a “boardroom bully” is an incentive to stick with who you know.

She believes the greater focus on work-life flexibility in conjunction with “the enormous talent wars” that are going on to attract and retain top people is easing the path for women who are aiming for more senior roles.

“It just takes some of the stress out of the practical day-to-day issues of juggling work and family life for both men and women – and I think that will help.”

Women are better managers in most areas

This last article, sent by a member in May 2008, reports on the relative strengths of men and women at senior management and CEO level. (The source was Stuff.co.nz, quoting Reuters, from 6 May 2008). These strengths will manifest in the boardroom as much as Exec team meetings, and it’s interesting to reflect on how the women’s strengths of imagination, and chance-taking seem well aligned with the typical benefit claimed for women on boards: injecting a diversity of ideas.

Women make better business leaders than men in all but two areas of management but men have the upper hand when it comes to focusing on the bottom line, according to an new Australian survey. Data collected from 1800 Australian female and male chief executive officers and managers found women exhibit more strategic drive, risk taking, people skills and innovation and equaled men in the area of emotional stability.
But men came out on top when it came to command and control of management operations and focusing on financial returns.
The survey, conducted for the Steps Leadership Program by employment consultancy firm Peter Berry Consultancy, found women were more likely to take a chance with their ideas and challenge the status quo.

"Women are ambitious, bold, mischievous, colorful and imaginative. They are more confident, competitive, visionary and have a stronger presence,"

Gillian O'Mara, general manager of the Steps Leadership Program, said in a statement.
But the survey found that men were more task focused and concentrated on getting the job done rather than dealing with relationships. Said O'Mara:

"(Men believe that) that bottom line dollars are the only game in town. Their key motives and preferences in life appear to be around revenue, budgets and profit. At work and at home, they are driven by financial opportunities, theyare task focused and concentrate on getting the job done without bothering too much with relationships. They are more comfortable with hierarchies, title silos and processes.

The results of the survey, which was based on an international research-based personality test called the Hogan Assessment System used by organizations to select employees, will be presented at a female leadership seminar in Sydney on May 14.

Professionelle Hits 1000 Registered Members!

By Sarah Wilshaw-Sparkes

1 August 2008

Just after our last update, in mid July, we hit our 1000th member. Some of you might have seen my announcement of this milestone on our blog page, complete with a couple of balloons!

This magic number had been our stake in the ground for membership at the end of our first year. Galia and I are both chuffed at this achievement. It means we have added members at the rate of almost exactly two a day and have signed up about eight percent of the target market we had identified as professional and corporate women in NZ when we set Professionelle up.

It also means I have an excuse to play around with pivot tables again to look at the profile of our members...

The last time I wrote up an analysis on our membership was around Christmas, when we had been going for nine months. Back then, I looked at our 700th member and compared her to the norms in our membership. This time I thought I’d see if our member profile has changed as we have gone from 500 to 1000 members. In the text below, the numbers in brackets relate to the member profile at 500 members.

The 'average' Professionelle member: who is she?

You won’t be surprised to hear that our members remain almost entirely female at 98% (97%). Since the 500 mark we have become even more New Zealand-centric with 94% (91%) of members living down here. Greater Auckland is still home to 60% (61%) of members but a noticeable difference which we are really proud of is that we have picked up members in many more locations outside the main centres: Kaitaia, Dargaville, Pirongia, Putaruru,Taupo, Te Puke, Waipukurau, Wanganui, Stratford, Levin, Bulls, Masterton and Rangiora. Galia's appearance on the TV One Special Report in April had a lot to do with that. Given we are an online community, this is exactly what we envisaged building: a safe environment for professional women throughout New Zealand to share their experiences.

Agewise, the largest group in Professionelle are those in their thirties who make up 43% (43%), followed by another 26% (26%) in their forties.

You are all extremly well qualified, with nearly three quarters holding a tertiary qualification. Exactly a third of you (33%) hold post graduate degrees and another 39% (40%) Bachelor equivalents. Of course, this means we have to make sure we keep up our act as yoursquo;re sure to let us know if we don't!

Full time employment remains the most common work arrangement at 60% (62%). Taken together with part time work, 70% (70%) are in what could be termed "conventional or traditional" work arrangements. A further quarter (26%) are self employed, contractors and in their own businesses, leaving 5% (4%) reporting as other, retired or unemployed.

Unsurprisingly, and consistent with our assumptions when we set Professionelle up, the mix of these employment types changes markedly as women reach the age of having children. This is ever later in New Zealand, with the median age now around 28. The exhibit below shows how the conventional employement of full and part time work drops sharply through the thirties age group. This pattern was much the same when we had 500 members.

Employment Type by Age Group Cohort for Professionelle Members

A consistent mix!

By now, an obvious pattern has emerged: the profile is remarkably constant despite doubling the number of members! This is not because we represent the NZ average. Far from it. Taking education as just one example,

Only 4.5% of the female population in this country have post grad degrees, while 11% hold Bachelor's, compared to our 33% and 39%. Professionelle seems to appeal to a very consistent subset of working women in New Zealand. These are women who are highly educated Kiwi urbanites, and well-advanced in their careers.

What do Professionelle members do?

The most diverse aspect of our membership lies in the jobs held. The 1000 members span about 200 (100) different job descriptions. We are really excited by this as it implies we appeal to women with a wide range of professional interests. Nevertheless, there are several sizeable occupation groups within our membership:

sales, marketing and advertising roles account for 14% (16%)
finance and accounting 11% (10%)
the legal profession 10% (10%)
HR excluding recruitment 9% (8%)
General Managers and CEOs 7% (6%).

Outside these groups we have several flavours of consultants and of coaches. Less common roles include a veterinary pathologist, a technical manager in meat processing, a criminology researcher and a ceramic artist. If I ever need to research a particular job for a novel or short story, I’m sure I could find it among our members..!

How did our members find us?

When we set Professionelle up we decided that because of who we were targeting (you!) we wanted to 'earn' your membership through providing intelligent, thoughtful and relevant content on our site and to the media. Readers may be unaware that we have never advertised. We have instead written articles for the business press, spoken at networking meetings, gained mention in others’ newsletters, intranets and websites, and regularly updated this site, which has done wonders for our Google indexing. And of course, we kicked it all off by telling friends and family about Professionelle, and they passed it on. So have many of our members, most of them women we have never met.

Referrals remain the most largest source for Professionelle in gaining new members.

