The male stranglehold on power in the upper echelons of British business is laid bare today in new research commissioned by the Observer. Women occupy just 34 of the 970 executive director positions at companies in the FTSE 350 index, according to a survey by the Co-operative Asset Management.
When it comes to non-executive director posts – which do not involve any management power – woman fare slightly better, but still occupy only 204 of the 1,772 jobs available.
In the most senior positions of all, women's representation is stuck in the single digits. Leaders such as Baroness Sarah Hogg, chair of venture capitalist 3i, and Dame Marjorie Scardino, chief executive of media group Pearson, remain in a tiny minority.
Only four chairmanships are held by women, equivalent to 1.3% of the total, and just nine women serve as chief executives, or 3%.
No fewer than 132 of the companies surveyed, including Barclays Bank and Royal Bank of Scotland, are men-only zones, without a single woman at board level.
Overall, female representation stands at just 8.8%, taking both non-executive and executive directorships into account. This feeble showing is despite the fact that more than nine out of 10 companies in the survey claim to have an equal opportunities policy.
Harriet Harman, Leader of the House of Commons and minister for women and equalities, this weekend asked for the full background to the research in order to consider its findings with the Department for Business.
"This is a very important piece of research," she said. "It shows how important it is for companies to have accountability on gender. A company in the grip of the old-boy network is never going to be successful in the modern world. If they can't see half the population as worthy of a say, then they are in the grip of structural prejudice. What does it say about a company that they have an all-male board? It is backward-looking and old-fashioned."
The Co-operative study suggested a yawning gap between most companies' public declarations of support for equal opportunities and their behaviour in practice. The report identified a "pinch point" for women – the level of senior positions at which their numbers begin to thin out. The researchers found that this "pinch point" frequently coincides with flexible working becoming less available.
Trish Lawrence of lobby group Opportunity Now said: "The majority of workplaces are designed around a mid-20th-century lifestyle, with an outdated approach to where, when and how work happens. Flexibility... should be a business imperative.
"The lack of women in senior positions may be attributed to the fact that women are much more likely than men to take a career break, and even more likely to take responsibility for child and elder care. We need to 'normalise' flexible working arrangements, encouraging more men to take advantage of these arrangements and sharing the caring responsibilities, while also enhancing their work-life balance."
The research also revealed that only a quarter of the companies in the survey mentioned that they offer flexible working, and those which provided details of the balance between men and women in their organisation were in a minority. Just over a third disclosed the gender split of their workforce, and a mere one in five gave details of the gender split in management.
Dr Ros Altmann, a former economic adviser to No 10 Downing Street, said: "I suspect many executives would be shocked to see these figures. It could be that they have not realised the extent of female under-representation."
Professor Alex Haslam of Exeter University, who has conducted extensive research into the boardroom barriers facing women, described the findings as alarming.
"They fit with a bigger picture in which it is clear that, despite a vaunted commitment to policies of equality and inclusiveness, women are still struggling to achieve recognition in the corporate world," he said.
"This is all the more alarming because a large body of data suggests that this change is needed urgently, not for cosmetic reasons but in order to realise the full potential of both leadership and industry."
Among the exceptions are media group Pearson, which came top in the survey with a female chief executive and finance director, as well as a diversity policy to help recruit and promote other under-represented groups. Support services company Mitie, in second place, also boasts women in its top two executive roles.
The Co-operative has pledged to start taking account of women's representation on boards when it assesses companies from an ethical, social and corporate governance perspective.
Altmann called on other big investors, including pension and insurance funds, to follow the Co-op's lead.
"In terms of ethical and socially responsible investing, the idea that most major UK companies have virtually no female executive board representation is an issue that investors should factor into their assessments of corporate responsibility," she said. "These large investors increasingly represent women clients, as women's wealth has substantially increased over the years."
John Reizenstein, managing director of the Co-operative Asset Management, said: "All businesses say they want the best leadership, but how do they know they've scoured the widest choice? Our study shows that while a few companies are reaping the rewards of 'equal opportunities', too many seek only to comply with the law."
Headhunters say that one major reason women do not reach the top is that male bosses often appoint people similar to themselves. Virginia Bottomley, the former Tory MP who chairsthe executive search agency Odgers Berndtson, said: "The majority of the population is female and the majority of those going to law and medical schools are female.
"It is inexplicable that women are not better represented at the highest levels of industry, commerce, finance and government. People often hire in their own image – I urge them to look out of the window rather than in the mirror."
By numbers
• There are 519 male MPs and 126 women.
• In 2002, the British Film Institute analysed UK productions from the previous two years. Out of 350 films, only eight were directed by women.
• Only 32% of students studying GCSE economics and 41% of those studying GCSE business are girls.
• In both the judiciary and police force, about 10% of senior roles are held by women.
• Women represent 45% of the UK working population, but just 19% of the IT workforce.
2) Forget shoes and men, this showed nailed out friendship.
I have never really understood why so many people felt personally affronted by Sex and the City. The 90s TV hit that charted sex columnist Carrie Bradshaw's navigation of life, love and the latest shoe styles in New York never claimed to be a documentary about contemporary women's lives. Inevitably though, the fictional portrayal of four unfathomably glamorous, sexually experimental and effortlessly successful Manhattan females rendered the series hugely influential, mainly because it was unlike anything else. But just because women are seldom seen on the small screen being hopeful, hilarious and horny all at once is not a good reason to levy the weight of feminist expectation against a single franchise. Still, the much anticipated release of the Sex and the City movie later this month prods those discomfits yet again.
