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It’s the bane of being a consultancy: you conduct right-minded research and then fail to put it into practice. Big Four firms PwC, author of Women in Work, and EY, behind European Financial Services Boardroom Monitor, are on track to flunk their own targets for women partners in the UK.
Luckily, there’s a PowerPoint presentation to address this shortcoming. First up: it’s not just them and it’s not just women. Companies across the globe are rolling back diversity, equity and inclusion goals, bowing to a new legal backdrop and zeitgeist. In the US these include retailer Walmart, burger joint McDonald’s, social media giant Meta and PwC.
As for women, fewer were granted new S&P 500 board positions last year: 42 per cent versus 46 per cent the previous year, according to executive search firm Spencer Stuart. None self-identified as non-binary.
Slide two: read the small print. This trend was reversed in the UK. In the top 150 boardrooms, 43 per cent of directors are women, up from the year-ago 40 per cent. Drill down to executive level, though, and the proportion shrinks to less than half that.
Slide three repurposes the same one used in presentations on renewables, AI and pretty much everything else: these things take time. When Norway launched its quota, the same group of qualified women — the so-called golden skirts — presided over multiple portfolios of non-exec directorships.
Building a pipeline of talent takes time and many women are felled at the first hurdle. Despite making up nearly half of the US workforce, female participation falls to 39 per cent at managerial level. For directors it’s 37 per cent, and just 29 per cent in the C-suite, finds McKinsey.
Absent in the consultant’s PowerPoint, though, is more meaningful data. Splitting workers by parallel caregiving roles, rather than anatomically, is more logical — not least in professional services, where taking a couple of years out to start a family can knock you back several more rungs on the partnership ladder.
Pew Research took a stab at this using 2022 data. In typical small-children-at-home years, aged 35-44, 94 per cent of fathers were active workers versus 75 per cent for mothers. That gap shrinks to a third the size when considering child-free respondents — implying concomitant salary and promotion gaps. Some research goes further, suggesting younger women — potential mothers — suffer the “maybe baby” career handicap regardless of whether or not said baby materialises.
That leaves two takeaways for the Big Four: get women partner goals back on track, and task the interns with harvesting more useful data sets.
Read the full article here