Women as employees, consumers and leaders

The recent call by Shinzo Abe, Japan’s prime minister, for company boards to have at least one female member highlighted the dearth of women in Japan’s corporate sector. Even in Europe and the US, women still fill only a small percentage of senior board positions. 

Yet despite the frustration at the persistent gender imbalance, it is easy to forget that the presence of women has transformed the workplace in a short period of time. Of course, in one way or another, women have long been part of industry – and not always as labourers. In the 19th century, after an injury left her husband bedridden and unable to oversee the building of New York’s Brooklyn Bridge, Emily Warren Roebling managed the construction.

Significant progress occurred in Europe and the US in the 20th century. After countries started granting all women the vote, the first world war brought women into factories. The roaring twenties also broke down many cultural impediments to women working.

There were interruptions to the trend, such as the Depression in the US, but during the second world war women were employed in unprecedented numbers. Yet as late as the 1950s, UK and US industries still adhered to “marriage bars” – requiring women to leave their jobs as soon as they married. Britain’s foreign office abandoned the marriage bar only in 1972.

Communist revolutions transformed the status of women. In his attempt to modernise the Chinese economy, Mao Zedong recognised that women needed equality if he was to bring them into the workforce in sufficient numbers, while in Russia the ideal proletariat woman was a working one.

Recent studies have found that businesswomen bring distinct working practices to their role – from a facility for working at a steady pace to the ability to maintain a complex web of relationships and to use these to encourage participation and power-sharing.

Yet businesses still struggle to increase female representation at senior levels. This is particularly true in Asia. McKinsey, the consultancy, has since 2007 tracked the role of women in the global workforce. It has found that, on average, women account for just 6 per cent of seats on boards in 10 Asian markets, compared with 17 per cent in Europe and 10 per cent in the US.

The quotas being considered by some countries are the subject of hot debate. For while most agree on the need for a corporate gender balance, consensus on the strategy that will achieve this is still some way off.

Sarah Murray