Women do not ever want to think that they are in a position because they are a woman; they want to think that they are the best person for the job.
My organisation looks at what we can do at every stage. We might start off with a 50:50 male to female graduate split—which is easy to measure and easier to encourage—but a drop-off happens, for lots of different reasons, as people’s careers progress. We have publicly stated our ambition for around 30 per cent of our partnership to be female. That drives behaviour, but at every level underneath that are points in someone’s career when a decision can be made for them. There needs to be that lens—there should be a different conversation about whether there should be a target.
From recruitment, through to performance ratings at year end, to how women are treated pre and post-maternity leave—including women in promotion rounds while they are still on maternity leave—I have very positive examples of how we can change not just the culture, but the way in which other leaders behave and the decisions that they make.
For example, two of the women in my team are HR business partners. They job share, but I could easily have decided not to have that. However, through inclusive leadership training, we encourage our leaders to really put a spotlight on the decisions that they make when they have a chance to set an example through role modelling or physical representation in roles—such as in that example.
There is also the conversation for women who are going on maternity leave, which is when the evidence that we have shows that things drop off. Women are less likely to return and progress their professional careers after that—I see evidence of that around the senior manager or director level. If you have the conversation with women about what they will do when they come back before they go, there is a very physical, stated objective. That may sound simplistic, but those of you around the table who have had a baby probably thought that you knew what it would be like beforehand, whereas actually you did not—you did not know until you joined the club. A woman can think that her world and her career will not change—and she might not want her career to change—but until she is in the position of having a baby, she does not know.
Things like that are less about targets and more about ensuring that we deal with the issues for each woman who is in that situation. We can even take that further to make the parenting debate gender neutral and include men in such conversations—because men who become fathers also go through a change. Having shared parental leave is great progress, but we are nowhere near where we want to be on that.
When we say “targets”, we tend to think about quotas and number on boards. However, I would like us to talk about targets for retention and returning to work and for people in certain age groups and from lots of different backgrounds.