“When you don’t have any support structure that becomes a barrier to getting back to work for both men and women.”
I’m discussing a new report showing that each year 54,000 women face some form of maternity discrimination with Nora Senior, UK and Ireland chair of Weber Shandwick, who recently stepped down as president of the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC).
The report highlights a clear problem facing UK business. Despite the changes to parental leave legislation and greater awareness of how to retain women after they’ve had children, it seems the rhetoric isn’t being put into practice. Senior agrees with the key finding of the report, that climbing the corporate ladder is much, much harder if you’re a woman with children, and feels this is down to timing and childcare options.
She wants the government to look at how it funds childcare. At the moment funding only starts when a child is three, and so anyone acting as a chief caregiver of children could be out of the workforce for three years.
“Government has to look at putting in place better childcare facilities,” she says. “If women do take time out to care for family they are then out of the office for a longer period of time and find it hard to come back.”
For Senior, the role business plays in the retention of women comes down to two things; an understanding of how to engage employees and the reality that for many small businesses their priority is simply staying afloat, not gender equality.
“Businesses should look at how they maintain contact and bring women back into the workforce. One way for this is looking at the tech available, looking at flexible working options … [Also], one of the biggest ways to retain staff is training, they see a career path that is going to upskill them and they see a career path within the company. More needs to be done to encourage and incentivise training.
“I think at the moment staying in businesses is a bigger priority and profitability will always come first. Being able to keep your business trading with a profit line is a bigger issue. Small businesses don’t have the time to sit down and work out policies and training programmes that support women, or even men.”
This lack of time and infrastructure is an issue that comes up in different guises again and again. Her time running the BCC allowed Senior to work with businesses at all different sizes and stages of their development, and in a range of political climates, but she clearly thinks there are some problems that are perennial. As someone with a languages background and a role that requires constantly advising international clients she’s understandably interested in the UK’s export market, although she is surprisingly sanguine about Brexit.
“There are lots of issues that were present before Brexit and are still present. Our economy is underperforming, we need to think about incentivising smaller businesses to enter into export, how do we get those businesses access to finance etc. We have infrastructure challenges around getting goods in and out of the country, as well as local issues such as transport and access to skilled labour. From there you look at local planning and houses, because businesses need a workforce that can live around them. There are lots of challenges.”
How does she think the change of prime minister will affect the future of British business?
“We don’t have a cohesive international trade strategy, Theresa May has created an international trade department, but I don’t think we have collectively moved forward in a cohesive manner on [this agenda] and I don’t think we’ll see an upward swing in export. That’s a challenge for the UK economy.”
Senior’s eyes have always been set firmly outside the UK. She did a degree in languages to “escape and travel the world” but after she found a job with a UK-based company promotion after promotion kept her in the country. She makes up for this by using all the technology at her disposal to work with international clients.
“A lot of companies I work with are doing work across the world so a lot of my time is spent on Skype helping them roll out international programmes. Tech helps you operate more easily in a global environment, when you have the mobile connectivity and the speed that’s needed.”
This last comment seems like a small dig at the UK’s plans around this. She talks about how the government needs to ensure that BT’s Openreach plan really can deliver internet at the speed it’s needed, and the need to investigate alternative options if it can’t. She points out that the UK is Europe’s biggest online shopper, so the opportunity for digital businesses is huge, but we need to have the infrastructure in place.
She’s the sort of woman who you’d trust with infrastructure and planning. She describes herself as always having been able to multi-task, and as well as juggling a big job at Weber Shandwick and presidency of the BCC, she also lives between Nottingham and Edinburgh with her husband and daughter.
“Communication is at the heart of everything, I have a brilliant support team both at work and at home. My husband and I have a military approach to our diaries, so we make sure one of us is at home for our daughter.”
It is common for businesswomen to be asked about their home lives in a way a man simply wouldn’t be, so it’s not surprising that she gives a brief overview but doesn’t go into much detail. I suspect she’d rather I hadn’t asked the question at all; maybe she’s right.
When I ask her if there’s anything she wanted to talk about that I haven’t mentioned she brings up the need to show young girls the options available to them. She wants to see more successful women speaking about their experiences in schools, in literature and in the media. With one caveat:
“All the discussion about Theresa May is around her shoes, not her policies. The media has to take responsibility too.”
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