Women versus big corporates

Today, the controversial former UK's Conservative Party politician Edwina Currie spoke out in her article in the 'Daily Mail' on the subject of the relationship between women and big organisations in particular.

Since we commissioned primary research on this topic a few years ago, it has been becoming more and more clear that the enemy of women in the workplace is positive change (or the reluctance to acknowledge the need for it), rather than men.

Since Charles Handy wrote of now long-accepted flexible working practices in ‘Age of Unreason’ twenty years ago, many big corporates have not been able to accommodate such practices on a meaningful scale – this provides a fundamental conflict of interest between many women (and a growing number of men) and companies.

Many organisations are becoming so target orientated and lurching from month to month that little attention is given to the importance of accommodating brilliant talents how it suits them. This should be perfectly possible if there remains a stand out ‘win-win’ for both parties, but this relies on a holistic mission and clear goals; directors who will trust their colleagues and immediate subordinates to allow them to work within a mandate rather than through micromanagement; and the will to accommodate the logistics of flexible workers.

Corporates have been 'talking some of the talk' but not 'walking the walk', a plummeting set of corporate values in a recession belies the nods towards diversity that are made in the good times. Mothers are quite reasonably requiring corporates to offer them an empathetic and values-based environment to temp them away from their primary priority of their families. This is increasingly also true of a new generation of male executives who accept the lot of a life in work, but not at any price.

Many of those whose investment is solely in the traditional model of a big corporate do not appear to care that they are losing a vast irreplaceable pool of disenfranchised executives. They are too busy fighting fires.

The executives who leave definitely don’t worry about it, they are establishing themselves as the the new generation of entrepreneurs where values and flexibility come first. This is the corporates’ loss.