Reflecting the power of word of mouth recommendations, the sources that brought members to us break down as follows::

referrals 49% (54%)
media mentions 26% (25%)
internet searches 14% (9%)
others’ networks 12% (12%)

Professionelle is a self-selecting community and we do not turn any bona fide members away. (We do ignore the applications from dubious Russian websites that we strongly suspect want to sell us little blue pills). This makes the consistency in the profile of our members all the more noteworthy. We believe it has a lot to do with staying true to our promise of delivering in-depth and values-based content and services. This is what you tell us you appreciate and what you tell others about. And we’d like to thank all of you who’ve taken the time to refer us to others!

Will we look the same when we hit 2000? We’ll let you know!

Mentor Survey

By Sarah Wilshaw-Sparkes

12 December 2007

Our last survey for 2007 was all about mentoring. Was it important for women's careers? Do our members have mentors? How did they find them? What, if anything, should (or could!) Professionelle so to support mentoring of professional women?

As always, we prepared a report to let our members know what the survey had revealed on this important topic. The report appeared in the members' only area in our last update and is now available for public view.

First, the numbers!

A staggering 100% of respondents believed that mentors play, or can play, an important role in woman’s careers. Clearly, the kind of work arrangement our members were in made no difference to theirview of the importance of mentors.
83% said mentors now played, or could play, an important role in their own careers.
Exactly two thirds currently have a mentor. Those who did not were as likely to be in full time "traditional" employment as in alternative arrangements.
Lastly, an overwhelming 93% of respondents believed that Professionelle should play a role in facilitating mentoring across our members. The two respondents who didn’t say “yes, you should” instead said “yes, you could”.

Value of Mentors

Two quotations will suffice to support the exceptionally strong positive response on this question:

From a member with her own businesses:

If not for a mentor to sound ideas with, I would not be in the position I am today with currently owning three companies and in the process of setting up another two. I cannot recommend enough finding someone you feel comfortable with who can also inspire you to reach great heights.

From another member in full time employment:

I am currently in a senior position and had not used a mentor before. However, after attending a resilience workshop facilitated by my organisation I realised what I had been missing out on. I chose someone in the organisation, pretty high up, that I respected and who was also outside the specific area I work in, to get a different perspective. My mentor’s input is already changing my life!

Finding Mentors

Relatively few respondents seem to have found your mentors through the active facilitation of their companies. There were exceptions, of course, like the member who found hers through a company-promoted relationship with the NZ Institute of Management. However, the general theme was that women found their mentors by themselves.

Owner operators reported that they rely on referrals from friends, or contacts made before they branched out into being their own bosses.

Repeatedly, the theme was that mentoring works when people “click”, when values align and when the mentor for some reason takes a personal interest in the mentee’s success.

Mentors came through professional qualification bodies and academic institutions as well as in the form of supervisors, ex-bosses and colleagues. One member reported her mentor offered her services after hearing the member speak on the local government election trail!

Mentor Services

In addition, useful existing sources for people seeking mentors came to us through this survey:

www.mentorcentre.co.nz According to its website, “The New Zealand Mentoring Centre provides the highest quality individual, peer, team and organisational mentoring & coaching services.”
www.rwr.co.nz/mentoring.php Retailworld Resourcing is a local recruitment agency that specialises in the retail sector and offers a retail-specific mentoring match-up service
www.businessmentor.org.nz/about/index.php “Business Mentors New Zealand is a fully funded service of Business In The Community. This organisation, operating with over 1,400 volunteer mentors… provides a national mentor network to help any New Zealand company which has been in business for at least 12 months and has less than 25 employees.”
www.mentornet.net Based in the USA. “MentorNet is the award-winning nonprofit e-mentoring network that positively affects the retention and success of those in engineering, science and mathematics, particularly but not exclusively women and others underrepresented in these fields.”

Ideas for Professionelle’s Role

There were three main themes to the suggestions on this question.

1. Provide an online or offline place for women to meet informally and make the necessary first connections

This appealed to women who were looking for opportunities to make an informal, yet personal, connection and then drive any resulting relationship forward between themselves.
Offline ideas: an “expo” or networking event; also some industry-specific gatherings.
Online ideas: a forum or email loop for women to connect.

2. Provide an online listing of both women willing to act as mentors and those seeking mentors (with some level of confidentiality)

This appealed to women who struggle to ask another to be their mentor. “Having a base with people who have already agreed is a great step”.
Running this via Professionelle’s message board or similar would give individuals control over the information and contact details they provid

3. Offer an active matching service in which Professionelle gathers information on mentees and mentors to make a preliminary match and facilitate a first meeting

Several respondents noted the risk that developing and running an mentor system could create a heavy admin workload.

A secondary theme from several of you was to provide “ground rules” in order to set expectations about respective roles, and to clarify the difference between mentors and coaches.

Where To from Here?

Informal meetings: We are planning two more offline networking events in 2008 which will provide informal opportunities for our members to get together. (Not a member yet? Registering is quick, easy and free!)

We are also currently exploring a more specific inter-generational meeting to link promising young women at university with potential mentors who have experience and connections in the public and private sectors.

Online listing: We recently opened a forum on the messageboard for people to post their networking meetings around the country. We will soon open one for mentees and mentors to post information on their needs and their experiences. The board allows for private messages to be sent, protecting confidentiality in the first instance. This forum will also only be visible to Professionelle members and will be free of charge.

Several of our members mentioned an interest in offering their services as mentors. We hope you will find time to register that willingness on the board. The first post on the board will be, as respondents suggested, all about ground rules and expectations!

Thanks again to everyone who responded. We look forward to seeing how well these activities support mentoring for professional working women.

Nine Months On

By Sarah Wilshaw-Sparkes

12 December 2007

Milestones

As I write this, on December 12th 2007, Professionelle has been going for exactly nine months. That’s a length of time that is - dare I say it - pregnant with possibilities, at least in women’s minds! Perhaps it’s appropriate, then, that it coincides with a new milestone in our journey to build a community to support professional working women everywhere.

Just yesterday, I registered our 700th member.

As I entered her details, I wondered to what extent she approximated our average member. This new member – let’s call her Inez – is:

Based in New Zealand, in Auckland
Aged in her early thirties
Educated to Bachelor equivalent level
A barrister / solicitor
Working part time

The last point to note is that Inez found us through referral from a fellow lawyer.

If you’ve been around Professionelle for any time you’ll know that Galia and I love to wallow in data; analysing our ever-growing member population from time to time is a task we particularly enjoy. I drew the long straw and set to with my pivot tables while Galia consoled herself by cooking up a storm to celebrate the last day of Hanukkah.

So, taking it one step at a time, who are our members, and how close to the norm is Inez?

Gender

Inez is a woman. So are 97% of our members.

