A Good Time to be a Girl: Don’t Lean In, Change the System
From the founder of the worldwide 30% Club campaign comes a career book for women in a transforming world who don't just want to lean in, but instead, shatter the paradigm as we know it.‘I absolutely love her, I think she’s such a force for good’ Pandora Sykes, The High LowIn A Good Time to be a Girl, Helena Morrissey sets out how we might achieve the next big breakthrough towards a truly inclusive modern society.Drawing on her experience as a City CEO, mother of nine, and founder of the influential 30% Club which campaigns for gender-balanced UK company boards, her manifesto for new ways of working, living, loving and raising families is for everyone, not just women. Making a powerful case for diversity and difference in any workplace, she shows how, together, we can develop smarter thinking and broader definitions of success. Gender balance, in her view, is an essential driver of economic prosperity and part of the solution to the many problems we face today.Her approach is not aimed merely at training a few more women in working practices that have outlived their usefulness. Instead, this book sets out a way to reinvent the game – not at the expense of men but in ways that are right and relevant for a digital age. It is a powerful guide to success for us all.
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William Collins
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018
Copyright © Helena Morrissey 2018
Cover design by Heike Schüssler
Graphs and charts by Martin Brown
Helena Morrissey asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780008241605
Ebook Edition © February 2018 ISBN: 9780008241629
Version: 2018-09-21
In memory of my wonderful grandmothers, Irene and Amy, who did not have the opportunities we have today.
Contents
3 The 30% Club: the strength of feminine power
4 Men, women, equal, different
5 Diversity of thought: welcome until anyone disagrees!
6 How CEOs can break the diversity barrier
9 Gender equality: good news for men and boys too
It’s a good time to be a girl! In all honesty, I don’t think I could have written that unequivocally before now. Of course, I’ve seen real progress for women over my fifty-year lifetime, thirty-year career in a male-dominated industry and twenty-five years of motherhood, beginning with one son and now (a final tally) nine children, six girls and three boys. It’s certainly been – increasingly – a better time to be a girl. As you read my story I hope you will see so much to celebrate about this progress that we’ve already made, and how you can create your own opportunities for success, whatever stage you are at in life. I recognise now that I made some ‘lucky’ choices along the way; by seeing what works and what doesn’t, my hope is that you might leave much less to chance.
But today’s opportunity is so much greater than the unfinished business of the past – and that’s why I’ve written this book now. Gender equality is a well-worn subject but it is not one we have mastered. Despite the huge body of literature, of advice, theory and opinion, the reality is that still only a small number of women have been making it to the top or feel they are fulfilling their potential. Many more tell me they feel discouraged about their prospects, unfulfilled or conflicted in their multiple roles as mothers or carers with careers. They can’t see the linkage between their own reality and gender equality efforts that often seem targeted at a narrow group of white, privileged and highly educated women, rather than at all women.
Companies, too, are frustrated by limited progress in the numbers of senior women after many years of feeling they are doing a lot to encourage their female and other ‘diverse’ talent. Sometimes, the result of all these special initiatives has – inadvertently – been to do more harm than good; difference can seem difficult rather than desirable.
And yet, I am more optimistic today than ever before. I believe that we – men and women, working together – have an unprecedented opportunity to create a new, more successful, quite different approach, one that will not just create more possibilities for girls, but more choices for boys, too – a bolder approach to gender equality that’s not aimed merely at training a few more women in working practices that have outlived their usefulness. Those women (and even fewer ethnic minority, gay or disabled people) who have made it to the top today are the exceptions, the ones who have mostly played by the rules of the existing game. We now have the chance to reinvent the game – not at the expense of men, but by creating new ways of working and living that fit the world of today and tomorrow, not the past. I have spent years listening and engaging with both women and men who tell me very similar things about the pressures they feel to comply with ‘norms’ that seem habitual rather than right for anyone, or relevant in a digital age.
So our ambitious, shared goal now is to devise ways of working, living, loving and bringing up families together, as equals. A model of partnership and collaboration, rather than hierarchy and patriarchy.
This is not the approach that has dominated gender equality efforts up to this point. Until now, women and ethnic minorities have mostly been playing catch-up rather than leapfrog. For example, more of us are becoming lawyers, accountants and doctors, but in the meantime men are pushing onwards, upwards and outwards, taking more entrepreneurial, higher-risk routes to success. Start-ups run by women, for example, currently account for only 2% of US venture capital firms’ investments. Following in men’s footsteps, emulating the boys but trailing a few years behind them, is not the answer. As women, we have our own strengths to offer.
