Identifying leaders

Diversity & Inclusion

Identifying leaders – how to get gender balance stickier?

Helen Broadbridge reviews the latest thinking and research on gender balance in leadership. This is a summary of the longer article published online at Blogs (legalwomen.org.uk) with full references.

What do organisations look for in leaders?

All organisations rely on processes to recruit and promote. Research suggests that organisations struggle to create processes that are truly gender-neutral, resulting in the trend towards gender imbalance higher up organisations. Organisational psychologist Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic has popularised this research by asking the tongue-in-cheek question, ‘Why do so many incompetent men become leaders?’ 1 (His real question is, ‘How can we find ungendered performance criteria?’, but I can accept that this is less catchy). His research focuses on the allure of charismatic individuals (particularly since the mediatisation of leadership since the 1960s – think JFK) and decision-makers’ linked inclination to prefer confidence over competence 2 . I particularly enjoyed his lament that there will never be a biopic of Angela Merkel going to meetings wellprepared, listening to others talk and making rational decisions after long periods of consultation and reflection.

It’s all about the process

He points to the uncomfortable conclusion that, despite best intentions, workplace processes are gendered. If we understand the different expectations that men and women face in the workplace, we will be able to design more objective processes. What actions can we take this?

Action: Managers should be encouraged to review performance feedback and, if a gender gap is identified, discuss it with the evaluators on their team and make a plan. Managers should be able to find objective, ungendered markers of performance that work for their teams.

Action: Offer training to encourage workers to think about leadership before it is needed. This will give potential leaders time to grow into a leadership identity, both in how they see themselves and in how they are seen by others.

When do organisations look for leaders?

In law firms, solicitors who make partner tend to do so with around ten years of post-qualification experience. 3 As competition for training contract places has increased, so has the average age of newly-qualified solicitors – to 29 in 2019. By comparison, the average age of first-time parents in the UK was 30.6 for mothers and 33.6 for fathers in 2018. To the extent that workers are considering having a child, this timing is difficult to navigate. Waiting to be in a position of power before taking parental leave may take too long, compounding the pressure over deciding how to share responsibility for caregiving, especially during the earliest years of a child’s life.

Pre-pandemic, policies offering an alternative to a full week in the office (often to integrate caregiving responsibilities) were taken up primarily by women. Unfortunately, the result of this gender imbalance has been a stigma which impacts all parents – for mothers, a career break, period of part-time work or different start and finish times can be viewed as socially acceptable but incompatible with leadership roles; for fathers, there has been a reluctance to take up these policies in the first place.

However, positive change can happen suddenly. Only a handful of years ago, fathers might be offered two weeks of unpaid leave upon the birth of their child. Now, it is not so uncommon to take six months of paid leave, with an increasing number of employers stepping up to align parental rights between mothers and fathers. The great hope of equalising parental leave is, firstly, that it will allow fathers to have a more fulfilling family life (which is reported as being increasingly important to men with every generation) and, secondly, that it will normalise taking time off work – be it parental leave, annual leave or the weekend.

Action: Gender-neutralise policies around parenting. Alongside normalising taking parental leave or working part-time for a period, for example, organisations should also widen their leadership identification window to include workers who may be reaccelerating their careers after the most intense period of caregiving responsibility has passed. After all, raising the next generation is a collective project that all of society has a stake in – that includes organisations and, of course, both parents. Part of that responsibility has to be providing jobs that are compatible with caregiving; the economy is better off if it is possible to earn (and thus pay tax) and care at the same time.

Concluding remarks

Gender imbalance is not inevitable, but it is sticky and current infrastructure is seen to favour men without caregiving responsibilities across the economy. Organisations need to make gender balance stickier than imbalance. They can achieve this by collecting data to find out if systems are having unintended consequences, experimenting with new processes, keeping what works, ditching what does not and reiteration. Ensuring that policies designed to help parents are applied equally to mothers and fathers is a key step to reframing the conversation around parenting and the workplace. In the future, we can hope that parental leave will be seen as a temporary step in a long career path. ■

Helen Broadbridge

Helen Broadbridge

Member of the Westminster & Holborn Law Society EDI Committee and Tax Solicitor

1. Chamorro-Premuzic, Tomas (2019), Why do so many incompetent men become leaders? (And how to fix it), Harvard Business Review Press.

2. Chamorro-Premuzic (2021), If women are better leaders, then why are they not in charge?, Forbes.

3. Connelly, Thomas (2016), Ten years to the top: average time to partnership revealed, Legal Cheek. “The research revealed that 80% of those handed fresh promotions had between nine and 13 years’ post-qualification experience.”