At the start of April 2013, Vince Cable, the UK's Business Secretary, said the introduction of UK quotas for women on boards is now a possibility given the recent stagnation of the number of women being appointed to board roles, as highlighted by research from Cranfield University. 

What is happening? With all the media attention, awards ceremonies and the public commitment from CEOs and chairmen, shouldn’t this movement have gained its own momentum by now? Apparently not. In the UK, numbers are creeping up slowly for female board appointments (and have now stagnated) and are moving even more slowly for executive appointments. I believe there are three main ‘culprits’ for this lack of progress:

An over-reliance on women’s skills training

Women's skills and leadership style have received a lot of attention. On the one hand women's consultative and motivational leadership approach is deemed to help organisations do better in the uncertain and complex 21st century. On the other hand, women's supposed ‘deficiencies’ are well-rehearsed: their lack of assertiveness, lower levels of confidence and, as the latest contributor to this debate, Sheryl Sandberg  , points out, their unwillingness to 'lean in'. 

The evidence for these strengths and weaknesses are mixed. Let’s take ambition as an example. While levels of ambition for female MBA students and senior executives are on par with those of their male counterparts, there is evidence that levels of ambition dip when women are faced with the double burden of career and family.

Skills are relatively easy to address and in a genuine effort to help women progress, organisations are offering skills training and mentoring to high-potential women. While such one-off interventions are often well received and boost short-term morale, they are unlikely to help women progress in the longer term. For that to happen, more fundamental barriers have to be addressed.

Companies and their systems

Companies, legal institutions, the media – in fact, most organisations of power --  are still run largely by men. And, as a result, the system is heavily skewed in favour of men, their networks and their leadership style. This is not to say that men actively and consciously discriminate against women, but rather that any system with one dominant group in power will always make it much harder for those in the minority to fare well. Unconscious bias has a subtle yet very powerful effect and when it comes to women in the workplace, in my view, the following three examples are a good illustration of these unconscious processes: 

1. Women don’t ‘look’ like leaders

We know from a lot of well-supported research that when we think about leaders we think about male characteristics: action-oriented, decisive, charismatic and so on. These are not qualities we tend to associate with women. We tend to see women as caring, nurturing and communal. When we think of women, we tend to think of them in the context of being a nurturing mother rather than a decisive executive and when we think of men, we tend to think of a charismatic leader rather than a loving and comforting father. Our perceptions influence our decisions on a daily basis on who should get the next high-profile assignment or who is the better candidate for the next promotion. 

2. Women aren’t the ‘safe’ option 

Studies show that while men and women seem to be evaluated as being equally effective when it comes to their past performance, women are less likely to be seen as promotable. The is because when we have a lot of hard evidence about a person’s performance,  their gender (as well as age and race) become less relevant in how we evaluate them. When we lack this concrete information, however, we have to assess their potential and take a leap of faith. In these uncertain situations, as is the case in a promotion situation where we just don’t know yet how someone will do in a more senior role, our stereotypes and biases kick in and we tend to go with people we feel comfortable with, which is almost invariably people who are most like us.

3. Women aren’t visible 

In order to appoint someone to a senior role, as we just saw, it helps if those in a position of power know you, have met you or better still have worked with you. It means you are less of an unknown quantity. Personal comfort plays another unconscious but important role. This is where the old boys’ network comes in. Men tend to network more with other men; it’s easier to find common ground and there is no danger of any gossip about why a senior male is meeting a younger female in the pub for a drink after work. 

The list of examples of how companies subtly but consistently disadvantage those not in a position of power (i.e. women, people of different ethnic backgrounds, people with disabilities) is potentially endless. It is not just one or two of these processes that are responsible for women’s reduced career progression but the accumulation of many of these; they build up over time and make it increasingly difficult for women to progress. It takes on-going detective work, daily awareness raising, long-term support from the organisation’s leadership team and a dogged determination to changes these small yet powerful biases. What is required is significant cultural change. 

Society more broadly

But cultural change cannot happen in organisations alone.It needs to impact society more broadly. Fundamentally, the role of women and mothers won’t change until the role of men and fathers changes. Parental leave after the birth of a baby is often still only given to the mother. While there are good reasons for a mother to be with her baby in the first months after birth, making parental leave only available to women enshrines, right from the start, that the mother is the primary caregiver. Arguably, it is not the time away from work for a six or nine month maternity leave that harms a woman’s career but rather the fact that she will shoulder the majority of the responsibility for housework and childcare for many years to come once she has returned to work. 

Will we see change?

I believe we will, but given the many subtle ways in which companies and society reinforce men’s roles as leaders and women’s roles as caregivers, I’m afraid that progress will be rather slow.