This article was recently published in the August/September edition of Project magazine.
We are now 33 years on from the introduction of the first legislation regarding gender in the workplace but could recent comments such as “Equality laws are now holding women back”* suggest that it is time for a radical re-think? I suggest that the fact that we are still discussing this, confirms that legislation alone cannot solve the equality question. Fundamentally a key piece of the solution is still missing and a tripartite resolution needs to be found that respects the needs of the individuals, employers and society.
The Arras People 2008 Survey of Project Management Professionals for the first time asked respondents about the impact of gender in their professional lives. We simply asked “Do you believe your GENDER has ever impacted your role as a Project Professional?”
The first cut of results showed that out of our respondents, 86% believed that this had not been the case, with 14% reporting that it had. A further cut by gender itself created a significantly different picture. Maybe we need to be widening the discussion to include the whopping 34% of females who stated that gender has impacted their role as a professional in the project management space compared to just 6% of males. In real numbers this equates to 135 female respondents compared with 62 males out of a sample of 1429.
As can be seen in the table, the male response is pretty consistent across the role groupings, whilst for the female sample the Project Manager role has a significant sample who feel that the gender issue is still alive and kicking.
We asked our respondents to comment on their experiences. Interestingly only 9% of the total chose to leave a comment, whilst in another section of the survey 23% chose to leave a comment on work/life balance (is this a hotter topic these days?). In total, 20% of the female respondents left a comment compared to 5% of the males of which 67% were negative, 7% positive and 25% ambivalent.
Negative comments centred around the following generalised statements: ‘Females being perceived as project support rather than management’; ‘Females suspecting or knowing their pay was significantly less than that of male counterparts’; ‘Females feeling that construction, engineering and IT are male dominated environments in which they are under more pressure to prove their ability against that of their male counterparts’. Our favourite Answer? “Only with occasional very old fashioned men…..”
Male responses were much harder to categorise, with around 42% giving an ambivalent answer suggesting that maybe gender passes under their radar in their work environments.
Several respondents felt that women succeeded over them in winning roles as the hiring organisation was hiring to profile rather than according to candidate skill sets. Most notable were responses from males praising the contribution of women in the workplace, an occurrence that was not repeated by the female respondents! Included among those are: “In the human mind this is not a female role yet; though it is wrong!” and “When working in Health & Education having no female presence holds back the flow of information from the other side of the table”.
So it would appear that there is still much to do. My question again is “are we looking in the right places to solve this in a balanced, fair and equitable manner?”
* Nicola Brewer – The chief executive of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission.
John Thorpe is the Managing Director of Arras People – The Programme and Project Management Recruitment Specialists – www.arraspeople.co.uk
