Women are not natural networkers. We might be more capable in the workplace, but we are more likely than our male peers to hide our talents and our selves behind the water cooler at the company do. And this failure to schmooze is holding us back. More than 50 years after the second-wave feminists smashed their way into the workplace, corporate UK is still overwhelmingly male. Just 10 per cent of board members of FTSE 100 companies are women. Some 25 of Britain’s biggest companies have no women at the top at all.

“It’s a complete scandal,” says Professor Lynda Gratton, of the London Business School (LBS). “Only the most exceptional women make it to the board, yet the boards of UK companies are full of men who are not in the least bit exceptional.”

Gordon Brown agrees. This week he suggested that companies could be threatened with “serious action” to ensure more women at the top of UK plc, unless the “completely unacceptable” gender inequality was addressed. Did Brown feel the irony as he looked round his Cabinet table to find just four female faces?

A study by the LBS found that a range of complicated factors were hampering women, including issues around childcare and a structural bias towards men in male-dominated organisations… Continue reading