3.7 Case study & role play

The Case

Women’s rights

In October 2012 the EU’s Justice chief Vivane Reding tried to impose a 40 percent quota on EU firms to get more women in top jobs, but her plan hit the buffers in Strasbourg.

Getting more women on company boards has been a long cherished aim for many senior EU officials. Only 3% of chief executives in big European companies are women, 14% sit as company board members. The situation is slowly changing. However the European Union believes at this current rate, it will take 50 years to achieve gender balanced boardrooms. The problem is how to break a glass ceiling? The “glass ceiling”, which symbolises the barrier preventing women reaching top positions still exists all over Europe.

Europe’s Justice Chief Vivane Reding wants quotas, forcing firms to reserve 40 percent of their top jobs for women by 2020.

But the EU Commission remains deeply divided on the issue. Many of Reding’s colleagues, notably women, still support self-regulation. Five of the Commission’s nine female commissioners are said to oppose Reding’s proposal. The result was that there is no decision yet.

Women still have a long way to go if they want to reach the targets issued by the European Commission – position, salary and respect in the workplace are vital if gender balance is to be achieved. When that happens the glass ceiling will be a thing of the past, but for now it stands as a reminder as to how far women have to go to find equality in the business world.

Case Analysis

1. Women’s rights around the world are an important indicator to understand global well-being.

(to be institutionalized and supported by law, social custom and behavior; to be ignored and suppressed; a major global women’s rights treaty; to be ratified by the majority of the world’s nations a few decades ago; successes in empowering women; numerous issues still exist in all areas of life; to range from the cultural, political to the economic; gender discrimination; to affect girls and women throughout their lifetime; to suffer the most poverty)

2. Women work more than men but are paid less.

(to do two-thirds of the world’s work; to receive 10 percent of the world’s income, to own 1 percent of the means of production; to be underpaid; to perform low-status jobs; unpaid work in and for the household; to take the majority of women’s working hours; to spend less time in remuneration employment; to own fewer assets)

Role Play

Task: Act out a TV round table on EU quota plan for women on boards

Ann Marie Domingues experienced gender inequality first hand and after winning an appeal for unfair dismissal, she sat up her own business in Lyon. She speaks about her experience in a gender unbalanced workplace.

Make use of the helpful phrases:

• I am quite sure that….

• The majority of the population…

• A very small percentage of…

• That may be true, but…

• My personal feeling is that…

• Well, I am calling for couple of reasons…

“They told me OK, you have skills, we want to work with you, at the same time they told me as soon as you move a finger we need to know it and to sign it. It was really annoying, and I really had the impression that I was related to being a woman. They were restricting what I could and couldn’t do. That is to say that I always had to make justifications and ask before I did anything. Everything regarding the budjets and procedures had to be signed and validated beforehand, so I had very little freedom. I was not given enough power to perform my mission or my job.”

Avivah Wittenberg Cox is a CEO who works with executives to build more diverse companies. She thinks that quotas can raise awareness on this deep-rooted issue.

Make use of the helpful phrases:

• Could you be more specific, please and …

• I am certain of one thing, …

• And another thing,…

• Do you mean to say that …

• There is one more thing I’d like to consider.

“I wish we had a glass ceiling because that’s actually much better than what we do have, a glass ceiling gives everybody the impression which is women are blocked just from the very top, which is what is called “the glass ceiling’. That’s actually not what I’ve ever seen in every company. Almost from the very first management levels you see the percentage of men beginning to rise and the percentage of women begin to drop off. That’s not a glass ceiling, we call it gender asbestos. We want to achieve 30% of female representation of UK boards by 2015 and we’re actually making some really good progress having had quite a slow start,” she said.

Fiona O’Hara isdirector of operations at the company which uses several programmes to attract and advance its female employees. She explains how offering support is key for some female employees. After making gender balance its goal years ago, a quarter of global management consulting group Accenture’s board is made up of women, beating the British average.

Make use of the helpful phrases:

• At the same time, however, …

• If you permit me…

• The chart shows that…

• It is clear from the figures that..

“Accenture has been looking at diversity and how to put it high for a business probably for more than 10 years. One of the things that we found was that women returning from maternity leave we had a return of about 75 % we’ve now managed to increase that to 90% through putting a lot more support around those women when they are in maternity leave and when they want to come back. We’ve been very flexible at our approach on how they return to work,” she said.

Simon Eaves, head of products at the company is one of the programmes mentors. Accenture has also introduced a mentoring program focusing on top jobs for talented, driven women.

Make use of the helpful phrases:

• The statistics say that…

• As I see it, …

• The point is that …

• We can hardly ignore it.

“We started the programme about one year ago, and in that programme I sponsor five women who are high performing in our organization and I spent a lot of time with helping to coach mentor and understand how we shape their careers within Accenture,” he explains.

Marion Brighton is Vice President of Thales UK. Responsible for Avionics and Air operation business she thinks women in her field have to prove themselves if they want to advance. Thales Group specializes in aerospace, transport and security. Actively working on gender balance, 22 % of its employees – from all over the world – are women. Four out of sixteen of the company’s board members are female, that is the equivalent to 25%.

Make use of the helpful phrases:

• I am well aware of…

• The point is we can’t wait for people to be happy with…

• Anyway it doesn’t matter. What matters is that…

• Although none of us would argue that…

• It is clear that…

“As soon as I started to get positions of management, yes you had to do a little bit more, yes, people were looking for, just to check they had made the right de cision when they put a woman in that management position, and I had to work very hard to get those promotions, but I don’t count those as barriers to progress,” she said.

Viviane Reding, Vice President of the European Commission, who has championed the draft legislation, points out that quotas would be a temporary measure, until a gender balanced boardroom is achieved.

Make use of the helpful phrases:

How/What do you feel about …?

Let’s be clear first of all over the general problems.

Well, I’d just like to say that …

In my view, …

I’ll leave it there, ladies and gentlemen. Unless there are further questions.

“It would be completely wrong to take women in just because they are female. We need to take women in because they are an asset. So it is not only about the female factor, it’s about the human capacity, but we do not do well if we leave part of our human capacity aside just because they are women,” she said.