‘Why stick with it once you’ve made your first million?’

Until late March 2000, Carol Galley was the highest paid female in the country and, according to the magazine Management Today, Britain’s most powerful woman. As joint chief executive of Merrill Lynch Investment, she controlled an investment portfolio worth £400 billion and had a reputation for chilly efficiency and ruthless boardroom tactics. Such was the awe she inspired that she was awarded the nickname, ‘The Ice Maiden’, and businessmen were said to quake if she even so much as blinked in their direction. Then she decided to quit.

The newspapers went wild. ‘The Ice Maiden Melteth’, announced the Telegraph in bold. At the age of 52, Galley was saying she wanted to dedicate more of her time to just having ‘fun’. ‘It’s been a very demanding role and I am looking forward to having a much more balanced lifestyle,’ she announced.

Galley is not the first woman to have cited a personal desire for more time and space as the reason for leaving a well-paid job. One of the most famous examples is that of Penny Hughes, the former President of Coca Cola UK, who seemed destined for an even greater role in the company’s global empire. Seven years ago Hughes tendered her resignation with the excuse that she wanted to spend more time with her two young sons. The ensuing tabloid joy is understandable. After all, it just went to prove what they had been espousing for years: a woman may have a keen brain for business, but when it comes to the nitty-gritty, biology and her nesting instinct will win the day.

‘I always thought I could do what I call the brain part of the job,’ said Hughes in a recent interview. ‘But the managerial part, the inspiring leadership, really requires emotion, and I suppose that’s what I wanted to put into the family and I just knew I couldn’t mix the two. By the time I had my first boy, Alex, I was 35. I purposely kept going with my career in order to reach my potential. I suppose my husband and I put off having a family until I had reached that stage.’

Next page: choose life

If the swathe of recent studies on the subject is to be believed, women are much more likely than men to give up even the most lucrative of positions in order to gain more time for their families or a more balanced life. Breaking the Barriers: Women in Senior Management, a report published by campaign group Opportunity Now, found that one of the chief concerns of senior women and CEOs in the UK were the long hours, hectic schedules and the conflict between home and work.

‘Women are just much more sensible about it all than men,’ said one senior City woman, who admits she’s beginning to tire of what is practically an all-male domain. ‘Why stick it? Once you’ve made your first million, even if you retired, you could probably live out the rest of your days quite comfortably and still have enough small change for life’s little luxuries. Besides, women in general, even in the City, still only earn a small proportion of what the boys do, so why slog your guts out for what will inevitably be a smaller piece of the pie?’

Even if a woman does ‘stick it’, decides not to have children, or is past her child bearing years when she makes it to the upper echelons, the evidence is that not everyone is going to be happy to see her.

Didn’t you know? I’m the new tea ladyIn September 2000 Mo Mowlam announced she would quit politics after the next general election. She said that she had finally had enough of trying to balance the obligations of being both a constituency MP and a cabinet minister. But she had previously admitted that elements in Whitehall had long been trying to ‘put the knife in’ with reports that her brain tumour had left her unable to do the job.

As Secretary for Northern Ireland, Mowlam had a colourful reputation for cursing like a trooper and, when negotiations were getting tough, of throwing her wig down on the table and exposing the few scraggly bits of hair left after her medical treatment. Such down to earth behaviour may have made her popular with the public, but it did nothing to endear her to some members of the Peace Process, and even her own party leader.

Next page: win friends and influence people

One story from a recent biography was that after being cold-shouldered by Blair in front of Bill Clinton in Belfast, she told the President: ‘Oh, didn’t you know – I’m the new tea lady around here.’

Eerily Mowlam’s case reflects some of the primary barriers to women’s career progression expressed in Opportunity Now’s report:

• Women’s exclusion from informal networks of communication
• Personal style differences
• Lack of awareness of organisational politics

When the whispering campaign against Mowlam was at its height, the allegations coming from Westminster were that she was incompetent, reckless, financially irresponsible and had dangerous ideas about drugs and sexual leniency. The message was that, psychologically at least, Mowlam was just not up to it. It’s hard to imagine that, despite her attempts to put a brave face on it, Mowlam wasn’t deeply disillusioned by the experience.

Down but not out
Isabelle Terrillon and Julie Bower are two other women who have said they started their careers full of ambition and gusto, only to fall victim to disillusionment. The two women recently made headlines after they sued their former City employers for discrimination. Both claimed that they were paid less than equally qualified male colleagues and, among the other instances of overt discrimination, Terrillon claimed that colleagues consistently made comments about her legs and shag-ability. When asked why she had stayed so long, Terrillon answered: ‘You think: is it me? Am I good enough? Then you tough it out. You want to show them you’re good, so you hang in there to try to impress them and change their attitude. And then you don’t know if it will be any better elsewhere. It may be awful where you are, but you think: better the devil I know.’

But women leaving the corporate world don’t seem to be doing too badly. Penny Hughes has now emerged at the helm of a fledgling e-enterprise, Web-angel. It’s a job that she claims has allowed her to establish a work-home balance that makes other men and women ‘green with envy’.

Next page: pastures new

Jac Peeris, 35, also circumvented the glass ceiling by setting up her own dot.com company. ‘The Internet is a great leveller. Over time we will see the culture change. Technology and decentralisation will force change, there will be flatter organisations with less process, less bossy behaviour and less hierarchy. It’s in the world of new technology that the real challenges lie.’

Anita Roddick echoes the same sentiments in her book Business as Usual. ‘The picture I see is a lot of women leaving the corporate world. They just don’t like the system. Dot.coms can be run from home. Women are tired of remaining invisible as managers.’

No matter how many women quit the City to go it on their own, there still remains an overall dilemma in the wider workplace. ‘Business is facing a massive problem retaining the most talented members of 50% of the labour pool,’ says Debbie Sandford, managing director of Random House Children’s Books. ‘Companies need to address equal pay and childcare issues. Yet, rather than perceive this as a systemic, epidemiological issue, management often takes a very narrow, case-by-case view; something like ‘she just can’t hack it’. Or they struggle with the ‘glass ceiling’ imagery which, by its very nature, casts women as victims. By and large, we are not victims; we are making our own choices.’ She advises companies to take steps to focus more energy on staff retention, offering employees subsidised childcare, golden handcuffs for women who have babies, paternity leave and flexible hours.

Even in the thriving world of female-run enterprises, the UK is still sadly lagging behind. In the US half of new businesses are being set up by women, compared to only 35% here.

Such is the concern that the Government announced plans to give more support to women setting up on their own. This includes the creation of the £95 million Phoenix Trust for projects aimed at helping women setting up in businesses, and the launch of a new women’s online business centre.

Next page: changing times?

Hopefully, this will begin to counter some of the difficulties faced by wheeler-dealing women, such as Martha Lane-Fox. She was a driving force behind the Internet company lastminute.com, and has said that empire-building is not always easy when you’re fighting against a culture that still believes that, as a ‘little woman, you’d be better off at home in the kitchen’. She remembers, ‘The first venture capitalist I went to see (for finance) was a man. His first question to me was what would happen if I got pregnant. My face just fell.’

Whether it comes to encouraging women to seize the e-enterprise day or to aspire to the boardroom ‘a lot more could be done,’ says Penny Hughes. ‘We need to give women a helping hand, a bit like in the US, where there is a structure to help potential women entrepreneurs. Also, when a company is recruiting at a senior level and it wants to make a change in business, they should at least make sure that they have got the best woman available on the shortlist. Women should not be put into a job just because they are female, but the best female candidate should at least be considered.’

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