We value our few brave male souls though! A number of them are close friends, family and business associates. Their support for Professionelle was evident when we sent out the Alpe d’Huez coupons as a thank you to members who’d sent us two or more referrals. Men may only be 3% of our members but they represented ten per cent of those top referring members. The most prolific referrer overall, with a fabulous tally of ten, was a man.

Global Geography

Our members are overwhelmingly from New Zealand, 92% in fact. Inez fits that profile. Unsurprisingly, the next largest source of members, at 6%, is Australia. A handful of other members come from as far and wide as Canada and Samoa.

This pattern must in part reflect that our personal networks are strongest here, and that we have worked hard to build a profile with the media in New Zealand. Our feature articles occasionally relate to purely NZ issues, such as the recent Kiwisaver advice, too. Lastly, we know our dot-co-dot-nz site address sometimes makes offshore readers wonder if they are “allowed” to join our community. Heck, yes!

Inside NZ

Exactly two thirds of our local members are based in Auckland, as measured generously from Pukekohe to Helensville. Again, Inez fits the picture on this third dimension.

Wellington, including Lower Hutt and Paraparaumu, accounts for 11%. Regional North Island towns – especially Hamilton, Tauranga and Palmerston North – add up to a strong 17%. The two main South Island centres take care of another 5%.

The balance comes from smaller South Island towns. The percentage of members in this area may be small but the coverage is remarkable. If we ever take a roadtrip from Bluff to the Picton ferry, we can stop to share a coffee with members in Invercargill, Balclutha, back inland to Gore, up to Queenstown, on to Alexandra and out to Dunedin. Then up the coast to Oamaru, Timaru, Ashburton, Rangiora, Christchurch, over Arthur’s Pass to Greymouth, and then a long haul up to Nelson and finally Blenheim. Phew!

Age

Inez is aged between 31 and 35. By a short nose, that is our largest 5 year age group, followed closely by the later thirties. Our third and fourth largest groups are women in their forties as can be seen in the graph below:

age

The average age of the Professionelle member is 39 years old and the median age falls in the 36-40 age bracket.

Education

Well over 80% of Professionelle members hold a tertiary qualification, ranging from advanced vocational through to post graduate. Post graduates account for a full third of all members.

Those with Bachelor or equivalent degrees account for the single largest group among the tertiary qualified members. Once again, Inez follows the norm!

Industry/Role

The way in which we collect data from members at registration can be answered by industry or by role in an organisation. It is up to members to choose how they describe themselves.

The major job groups that cover a little over half of our members are:

13% Marketing and sales

11% Barristers and solicitors (hello, Inez!)

10% Consulting (excl recruitment consulting)

8% Human resources

6% Finance and financial advisers

6% Line and general management, private sector

Beyond this point there is a long tail, moving from academia/teaching through accounting, IT, publishing/ media/ journalism to project managers, not for profits and psychologists!

It is hard for us to discern the mix of public and private sector with confidence. From the subset of members for whom we do know it, however, the mix appears to run at about 3:1 in favour of the private sector.

Work Arrangements

Here for the first time, Inez departs from the norm for our members. As a part timer, she’s in a small minority.

The most common work arrangement is full time, which covers 60% of our members. The next most common arrangement, used by 28%, is self-employed/ own business / contractor. These three strands go together because contractors may be sole traders who could be classified as self employed, while those in their own businesses are also self employed.

Part timers constitute just 8% of our membership. “No employment” (such as retired people, students etc) and “not stated” form the last 5%.

It is surely noteworthy that the proportion of the more alternative arrangements runs as high as 36%. Anecdotally, we see that this reflects women’s efforts to forge flexible working arrangements as their lives change. The highest proportion of flexible arrangements – just under 50% - appears among members in their late thirties and early forties.

How our members found us

Almost two thirds found us through referral from friends, colleagues and trusted newsletters. Galia and I of course got the ball rolling when we launched, but it didn’t take long for registrations from people we’d never heard of, referred by others we didn’t know either, to start appearing in our system. Inez, who heard about us from a legal colleague is, on this dimension, once again in with the majority.

The next largest group of members, 22%, came to us via mentions in NZ print media, whether from articles we had written or quotations we had supplied on issues affecting professional women.

10% of members found us through internet searches. All our effort to produce word-rich content, and regularly update it, is worth its weight in gold when it comes to climbing Google rankings for free!

The remaining few percent were from registrations that did not provide information on this item.

Conclusion

It seems that our 700th member matches the norm or average of our members in almost all respects.

Some readers may wonder why we collect any data on our members and what we do with it. The answer is simple: we want to be sure that we are attracting, and continuing to attract, the sort of women we had in mind when we developed the site. It’s the acid test of how our material and brand values are being received and interpreted.

By the way, we absolutely will not share or sell our member information to third parties.

The data reviewed in this report is unequivocal: the vast majority of our members are professional working women in the kind of careers we have often seen in our combined thirty odd years of work experience in professional services and corporates. The feedback we’ve had from our members so far (feedback that is typically infrequent, but in-depth when it comes!) confirms that Professionelle is addressing a number of the issues that matter and that it is positioned to make a difference.

It’s great to know that our read of the issues in professional working women’s lives is broadly right. It’s even better to see our community beginning to share successes and the seeds of new solutions.

What Stops NZ Women Rising to the Top?

By Galia Barhava-Monteith

17 June 2007

Introduction

As I sat down to analyse our survey on barriers to women rising to the top, it occurred to me that the timing couldn’t be better. It has been nearly nine months since Sarah Wilshaw-Sparkes and I launched Professionelle. Working through the responses to this, our latest survey, I was able to ask myself if we’ve been addressing the issues that REALLY matter for professional women in New Zealand? Judging by the responses to the survey, it seems we have been quite on the mark. But read on to make your own judgement!

Nearly forty years on from the feminist revolution, we know that women aren’t making it to the top in New Zealand’s businesses.

The numbers:

The figures say it all. When looking at the proportion of women in board positions in our top companies, New Zealand fares the worst of the English speaking countries, even behind Australia!

Women Board Directors ASX200 International Comparison

Source: 2006 EOWA Australian census of women in leadership cited in the Australian Financial Review.

The two of us at Professionelle are baffled. When we set up our website we based it on our own experience and observations. We knew that being a professional woman could be a lonely experience. We didn’t think - or at least not consciously - that sexist attitudes were that prevalent any more. Perhaps we were swayed by media coverage of the very few, but very prominent, senior women in the private sector. But as we started researching the topic of the position of professional women in the third millenium, using New Zealand data as opposed to international data, the picture that emerged was a lot worse than we expected.

Having taken a good look at the relevant New Zealand numbers, we felt it was time to ask our members for their opinions on the key barriers preventing New Zealand women from reaching the top of companies and organisations.

