Much can depend on the culture of a particular company or industry, rather than the country it operates in. While service industries tend to be more female-friendly, industries such as oil and gas, IT, stockbroking and investment banking have traditionally been known for their ‘boys’ club’ culture, meaning women are excluded from male networks, and expected to work in the same way as men, with no allowances for women’s different needs or circumstances.
‘I wanted to be a stockbroker. I went to London and worked on the trading floor. I was working with all men and I liked the thrill of it, but it started to wear me down in the end,’ says Lucy Reed, a Melbourne-based, 34-year-old mother of two who left her career in finance after the birth of her children, and is now a yoga teacher. ‘You have to be a lot tougher to survive in there and you lose your femininity.’
Multinational corporations are often seen to offer more opportunities to women employees, both expats and locally hired. ‘There’s still a preference among Chinese organisations for male leadership,’ explains IDEO’s Michelle Cheng. ‘However, in international organisations there are more and more Chinese women and women leaders. I think that’s primarily due to influence from the West. The companies either transfer women over here, or they hire a good percentage of local females as well as males.’
Many companies now see a business case for diversity and are making big efforts to incorporate more woman-friendly programs. Not only do companies loathe losing employees they’ve spent years and money in training, but mixed groups are also seen to make better business decisions. Research by American consultancy group Catalyst, which specialises in women’s business-development issues, has shown that companies with a higher representation of women in senior management positions financially outperform companies with proportionally fewer women at the top. Childcare, maternity and paternity leave, lactation rooms, flexible work hours, telecommuting and the introduction of women’s networks are some of the ways companies are trying to keep women in the workforce.
However, according to Gilmour, ‘the recession has put diversity on the backburner. Lehman Brothers had a very good program for getting women back to work. But they don’t exist anymore.’
Most analysts are uncertain how the global financial crisis will affect women’s progress in cracking the glass ceiling. ‘There’s going to be a shift to services as opposed to manufacturing, and women tend to dominate in the service industry,’ says Irene Natividad, a Washington-based Filipina-American who runs the Global Summit of Women, dubbed the ‘Davos for women.’ There’s a belief that women tend to be more conservative investors – hence beneficiaries of a backlash against the high stakes risk-taking that led to the global financial crisis, she says.
‘In terms of leadership, I think there’s been a greater demand for accountability, and women will go even further. I see this as an opportunity for women.’
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