Help wanted on the bottom rungs

Thorne’s view is supported by a recent report from the headhunting firm Spencer Stuart that explored how the pool of potential female non-executives could be enlarged. Bolstering managerial support was near the top of the list.

For many workers, a manager is often their first mentor, said Julie Welch, group HR director at Wincanton, the logistics giant. “Research has shown that the coaching of women is so important to development, and often the first contact women have with a mentor or coach is their line manager.

At Wincanton, middle managers are invited to participate in Accelerate, a training programme aimed at equipping them with the development skills to become better coaches. Similarly, when the cosmetics giant L’Oréal launched WorkSmart, a flexible working programme, there was extra training available for managers. “We’ve given [them] responsibility to manage their team remotely and enable them to have a flexible working pattern,” said Isabelle Minneci, HR director in the UK and Ireland for L’Oréal.

But this doesn’t necessarily go far enough. Thorne believes that training is only half the battle; businesses must make managers accountable for diversity issues.

“Make sure they are responsible for retaining very good women,” she advised. “Identify who are your very talented women and then say to their managers, you have a responsibility to help develop them and retain them and bring them through.”

Retention is a challenge, even in more female-friendly sectors. While L’Oréal has no problem attracting women — 69% of its staff are female — it’s a different picture higher up the ranks: “it’s only 27% of women at executive committee level,” said Minneci.

Like many companies, L’Oréal was losing a large chunk of its female workforce as they reached child-bearing age. “The first thing we did was give responsibility to the managers and encourage them to coach and mentor their female employees so they could see that they can continue to progress at the company whether they have children or not,” said Minneci.

Metrics and targets are the only way to get results, said Simon Russell, an HR practice leader at Spencer Stuart. “If you measure anything, it concentrates the mind. In addition, if it is very clear from the messages that employees are hearing from much, much higher up the organisation that they are noticing and taking account of what is being measured, that tends to galvanise people.”

At Deloitte, key statistics are put in front of the executive team. “We look at the combined net metrics of joiners and leavers. We’re also in the process of identifying the metrics that we need to introduce for managers,” said Thorne.

But sometimes even the most capable managers make the wrong decisions, particularly about recruitment and promotions, as a result of unconscious bias — the notion that people automatically give preference to those who look and sound like them.

“There has been an assumption that a good servant of the company — who is of good intellect and with a good track record and good future potential — will know what is right when it comes to hiring or developing people or recommending them for promotion,” said Russell. “Yet the evidence suggests that while many people do that to the best of their ability, there are all sorts of assumptions that people carry with them, no matter how modern or open-minded they feel they might be.”

At Deloitte, the leadership team and interviewers have received training in unconscious bias and are considering offering it to those further down the ranks. “One of the things we have to keep fighting is unconscious bias, because if an organisation is run by lots of white men then it is very difficult to change that,” said Thorne.

Martin Swain, vice president of global employee relations, inclusion and diversity at Glaxo Smith Kline, the pharmaceutical company, said that training is only part of the solution.

“Unconscious bias is incredibly powerful and the very fact it is unconscious and can be institutionalised is remarkable. I don’t believe the solution is unconscious bias training because it makes you very aware in the moment. Once the moment has passed, because your bias is unconscious, it kicks in again,”he said.

“The only way you can embed principles is in the processes — so that you are bringing to people’s minds the fact that bias exists when they are actually making real decisions.”

Give them a chance

“Do you think there’s a glass ceiling?” It’s a question Sharon Thorne, managing partner at Deloitte, has been asked many times.

“I always say ‘no’ because it’s not affected me, and when I talk to senior people in our organisation, there’s no glass ceiling,” said Thorne, 49. “But actually I think there is an unconscious one. How else do you explain the fact we’ve been recruiting so many women for so long and still have got only 15% of our partners to be women?”

Not that this has held back Thorne. She was championed by John Connolly, who was head of Deloitte’s London office when she met him in 1996 and later became chief executive. “From a very young stage in the organisation, I had someone making sure I was being given opportunities and sponsoring me to other people,” she said. “In 2006 I was the first woman put on to our executive, as managing partner for talent, and that enabled me to develop and progress and to pick up bigger roles. Being given those opportunities early on is critical in terms of making a difference.”