As companies wait for Viviane Reding, European commissioner for justice, fundamental rights and citizenship, to announce her expected plan for mandatory quotas for women in the boardroom next Tuesday, Rogers said behavioural change was not happening fast enough in the boardroom.
“Balance is important; the odd successful woman here and there is far from ideal and generates its own problems. I firmly believe that women in senior positions need other women in senior positions, in order to create a support and learning network. Without this, they will learn and adopt their leadership behaviours from the men that surround them. As a result, to all intents and purposes, they may become surrogate men.”
She added that, while most women do not want legislation in this area – preferring progression and recognition because they have earned and deserve it – change was not happening fast enough.
“Part of the reason for this is that, in my own experience, most men behave decently in the workplace and are completely unaware how some of their behaviours may be unhelpful in promoting gender equality.
“For example, a male manager looking to promote a man may say: ‘Chuck him in at the deep end and let's see if he sinks or swims.’ The same manager may say of a female candidate: ‘Is she ready yet? We don't want to set her up to fail.’ Words said with the best of intentions, without any malevolence – and, arguably, stated by a well-mannered man – but the impact on the progression of the two careers is clear.”
Rogers suggested this could be addressed through research to identify the most common 'unhelpful behaviours' and investment in a substantial education campaign. However, she added: “Even then, I am not convinced it would work and if we got it wrong we could end up with a whole generation of indifferent and unsympathetic businessmen.”
Rogers is a mentor for Women 1st, a thought leadership programme from hospitality, passenger transport, travel and tourism sector skills council People 1st. Only 6% of director level positions in hospitality are held by women while nearly 60% of the workforce is female. Her full comment piece can be read here.
Her comments come as Semta, the sector skills council for science, engineering and advanced manufacturing, called on companies to encourage more women into advanced manufacturing and engineering, helping to close the skills gap that exists in the sector.
Lynn Tomkins, Semta’s UK operations director, said:“Women are a great untapped resource at a time when we need a wealth of new talent and higher level skills to improve competitiveness. They comprise half of the working population, yet only 21% of the workforce in UK advanced manufacturing and engineering are women and only 6% of engineers are women. That’s not good enough.
“The sector, which contributes £250 billion turnover to the UK economy, needs to recruit and train 82,000 scientists, engineers and technologists by 2016 and upskill 363,000 of the current technical workforce, whose qualifications are below world class standards.”