At the risk of collapsing one Bradshaw metaphor into another, I always found the series charming, funny, good-looking and intelligent, rather like the perfect first date. I enjoyed following Carrie and her achingly archetypical friends - Charlotte (Upper East Side princess forced to redefine her sense of perfect when marriage and fertility go wrong); Miranda (fiercely independent lawyer not softened by motherhood); and Samantha (unrepentant fuck machine, latterly breast cancer survivor). I'm almost afraid to admit it lest it show me up as shallow, but the show did make me ask pertinent questions about my own life and those of my friends - and not solely because we were swithering over Manolo Blahnik designs.
Sex and the City was always two parts fantasy shaken with one part delicately skewered reality. So - no - hot, smart women do not only talk about men and shoes, Manhattan isn't always sunny, and newspaper columns aren't generally written, unresearched, in slinky vest tops (though actually, reader, you should see me now).
But this fantastical element was tolerated in exchange for the unprecedented honesty about other areas of women's experience that Sex and the City hauled into the mainstream. Most prominently, the series discussed the micro and macro of sexual relationships as they had never been before: when is it all right to fake an orgasm? Ought there to be cleanup etiquette for men giving head? How does maternal ambivalence affect a woman who is already pregnant?
Those gasp-out-loud episodes were embraced by women not only because they'd been there privately, but thanks to the context in which they were
I'm a firm believer that all our subsequent interactions are dictated by original familial connections, so it has always fascinated me that Freud didn't bother to create an Oedipus-style template for women's relationships. It's an absence that Shere Hite notes in her latest report on women loving women, alongside the dearth of media representations of what are often the most important relationships in women's lives. Aside from the imported Desperate Housewives and the brilliant British-born Pulling, it's hard to think of popular art that takes women's friendships seriously.
Perhaps that's because we don't take them seriously ourselves. On the one hand we lionise relationships with other women - it's a given to crow about the super-fantasticness of one's friendships, and we're happy to admit how essential those relationships are in the scheme of our lives. Yet, day to day, we give those connections far less traction than they deserve. When was the last time you sat down with a female friend and asked: "Where is this relationship going?" Women analyse their interactions with men to the nth degree, while their profound connections with others of their gender go unexamined.
I'm sure it's partly to do with the way women's relationships are set up publicly. From an early age, girls are taught that they are in sexual competition with their peers. Nobody wants to be the loser in the race to couple up, and nobody wants to be deemed a lesbian. Later, women wind up being their own worst enemies, buying into a culture that sets them against one another: the singles versus the marrieds, the stay at homes versus the working mothers. We are told that we can only understand those who mimic our lifestyle choices. It's interesting that when Hite surveyed she found that, of all barriers to friendship, relationship status was the greatest. Single and partnered women were less likely to be close than those of a different class or race.
Sex and the City was seminal because it showed women's friendships according to a panoply of responses: anger, doubt, judgment and envy, as well as love. And it proposed basic needs - flu, a cricked neck, the plus one - as fulfilled by other women. It's not anti-men to acknowledge how females can sustain each other. But it is pro-women to suggest that we cease angsting at each other, especially about shoes
3) Leadin Ladies kept out of the limelight.
Female actors, especially those over 40, are still under-represented on TV, film and in theatre and when they do get a break it is often in a stereotypical role, a conference on the subject heard today.
Hundreds of women, from actors to directors to writers, gathered at the National Theatre to hear depressing statistics reeled off: 17% of playwrights are women; 38% of stage roles are for women; 35% of TV roles are for women; of the top 250 films last year only 9% were directed by women.
Speaker after speaker accused commissioners of either not considering older female actors for parts, or when they did, the parts were stereotypes of what a woman over 40 was thought to be.
However, Hilary Salmon, executive producer of BBC drama, said there were reasons to be cheerful and pointed to the high number of women in commissioning roles at the main broadcasters. She said EastEnders had 23 regular female characters and 21 men and on Holby City it was 15 women to 10 men. She added: "If there are stereotypes then it is our fault."
The conference, called Vamps, Vixens and Feminists: The Elephant in the Room, was organised by the Sphinx Theatre Company, which was set up in 1973 as a professional feminist ensemble company, originally called Women's Theatre Group. Its artistic director, Sue Parrish, said she had been among those "pushing this stone uphill for 30 years". She added: "The opportunities presented by the 2007 equality legislation seem to have passed the arts community by."
The playwright Tanika Gupta recounted her experience of her play Sugar Mummies at the Royal Court, which had Lynda Bellingham as the lead aged 60 or so who travels as a sex tourist to Jamaica. In a meeting with Channel 4 about a TV adaptation "the first thing they asked was can you make your female characters younger, can you make them 29-30. I said no, that would totally defeat the object of what the play was about".
Tracy Brabin, who has been on the writing teams at Hollyoaks and wrote three series of Tracy Beaker, said men often dominated the writing teams of continuing drama. She urged women writers to "be more assertive, have more confidence, be true to your story and be angry".
The actor and director Janet Suzman rounded on the predominantly male critics who hold so much power in theatre. "It's a very, very male club. On the whole it's boys," she said. "And they look up at women characters on the stage for the spark of sex that's going to make their evening less tedious for them."
Among the supporters of the conference was Equity. The union's vice-president, Jean Rogers, urged people to sign their petition demanding that women are portrayed equally in TV and film drama.