Professionelle’s research:

We asked our members to list what they believed were the three most important barriers to women’s progression to the top. They were able to choose from responses provided by us, which were based on international research on the topic, or to write their own. Respondents were also able to provide us with their thoughts and comments.

Over forty of our members took the time to answer the survey, and many also provided us with indepth and insightful comments.

On reflection, I found the results surprising. I didn’t expect to find such widely held experiences of male-dominated cultures across the board. What I did find heartening though, was that although one important barrier lay outside our immediate control, the other major one was in fact a reflection of women having more choices and choosing to exercise them!

Our analysis:

We analysed the results on the barriers in three ways:
1. By importance (those listed as first and second most important barriers),
2. By frequency of mention across all the barriers listed,
3. By the comments provided.

The most important barriers:

Two of the three most significant barriers concerned women’s experiences of male dominated workplaces. These three top barriers were:

“Inhospitable corporate culture - masculine leadership styles, vocabulary and norms”
“Women opting out rather than put up with the "corporate cr*p"”
“Women's exclusion from informal networks”

Given that the Professionelle members who responded to our survey came from a wide range of occupations and employment types around the country, we believe these results are all the more powerful because of how consistent women’s views were.

On the face of it, these results might seem depressing as forty years on it appears we still have to deal with similar corporate cultures to those described in early feminist writing. The sexism is probably less overt than in the seventies but its effects are still felt: masculine leadership styles, masculine style of speech and masculine norms apparently still prevail. And it’s deeply frustrating to read that women in 2007 still feel excluded from informal networks and the “boys’ club”.

That said, the second important barrier is much more heartening. The fact that women themselves are choosing to opt out is very positive. It shows that women in New Zealand have choices, and that we are able to exercise them. Some of us choose to stay in full time work and others choose to pursue other paths. Granted, for some, leaving traditional employment may not be economically viable, but increasingly, other forms of work are becoming more economically sustainable, judging by anecdotal evidence and our membership profile.

In our latest analysis of our 670 registered members, nearly a third are in non-traditional employment arrangements, such as contractors, running their own businesses and self-employment..

The most commonly cited barriers:

We classified all of the responses (excluding the comments) into set categories. The three most commonly mentioned barriers matched, as expected, to the three most important ones. However, the top five prevailing barriers provided more depth to the picture:

Lack of mentoring emerged as the fourth common barrier to women’s progression to top positions. Our current survey aims to explore this barrier further and to see how Professionelle might help address mentoring needs.

Another area where we at Professionelle aim to help is with the fifth most common barrier: the burdens we women load on ourselves. Members made a number of revealing comments on this topic:

Women’s perfectionist tendencies.
Women’s lack of self-belief and confidence.
Women mistakenly assuming that you make it through hard work alone and not through networking and the social side of the corporate ladder.
Women moving into staff roles and not gaining line experience.

Also commonly cited were barriers concerning the lack of career opportunities given to women, companies not wanting the risk of giving women high visibility roles, and women not being in the pipeline long enough.

Looking at both the important and the commonly mentioned factors, a consistent picture emerges. Yes, definitely there are things organisations and companies can do to help women move through the ranks. In particular, they can work on their culture and ensure women are not excluded. They can monitor the insidious sexism that our survey shows is still very much present in many work environments. And, indeed, companies are beginning to realise these are strategic issues for them and are coming to Professionelle for advice on how to overcome these issues.

However, there are also things that women as individuals can do. These are the things we focus on at Professionelle.co.nz. Our ‘Feeling like a Fraud’ feature was written specifically for those of us who suffer from perfectionism and lack of self belief!

As we plan ahead for next year, we will definitely ensure that the content we provide to our members will continue to align closely with these findings.

What were respondents most passionate about?

But what did our respondents feel most strongly about? What propelled them to write their very thoughtful comments? Analysing this part of the survey proved to be the most interesting.

My hypothesis was that respondents would be most likely to comment on the work-life-family responsibilities challenges. I wasn’t far off. However, what they felt most strongly about, again, was the persistent and insidious bias against women, which, according to our respondents, is still very much alive and well in New Zealand companies.

Bias against women is alive and well:

Reading the comments, I was most struck by women describing their personal experiences and direct observations of sexism in inhospitable, male-dominated cultures. Their comments fly in the face of the prevailing view that women in New Zealand don’t face such serious barriers.

I think the concept is out there that women don't have barriers any more to rise to the top, but I personally think in Auckland firms are still long way from accepting women at the top.
It will be interesting to see how many corporates actually have a grooming process where women are groomed to reach the top. I have seen this happen in UK and good to see an interest was shown by the top level in the staff below regardless of the gender. Also I think because sometimes it takes a lot for women to reach the top, the also become barriers to other women reaching the top as the instinct to protect your own territory kicks in.
This would be a non issue if there wasn't an unspoken culture around the high level positions.”
The "boys club" is alive and well - and they don't welcome outsiders!
The 'Boys club' thing is so underestimated. In my experience, in this type of Boys club environment, it's obvious that most men don't even know how to react when women are at the same 'table'. The tone usually lifts a bit - until the first joke...then your presence almost becomes invisible!
;As I move through my 30s and in a senior management role I'd say the barriers are increasing rather than decreasing. An older woman commented to me that women have a tougher time as they move through the higher ranks than they do at more junior levels and I'm finding that to be true.

Making the situation worse is the perception that men in senior positions are not prepared to take the chance to promote a woman alongside them, because women in high positions are highly visible and exposed in New Zealand.

CEOs and Chair of Boards are not willing to "take the risk" of going against the norm and putting in a woman. Media focus on women in high profile or CEO roles is not balanced. My experience - some CEOs and GMs actively dislike having strong women on the senior mgmt team as it changes the club rules.

Family responsibilities:

The second topic most frequently commented on was family responsibilities. Looking at the responses, it isn’t the family responsibilities per se that prevent women from pursuing their career. Instead, it is the lack of assistance both at home and from a work structure perspective that results in women ending up having two full time jobs!

I found the following comments most poignant on this particular issue.

The ownership of family matters we assume (rather than expecting our partners to equally share the load)means that a) we are more likely to get burned out and b) we don't have enough role models of both women and men who have high-powered careers and who are strongly involved in the care of their families. Only when both genders demanded this flexibility will workplace norms change.
Unfortunately I think it still comes down to the career vs family dilemma. While there are opportunities for women to work part time the attitude (at least where I work) is that once you have made that choice you are pretty much going to stay where you are. Part timers don't make partnership. "Role reversing” as a couple is pretty difficult too as even if you are lucky enough to find a partner who is happy to be a stay at home dad they are frowned upon and people seem to assume they did it because they have the second rate career or couldn't get a good enough job to support their partner so she could do it
I'm not sure about the reasons listed, but I do see - often - that women who are also mothers have less upward mobility because of the other full-time job alongside their paid work. The greatest obstacle seems to me to be lack of support in child-rearing and housekeeping. It may be changing slowly, but during these school holidays, how many working mothers are thinking about the children and taking responsibility for their care, compared to how many men? I know many men do support with particular tasks, but who does the thinking and working out?

