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Professional women take on old boy’s network

‘New girls networks’ are challenging the traditional power of some of the most established old boy networks such as the senior civil service, according to a new Demos report called Girlfriends in High Places.

New research from Demos – which is backed byfive government departments and Norman Broadbent, a recruitment consultancy – shows how men rely on informal network to help them to operate inside organisational hierarchies such as the civil service. Women are often effectively excluded from informal networks at work.

However the report argues that the growth in women’s professional networks – including one for senior female civil servants – is helping women to ‘have it all’: personal career development while acting together to tackle workplace inequality. The report shows how exclusion from informal networks at the workplace puts women at a disadvantage because they receive less informal encouragement to take on new challenges or to apply for promotion.

Addressing the formal barriers to women’s progression to senior positions is unlikely to be sufficient to tackle the unequal gender distribution of the civil service, which is ‘bottom heavy’ with women. Women make up 26% of the senior civil service and 23% of top management posts (Cabinet Office, April 2003).

In fact, the offer of flexible working hours – which has been welcomed by large numbers of women who can combine work and family life more easily – may have had an unintended effect. Women, who are far more likely to work flexible working hours than men, find they often miss out on after-hours socialising and are further excluded from informal networks.

“Women’s caring responsibilities are part of the explanation, but it’s also about everyday ‘male bonding’ activities and the sexual politics of the workplace that exclude women,” says author Helen McCarthy. “Flexible working has helped a lot of women juggle their busy lives, but may have unintentionally put them at a disadvantage by taking them further out of the loop at work.”

The research highlights examples of women’s exclusion from informal networks in the civil service which are banal yet have a powerful effect:

Networking women in both the public and private sector are responding in new ways which challenge these forms of informal power contained in male-dominated networks.

The report provides growing evidence that women’s professional networks have the potential to change work place culture in a way that benefits women. Women’s professional networks counter gender inequality by connecting their members. Of the members of women’s professional networks surveyed in the report, 87% said that the fact they were women-only made them attractive.

The report suggests we could be entering a new era of work-based ‘networked feminism’ which is better suited to today’s complex gender politics where women have to juggle many different personal and professional identities.

“With networks, you can be sure that no-one’s checking your feminist credentials on the door,” says Helen McCarthy. “It’s OK to want to get ahead and be successful. But equally, women want to help each other and they want a fairer deal as a group. Networked feminists recognise that ‘having it all’ means acting to advance women collectively as well as realising their own personal goals.”
 

Notes for editors

  1. Girlfriends in High Places: How women’s networks are changing the workplace is published by Demos on Thursday 29 April 2004. Helen McCarthy is a researcher at Demos.
  2. The research was funded by Norman Broadbent, a recruitment consultancy, and five UK government departments: the Cabinet Office, the Department for Work and Pensions, the Ministry of Defence, the Home Office and the Department of Health.
  3. The Cabinet Office releases a progress report on civil service diversity targets which were set for 2005 on Thursday   22 April 2004.