Image photographed by Thomas Lohr for Harper's Bazaar
David Cameron has sometimes appeared to condescend to women. Playing to the gallery at the House of Commons, he once told the Labour MP Angela Eagle to "calm down, dear", prompting whoops from his own benches and general tutting everywhere else. Times have changed, and this past July the Prime Minister suddenly seemed to adopt a more feminist agenda. At a speech to business leaders, he said with rare energy: "A woman still earns just 80p for every £1 earned by a man. That is a scandal." So at least he now seems to be making the right noises about fairness. And he’s not alone. Worldwide, governments are seeking the grail of economic growth and are eventually realising that they won’t reach the prosperity they crave if they don’t support their female workforce. We are, at last, being seen as an untapped resource – the keys to a golden future. And we don’t have to pretend to behave like men in the workplace to be valued any more.
Foremost among the people spreading this message is Tina Fordham, the managing director and chief global political analyst at Citi. "Childcare, elder care, healthcare… these aren’t women’s issues, they’re human issues," she says passionately. Fordham has been named one of the 100 Most Influential Women in Finance and one of the 19 Best Economists on Wall Street and is stratospherically high-powered. How reassuring, then, that when we meet for breakfast at a busy Soho restaurant, she’s using the time between appointments to shop online for a new-season Preen dress: she doesn’t see the smallest conflict between an expertise in finance and an interest in fashion.
She is also producing evidence that will force the government to wake up to the fact that growth these days has to come from promoting and encouraging women into the world of work. And not just getting them into the office, but keeping them there. "Which means making sure they’re happy," she says drily. "Many firms have 50 per cent female intake but women just don’t make it to board level. At Citi, 98 per cent of women who leave to have a baby return to work afterwards, so they do come back. But then something happens: they stop enjoying it. Even the women who haven’t got families. And a huge percentage of senior women leave. I call it 'the missing middle'."
But how to stop these high fliers from finding that ambition withers just when they’re at the height of their powers? David Cameron has announced that from next year companies with more than 250 employees will be forced to reveal what the pay gap between male and female staff really is. Hopefully this will shame unfair organisations into redressing the balance. But the most important thing, clearly, is to find something you enjoy doing so much that, despite all the compromises, you’d rather do it than not. And that, as I know all too well, takes absolutely years of trial and error. I spent 15 years working in newspapers, kidding myself that I loved the buzz, all the while feeling overwhelmed by the demands of managing a team of 25 journalists (which my former boss Veronica Wadley always said was like herding cats), and becoming a mother to two children. When I finally made the switch to Bazaar, I realised what it really means to love your work and value your colleagues while still creating space for family.
Fordham, for one, is not about to quit any time soon. A single mother of two young girls, she has soared professionally because she loves what she does and because her daughters are proud of her. She puts her success down to "becoming expert in something [in this case, women as an economic force] that nobody else knows anything about. And not being afraid to speak up and say what I think. Though of course," she adds thoughtfully, "you have to get into a position where it’s appropriate for you to do that. But I’m not afraid to disagree with a boardroom full of men." As for people-pleasing and managing up, the clichéd female routes to success: "I call them short-sighted. What happens when your boss leaves? You should be building relationships across your company."
Fordham is based in London, and the UK’s record in terms of women in the workplace isn’t too shabby. Britain is ninth in the world for economic power wielded by women – though that equates to only 23.5 per cent of boardroom places being filled by women. But other countries, particularly in the Far East, have a much bigger problem. So much so that the Prime Minister of Japan has placed "womenomics" at the heart of his reforms. "Asian culture in business is very male," agrees Younghee Lee, the executive vice president of global marketing for Samsung Electronics’ mobile division. She is based in South Korea but manages a team of over 1,000 employees around the world, including in London. In a bright, slick meeting-room at the Samsung UK headquarters just by St Paul’s, she explains how she coped with moving from the L’Oréal cosmetics firm – where she had female peers – to the technology giant, where she was the first female vice president in the company’s mobile division. "It was a big challenge. In South Korea, China, Singapore, young women are enter-ing the elite jobs, the professions, as doctors and lawyers. But they aren’t so prominent in the militantly male world of technology," she says. Lee estimates that the Samsung workforce of over 300,000 employees glob-ally is 49 per cent women, but only four per cent of the executives are female. "But that is changing," she says. "Samsung now has a daycare centre in the office, gives women two years’ maternity leave and offers sabbaticals to all its employees. The position of women is becoming more and more powerful."
Powerful not only as generators of wealth – though in Britain 67.2 per cent of women aged 16 to 64 work – but also as consumers, which is obviously of tremendous relevance to Lee, since whether they are earning the money or not, women are at the centre of decision-making about all the big purchases a family or couple make. So every company that sells to consumers urgently needs to have people in positions of power who are able to communicate effectively with female consumers… and that means women. "I am not an engineer," says Lee. "I don’t understand technology as a male engineer does. But I bring consumer understanding. I think the way our customers think, and I bridge the gap between the product and the person who’s buying it. We now see technology the same way as we see fashion or handbags. It’s part of our lifestyle."
Ah yes, handbags. For not only does our craving for leather goods help fuel the luxury-fashion market, it also defines what’s happening in it and in the economy as a whole. Dr Philippa Malmgren, a former adviser to the US President and former deputy head of global strategy at UBS, observes in her new book, Signals: The Breakdown of the Social Contract and the Rise of Geopolitics, that: "When the economy’s booming, women have enough cash to indulge in something that has no meaning to men: handbags. But after the financial crisis, when they became more aware of looking after their financial future, they stopped buying so many bags and turned to shoes instead, which are something men often get real pleasure from." I am not sure I agree with her. Some research says heel heights in recessions are lower than they are in boom times, when taxis are an option. But other surveys say that a frivolous high heel is the last escapist fantasy we hold onto in a downturn.
I should point out here that when we met in the Assouline bookshop on Piccadilly, Malmgren came in wearing trainers but with a towering pair of Louboutins to slip on for our conversation. When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping, indeed – but only for certain things. Watching how women consume and being able to draw intelligent conclusions from it is one key to financial superstardom. And female economists are far better observers and analysts of this than their male peers. For one thing, they understand the tremendous extra burdens women place on themselves regardless of the demands of their career. Fordham says that we work an extra 20 unpaid hours a week compared with an equivalent man. "It’s looking after our parents, or buying presents for our kid’s teacher. That’s what society is and we choose to do that. I know I do." Fordham, who has just written a report on women in the economy called Global Growth Generators, doesn’t argue that women should be paid for all the hours of childcare and cooking we do, but she does point out that any country that wants economic growth and yet puts barriers in the way of women joining the world of work is shooting itself in the foot.
In the meantime, high fliers like Malmgren, Fordham and Lee will go on shopping for fabulous dresses in between meetings, and changing the dial for other women in the workplace all the while.
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