Lack of flexible work arrangements was also seen to contribute to the burden:

Along this barrier (lack of flexible work arrangements) is lack of child-friendly workplaces. It doesn't affect me, but it certainly would help working mothers.

Women needing to learn how to ‘self-promote’:

The third most commented on issue was women’s reluctance to place themselves in the high visibility positions required in order to ‘make it’ in the traditional work place.

Many policy makers and decision makers are men. People have a tendency to include a 'recruit to type' component when selecting people for opportunities. Women need to place themselves in a position where they are VISIBLE to the decision makers, even while in 'lesser' roles. You can only be chosen when you stand out from the well qualified crowd. We need to be able to confidently talk about our experience in a 'can-do' way if we haven't done EXACTLY THAT THING before...show that we are a safe pair of hands and that we have something more to offer.
Further comment, a number of women I have worked with WAIT for opportunities to happen, rather than activity seeking them. Note also that the barriers I have selected all indicate little 'active' bias against women, but a more implicit or subconscious bias that is really hard to define.

Some of our respondents felt that women build the highest barriers for themselves, and believed that women who work on those barriers were in a much better position to advance.

Of course there are barriers to women that are external - but I believe that in today's world we are our own most significant barriers.

Lastly, one respondent thought that women might not actually want those high ‘profile’ roles.

I'd have to say that I haven’t experienced significant barriers that couldn't be worked around or pushed through and I work in an extremely male oriented work place. Yes, at times they may have been a little more barriers than what my male colleagues experienced but I now find myself in a position equal to or higher than my male colleagues. The question I wonder about is if women actually want these roles on boards or CEO/GM? I have interviewed 5 women for a high calibre role at my firm in recent weeks and all 5 were ill prepared and dispassionate about the industry and the role and they are the only applications I have received after casting the net far and wide over an extended period. In discussions with other friends in my industry I'm hearing the same thing from them which leads me back to the question is there a skills shortage in general or perhaps that women don't want the roles we think they do?

This last comment fits well with our last major finding that perhaps women don’t necessarily want to advance in traditional workplaces in the same way that their male counterparts do.

Women have different drivers

Although ‘women opting out of their own choices’ was one of the top three important and commonly cited barriers in our survey, there were relatively few comments about it. When our respondents did comment, however, it became evident to me that some of our members believe women simply have different drivers to men, and that these are reflected in the choices they make.

“Is this just a numbers game? Are fewer women are at the top because many talented women lose the desire to work to the top because of the sacrifices required in other facets of their lives? We were brought up with the 'girls can do anything' message - true! but it turns out that girls can't do everything. With family, friendships, partners, homes, work, and hopefully some outside interests to maintain usually something has to give. It's been my observation that women are happy to leave behind corporate crap and take on rewarding work that fits with lifestyle and this usually does not align itself with corporate advancement. It would be interesting to do a profiling exercise of women who have reached the top of the private and public sectors. For example, how many have families?”

Generally speaking, women don't seem to be as tolerant as men at putting up with stressful situations and relationships, so we opt out more easily. Do we need to toughen up or can we keep our high expectations?

Conclusion

Working through the data proved to be a lot to take in!

I believe the findings are alarming. As we near the end of 2007, women are still finding it difficult to advance in New Zealand because of the underlying male-dominant culture. Yes, it could be the case that our survey contained a self-selecting bias; perhaps the women who responded to us feel passionately about it because they’ve experienced it. However, these results, the numbers and our anecdotal observations based on our users' comments and our work, all suggest that New Zealand business has a way to go to both acknowlegde and to seriously address this issue.

However, what heartened me was that many of our respondents felt that women who exercise their choice and opt out are doing it voluntarily, not because they have been forced to. Coming from a different country where these options aren’t open to the same extent for economic reasons, I fully appreciate how New Zealand women have real options available to them. We can work full time or part time or not at all, taking career breaks. We can start our own business or we can contract our skills.

All these choices are socially acceptable and often economically viable. What these results say to me is that if corporates and organisations want to hold on to their talented women, they need to act fast, as the options we have make other choices appealing!

What do you think? We’d love your thoughts and reflections on this extremely important topic. Please e-mail me or post your thoughts directly on the message board.

If you’d like to read other articles on the status of New Zealand professional women on our website, you can read about our analysis of the 2001 census data:

Behind the Numbers
Behind the Numbers - Part 2
Behind the Numbers - Part 3

We also investigated the myth of a "Golden Age" for Women CEOs in New Zealand and discovered the unpleasant reality of a widening gender pay gap

Slip-Slidin' Away

Lastly, if you want to find out how you can overcome feeling a fraud, read one of our earlier Ask the Experts:

Feeling Like a Fraud - the Impostor Syndrome

Behind the Numbers Part 3

by Galia BarHava-Monteith

15 July 2007

Introduction

Here at Professionelle we believe in shedding light in murky corners. That means looking deeper than the well known facts that are dished out regularly. In the case of New Zealand’s gender pay gap it means it’s not good enough to know that men are better paid than women and leave it at that. We need to dig into how much better paid they are, in which occupations, and, of course, why.

This is the third and final article in our ‘Behind The Numbers’ series and is based on 2001 census data. As soon as the Stats Department releases comprehensive numbers for the 2006 census, I’ll refresh this analysis.

pay inequity

In these articles I examine in detail seven professional occupation groups I believe are relevant to you, our users. These groups are:

CEO or managing directors not in the public sector
Information Technology managers
Advertising and public relations managers
Human resources managers
Accountants
Management consultants
Barristers and solicitors

In the first two articles I looked at how much women and men were getting paid in these occupations according to the 2001 New Zealand census data. And what I found was staggering.

Key facts so far

Professional women were better educated than the men in our target occupational groups.
Men, as predicted, were getting paid more, and in some cases substantially more, than professional women across all the occupations.
The biggest pay gap was for barristers and solicitors where the median income for male solicitors was $42,137 higher than that of female barristers and solicitors.
The proportion of men earning over $100k was generally double or more than the proportion of women. The ratio was lowest for HR managers and highest for accountants.

