Breaking the bias for women leaders
- publish258
- Mar 7, 2022
- 4 min read
Updated: Apr 7
Policies only take women leaders so far. For organizations, the priority is to break the cultural bias that holds back talent, says Hilarie Owen at the Leaders Institute
Hilarie Owen
On International Women’s Day, we celebrate the advancement of women who have overcome barriers and become leaders across business, politics, and society. However, bias still exists, often unconsciously but sometimes coercively. For years a solution has been to send women on courses, but the issue isn’t about ‘fixing’ women but rather fixing organisations. This is reflected in the latest figures for women on boards.
Today around 39% of board members are women, which is 3% higher than 2020 and which is slowly improving, but behind this figure are hidden facts. Most women on boards are non-executive directors while 13.5% are executive directives, down from 14.2% in 2020.
Women are still hugely underrepresented in full time senior management and executive levels. The problem isn’t lack of talent and it is well-known that companies with more female executives perform better. Therefore, the issue must be something else.
One of the most worrying is the behaviour of those who hide behind social media attacking women in public life and this is not just men. When the BBC series Bodyguard was viewed there was a surge of criticism for having so many women in positions of authority.
The response was even more aggressive when Politics Live on BBC 2 was launched with a panel of MPs and journalists that happened to be all women. Tweets from both men and women called for someone to be sacked. Yet how more often have we seen men only panels talking about politics or business with no such reaction?
This backlash is sometimes called ‘centrality’ and operates when men feel it is their right or entitlement to hold a privileged place of leadership in business, politics, the home and in society. It is the loss of this privilege that produces grievance. Women who support this view have internalised male centrality as normal.
The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media found that when a room has 20% women, men perceive it as 50%. Above 20%, the feeling men then experience is that women are taking over. This was also found in school pupils in the US.
How do we change things? In my last book We Lead: How Women become Leaders I interviewed 30 women at the top of their careers and patterns emerged that helped them so let’s focus on how society (and that is all of us) can enable being a leader a more equal playground.
The leadership journey begins in childhood as we know from our research. Leadership isn’t something you acquire on a course or because you have become a manager. It has been influenced by parents, teachers, friends, family and out of school activities such as sport or drama. I asked the 30 women who were their leadership role models when they were young. For the majority of women it was their father:
He used to say: ‘you can do anything you want to do’.
My father would say: ‘you can do anything you want in life’.
My father treated us no differently than boys
For a small number the role model was their mother
My mum was my role model. She brought up three children on her own. We lived on a council estate in Liverpool but she always said ‘never put a label on anyone’ and ‘have horizons as far and as wide as you want.’
Positive affirmations were vital for these women as children. It enabled them to believe in themselves. Whereas over-critical parents result in their children suffering from imposter syndrome in adult life. Positive affirmations such as being told they could achieve anything was particularly important between fathers and daughters. Teachers also had a role in this too.
In adulthood the key was to find role models and a mentor to enable the women to develop their identity and efficacy as leaders. Time and again the women talked about individuals at work in their early careers.
When I first came to work in a large firm at one year qualified, the managing partner was Tim and he encouraged me to take on responsibility and to be myself.
Julian would let you have a go and then mentor you to be better.
Dame Eve Buckland who always engaged with front line staff told me to have no fear in going to the next level.
Each of the women were also clear about defining moments in their careers and how these shaped them. They were organised and had support around them. Each were actively constructing themselves to be authentic leaders and role models to those that followed them. They continued to seek out mentors and learning was as part of their working lives as achieving success. The concept ‘to lead’ is derived from an ancient language where the word ‘laed’
meant to follow a path. A leader is someone who guides those travelling the path. For organisations, the first action must be to address cultural issues that hold talent back because of bias. We have to break the bias for humans to progress. As Dr Martin Luther King Jnr said: ‘human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable; it requires the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals’.
▪ Hilarie Owen is chief executive of The Leaders Institute and author of ‘We Lead: How Women Become Leaders’, Novaro Publishing, 2019.
