Women with balls of steel

The Daily Mail was only one of the newspapers to gleefully pounce on such an opportunity. ‘It could almost have been taken from the pages of a school magazine’ they gurgled. ‘A breezy pep talk from the new head of the sixth.’ One employee was quoted as saying: ‘It made her sound like a character from Enid Blyton’s Mallory Towers school stories. I’m dreading the first time I see her because I know I’m going to laugh.’

Some years later, Forgan left the BBC and now heads her own media consultancy. She is fairly sanguine about the way she was immediately written off as ‘a piece of fluff’.

‘I think there are a lot of characteristics about the style of women that are construed as jolly hockey sticks, or daffy or too sentimental. These descriptions have traditionally been used to denigrate women’s fitness for senior responsibility. But things are changing. New technologies and flatter management structures are providing more opportunities for women managers to do things their own way.’

The secondary finding of the Smithson/Stokoe study was that those women who do succeed in the workforce are generally uncomfortable with having to alter their attitudes to suit a male-dominated environment. ‘The women who bought into this environment were more concerned about long hours and the stress it placed on other commitments like family. Men didn’t need to make as much emotional effort to fit into that lifestyle, compared to women,’ Smithson says.

Hardly surprising. The ‘macho’ attitude of City workers, with its emphasis on long hours, heavy drinking, and lap-dancing bars as key elements of ‘corporate entertainment’ often leaves young women firmly outside both the formal and the more informal office loop. Women’s networks are beginning to pop up to offer City women an alternative way of making connections, but they are still few and, even then, it’s unlikely that you’ll be hobnobbing with the people who really count. It remains that in order to succeed in a company, an individual must be perceived as being fully committed. That means putting work activities, including socialising with other employees, before non-work activities such as family.

Next page: maternity on the go