Too depressing

I should tell you that my usual approach to doing such analysis is to crunch all the numbers first, figure out what’s going on, and then to write all the articles in one go. But I found this exercise so depressing that I ended up doing one round of analysis, writing the article and needing a break. Every time I worked on a piece, I was truly surprised at what the numbers showed.

This article is my last attempt to peel off the onion layer that will reveal a good explanation for why men are so much better paid than women. The obvious hypothesis is that it’s all to do with women being much more likely to work part time.

Do professional women get paid less because they work part time more?

In the table below I outline the pay gap for the seven occupation groups and the % of men and women who reported working over 40 hours a week for each group. As you can see, the proportion of men who worked over 40 hours a week is consistently greater than the proportion of women. But, does this fully explain the pay gap? These professions are paid salaries after all, not hourly wages.

Occupation	Gap between men and women	% of men who worked over 40 hours a week	% of women who worked over 40 hours a week
Information Technology Manager	$14,118	91%	80%
Human Resources Manager	$7,877	95%	85%
Advertising and Public Relations Manager	$21,000	93%	80%
Barristers and Solicitors	$42,137	89%	77%
Management Consultant	$18,658	74%	60%
Chief Executive and Managing Director	$27,419	90%	64%
Accountant	$18,857	78%	54%

In a further attempt to clarify things, I created two indices:

I divided the median salary of women in each occupation by the salary of the men in that group to get an index.
I divided the proportion of men working over 40 hours a week by the same proportion for women to get a second index

My logic was that if indeed the reason men were getting paid more was because they were more likely to work full time, then the ratio in the first index should roughly equate to the ratio in the second index. In other words, I hypothesised it’s all a question of hours of work, not pay rates per hour. If, however, the income index turned out to be below the hour index it would mean that women are paid less than men per hour, even allowing for women's greater propensity to take in part time work.

Take a look at the next table that compares these two indexes for the seven occupation groups:

Occupation	Pay gap	INDEX of median women's income/ median men's income	INDEX of women working >40 hrs/ men working >40 hrs
Information Technology Manager	$14,118	81%	88%
Human Resources Manager	$7,877	87%	89%
Advertising and Public Relations Manager	$21,000	71%	86%
Barristers and Solicitors	$42,137	54%	87%
Management Consultant	$18,658	72%	81%
Chief Executive and Managing Director	$27,419	63%	71%
Accountant	$18,857	69%	69%

Well, there you go. That makes for extremely interesting reading!

What’s the Root Cause?

The pay gap for HR managers and accountants can be largely explained by the % of women working part time. For the rest, we have to conclude that the fundamental pay rate per hour is tilted against these professional women. And in the case of barristers and solicitors it's tilted as steeply as the south face of Mt Cook!

I've controlled for full time versus part time and for comparability of work by using specific occupations. We know from an earlier article that women are more highly educated than men in these occupations. We're running out of the usual excuses. One of the last possible reasons could include men being, on average, older in these occupations, so their income reflects longer careers. Unfortunately, I couldn't find Census data that showed detailed occupations by age, sex and income.

The age argument aside, we're only left with a behavioural explanation: women don't ask for pay rises as aggressively as men. In case that's true, we'll post advice on how we think women can systematically and successfully approach salary negotiations and pay rise reviews - but that will have to wait for another day!

Your Views

What are your thoughts about these numbers and the drivers behind them? Were you surprised? Do you think 2006 numbers will reflect a similar reality? We'd love to hear from you so please e-mail us on comments@professionelle.co.nz

Do you want to go digging for yourself? Check out:

http://www.stats.govt.nz/census/2001-census-data/2001-incomes/default.htm

Slip-Slidin’ Away

(The Position of NZ’s Professional Women in the Third Millenium)

By Sarah Wilshaw-Sparkes and Galia BarHava-Monteith

26 July 2007

sliding

In May and June 2007 , we had articles and comment about the position of professional women in New Zealand published in the New Zealand Herald’s The Business. One piece covered our findings about trends in the pay gap for professional women this century. Other commentary reflected our investigation into whether, with the departure of Gattung and others, NZ was seeing the end of a “Golden Age” of women CEOs. In this feature piece, we blend this published material together.

New data

These recent pieces draw on newer data than was available when Galia wrote her three-part analysis of the pay gap. One key source we used was the annual NZ Income Survey which runs up to 2006. The second was a special request we made to Stats NZ for information from the only partially-released 2006 census. This gave us numbers and pay by gender of the specific job categories for public and private sector CEOs.

Professional women definition

First of all, who do we mean when we say ‘professional women’? We mean exactly the sort of women who are members of the Professionelle community, i.e. academics, accountants, barristers, CEOs, consultants, corporate managers, etc etc. Working with the constraints of our data sources, however, we have to use a somewhat broader definition. The Income Survey covers professional women in two main occupation groups:

‘Professionals’, which includes accountants, lawyers and scientists and also public sector employees like nurses and teachers.
‘Legislators, Administrators & Managers’ which includes MPs, corporate managers and public and private sector chief executives, among others.

Growing numbers

There are about 180,000 women in ‘Professionals’ and another 75,000 in ‘Legislators’. Combined, these two groups comprise almost 30% of NZ’s working women and their numbers are growing at over 3% each year, faster than for any other occupation group for women. (Professional men are growing at the same rate, but are eclipsed by male technicians and by trades workers).

There are far more women CEOs around now than a decade ago, too. The fastest growing group of women CEOs is in the private sector. Here the number of women employed has seen a huge 31% compound annual growth rate over the decade to 2006. Female CEOs in local government and central government have grown at around 11% and 5% compounding, respectively.

These rates, well above the numbers for professional women in general, sound encouraging. However, the numbers for male CEOs have been growing too, and the net result is that women have only increased their proportion strongly among Chief Executives - Local Government. This is the one CEO group where women have breached the 50% mark (see the graph below). In the private sector, the proportion of women CEOs has actually shrunk from 22% in 1996 to 19% in 2006, at a time of very rapid growth in this occupation group.

No Golden Age

A final, depressing observation on women CEOs is that, taken overall, their numbers have grown considerably slower than men over the last ten years – 19.6% compounding versus more than 25%. Consequently, men chief executives finished the decade even further ahead on numbers than they started at in 1996. If we look at the ratio of male chief executives to their female counterparts, the ratio worsened as follows:

1996: 2.2 men for every woman
2006: 3.4 men for every woman

So much for the Golden Age of women CEOs!

Higher education, higher pay among women

Professional women – those in the broad Professional and Legislator occupation groups - have invested substantially in themselves through education. Almost 45% of them have tertiary qualifications, compared to only 10% of women in all the other occupation groups. These are the women who have increasingly filled the ranks of graduates from law and commerce degrees – a key hiring pool for the management track in both private and public sectors.

