So, a woman at the top of her game has been unceremoniously kicked out of her job - she's not the first and surely won't be the last. Carol Bartz, until this week CEO of Yahoo, has been fired by the company board. She received the news via a phone call from the Chair of the Yahoo board. Charming.
Does this have anything to do with the fact that Carol Bartz is a woman? If she were a man would this have ended the same way? Would enforced quotas for women on boards have helped this situation in any way? I believe that they would.
A recent 'Women and Work' survey of three thousand women by Marie Claire magazine and Everywoman found that sexism is still rife in the workplace and that women believe they are disadvantaged compared to men when it comes to pay, promotion and age. 44 percent of women surveyed said that that glass ceiling still exists in their workplace and 83 percent said that being attractive helps women get on better at work. In another survey of both male and female managers almost three quarters of the women surveyed said that they face barriers when it comes to top level promotion, while 62 percent of women and 42 percent of men, surveyed backed positive action to boost the role of women.
The pay gap between men and women is another issue that highlights workplace inequality. The Chartered Management Institute said last week that it would take 75 years at the current rate of progress before women will receive equal pay. I'm not sure about you, but I would definitely like to see equality for women in my lifetime, I don't think I will last another 75 years unless there are some remarkable advances in medical science.
It is now taken as a given that there is a very good business case for diversity in the workplace. Home Office Minister Teresa May said recently that "there is growing evidence that companies with more women on their boards outperform their male-dominated rivals."
All this leads me to believe that now is the time to start using quotas to sort this situation out. Lord Davies recommended in his Independent review into women on boards that FTSE 100 companies should be aiming for a minimum of 25 percent female board membership by 2015 and expects that many companies will exceed that target.
So why don't we just bite the bullet, get on with it and introduce quotas now?
They have worked amazingly well in Norway where it has been law since 2008 that 40% of the membership of boards in publicly listed companies must be female, if they don't comply companies risk stiff penalties.
Coming back to Yahoo, much is made of Bartz swearing and having the balls to make aggressive cuts within the company, would that be reported so disparagingly if she were a man? Oddly, less is made of the fact that Yahoo profits increased under her command.
There are nine people on the board at Yahoo, two of them women, both joined since Bartz became CEO in 2009. Would a stronger female presence on the board and within senior management have made a difference in the way she has been treated? Yahoo are not unique in having less than 25 percent females on their board and would not be surprised by similar situations in other tech companies.
If women were given an equal chance, most people (me included) would put sackings of female executives like Bartz down to non-gender-related issues. It would be nice not to have to consider the possibility of sexism towards a woman at the top of her game. Would having more women around her at Yahoo have helped? We will never know. But, if there were more women at the top, we wouldn't even have to ask.
And, what next for Carol Bartz? Maybe she and others like her should find somewhere more female-friendly to work. Perhaps it's time to check out the 'Where women want to work' guide.
Follow Sue Black on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@Dr_Black
Red Room: Richard A. Moran: How to Fire a CEO
I believe the desire to see more women on the boards of PLC is no more justified than a desire for new businesses to insist that barriers to entry should be removed, on the grounds that they are unfair.
Margaret Thatcher proved that a woman can get to the top. Carol Bartz showed that a woman at the top is not a guarantee of success for the business. I love high achieving women and there are millions of them. They are busy doing it right now, whilst this heated debate is being debated heatedly.
[disclaimer: there is NO such thing as a female and male approach. We are all individuals ( I quote “ Life of Brian” if you haven’t seen it .. see it ! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVygqjyS4CA)
First of all, it implies employers of skilled computing professionals (as opposed to CEOs, who are *management* professionals, let's remember) have enough choices over who to hire. I have very considerable experience of recruiting software developers, and it can take months and months and hundreds of interviews to find people with the right skills and experience. Throw in quotas, especially for a group who are notoriously reluctant to enter the profession, and those months could turn into years. Either that or you have to lower the bar very significantly.
Lowering the bar to accomodate quotas often lead to problems with software quality and lowering the quality bar will lead to very significant cost and schedule overruns on projects.
If you're Tesco, and you have to take far longer to recruit teams or lower the bar when hiring people to adapt your business systems, then schedule overruns due to poor quality will have a knock-on effect on your business, as it will delay strategic business programmes.
I can say from personal experience that when women go up for developer roles and have the necessary technical skills (again, we're not talking about careers in management or marketing here), they get the job and they get paid the same.
If women don't grow up wanting to work in computing, then quotas are not the answer. The question we should be asking is: *why* don't they want to?
Companies listed in Norway, if you exclude oil and gas related businesses, are hardly world beaters. The Norwegians are fortunate to have such large amounts of natural resources and can certainly be commended for the prudent way in which they have decided to maximise the national benefit of these resources - not only in their sovereign wealth fund but also in the way it has enabled them to introduce quotas on female board representation. Have many businesses moved their domicile and HQ to Norway to take advantage of the more equal gender representation at Board level? Institutional investors are rather keen on rebasing for tax purposes regardless of "morality" so I'd have expected them to be clamouring for businesses to seek listing in Oslo if there was a benefit to them in doing so.
I agree that were there more women on Boards there would be more of a chance that underperforming women in senior jobs might be replaced by other women. However, is it really true that women who are so outstanding as to be able to make it that far in today's system are not strong enough to win the argument with their male colleagues just because they are women?