Women and the workplace
Our cover this month is an extraordinary story. It's not everyday you come across a single mother-of-two barely out of her 30s running a Midlands metal-basher. It's not often either that you then go on to hear a chief executive admitting that staff have seen her cry.
Elsewhere such a revelation would be seen as a weakness in the male-dominated world of business. But for Dani Saveker it appears to have given her a position of strength from which to make sweeping changes to the company. "Staff know I'm human and it's the best I can do to make sure I'm there for them when they have a crisis," she tells us. "None of us is invincible. Things happen and it's part of life."
Dani goes on to offer some revealing views about male managers. "So often (they) don't show respect to people below them. They seem to believe they have a status above and beyond anyone else but everyone is important in their own way."
In many regards Dani's wider observations go to the heart of the complex debate surrounding women in the workplace today. Despite massive cultural shifts in the last 30 years, the sad fact remains that a pitiful three per cent of executive directors and eight per cent of non-executive directors in this country are women.
I see evidence of this all around me. Just take Insider's own property and dealmakers awards - you will hardly see any women in the audience (indeed the property sector is still the worst culprit for being a boys club).
As Perm Saini remarks in our women in business feature on page 22, "the perception in the industry is that females are not as sufficiently capable as their male counterparts".
This is all pretty depressing stuff which is why the government are so keen to do something about it. The excuse all too often given by short-sighted employers is that women invariably take a temporary break between the ages of 30 and 40, the key time to progress, and so there are fewer women vying with their male colleagues for executive positions.
The government's answer is to increase paid maternity leave and even give women the option to transfer some of their paid leave to partners. Although laudable, there are risks as more legislation could easily have a more detrimental effect, particularly in small businesses. As is remarked elsewhere in our feature: "When people are on leave it's not always a money issue, it's a people issue too."
As I said, there are no easy answers here. But if there is one thing that businesses can do to address the issues, it is surely for them to be far more flexible in their approach to helping working mothers return to work. Being prepared to dip in their pockets for nursery and childcare provision would be one giant step (and government could help here), another would be to give working mothers better access to technology to enable them to return in a more flexible fashion. You may not believe it, but there are still millions of workers who don't know the meaning of the words email, internet and broadband.
Better still, just get every one of their bosses to read our article on Dani Saveker.
Jim Pendrill, editor
Dani Saveker is that rarity, a woman in charge of a successful British manufacturing company. But she doesn't make herself scarce at Savekers' headquarters. She shares her philosophies on business and life read on.
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