This educational attainment probably explains why they earn more than women in other job groups. Professional women earn the most at $22/hour (median), while the legislators earn the next highest rate at $19.50. By contrast, all other women’s median hourly pay is only $13.50/hour. So where’s the problem?

Pay inequity alive and well

The problem, of course, is they’re still paid less than their male peers. Thirty five years after the feminist revolution of the seventies, pay inequity is still with us for high achieving, well-educated women. It’s a hard fact to swallow.

How much are they behind men in these two occupational groups? In 2006, median weekly earnings across all age groups for professional and legislator women were about 70% of their male peers’. Of course, part time work is one of the causes of the gap, even though far fewer of these women work part-time than women overall do – only about 20% of them work part-time versus 35% of all women; nevertheless, part time work means fewer hours and that does contribute to the weekly pay gap.

We corrected for that, however, by only looking at median hourly earnings. This shrinks the pay gap to about 80%. On 2006 pay rates, however, that still equates to about $10,000 a year!

Women CEOs paid less, too

And the story for CEOs is no better. As the graph below shows, public sector women CEOs received two thirds of the pay of their male counterparts in 1996 and this situation remained utterly unchanged in 2006. The situation improved for private sector women CEOs – but only because men’s pay fell. Two wrongs don’t make a right; we don’t want to see men’s pay reined in either!

paygap

One issue may be the part time versus full time argument – but we don’t know of any part time CEOs or Managing Directors (of either gender)!

You’ll remember from the analysis above that the penetration of women among Local Government CEOs has grown strongly. Can you guess which CEO group received the lowest salary in 1996 and 2006? Of course you can, even before looking at the next graph. It’s local Government CEOs. The median salary for women in this group was $35,500 in 2006. This is well down in real terms on the $37,500 they received in 1996. Private sector male CEOs, by contrast earned a median salary in 2006 of over $82,000.

salary

The public sector pay gap data presented seem somewhat ironic, considering the gender of our Prime Minister and several of her cabinet colleagues, and in light of a 2003 taskforce launched by the Labour Government into this issue!

Pay gap drivers

The reasons why women in general face a pay gap have been widely covered, most recently in the Ministry of Women’s Affairs 2002 Next Steps in Women’s Pay Equity. To recap briefly, the main drivers noted were lower educational attainment, fewer years of work experience (typically due to reducing work hours to care for dependants) and the higher proportion of women in lower paid occupations. Other commentators have also pointed to women’s apparent lack of assertiveness when it comes to negotiating entry pay and raises.

There’s an aspect of this pay gap for professional and legislator women that’s astonishing, however. Since 2000, their median hourly pay gap has worsened. This century, it has trended down almost one percentage point a year. For 15-24 year olds, the trend since 2003 has been even more sharply negative. In those three years, young professional women have seen the gap widen by over a point a year and for professionals the rate has been twice that – see graph below.

15-24

Better performance on drivers

None of this deterioration makes sense when we look at how women have progressed on the drivers of pay inequity listed earlier.

The educational attainment of women in these two occupations has increased rapidly. For example, the proportion of professional women with tertiary education since 2000 has grown eight times faster than men, to now almost match them, according to the New Zealand Income Survey.

It’s no news that women are having their babies ever later, too. Two thirds of New Zealand’s babies in 2004 were born to mums over the age of thirty, and the 40-44 year old cohort of mothers is the fastest growing. That means women are staying longer in their careers and amassing more work experience than ever before.

We can’t assess shifts in the relative mix of occupations until more data becomes freely available from the 2006 census. As to the suggestion that women don’t push for pay, it’s hard to see why that should have deteriorated in the last few years.

Impact of childcare costs

Whatever is fuelling the widening pay gap for professional and legislator women, employers should be concerned. Women’s pay has a direct impact on their ability to keep working full time. We've said it before on this site: if women don’t earn enough to afford really good quality childcare it’s harder for them to decide to stay on at work. High quality care means a very low ratio baby-adult arrangement, like a nanny or in-home care. That can easily cost $60,000 in pre-tax income. It’s not hard to see that the $10,000 mentioned above would make a material difference to the professional working mother’s trade-offs.

One way traffic

Once these women step out into less traditional work arrangements, the chances increase that they won’t return to full time work. Anecdotal evidence from our female Professionelle members is that participation in conventional (i.e. full-time and part-time work) falls from a high of almost 90% for 26-30 year olds to a low of just over 50% for 41-45 year olds. That’s a lot of talent being lost to employers, to say nothing of sunk recruiting and professional development costs. The men who stay on and rise into more senior, high-paying positions cannot logically all be the very best candidates, but instead represent the best available after female contenders have left.

Expensive Loss

New Zealand’s population pyramid is currently tightest for those aged 25-35 – precisely the age group that at its younger end is absorbing companies’ development time and expense and at its upper end is eroding as professional women finally begin families. Employers who want to win in this tight talent market surely need to check their own pay gaps, and figure out if they can afford to ignore them.

Slip-Slidin’ Away

It’s clear that among employed women, the occupation groups that comprise professional women have been doing well this millenium in terms of their numbers and their absolute levels of pay. Female CEOs are also rapidly increasing in number. However, the relative position to professional men and male CEOs currently appears to be headed in the wrong direction, despite professional women steadily improving their performance in terms of education and length of career. As Paul Simon sang, "The nearer your destination, the more you're slip-slidin' away."

We don’t know when or if the slide will reverse, but we’ll keep watching the trends and reporting on them. In particular, we’re keen to find data that is as recent and as directly comparable between the genders as possible. That way we hope to avoid the recent angry exchanges you can read about in Business Week’s blog, that were triggered by an article reporting on persisting pay gaps.

What do you think?

Can you contribute to this issue? What have you seen and experienced? Please let us know at feedback@professionelle.co.nz

Data Sources

New Zealand Income Survey June Qtrs 2000-2006
1996 and 2006 Census data sourced from Statistics NZ on three occupation groups relating to chief executives and the top layer of management:
- 11211 Chief Executive – Central Government
- 11212 Chief Executive – Local Government
- 11311 Chief Executive and/or Managing Director
Demographic Trends 2005 (for maternity data and population pyramid)
Labour Market Statistics 2000, and 2006 (for education data by occupation group)
Census of Population and Dwellings 2001 (for full time versus part time participation by gender and occupation)
Ministry of Women’s Affairs “Next Steps in Women’s Pay Equity”, 2002
Professionelle’s registered member database

Behind the Numbers Part 2

by Galia BarHava-Monteith

15 June 2007

The gender pay gap

Have you been lying awake at night wondering if men are still better paid than women for the same jobs? Well, probably not, but we are all too aware that the pay gap is still with us. However, the figures that are usually quoted are very broad, such as median income for all men ages 25-45.

