City Women’s Network Breakfast Panel, Friday, 3rd October 2008

City Women’s Network continued to celebrate 30 years of successful networking with a prestigious breakfast event hosted by the Lord Mayor, Alderman David Lewis (pictured right), at the Mansion House on October 3rd. Nearly 200 women (and a few men) gathered in the Egyptian Room for a lively breakfast panel discussion with top businesspeople about the dynamics of gender at the top of British business.

As the Financial Times pointed out in its report the next day, despite their takeover troubles, two of the UK’s top businessmen, Lord Stevenson, Chairman of HBOS and Donald Brydon, Chairman of Taylor Nelson Sofres, ‘did not dare to break their date with City Women’s Network at the Mansion House’ and were happy to debate their experience of working with women on top boards.

They were joined by a panel, which included Helen Alexander, Vice President of the CBI, and a non executive director of Centrica and Rolls Royce, former government minister Baroness Virginia Bottomley, now a headhunter with Odgers, Ray & Berndtson, Andy Harrison, Chief Executive of easyJet, and Janet Gaymer, the Commissioner for Public Appointments and Patron of CWN. The Chair of the session was Margaret Heffernan, businesswoman and author of the best selling book ‘How She Does It – How Women Entrepreneurs are Changing the Rules of Business Success’. The panel members and CWN President, Clare Dobie, are pictured above.

Lord Stevenson told the audience that women on boards were often better at asking challenging questions and were also ‘infinitely better than men at delivering bad news without being aggressive'. Helen Alexander pointed out that there was still a long way to go for women to have more influence on top boards, revealing that she was once discussing something with a FTSE chairman, “and he said to me, out of the blue: ‘Like all women, you’re interrupting me!’”.

She also told a story about a gathering she had attended recently to say farewell to a top executive at which a FTSE 100 chief had said it was ‘impossible to do that kind of job without a good wife’.

Janet Gaymer pointed out that the private sector was lagging behind the public sector in terms of numbers of women directors and that some research showed that women’s views are not really heard until there are three women on a board. Helen Alexander said that it was ‘more fun’ if there were other women on a board, and although she had been told there was ‘a tipping point’ for increased women’s influence, she had not come across it yet.

Meanwhile Baroness Bottomley said that times were changing for younger women. “I know that my views are dated because I’ve got a wonderful daughter in her twenties who’s a City trader and, as for the idea that women are self effacing, meek and negative – well, forget it.”