New reason few women make it to the top jobs

According to the study, “the vast majority of highly qualified women don’t have political allies to propel, inspire and protect them."

What you need to know:

  • Studies show that while men generally have sponsors who help them climb to top leadership jobs, women rarely do

Studies in different parts of the world suggest that there is just one more stubborn thing that prevents women from rising to the top leadership positions at the workplace. It is a lack of sponsorship.

Yes, women need to work with sponsors, not just mentors, to rise to the top. That’s what men do that women apparently don’t.

This revelation was first made in a big way in 2011 by the New York based Centre for Work-Life Policy, now known as the Centre for Talent Innovation (CTI) — a non-profit think-tank on workplace diversity and talent management.

After a study to understand why women, despite having grown in numbers in the lower to middle management, hardly made it to top management, CTI came up with an explanation it called the “Sponsor Effect”.

According to the study, “the vast majority of highly qualified women don’t have political allies to propel, inspire and protect them through the perilous straits of upper management. They lack, in a word, sponsorship.”

Men, on the other hand, do. They more readily create relationships with business leaders who help them up the corporate rungs towards the C-suite positions, these being the offices of the chief executive officer, chief operating officer, chief finance officer, and so on.

This is what CTI referred to us the “sponsor effect”.

“Without sponsorship, it is nearly impossible to climb the last slippery slopes of the career ladder — where competition is at its most intense,” the organisation states.

To broaden this thinking, CTI has been carrying out similar studies in different parts of the world. The most recent was in the UK, whose results were released in June. Predictably, the same message came through.

A press release following the study states: “Women enter the white-collar work force in the UK in far greater numbers than men: 57 females for every 43 males. Yet as employees in large corporations move from entry-level to middle management, and from mid to senior level positions, men advance disproportionately.”

Also in the UK, the reason was the same as that established in the US. Lack of sponsorship in support of the women was to blame, and not quite the much talked about extra responsibilities such as child care.

The latter has been addressed in many workplaces through flexitime and the establishment of crèches among other initiatives.

“British women tend not to have sponsors – powerful champions willing to take a bet on a young talent, go out on a limb for her and advocate for the next promotion,” reports CTI.

According the studies, women are disadvantaged when it comes to sponsorship at the workplace because it is a male phenomenon.

Usually, the people who would be sponsors are men in senior leadership jobs. So, “when it comes to choosing who to tap on the shoulder and groom for leadership,” argues CTI, “C-suite executives automatically reach for a ‘mini-me’.” That would be a young man.

Few will pick out women. The reason is that because sponsorship involves spending a lot of time grooming the candidate, older men don’t want to be mistaken for having an illicit affair when seen spending much time with a younger female colleague.

Women are also wary of such thoughts, and so they hardly seek such work relationships. It is a catch-22 situation for both the would be sponsor and the young female talent. The victim, nonetheless, ends up being the latter.

According to the study in the UK, men with sponsors are 40 per cent likely to move up the ladder. For women, the sponsor effect would be even higher if it happened. A woman with a sponsor would be 52 per cent more likely to rise.

This partly explains why despite the fact that many organisations now have policies aimed at supporting women at the workplace, gender imbalance at the top remains a sticky matter.

So, last month while giving a talk at Strathmore University in Nairobi, Unilever’s human resources vice-president for Africa, Ms Antoinette Irvine, stressed the extra effort that women must really make to gain visibility at the workplace in order to rise to the top.

A core part of that effort, she told students at the university during the “Diversity Talk”, was for women at the workplace to stop just being managers, but to also be problem solvers.

But they had to go beyond that too, she told them, noting that it was important that they built good relationships with colleagues who could assist them work their way up.

“Have an army of loyal people around you,” she suggested. “You will soon depend on them when you are at the top.”

Irvine’s talk was part of Unilever’s student empowerment programme. She urged companies to review their human resources policies to incorporate the uniqueness of women, given the realities that put them at a disadvantage.

A reality that must also be dealt with in this part of the world, according to recruitment manager at Corporate Staffing Services, Mr Perminus Wainaina, is the traditional mentality that senior positions should be occupied by men.

“This societal belief still makes many women to fear contesting for senior level posts,” he contends.