I was interested in specifically comparing the income of the same professional groups I looked at in Part 1 of this series. I was also interested to see if the highest paid men were part of these occupational groups.

Background

There were almost 237,000 men in New Zealand in 2001 who were classified as full time ‘Professionals’ or ‘Legislators, Administrators and Managers’ compared with 219,000 women in the same categories. These men represented just over a quarter of all men and women surveyed in the census

Who’s better educated?

Women are! Just under half of the men in these groups (47%) held an advanced vocational qualification, a bachelor degree or higher qualification. This compares to over half (57%) of the women.

Who earns more than $100K?

The proportion of full time working adults who earned over $100K in 2001 was 4%. The proportion of ‘Professionals’ and ‘Legislators, Administrators and Managers’ (both men and women) who earned over $100k in 2001 was 10%.

The interesting picture emerged when I looked at women and men in these two groups separately. Fourteen percent (14%) of men who were ‘Professionals’ and ‘Legislators, Administrators and Managers’ earned over $100K in 2001.

Only 3%, yes, THREE PERCENT of the women in the same two categories who were working full time earned over $100K!!

So who are the men that earn the most and how do they compare to the women who earned the most?

To re-cap, the highest paid women in 2001 were Information Technology Managers with a median income of $61,158. Who do you think were the highest paid men from our selection of occupations in 2001?

You probably guessed it, barristers and solicitors. Male barristers and solicitors had a median income of $90,704 in 2001. This median income is almost twice as much as women barristers and solicitors whose median income was $48,567 in 2001.

And here is how the median incomes for our select occupations compares for men and women and the income gap between them:

Occupation	Median income for women	Median income for men	Pay Gap
Information Technology Managers	$61,158	$75,276	$14,118
Human Resources manager	$54,765	$62,642	$7,877
Advertising and Public Relations Manager	$51,608	$72,608	$21,000
Barristers and Solicitors	$48,567	$90,704	$42,137
Management Consultant	$47,748	$66,406	$18,658
Chief Executive and Managing Director	$47,517	$74,936	$27,419
Accountant	$41,062	$59,919	$18,857

NOTE – these detailed median income figures are for ‘the employed’ which implies all employed not just full time. More on this later.

It's just too depressing. Women had a significantly lower median income for each of the occupations examined. It even applied in HR (although this was the smallest gap), but the discrepancy for barristers is by far the largest.

I must be a masochist because I kept going. I looked at the proportion of men and women in these occupations who earned over $100K in 2001.

So here we go:

Occupation	% Women earning over $100K	% Men earning over $100K
Information Technology Managers	13%	25%
Human Resources Manager	10%	18%
Advertising and Public Relations Manager	9%	27%
Barristers and Solicitors	13%	44%
Management Consultant	16%	30%
Chief Executive and Managing Director	19%	38%
Accountant	3%	20%

Men in 2001 were much better paid than women and were basically at least twice (with the exception of HR) as likely as women to earn over $100K.

However, these detailed median income figures are for all employed adults, not just for the full time employed. Maybe these figures reflect the fact that women in these occupations are more likely to work part time?

In my next and final article on the 2001 figures I’ll try and answer this question.

What are your thoughts about these numbers? Were you surprised? Do you think 2006 Census numbers will reflect a similar reality? We would love to hear from you, so please e-mail us on feedback@professionelle.co.nz

Behind the Numbers Part 1

by Galia BarHava-Monteith

16th May 2007

I have a confession to make: I like statistics. I like numbers that tell a story about people. So, I have long wondered who the most highly paid women in business and professional services are, and if being highly qualified actually means earning more. I’ve also wondered if the highest paying occupations are the same for women as for men. And of course, I really wanted to know what’s behind the often quoted statistic that women earn less than men for the same work.

So, I went digging. Imagine my surprise to find, buried among the multitude of reports from Stats New Zealand’s 2001 census data, incredibly detailed tables outlining gender and income by detailed occupations.

And what I found was not what I expected!

Women in the occupations of interest to Professionelle were the most highly qualified group. They were also more highly-qualified than men in the same occupational groups.
The highest median income for women was not found among Barristers and Solicitors or CEOs.
The highest median income for women did not correspond with the percentage of women who were paid over $100K.

This is the first of a series of three articles aimed at shedding some light on the status of professional and corporate women’s pay and working hours in New Zealand, based on the 2001 census data. I also plan to refresh this series when detailed analysis from the 2006 Census becomes publicly available.

Background

The two groups of interest to me were ‘Professionals’, which includes health and educational professionals and ‘Legislators, Administrators and Managers’ which includes both public and private sector corporate workers.

There were 219,000 women in New Zealand in 2001 who were classified as ‘Professional’ or ‘Legislators, Administrators and Managers’. They represented about quarter (27%) of all the women in the census.

Not surprisingly, over half (57%) of these women held an advanced vocational qualification, a bachelor degree or higher qualification. Surprisingly, (at least for me) less than half of the men (47%) in the same occupational groups had this high level of education.

To give you an idea of how this compares to the wider adult population, only a quarter or (23%) of New Zealanders had this level of education.

So who earns the most?

Let’s cut to the chase...Who are the most highly paid women out there?

By way of answer, here’s a quick quiz. How would you rank the following occupations if you were asked to say which had the highest median income for women in 2001?

Chief Executive or Managing Director (not in the public sector)
Advertising or public relations Manger
Information technology manager
Human resources manager
Accountant
Management consultant
Barrister and solicitor

I don’t know what you reckoned, but I was sure that among women the highest median income would be for barristers and solicitors and for management consultants. Certainly, I was sure they would be higher than that of HR managers. Well, how wrong was I!

The highest median income of all the groups I looked was:

Information Technology Managers with a median income of $61,158 in 2001.

Here is the detailed ranking:

1. Information Technology Manager	$61,158
2. Human Resources Manager	$54,765
3. Advertising and Public Relations Manager	$51,608
4. Barristers and Solicitors	$48,567
5. Management Consultant	$47,748
6. Chief Executive and Managing Director	$47,517
7. Accountant	$41,062

Surprised? I definitely was. Next, I looked at the percentage of women in each occupation group who earned over $100k in 2001.

The group with the highest proportion of women earning over $100k in 2001 was Chief Executives and Managing Directors (not in the public sector) with 19%.

The percentages for the other occupations were as follows:

1. Management Consultant	16%
2. Information Technology Manager	13%
3. Barristers and Solicitors	13%
4. Human Resources Manager	10%
5. Advertising and Public Relations Manager	9%
6. Accountant	3%