The Rise of the Female Executive How Women's Leadership is Accelerating Cultural Change

by Thomson, Peninah; Laurent, Clare; Lloyd, Tom

• ISBN13: 9781137451422
• ISBN10: 1137451424
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2015-11-10
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

The aim to bring gender equality to the boardroom is part of a broader societal project to ensure that more of our available talent, ability, and experience from every part of society moves to where it can create the most economic and social value. Lack of sufficient diversity of thought has been identified as a contributor to malpractices which ultimately led to the financial collapse in 2009. Redressing this imbalance continues to be an important goal for business and society alike.

This book provides a timely review of progress in the gender-balancing of boards and places it in its broader societal context. It includes international comparisons and examines the UK and EU political environments. Ensuring a robust "pipeline" of our most talented women is critical to sustaining progress and the book offers insights into interventions that address this challenge. Featuring interviews with mentors and mentees, it illustrates how mentoring can play a part in helping women stay engaged with their ambition and with their career progression opportunities during times of transition when women traditionally fall away from the work place, and, later on, in increasing the number of women executives in positions of power in our corporations.

Author Biography

Peninah Thomson is CEO of the Mentoring Foundation, the company that owns and manages the FTSE 100 Cross-Company Mentoring Programme. Peninah's early career was in the UK Foreign Office. After Doctoral studies at the University of Oxford, she joined PricewaterhouseCoopers, working for eight years in Government Services and Economics Division, and at Cabinet Office level in India, Africa, Singapore & Hong Kong. Seconded for two years to the UK Cabinet Office and to the European Investment Bank in Luxembourg, she was then promoted Director, and spent four years in PwC's Corporate Transformation Practice working at Board level in FTSE 100 companies. Peninah is an International speaker & broadcaster, and has published four books and refereed articles on women's leadership, corporate governance & business ethics. She directs the FTSE 100 Cross-Company Mentoring Programme, in which 51 FTSE 100 Chairmen & CEOs mentor senior women from just below the Board to become credible Board candidates. This highly successful Programme has been running for nine years and has been emulated in France, The Netherlands, Belgium, New Zealand, Ireland, Canada, Turkey, Australia, Hungary, Germany, the Middle East and South Africa. She is co-author of The Changing Culture of Leadership (2000); A Woman's Place is in the Boardroom (2005), A Woman's Place is in the Boardroom: The Roadmap (2008) and Women and the New Business Leadership (2011). For the last 14 years Peninah has worked exclusively as a Board level executive coach with individual male and female senior executives, and with Boards and senior teams as groups, on strategy, organisational change, and leadership. Peninah served on the Strategy Group of Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford. She was a member of the UK Commissioner for Public Appointment's Advisory Board, & an Advisor to the Center for Work-Life Policy, New York. 
 
Clare Laurent is an Associate with the Mentoring Foundation, where she helps Peninah in the running of the FTSE Programmes and related activities. Clare's career began in the City as a lawyer. After 15 years and a short career break in Hamburg, Clare obtained a Masters degree with Distinction from the University of London in Career Management and Coaching. For her Masters thesis she examined women's career journeys and how mentoring helped them overcome their obstacles to success. Alongside her work at the Foundation, Clare is now continuing her research into mentoring processes as a doctorate student at Birkbeck, where she also assists with the teaching of post-graduate Coaching modules. Previously, Clare worked as a Solicitor in the City from 1990, specialising in internet law and regulation. She was General Counsel and SVP, Public Policy for AOL Europe from 1998-2002, with a diverse portfolio from supporting multi-million pound commercial advertising deals, acting as company spokesperson for regulators, government and in the media and representing the industry as Chairmen of the Internet Service Providers Association. She then joined Hutchison 3G as its Director of External and Regulatory Affairs for Europe where her work included renegotiating critical roaming deals and representing Hutchison before national and international regulators and the Competition Commission. It was her experience both of professional services firms and the dynamics of international matrixed organizations that gave rise to her interest in organizational behaviour and how coaching and mentoring might bring about change. 
 
Tom Lloyd is a former editor of Financial Weekly and Management Today, was founding editor of Gemini Consulting's quarterly management journal Transformation and wrote the 'Working Brief' column in the Sunday Telegraph for several years. His published books include Managing Knowhow, with Karl-Erik Sveiby (Bloomsbury, 1987), The 'nice' Company (Bloomsbury, 1990), Business at a Crossroads and The crisis of corporate leadership (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). He was also the co-author of the successful A Woman's Place is in the Boardroom and A Woman's Place is in the Boardroom: The Roadmap with Peninah Thomson and Jacey Graham (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 2008), and of Women & the new business leadership with Peninah Thomson (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). He is a visiting fellow at Northampton Business School.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. The Big Project
2. The Story So Far
3. Politics
4. Mentoring Works
5. Mentors And Mentees
6. The Executive Challenge
7. The Pipeline Challenge
8. The Pipeliners
9. Mentoring Lessons
10. Learning From The Pipeline
11. Culture, Culture, Culture