Marion's Blog

Just last week new figures were released in the Netherlands on one of the hot topics of our time:  Women in the higher echelons of big Corporates. Apparently the glass ceiling has thickened, and the percentage of women has dropped to less then 6% of all senior executives. This despite all the effort made by government and businesses alike to attract more women to the senior workforce.

During the same week I attended a meeting with 99 others, all by invite only, about the financial crisis and what the implications were for businesses in Netherlands. Of the 100 people, I guess about 6 were women, the rest were men…so again, the 6% held true. But looking at the group, and analyzing by virtue of the participants list what type of executives there were in attendance, I couldn’t help but start thinking about the one rule that is true in statistics of any nature… that whatever statistic you read – it can only ever be as good as the information it was based on. And in the case of Women as Senior Execs, I am beginning to believe that the basis for the statistic may be the wrong one.

A very dear friend of mine recently reacted to my blog on Women Power by telling me a story about football and tennis players. He basically likens the men in large corporates to football players, all very happily playing the same football game, understanding the rules without it needing to be explained. All is well, but now suddenly, a tennis player comes along. Actually – it could be quite refreshing to have a different attitude mingle with the old, rather staid, approach of the football players, but instead they often fear it and feel that if they allow the tennis player to go her (or his) own way – it may not be as comfortable for them and could end their comfortable routines. So the tennis player is left rather to her own devices. Now of course, some tennis players will start picking up the rules that are applied by the football players and is able to join in the game. In this case, the football set actually prides themselves on having allowed a tennis player to become part of the team, but if you look at it closely enough you will realize that it only works because the tennis player has become more of a football player, not the other way round. Those tennis players that adapt can be quite successful in the football world – but they give up some of their “tennis player-istics” in the process. The football players will continue to play the game the way they have always done, and none of the real benefits of mingling football and tennis players come to fruition. Those tennis players that don’t become football-ish, will often find it hard to progress and will leave to go and do something that suits them better.

Now my point is that maybe this is where the statistics are wrong. Why do we look only at how many women are successful in those well established businesses? Should we not consider the fact that out of all those intelligent women out there, there are a large number that will actually consider a career in large corporates, but decide that instead of playing football,  they would rather found their own tennis-playing businesses, where they can determine the rules from the getgo, where they can hire other tennis players instead of having to fight it out with the football crowd. We see that 60% of new businesses are being founded by females… is this not far more exciting to business overall then merely considering how many senior executives there are in the companies that are already floated on the stock exchanges?  We might want to simply change the facts that are the basis of today’s statistics, and look at all women in business, large or small.  Perhaps instead of looking straight up in our usual skies to a perceived glass ceiling, we might see something very different. You may just find that all those tennis players have been hitting their balls up in the atrium on either side of the ceiling – aspiring greater heights then they could have managed in the corporates and getting their businesses ready to be the next generation of companies floated on the stock exchange….